Kareela
The BLM meeting room is full. Jasmine waves me into the middle of a row, toward an empty chair beside her. I excuse myself, then sit, as a woman with long braids, lean and muscled arms, and eyes so large they make her face seem that of a child’s, speaks. The energy in the room, thick and pulsating, presses against me as I take in her words. Not just the story, but everything behind it, the collective memories of hate, of pain that goes back generations: being sent to the back of the bus or theater; having homes bulldozed, belongings carted away in garbage trucks by order of the city.
She stops, and the crowd is hushed, their attentiveness palpable, those memories—of being beaten, chased, feared, and suspected and surrounded for doing nothing but daring to be born Black—like a heavy fog, rising in the room.
She continues, her expression incredulous at the injustice she speaks of, because no matter how much we expect it, when it happens to us—these injustices, these atrocities—it’s disorienting. A surprise.
The thrum vibrates through us, through me. Anger. Conviction. Pain. And that’s what Carson wants. Why this woman is telling her story. With a sigh and a slump to her shoulders, a sad little smile, she stops.
Carson joins her onstage and locks his fingers with hers—half handshake, half handhold—before turning to the crowd. “I imagine every person in this room has a story like that one,” he says as the woman returns to her seat. “Our stories, our experiences, are what brought us here. What brings us together.” He looks to the crowd, his gaze sliding from person to person, meeting as many eyes as he can, meeting mine. “Every person’s story matters. Every voice matters. It is our voices, our collective voices, that will effect change.” A murmur of acknowledgment crests around me and I squirm in my seat, that conviction, that call, rising in me, too. This is not what I came for.
“A lack of safety, a sense of terror,” says Carson, “we’re not born with these things, but we learn them quickly. I’ve already given my seven-year-old boy the talk.” Carson gives a little grin. “Not that talk.” A few chuckles sound. “You know the one, the more important one, if we want to see our sons turn into men. The one that teaches them the opposite of what little white boys are taught. That tells them to make themselves small, to be pleasing and obedient, if they want to stay alive.” Heads nod, the murmur of assent grows, and the words in Antony’s file seem to rise up, swirl around me. How he wasn’t pleasing. How he didn’t obey.
“Because they don’t see my boy as a boy, my daughter or wife as any other girl or woman.” Carson leans forward. “They see us as inherently dangerous, violent, criminal. They see us as a threat. Something to be stomped down, restrained, taught to bow to authority. And every time one of our boys or girls is beaten, is harassed, is street-checked, pulled over, taken down to the station, or taken from this world for the simple crime of living, every time that happens and an officer is acquitted or not even charged, it tells all of us, again, we’re not safe here. We’re not wanted.” Carson pauses. “But this is our home. This is our one life. These are our children. And they shouldn’t have to be afraid.”
Carson’s face blurs, and I see Antony, his face as it was, as it would have been. Standing in front of a crowd like this one, speaking words like these. It’s hard to look, but there’s no point in averting my gaze. Since opening that file, I’ve seen my brother everywhere: a Black man corralling his children into the car; a professor riding his bike to Dalhousie; a homeless man standing on the street corner, despondent and downtrodden. I see all the people he could have been and isn’t. All the lives he could have lived.
I only half listen as Carson talks about the upcoming rally, in two months’ time, which will end onstage at Grand Parade, with media there to broadcast our voices across Atlantic Canada and beyond.
“Our stories!” he says, his voice growing in urgency. “That’s what will make people listen. That’s what will stop making us a meaningless statistic people can turn their faces from, pretend doesn’t exist, doesn’t matter. That’s why our sister was up here today. That’s why we need you. Each of you.”
His gaze passes over the room, meets mine, and I hear his call, what he wants: My voice. My story. Antony’s. At his dinner table, Rania told him it wasn’t time, but now…
“We’re in this together,” he says. “We have to be. We need people to tell their stories. We need people to spread the word. Flyers, posters, social media.”
It all rushes in: his chest, his shoulder, his hip, his head.
“We want as many signatures on that petition as we can get. We want people the city will recognize—”
The witnesses who tried to tell their stories but were silenced, threatened.
“Doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors, mechanics.”
My father, sinking into himself until he was a shell, until I couldn’t even remember what had once filled him.
“We’re not powerless.”
My mother, not wanting me to listen to Black music. For a time I gave in to her urgings—straightening my hair, modifying my speech, becoming as culturally white as possible—because of the fear of those boys who’d surrounded me, of others like them.
Carson says it again. “We are not powerless!”
But aren’t we?
“We never have been, and we never will be. But we have to work that power.”
Antony, despite all his bravado, all his passion, was torn from this world.
“There is a club.” Carson’s hands lift, a preacher on a stand, his voice commanding. “Not a club you’d ever ask to be a part of, made up of people who’ve been beaten, broken.”
Who bleed.
“Generation after generation.” His congregation is on the edge of their seats. “But are we beaten?”
“No!” Voices rise—several bodies, too, energy thumping like an angry bass beat.
“Are we broken?”
“No!”
Something in me wants to shout, too, and I writhe, because this is not what I came for.
“We’ve lost our loved ones—and not just from the killings. From the fear. Because fear, that shit will eat you alive!”
I came for distraction. To feel as if I belonged, with no intention of standing up for that belonging.
“All our Black and Brown faces, they see those faces. But they don’t see us. They see something to be erased. They see inferiority.” A breath. “But are we inferior?”
“NO!”
“No. And we’re here. Here to stay.”
My legs twitch.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“NO!”
“So hand out those petitions.”
Shouts and claps fill the space. An ache rises in the back of my throat—fear, but also a yearning. For change. For Antony’s death to have not been in vain.
“And not just to your Black friends. All your friends. Tell them your story.”
A memory surfaces.
“Pass out those flyers. Bring your mama, your grandmother, your next-door neighbor. Bring everyone. Of every color, every race. Because we’ve had enough.”
Antony. Twirling me in the air, laughing.
“We’ve had enough!”
Joy.
“It has to stop!”
Love.
Carson’s face glistens. His arms shake, and I can almost see Antony up there on the podium, calling out. Calling to me. “No more beatings!”
“NO!”
Energizing the crowd.
“No more killings!”
“NO!”
Carson’s voice lifts, filling the space, as Antony’s would have. “No more being afraid to run through the park. To drive your car. To live!”
But Antony’s not here. He never made it to Carson’s age. Never made it to mine.
“It may not happen today. It may not happen tomorrow. But we need to defund the police!”
“YES!”
His chest, his shoulder, his hip, his head: and all that love, that passion, that joy, was gone, just like that. My parents gone, too. Never to return—not in the way they once were.
“Disarm them!”
“YES!”
And we need to. But do I? Resistance, fear, like a vise, clamps down as people around me rise—hands in the air. Shouts, too.
“So hand out those flyers. Print those petitions—take them to your work, your church, your great-aunt Petunia’s nursing home.” Chuckles erupt. “We need as many names as possible, no matter the hue. And seriously, pen and paper. Don’t trust people to go home and visit the website themselves. Netflix will make them forget.”
More laughter. But I can’t appreciate the humor. Not when I’m expected to tell my story. Stand up the way Antony did. Risk myself.
“Blow up social media. Take the information packets on what defunding the police actually means, because you know people will have questions. And those questions need answers.”
Possibly lose my life, when I’ve already lost so much.
Carson steps down and those who hadn’t already stood, do. Desperate to leave, I jump up, weave my way through these Black and Brown bodies, ignoring Jasmine’s questions, the hands on my shoulders, the smiling faces.
A chant of song rises around me, Rania’s voice leading the flock in this church of the movement. I’m five feet from the door when Carson steps in front of me, like a mirage taking human form. “, I was hoping to catch you before—”
“No.” My limbs tingle, my mother’s, father’s, brother’s face in front of my own.
I won’t be his spokesperson. I won’t bring this baby into this awful world. I’ll stay with Thomas, who is safe and kind and stable. And if he leaves me because of the baby, or because he finally sees how damaged I really am, so be it. He wanted the baby more than me, anyway. I’ll take in Gran. And, somehow, figure out a way to make it work.
“?”
I dash past him toward the door, not looking back, the word erupting from my throat more for me than for him. “No!”