Member-only story
My father missed the turnoff. We intended to go around the city. We were driving from NYC to Raleigh, NC — or the other way around. I don’t remember that.
But I do remember the smoke, the tension in the air. I remember feeling confused, that something was terribly wrong. We were in the nation’s capitol. There was smoke and fire and people fighting.
I was eleven, but politically aware. I was a bit slow learning to read (the look-say method didn’t work for me, and over a summer my sister taught me to read using phonics), but once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. I read the New York Times every day. Call me Poindexter.
A year or so earlier, I had read a paperback that was hanging around, Black Like Me, a book about a white journalist who disguised himself as a black man and went South — to understand firsthand what it’s like. I barely knew any black people but I knew about racism. Second hand, from a book. Until this moment.
I wasn’t afraid, but I’m pretty sure my family was nervous. My nose was pressed up against the closed car window. I wanted to see, to understand, to take it in. My dad just…
