If thus thou speakest, thou wilt have hatred from me, and will justly be subject to the lasting hatred of the dead. But leave me, and the folly that is mine alone, to suffer this dread thing; for I shall not suffer aught so dreadful as an ignoble death.
Sophocles |
Antigone
+++++
October
He was tired. He had been all week, but there was nothing new about being tired. Not these days, not in these times.
Being tired went with the job. The endless day-in and day-out of life on the streets. Minutes into hours, hours into days. Days then weeks, and on and on, endlessly, into months and years. Endless, pitiless time, time without end, streets without end. Jackals dancing around the fires of midnight, jackals with their faces aglow, red-eyed and glowing -- with blood of the innocent dripping from their snarling lips.
His name was Mathias Polk, though almost everyone called him Mattie, and he'd been with the department for -- what? -- almost twenty one years now? Long enough to have looked on helplessly as one marriage washed away in floods of doubt and recrimination, long enough to know his second marriage was weakening under new, ebbing tides of doubt.
No, he knew he was more than tired, that he was slowing down, and the knowledge wasn't always so easy to hide from these days.
Hiding in plain sight, wasn't that what he'd thought once? That's what it felt like, this being a black man -- in a white man's world. Enforcing the white man's law, playing by his rules -- even when they turned their backs to you. When you walked into the briefing room and you felt their eyes burning into the back of your black skull; when you walked through a store and could feel the hate growing all around you...surrounding you, until you felt choked off from their world?
But it hadn't always been that way.
No, he remembered a time not so long ago, perhaps not so far away, when things had been different. When differences had been papered over; before animosities, banked down and seething, had resurfaced -- boiling up like black tar from deep within the earth, waiting to spread out over the land and smother everything again -- with hate.
And he was beginning to fear the projects again, hate the way his own people turned away with sidelong glances when they saw his patrol car turn into their neighborhood. Hate the way his Brother Officers, his Brother -- White -- Officers grew quiet when he joined them on the street at a hot call. Hated being black, because in their eyes he couldn't be trusted.
But it hadn't always been that way, even just a few years ago. No, everything had changed -- to the way things had been a long time ago. Hate was back now, everywhere.
He felt that same kind of tired, the kind of tired he'd hoped to never feel again -- the kind of tired you feel when something evil you thought was long dead and gone suddenly, unexpectedly, returns in the night. The kind of tired you feel because you're black, because you were born with black skin, and you can't keep running from the kinds of differences people force on you, ram down your throat until you choke.
But he was tired of being a black cop most of all. Tired of the whispered, sidelong glances. Tired of being cast aside by his own people, tired of waiting for acceptance he knew would never come from his fellow -- white -- officers, and not just because his skin was a different color than their's. No, not just that.
Because it HAD been better, and then overnight, in a flash, it was all gone. Breitbart. Mark Levin. The ever-present Rush Limbaugh. What had been fringe paranoia was mainstream now, their lies spilling like raw sewage into the President's mind. They called it freedom; he called it hate. Freedom to hate again, and he heard it these days everywhere he went.
"Why'd they let a nigger put on that uniform?" He'd heard that one a few weeks after the election, but now, after hate was the new normal, he heard variations on that theme almost daily, and it was beginning to wear him down.
'It's like no matter where I go, no matter what I do, I'm always gonna be on the outside -- always on the outside, lookin' in...because that's where they're going to put me, because that's where, they say, I belong.'
And it would always be that way, he didn't have to add, because that's just the way things were. There'd been a brief flowering of acceptance, then all that hate had come welling back up from the deepest, darkest places of the soul.
Twenty-one years and still a patrolman, despite having aced the Sergeant's Exam -- twice. As in: two years running, beating out everyone else. As in, being passed over -- because in their eyes I'm just a nigger, a Second Class Citizen, and therefore not worthy of rank. And I'll never be more than that in 'their' eyes. 'I'm not an African-American, and I'm not even a black man. I'm a Nigger, plain and simple. Nothing's ever really changed, not really, and nothing ever will.'
Yet he'd graduated near the top of his class at Ole Miss -- the University of Mississippi -- with a major in Sociology and a minor in Political Science. He'd grown up in Oxford and wanted to be a politician, too, or at least that's what he'd told himself all those years ago, before he'd seen the light. "You're either a part of the problem -- or a part of the solution," the old saying went, but by then he'd begun to see politicians as just one part of a much bigger problem. Hate was hate, and he'd never be able to change that. He'd never be able to change human nature, so he'd decided to help where he thought he was needed most.
He turned on the radio, started singing with the music...The Who...Baba O'Reilly. "I don't need to fight," he sang, "to prove I'm right, I don't need to be forgiven." He'd wanted to make a difference, and the only place he could was out here -- out here in the fields, and then he was screaming "teenage wasteland, it's only teenage wasteland."
Because that's what it felt like now. A wasteland. Drugs everywhere, no personal responsibility. Politicians at every level had sold us out -- not just his people, but everyone, the entire country. Idealists when they campaigned, once they got in office they acted like whores, they spread their legs for anyone with money, and the more life 'educated' him, the more aware he became of this one self-evident truth: Money is Power. Democrat, Republican -- didn't matter: 'We, the People' was an abstract promise that held little relevance today, and the rising tide of mediocrity that had flocked to public service as a result was a joke, a new class of self-interested charlatans.
Clinton sold out black people just much as Reagan and Bush had, only when he sold welfare reform to -- 'We, the people' -- it turned out welfare reform meant prison privatization. Don't give a man on the 'down-and-out' a hand-out when it was much more profitable to stick his ass in prison! Why give a black man twenty large when you can give sixty to your cousin -- so long as 'cous' is in the prison biz? And who cares if the judges are invested in the system up to their eyeballs, the prosecutors, too. No sir, the rich get richer and the poor get -- children? Ain't that how the song went? Always been that way...always will be, too. Might as well get used to that, boy, so harness up and get ready to pull that plow. Maybe they get us to pickin' they cotton again, and real soon, too.
Yet he'd just bought a house out on the east side of town, and he had a daughter in middle school now, another kid on the way. "Isn't that funny?" he said as the music ended. "Or is that what you call irony? Because haven't I sold out, too?" he continued, talking to himself now as he drove down one bleak street after another. The white kids in this neighborhood were playing in the mud now, like the black folk did a hundred years ago.
