“I promise if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me.”
–Jericho Brown
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Hours before I was arrested, I saw Miles Ahead, a speculative art house film about the span of years when Miles Davis failed to produce new music, directed by and starring Don Cheadle. The scene that resonates with me the most is a flashback wherein Miles exits a club to smoke a cigarette between sets. After a few drags, a cop orders him to move along.
A heated exchange ensues. Miles tells him he’s the man on the marquee, but the cop assaults him with his stick nonetheless.
After the film, I ate at an Italian restaurant on Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn with my then girlfriend, now my wife. Like extras in a bad movie, we were the only couple of color. The meal was quick, expensive, and unremarkable.
I drove my usual route home and prepared to make a left onto Driggs, which would have brought me directly to Bed-Stuy through Williamsburg. The light was green, and a cop, traveling east in the other direction, paused and flashed his lights, granting me the right of way. This ordinarily would have been a kind gesture if he hadn’t turned directly after me. Two blocks later, he hit the sirens.
“License and registration,” he demanded at my door. “I need you to roll all your windows down, sir,” he said, as he and his partner shined their flashlights throughout the car.
Miles tells him he’s the man on the marquee, but the cop assaults him with his stick nonetheless.
“Here you go,” I said, handing over the documents along with my CUNY ID. “I’m a professor, by the way.”
The strategy of revealing my employment as a public servant had worked many times before, some letting me go in recognition of our shared commitment to the city, not to mention our source of income.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I pulled you over because your tint is too dark, but let me run your name and if nothing comes up, I’ll let you go.”
By then I had been pulled over many times in New York and wasn’t surprised or any less annoyed. The charade was all too familiar.
Sure, officer. You can run my name, officer. I’m not a criminal, officer. I’ll wait here patiently, officer. Thank you, officer.
My wife told me to relax.
“Someone should give his ass a ticket,” I said. “His fucking headlight’s out.”
“Relax,” she said again, and I replayed all the other times that I had been pulled over and detained. For a taillight, headlight, illegal tint, speeding when I wasn’t, improper lane change, and I’m sure for other reasons I can’t remember.
Once, when I was traveling to D.C. from Brooklyn late one night, a cop pulled me over for speeding. Maybe I was, but when he came back from running my license, he was more concerned about my vehicle’s registration. My car was listed as black, indicated by the initials “BK” instead of the color that it clearly was, blue, which meant that the initials should have been “BL.”
He asked me to step out of the car, and we waited on the shoulder of the B-W Parkway for another officer to arrive so he could check the car’s serial numbers. Awkwardly, I tried to explain that I had never noticed the error. I knew he didn’t believe me. It was definitely a dope boy’s car, a late-model electric-blue Acura with dark tint and low-profile trim that ran along the underside of the doors and hood.
I hadn’t altered its condition from the day I bought it at the dealership. I was more drawn to its low mileage and immaculate interior than its exterior appearance.
I thought of all these run-ins until it became clear that it was taking too long for the officer to return. Had I done something? I began to wonder.
“I need you to step out of the car, sir.”
“What? What did I do?”
“There’s a warrant for your arrest. Step out of the car, sir,” he said again, and my wife began to cry.
“What did I do?” I asked again in disbelief as he hungrily searched every pocket of my heavy coat. It was an unseasonably cold evening in April, a few days before my thirty-fifth birthday. “What did I do?” I demanded once more.
“Sir, I can’t tell you until we get to the precinct.”
“What?! So, you’re telling me that I have to spend the night in jail, and you can’t tell me why.”
“Sir, you’re resisting arrest!” he boomed, and I saw Miles again bleeding on the asphalt. In the officer’s eyes, I saw a flickering flame, ready to consume everything in its path. His tone confirmed the rest.
Burly and bald, he shifted into a fighter’s stance, and instantly, I felt the weight of the moment. I saw Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Sandra Bland. This was three months before we would witness Philando’s execution.
“Does he need anything?” my wife asked as she climbed over the armrest, crying more profusely now.
“No,” said the cop. “Take all his valuables.”
I handed her my watch and wallet.
When he turned me around to cuff me, I noticed we had drawn the attention of the white faces staring from their brownstone stoops. An oversize beanie slouched loosely on my head and I wore a collared shirt buttoned to the neck. Looking at their faces inspecting mine, I realized that I would have fit in nicely with the neighborhood’s newest residents except, of course, for my skin.
“I’m not a criminal. I’m not a criminal. I’m not a criminal,” I repeated through clenched teeth as we drove away, the older cop seated beside me in the back.
“Sir, it’s not about being a criminal!” yelled the burly one.
We rode the rest of the way in silence, the cuffs pinching my wrists when potholes rattled the suspension.
We arrived at the 90th Precinct, a few blocks from the Broadway stop on the G train, a stop that I frequented when I taught writing at the Graham Avenue campus of Boricua College. The older cop took me straight to the holding cells, where a Black man, maybe in his twenties, was being processed, and I watched him as I waited. He had a fresh fade and wore stylish clothes over a fit frame, the tongues of his ACGs flopping as he turned to be photographed.
“What they get you on?” he asked after he had been processed and placed in my cell.
“I don’t even know, man. They haven’t told me, said there was a warrant for my arrest.”
“Oh, you good then. They didn’t catch you with nothing, you good. Probably a citation. You gon’ get released tonight,” he said with a smile. “They caught me with some cash, said they saw me do a hand-to-hand, but cash ain’t enough to charge me. You feel me? They got the other dude out there but whatever he had on him, on him.”
He stood and slowly paced the cell. “They tryin’ to jam me up cuz they know I’m on parole,” he continued, turning back to me. “But I been working. I’m a personal trainer. I got pay stubs. No arrests….I’m good.”
His arresting officer returned and pulled him from the cage for his phone call, handing him a cell phone while he stood off to the side.
“Step out of the cell,” my arresting officer said when he returned. “Take off your belt. Remove your shoelaces.”
And like that, I was initiated into the criminal justice system.
When we were done, he placed me back in a cell. Then the burly one returned.
“Okay, what number do you want me to dial?” he asked through the bars.
“Can’t I make my own call? The dude before me did. Cop let him out and he sat right there,” I said, pointing to a desk chair. “Look, this is how this is going to go: You tell me the number and I dial. Simple as that.”
“Fine.”
I gave him my wife’s number and he held the phone up to the bars when it rang. She was frantic, but I calmly logged her into my email account and dictated a response to my department’s secretary.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “This guy’s giving me a hard time, so—”
“What?!” he interrupted. “I’m giving you hard a time? You think because you’re a professor I’m supposed to give you special treatment? You’re done!”
Then he hung up the phone and stormed off. I was enraged for what seemed like forever before he returned with a sheepish grin. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “Your warrant is for an outstanding bike ticket.” His tone suggested that he wanted me to overlook everything he had said and done before.
“You mean to tell me that you arrested me for a bike ticket that I already disputed?”
“You ever live on Classon Ave.?”
“Yes.”
“You must have not received the notices.”
“And you arrested me for this?” I said, astonished. “I bet if I was a white boy, you would have let me go.”
“Oh, now it’s about race!” he said, growing defensive. “Don’t give me that shit.”
“You arrested me! For what?!”
His face tightened as he sought an answer he couldn’t find or would rather not share.
“Fuck you!” I screamed at his back when he stormed off, clipping the last word almost instinctively, afraid that he may have heard an invitation to assault me.
Thus began my night in jail. I thought of that bike ticket, how the cops had sped up to stop in front of me as I keyed open the door to my place, how I had turned around in alarm and asked the officers if everything was okay. I was guilty of riding my bike on the sidewalk for maybe twenty yards as I left the street and rode past the bodega on the corner to my door.
I saw myself cussing out the officers, obvious rookies who in their youth didn’t know how to restrain me. I had laid into them and questioned their incompetence and overreach of the law. I thought about how ridiculous everything had seemed now. I had been pulled over many times since the incident and no other officer had ever mentioned a warrant.
But what really made my head hurt was the understanding that my current address, the one that I had publicly claimed on my license, was available to them, and if it wasn’t, it was evident there was a gross breakdown in the city’s communication. If I had really committed a crime, they would certainly come to find me.
“You know, we don’t even issue bike tickets anymore,” said the attending officer as if he were listening to my thoughts.
I chuckled in disbelief and resigned myself to my circumstances. While the officers chatted about their long commutes and pay grades, I thought about what I had planned to teach the next day.
I was in the middle of my poetry unit and was going to discuss the figurative language employed in “We Wear the Mask,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s reflection on the collective plight of African Americans who feel they must conceal their distress from the world. Dunbar was the son of enslaved Africans and knew the horrors of slavery firsthand. Through the poem, he illustrated the emotional intelligence that our ancestors used to cope with the absurdity that complicated their days.
I had taught it many times before, and almost instinctively, I began to recite the verses that I could remember in my head.
We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.
We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!
The long history of oppression hadn’t defeated our ancestors, and I found comfort in their strength. I wouldn’t be broken by these bars.
The long history of oppression hadn’t defeated our ancestors, and I found comfort in their strength.
Soon enough, others were placed in the cell with me. The first, a Latino man, was barely out of his teens. Even though there were only two of us in there, he sidled up to me so close that his thigh pressed against mine.
“You smoke bud?” he asked, and I looked at him confused, wondering if his question was some sort of joke.
“Nah, man,” I lied, having come to appreciate the medicinal benefits of cannabis as an adult, but that was none of his business.
“I can get whatever you need,” he continued. He had gone to a GameStop to return a controller. The store was apparently closed, but the door had been left ajar, so he went in and took what he wanted from the shelves, not realizing that his movements were captured on surveillance cameras.
They caught him the next day when he went back to complete the return, and as he shared the circumstances of his arrest, I thought of how foolish he sounded, how completely unaware he was of himself and his predicament.
When he told me to extend my body across the length of the bench so that I could sleep without anyone sitting next to me, I took his advice and stretched out, if for no other reason than to end the conversation. He slid to the other side of the cell then and spoke to a young woman.
“What you here for, Ma?” he asked, and she detailed the story of a lover’s quarrel. Through sobs, she explained that her boyfriend had taken her phone and wouldn’t return it. He had taunted her and ran with it between the courtyards of their projects until she had had enough.
“He said I stabbed him, but I didn’t.”
“You too cute for that, Ma,” said the gamer.
“And I’m pregnant with his baby,” she managed through tears.
“You hungry, Ma?” he asked, moving to hand a few bills to the attending officer. “Get a couple bags of chips and a honey bun.”
My anger eventually receded and became a profound sadness, not necessarily for myself, for I sensed that that my arrest wouldn’t gravely impact the course of my life. I was saddened for the people locked up with me who seemed trapped in a system that feeds insatiably on Black and Brown lives. I saw myself again in the South Bronx, where I had taught young men and women at a reentry program years before I became a professor.
At close to three in the morning, we were transported to central booking by a pair of tired, disengaged officers. When we arrived, we were shuttled from cage to cage for further processing. My irises were scanned and entered into a database before I was thrust into a narrow cell where a data clerk confirmed my identity and address. Then I was placed in a cell with eight other men ranging from their teens to their fifties.
One man was groaning uncontrollably, his body convulsing as he violently scratched his forearms. I tried to sleep sitting up, but every time I felt myself drift off, he seemed to unleash a disembodied wail that echoed throughout the cell.
I awoke the last time to the sounds of guards sliding bananas and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches through the bars. Then they chained and shuttled us to another cell that was packed with more men awaiting bench trial. Some had been waiting all weekend.
There was a teenager arrested for fighting with his brother, men arrested for public urination, public intoxication, weapons charges, violation of parole, possession of controlled substances, and I’m sure for other offenses they didn’t share. Together we talked about the Knicks and the lottery numbers and our arrests, all while the man continued to groan as drool fell from his mouth.
“I be tweaking like that when I be on them Percs,” said a teenager, laughing as he laid supine on the concrete floor.
There were only two white faces, one a young man who wore an expression of shock and terror, his eyes wide and unblinking. The other was an older man whose demeanor was relaxed and unconcerned, an attitude that seemed to suggest the life of a career criminal. He had been accused of stealing a Home Depot truck and was caught when he went back to the store the next day, a crime that some of the guys had heard reported in the news.
Before we were called into the courtroom, we were summoned by a lawyer from the Legal Aid Society who reviewed our cases in a small room attached to the cells, accessed through a thick steel door. I had indeed been cited for illegal tint along with my outstanding warrant, but both would likely be dismissed via a conditional discharge, meaning my record would be sealed if I had no further police contact for six months.
While I appreciated her confidence, I explained that I needed my charges dismissed immediately because I was in the process of being hired as a full-time professor, that the arrest could jeopardize my livelihood.
I didn’t share that I had worked as an adjunct professor for six years at Hunter and City Tech and Medgar Evers and Boricua, that I had gone through multiple interviews at Queensborough, that my prospects were high. I concealed all my anxieties and calmly asked if she could ask for more. I left the room hopeful but worried.
Would all I had worked for be thrown away over a bike ticket? As men came and went from the cell to the courtroom, I realized that those who returned were to be remanded to Rikers Island. While I wasn’t worried about this fate, the energy in the cell began to shift, and I empathized with the men who were facing it.
Surely I would go home. I had never been arrested and had a clean record, but this wasn’t the case for the gamer, who upon entering the cell again paced around with tears in his eyes.
Bang.
He reared his head back and violently slammed it into one of the steel doors.
Bang.
The mood in the cell darkened. The jokes ceased. The guy who sat next to me would be remanded too, and he stared at the floor vacantly. My name was called shortly thereafter, and I almost leapt from my seat.
The judge who presided over my case was a middle-aged Asian man, who, at the reading of my charges glanced up at me and expressed what appeared to be a mix of exasperation and shame. I read an apology on his face.
The proceedings lasted no more than five minutes and lacked any drama. My lawyer detailed my circumstances as a pending hire and asked the judge to grant an immediate dismissal, to which he consented without hesitation.
I left the courtroom with a dollar in quarters given to me by the young man booked on the hand-to-hand and a MetroCard given to me by the court. I was exhausted and needed to use the bathroom as I waited for the train at Borough Hall.
Standing there, I surveyed the station and caught the eye of a middle-aged Latino man who had been jailed with me. He had passed the time in what was either a drunken stupor or a Buddha-like state of serenity. We hadn’t exchanged pleasantries, but when he saw me, he smiled as if he sensed I needed the affection.
I wiped my eyes to hide my tears. Thankfully, the ride to my wife’s job was only a few stops away.
It took me a while to revisit Williamsburg, maybe months, the trauma of my experience too piercing to endure.
“They think they can break me. They think they can break me,” I said again and again as I sobbed in her arms. I didn’t want to cry and was surprised that I couldn’t stop, but eventually, as she swept my face with her palms, I embraced the release. I wanted to square up with the burly officer and loosen a few of his teeth with my fists, to show him that I’m a man worthy of respect, but I felt abused and shattered instead.
It took me a while to revisit Williamsburg, maybe months, the trauma of my experience too piercing to endure. I’ve overcome my anger at the thought that the officers preyed on me like an animal, that they prodded me to incriminate myself without reading my rights, that my case was a waste of time and money.
I’m more upset by my mind’s urge to forget, a defense that feels natural and appropriate sometimes. But if I do, if I succumb to what’s easy, I stand to lose much more in the process. I must always remember what happened to me to remember what it means to be a Black man in America.
There are no markers to indicate the time and place of my arrest, no plaques outlining the officers’ names and their ranks, no visible image of what transpired on that April evening, but in my mind’s eye, I see it as I always will. I see the place where I learned what it’s like to spend a day in chains.
______________________________
In Open Contempt: Confronting White Supremacy in Art and Public Space by Irvin Weathersby Jr. is available via Viking.
