We Rip the World Apart

Kareela Halifax

Kareela

Halifax

The following weeks pass in a blur. By the time my pregnancy is nearing the end of the second trimester, the old family house has been sold, I’ve found a two-bedroom apartment in a house less than a ten-minute walk from my old place, where Thomas still lives, and Gran is settled in the room next to mine.

I overcame my fears and spoke at the rally, talking about how Antony’s death shaped and altered our family, defined us. How it still does. Most importantly, I told the story of that day. Not the one in the officers’ reports, or what the news relayed. But the true story. From the people who were there. Who saw. I told them who my brother was, who he could have been. Who our family was, too.

It’s hard not to sink into wondering what would have happened if I’d taken this path sooner: if I’d aligned with my father’s burst of passion, would it have brought him out of his despair? Brought us together? Would he be here still, speaking beside me?

But wondering won’t help. So I told that story, too, how my father was also a victim of those officers’ crimes, of the media’s heartless and inaccurate reporting, how our whole family was, and how it scarred us in ways that will never fully heal.

A few days after, I received a call from Deja, who told me her part of the story: what I already knew from the file and intimacies she hadn’t shared there. Memories of a day I didn’t recall until her words brought back flashes: the three of us taking the ferry to Center Island, riding all the rides I was tall enough for, eating cotton candy and funnel cakes, and how Antony had seemed so happy. So proud to be my brother.

She still thinks of him regularly, all these years later. Like me, she imagines who he would have been, the life he could have lived.

I’ve turned down all requests for further interviews. Antony’s story is out there. Our story. It exists. And that’s enough. I’ll continue to work with the movement—because it’s work someone needs to do—but I don’t want to be their spokesperson, the contact the media call every time another Black person is beaten or killed. Our story exists. And it’s time for me to exist now, outside of that history.

I called my mom before the rally. She asked me not to do it, not to endanger myself. When I told her I had to, despite my promise, that it was the right thing for me: to make some sense of all that had happened, to try, at least, for some semblance of good to come out of it—she stopped. She didn’t want me to. She thought I shouldn’t, but, “It’s your life,” she said, “so do what you have to do.”

I tried to keep her on the line, to figure out where she was, what she was doing. “Living,” was all she would say, “trying to remember where I came from. Who I was. And trying to get better.”

She ended the call by reminding me of her love. And this time, with words, I reminded her of mine, too.

A delivery arrived from her today: two large bins. As I open the first one, a scent I haven’t smelled in over a decade drifts out, along with a memory that had all but been forgotten—sitting in our Toronto home, my rage at having to move momentarily tempered by a whisper of Antony.

I hold the small sleeper in my arms, my own child somersaulting within me, and the tenderness in my mother’s voice as she folded my baby clothes, her hands delicate and slow and full of a love that I’d barely taken the time to register, comes back to me. The depth of it hits me in a way I’ve never been able to appreciate before—what she lost, how it would have wrecked her. This little life inside of me, who, at first, I wasn’t even sure I wanted, now means so much I’d rip the world apart to keep her safe. And I haven’t even met her yet. To have held her, raised her, loved her for twenty-three years, and then…

Holding back tears, I open the second box to see a small notecard sitting atop a bright swathe of neatly folded fabric. I lift the notecard, instantly recognizing my mother’s small and distinct script.

I used this wrap to carry both of my babies and thought you should have it. I’m sure Violet could show you how to use it, but wait for me? I’ll be back in time to teach you. If you’ll let me.

The doorbell sounds and I wipe my eyes, then rise from my seat at the kitchen table. Thomas stands on the stoop, a toolbox in one hand, a bag, which I’m sure is full of food, in the other. His smile is tight. But he’s smiling, which is progress from those first tense interactions after the five-hour conversation we had when I returned to tell him I was keeping the baby but letting go of us: romantically, at least.

He sets the food on the counter, then heads to my bedroom where the disassembled crib we’d gotten from one of his cousins lies in a pile against the wall. He tried to convince me to stay together—at least for the baby—get a three-bedroom apartment, so he could be there to help me through the nights, through those initial months of sleeplessness and trying to adjust. And then, he said, once the baby was older, he’d leave if I wanted, give his room to her. It made sense. It would be the practical thing to do—but life can’t be about practicality. And I love him too much to give him false hope—that the hurts we’ve caused would disappear, that we could ever be more than co-parents again.

I follow him down the hall, watch as he assembles the crib. If we’d met at another time—a year from now, three, maybe we could have worked. But Thomas doesn’t even know who I am, only the person I falsely showed myself to be. I don’t quite know who I am, but am certain I need to figure that out on my own.

In the first news report, and in the ones following, I saw my name and the descriptor beside it: Kareela Jackson, a mixed-race woman. The first time I’d ever seen those words written in black and white—that compound—describing me.

For the last decade, I’ve been defined as Black, or Black…but not quite, as if the white in me was an absence of what should have been but wasn’t, as if I held on my shoulders the weighted responsibility of trying to make sense of it all.

I stared at those words, smoothing my finger over the letters— mixed race —and saw the freedom to let go of the need to define myself by one identity over another, one race.

I’m not a Black woman, exactly, not a white one, certainly. Both and neither. Like a bridge, one foot planted on each side. Able to exist in both worlds—in some capacity, at least—cross lines that have no need of even being there. Be who I am, regardless. And my daughter, if I raise her that way, will be able to do the same thing.

“Oh, look at dis!” Gran’s voice sounds from the kitchen. “What a baker dis man is!”

She strides—as much as she still can—down the hall and into the room. “Gud to know dis girl chile won’t be eatin only food off de shelf.”

“Definitely not, Mrs. Jackson!” Thomas stands, smiling at me, at Gran, doing his best to mask the pain behind his eyes. “We’ll take good care of her.”

“Violet, I tell yuh. Violet.”

Thomas nods, then meets my gaze, and a part of me does wish I had met him a year from now. Two. That I could introduce him to the self I’m starting to discover, see if he loves her.

But who knows, that person may not have loved him.

Thomas returns to the crib, adjusting a few final lug nuts, then closes and lifts his toolbox. “Well, I guess I should take off. See you at the ultrasound.”

We’ve had discussions about boundaries. About giving each other distance, and when the baby comes, how we’ll split time, share holidays. That things may have to change when each of us finds other people to share our lives with—a topic he doesn’t like to talk about, not wanting this family to be what he sees as a broken one.

And that, I tell him, is what he’s got all wrong. Not broken, but multifaceted—with more histories to learn and understand, more cultures and ways of being to embrace.

“No.” I shake my head. “Stay and eat.”

He grins and doesn’t say no.

After we’ve eaten and cleaned up, Thomas washing and me drying, I shut the door behind him and sit with Gran. In the past weeks, she’s told me about Femi and Ella and Chevelle. About my father—how he was taken, how, although she wasn’t able to help him as much as she hoped, she’s so thankful she had those extra years with him, could care for him again. Care for me when he couldn’t.

“If there be one thing me got right,” she says now, “it be to carry on. Because life, no matter what form it in, no matter de pains tacked onto it, means something.” She places her paper-frail hand on my cheek, cups it. “We here for a reason, baby girl. We here until we not. And with de life me got left, me gonna hold dat great-grandbaby, and if me can’t see her, me gonna smell her, and feel her. Smooth me fingers over her cheeks, her lips, her palm.

“Me gonna get up in de morning and keep on getting up, just like me always have, even if me no longer see the sun, ’cause the sun still rises.”

She stops, and in her eyes I see the memories, the losses: her children, and all the people who came before.

“As long as yuh alive,” she says, “in every bad, if yuh wait, if yuh look, eventually yuh see a good. A good that wouldn’t have happened if not for the bad. Some lesson, some joy, some somet’ing. It doesn’t mean yuh happy de bad t’ing happened, but yuh happy for de good t’ing. Yuh hold on to dat. Yuh be thankful. Holding de good.”

It’s what my mother never realized, but, I hope, is starting to discover. It’s what Gran, clearly, has done, what she had to do, after what she lost: her babies, and other things, too. Things she’s barely brushed the surface of, but that I sense, lingering in her pauses, the way she skips through certain aspects of her personal history, what she alluded to the day the secrets started unraveling, and in the advice she gave my mother that long-ago night.

She lowers her hand to mine, squeezes, smiling. “This be de good I have now. You. Dat baby to come. And you, Kareela. Yuh a good t’ing. Yuh enough.”

Moisture builds behind my eyes as I exhale, raise her hand back to the side of my face, and lean against our joined flesh.

I continue to ask her questions about the past. Not that the past on its own can give us answers. We’ve got to carve those out for ourselves, or at least that’s what I think…what I hope. What I’m trying to do.