One of Our Kind, page 4
“PROFILES IN BRIEF: CARLTON WAY”
Who is Carlton Way?
Born in the Bronx, New York, Mr. Way, 56, put himself through MIT, graduating magna cum laude in chemical engineering. He subsequently earned an MBA from Stanford, becoming the youngest African American ever to graduate from their storied program. Following stints at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, Mr. Way founded his own firm, Argent Financial, specializing in investments in lifestyle products. He is also a co-founder of Liberty, a thriving, entirely Black Los Angeles suburb founded on the principles of Black excellence.
Net Worth
Per Forbes, Mr. Way is worth an estimated $3 billion.
Personal Life
Born to public school teachers, Mr. Way had an early life marked by the tragic loss of his father to a police-involved shooting. He is unmarried and has no children.
Notable Philanthropy
Since 2017, Mr. Way has paid the loans for the entire graduating class of Howard University, an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) in the United States. In an interview, Mr. Way said he wanted the graduates to be “unshackled from the chains of financial slavery.”
5
The news alert pings Jasmyn’s phone as she’s walking Kamau into school the next morning. She glances at the screen. Breaking News: Black man dies, child injured during officer-involved shooting in Los Angeles.
“Jesus Christ. Please don’t tell me they shot a child,” she mutters out loud without meaning to. She starts to click the link, but then doesn’t. Better for her to wait until Kamau is tucked away in class.
Kamau tugs on her hand. “Moms, you’re not even listening,” he says with his mad face on.
Jasmyn looks at him and wants to smile. His mad face is especially cute. The way he scrunches his little nose up tight and pushes out his lips reminds her of when he was a baby. She wants to scoop him up, cuddle him close, and keep him safe.
“I’m sorry, baby. Say it again. Mama’s listening.”
He pouts a little more but repeats himself anyway. “Nico wouldn’t let me hold his comic book.”
“Remind me who Nico is again?”
“I said that already,” he whines. “He’s in my class.”
“All right, calm down,” she says and kisses the top of his head. “Why don’t you tell me all about Nico and this comic book.”
By the time they get to his classroom, Jasmyn has agreed to buy the new Miles Morales Spider-Man comic for him.
On her way out, she runs into the principal.
“Mrs. Williams, lovely to see you,” he says, holding his hand out for a shake.
Ordinarily, she’d be happy to see the man. He has a confident, no-nonsense air and a smile that puts her at ease. Now, though, all she wants to do is to leave the campus so she can read the news about the shooting. Not knowing the details makes her feel unsafe, like a fault has developed underneath her feet and she’s no longer sure where to stand.
Jasmyn bites the inside of her cheek and tells herself to be patient. “Lovely to see you as well, Principal Harper,” she says and shakes his hand.
“I believe you met my wife, Sherril, a few weeks back. She’s Liberty’s one-woman welcome wagon.”
“Oh, yes, I did. Please thank her again for those cookies. They were delicious. Kamau devoured them.”
He laughs. “I’ll ask her to bake some more.”
“No, it’s OK. I wasn’t trying to—”
“Believe me, it’s no problem at all,” he says, waving her off. “Speaking of Kamau, I have to say, he’s adjusting very nicely, better than we could’ve hoped given the mid-grade transfer.” He taps his nose and leans in slightly. “I have a feeling for these things and I can tell that he’ll thrive here.”
His words are a balm and Jasmyn feels some tension leave her shoulders. “I’m so glad to hear that. I’ve been worrying a little.”
“That’s only natural,” he says. “But now you can set that worry aside.”
“Thank you,” she says, surprised at the depth of her relief and gratitude.
“No need to thank me. ‘It takes a village,’ as they say.” He holds out his hand for another shake. “Well, I’m sure you have a busy day. I won’t keep you.”
As soon as she’s outside the school gates, she plucks her phone from her purse. There’s another breaking news alert. It turns out there’s cellphone video of the shooting.
“Jesus Christ,” she says aloud to no one. Her scalp prickles hot and then cold and hot again. Her dread is crushing and, too, so familiar.
She opens the article as she walks. It starts with a bold-faced warning: This video contains graphic content. Viewer discretion is advised. Will there come a day, she wonders, when these videos don’t even have a warning? When they are so commonplace that they’re no longer shocking?
At first the article is everything she’s come to expect from incidents like these. White cop. Traffic stop. Dead Black man.
But then she gets to the part about the child, and Jasmyn is only able to process the most basic details.
Girl.
Four years old.
Collapsed lung.
Critical condition.
MLK Hospital.
Mercy Simpson.
Her name is Mercy Simpson.
Jasmyn flashes back to the incident with the cop in the spring. It could have turned out so differently. It could’ve turned out like this.
She presses a hand to her chest, wanting to push down the bile rising inside her. The back of her throat burns. The baby kicks, as if he can sense her distress. Jasmyn pulls her eyes up from her phone to check where she is. It’s still morning. She’s still on the sidewalk in the bright sunshine outside her son’s school.
She’s still here, in America.
According to the article, the dead man’s name is Tyrese Simpson. His girlfriend, Lorraine, was in the car with him. She’s the one who recorded the video. Mercy Simpson is their daughter. The police say Tyrese was reaching for a gun. Lorraine says he was unbuckling his seat belt. The police are promising a thorough investigation. They’re asking for patience and calm.
It’s all Jasmyn can do not to fling her phone across the street. How dare they ask for patience and calm? How dare they ask for anything at all?
She scrolls to the video at the beginning of the article and clicks the link.
The first image Jasmyn sees is of the cop’s face, pale and hard, hovering in the driver’s-side window. The little girl, Mercy Simpson, is crying in that inconsolable way four-year-olds do. Lorraine shushes her, calls her “sweetie,” tells her they’ll be home soon. Jasmyn hears the slight tremble in Lorraine’s voice as she tries to hide her terror from Mercy. She pitches her voice high, gives it a soothing singsong quality. It’s the tone every parent uses when they’re afraid of something but don’t want their child to be afraid of it, too. Jasmyn recognizes Lorraine’s tone because she’s used it herself on Kamau.
Tyrese asks why he was stopped, but the cop doesn’t answer. Instead he asks for license and registration.
The camera falls over and gets obscured by something that Jasmyn guesses is fabric. Lorraine was probably trying to hide the fact that she was filming. Next, there’s a shot of the glove compartment being opened.
Jasmyn pauses the video to gather herself for what’s coming. Once, when Kamau was little, about three years old, she’d been watching cartoons with him. King came into the room and, for some reason or another, paused the TV. Kamau immediately began crying. When they asked why he was upset, Kamau explained that the characters in the show were very hungry and just about to eat, but now that the TV was paused they’d have to be hungry for longer and their tummies would hurt. Jasmyn had wanted to laugh at his absurd sweetness, but she stopped herself because Kamau had his serious face on and she didn’t want to belittle his feelings. For him, the characters on TV were real. When you paused it, you paused their real lives.
“So what happens when you turn off the TV?” Jasmyn had asked.
“They wait for us to come back,” Kamau said.
Jasmyn started to explain but King put his hand out to stop her.
Later, King said: “No harm in letting him believe it. Let him have his innocence for as long as he can.”
Now Jasmyn’s finger hovers over the Play button. She wishes Kamau’s sentiment had been right, that if you paused the video, you paused the life. That if she doesn’t press Play then Tyrese and Lorraine and Mercy will be safe. But it’s not the witnessing that makes it real. These things—these murders—take place whether you watch them or not.
She resumes the video.
The cop asks Tyrese to step out of the car.
Tyrese asks why and Lorraine does too.
Mercy Simpson wails even louder.
The cop realizes he’s being filmed and tells Lorraine to stop.
And then, chaos.
The camera tumbles to the ground, filming only the roof of the car. The audio is still recording. It’s hard for Jasmyn to make out the words because Mercy Simpson is crying at the top of her lungs, but she catches most of it:
Why I can’t record? It’s my right to record you.
Put your hands where I can seem them!
Why you can’t see them? They right here!
You asked him to get out the car!
I can’t see your hands!
They right here!
And then the shots, like small bombs exploding. Like lives exploding.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
And then Lorraine is screaming and the cop is swearing. But it’s Mercy Simpson’s sudden shattering silence that undoes Jasmyn.
She presses the phone against her chest, squeezes her eyes shut. “Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ.”
“Honey, are you OK?” a woman’s voice asks.
At first, Jasmyn doesn’t realize the woman is talking to her, but the voice comes again, closer now.
“Do you need a tissue?” the woman asks.
Jasmyn touches her face and understands that she’s weeping. She takes the tissue, dabs at her face. “Thank you.”
“Of course,” says the other woman. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“I’ll be all right in just a minute. Just a minute.” She takes a deep breath and then another.
“Please, take all the time you need,” the woman says.
A few more seconds pass before Jasmyn can compose herself enough to really pay attention to her Good Samaritan.
The woman is pale brown with loosely curled black hair—a 3B curl pattern if Jasmyn had to guess—and dressed in a lavender pantsuit. A little girl, a miniature version of her mother, stands next to her.
“Why don’t you run into school from here?” the woman says to her daughter.
The little girl’s face lights up in delight at the prospect of half a block of independence. “Bye, Mama. I love you,” she says and skips away.
Jasmyn protests. “Thank you, but you didn’t have to do that,” she says. “Go ahead and walk her in.”
The woman just smiles and then guides Jasmyn from where she’s standing in the middle of the sidewalk to the sidelines.
Jasmyn feels the eyes of other mothers and fathers on her as they hurry by.
“Please tell me what I can do to help,” the woman says.
Jasmyn holds her phone aloft. “I watched the latest shooting.”
The woman’s eyes register nothing.
Of course, Jasmyn thinks. She doesn’t know yet. The news only just came out.
“There was another shooting,” she says, voice shaking. She presses her nails into her palms and wills herself to be calm. “They killed him. They almost killed his daughter, too. She’s in the hospital fighting for her life.”
“Who killed who?” the woman asks. Her curiosity is small and mild.
“I’m sorry, I’m not doing a good job explaining.”
Jasmyn’s eyes fill with tears again and she dabs at them. Now she feels vaguely like an army chaplain charged with delivering the worst news. Impossible news. Your child—the precious thing that is you and not you, the thing that is your beating heart made flesh—is gone. Who, Jasmyn wonders, called Tyrese Simpson’s mother and father to tell them that their son was dead? Who is caring for Lorraine while her child struggles for air through punctured lungs? Who breathes for Lorraine?
It’s this last thought that allows Jasmyn to pull herself together. This news will be as hard for her Good Samaritan to hear as it was for Jasmyn. She offers the news carefully, threading a poisoned needle.
“The cops killed another Black man last night. His daughter was in the car with him and they shot her, too. His girlfriend got video. I was just watching it. His name was Tyrese. His little girl’s name is Mercy.” She holds out her phone for the woman to take.
Understanding blooms in the other woman’s eyes. “Oh no,” she says. “I don’t watch those. It’s much too much for me.”
Jasmyn raises her eyebrows and sweeps a reassessing gaze over the woman. That 3B curl pattern might be a 3A and she really is a very pale brown. Her makeup is impeccable, a palette of blushing pinks and gloss like a freshly misted orchid.
Of course Jasmyn has met her type before. She’s one of those Black people, too delicate to face up to the world we live in. The kind that looks away and pretends that if she can’t see the world’s violence against Black people, it isn’t happening. Jasmyn has never understood, or agreed with, that way of being. She always clicks the headlines. She always watches the videos. Why should she feel safe and comfortable when yet another Black man is dead? No. It isn’t OK to look away. She always watches. Bears witness.
“Is there anything I can do to help you?” the woman asks. She offers Jasmyn another tissue.
Jasmyn waves the offer away, not wanting to take anything else from the other woman. She inches her shoulders back and stands taller. “I’ll be all right in a minute.” She wipes her face with the tissue she’s already holding. It comes apart in her hands.
It occurs to her then that she’s doing the thing King sometimes accuses her of doing: judging other people and finding them lacking. Just because this woman doesn’t watch the videos doesn’t mean she doesn’t care. After all, here she is, offering care to a stranger. Jasmyn feels a compulsion to connect with her beyond this moment of comfort. Maybe it’s because she’s still raw from watching the shooting. Or maybe it’s because the woman is Black, too, and therefore must—in some essential part of herself—understand how Jasmyn feels, because she’s feeling it as well.
“Actually, I will take that tissue if you don’t mind,” Jasmyn says. She rolls her shoulders, trying to loosen them, trying to give the woman a second chance.
The woman hands her the entire packet. “You keep it.”
Jasmyn thanks her and wipes away her remaining tears. “I’m Jasmyn, by the way,” she says. “My family and I just moved here a month ago.”
“Oh, yes, the newcomer. You’re going to love it,” the woman says with genuine enthusiasm. “I’m Catherine Vail.”
Jasmyn doesn’t miss the way Catherine says the newcomer instead of a newcomer. This is what happens when you live in a small community, she supposes. Everybody gets up in everybody else’s business.
They make small talk. Catherine’s job is an unusual one. She’s a speech and dialect coach for actors specializing in accent modification. She’s divorced, with full custody of her little girl.
“Listen,” Jasmyn says. “I hope this isn’t presumptuous of me, but do you want to exchange numbers? I’m sure there’ll be protests tonight at city hall and vigils at the hospital.” Most of her friends and some of her coworkers would be going out to one or even both. “We could meet up somewhere downtown if you want.”
Catherine hesitates, and Jasmyn thinks that maybe she’d judged her correctly in the first place. She is the type that looks away. But then she says, “Of course,” and enters her number into Jasmyn’s phone.
“Well, it was lovely meeting you. I hope your day gets better.” Her voice is a placid lake, cool and serene.
When Jasmyn texts Catherine later in the day to ask if she wants to attend a vigil in front of MLK Hospital, the woman declines, saying she can’t find a babysitter. Jasmyn stares at the text for a few seconds. People lie all the time to get out of things they don’t want to do. Maybe Catherine Vail can’t find a sitter, but Jasmyn’s gut says the woman simply isn’t interested in protesting or in being vigilant. But, again, maybe she’s jumping to conclusions too quickly. She sighs, puts her phone away, and gets back to work.
* * *
≈
The vigil is small, only about a hundred or so people, mostly Black women. They congregate in a parking lot across from the emergency room. Someone hands out tea candles and someone else says the Lord’s Prayer. After a while, a woman starts singing “Amazing Grace.” Her voice is resonant and clear, like struck crystal. One by one, everyone else joins in and Jasmyn imagines for a moment that their combined voices make it to Mercy Simpson’s ears and give her some small comfort.
“How was it?” King asks later when Jasmyn climbs into bed.
She takes a few seconds to settle into the soft warmth of the sheets before answering. “You know how it is,” she says on a sigh. Over the course of their relationship, she and King have gone to quite a few vigils together. They always left feeling angry, energized, and comforted in equal measure.
“Want me to massage your feet?” he asks.
“You’re a godsend,” she says, and unearths her feet from the covers.
King’s hands are magic, stretching her toes and digging into her aching arches. When he’s done, he peppers her stomach with small kisses. “My boy is getting bigger every day,” he says.
