Tyler Johnson Was Here

by Jay Coles

  There’re huge police lines, vans, and cones on every corner, containing us in a single space. Like animals or criminals. At the ends of each road are SWAT trucks and huge military tanks, as if they’re a symbol to prevent us from escaping oppression.

  There are newsmen and newswomen here in fancy suits, with microphones glued to their hands and pressed up against the mouths of Sojo High students. Half of Sojo High is out joining this fight, this desperate plea for justice and safety—basic human rights.

  “Everyone stay close by,” I say, leading the way deeper into the crowd to the front line of the protest. I start to see people I recognize, even some from Johntae’s party.

  “Aye-yo! There goes Faith!” G-mo shouts, pointing her out as she comes from an alley across the way.

  Faith runs over and throws her arms around me, her braids scratching the side of my face. She passes us bullhorns and large white signs.

  As we move to the front of the protest, I see the posters up close. Some have my brother’s name on them, and also a list of other names. Some of them say: TYLER’S FREE! Because, I realize, it’s all about how he’s free. It’s not just about how he died. It’s about how he broke free in such a fucked-up way. It’s about how he lived.

  Ivy’s sign, held up high in the sky, says: STAY WOKE.

  G-mo’s sign says: I AM A HUMAN BEING. I AM YOU.

  The sign that I hold up says in big, bold, black letters: MY LIFE MATTERS!

  There’s a cacophonous blare of voices that has me flinching.

  Everything is so loud and suffocating.

  I turn my head and see Ms. Tanner waving us down. When she finally gets over to us, she hugs everyone, even my mom.

  I give yet another scan of the crowd to see all types of people: black, white, Asian, Latino, young, and old. And I see Albert Sharp. He stands surrounded by news reporters, by protestors, but when he sees Mama and me, he steps right toward us and first takes Mama’s hands, then my own. His palms are warm and dry. Everyone nearby turns to look at us, and I can feel realization sweeping over the crowd—realization of who we are, that we’re Tyler Johnson’s family.

  “I’m glad you came,” Mr. Sharp says, his voice just as deep and slow as molasses as it was on the news. “I know this is a difficult time for you. But we will get justice. For you, and for your son,” he says to Mama.

  She’s nodding slowly, eyes tearing up. “Thank you.”

  He nods at me with a small smile. “You’ve got a great young man here,” he says. “Contacted me about getting this protest set up.”

  Mama looks at me with surprise, but I shrug, embarrassed. “I felt like I couldn’t just sit there. I had to do something.”

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry for the pain you’re feeling.”

  Mr. Sharp tells us that God’s going to come through in the end, that he always does, that he’s going to push us right out of this messy tunnel in our lives. He even stops to pray for us, asking the Lord for mercy and grace and peace and justice. Everyone around circles us, including Ivy and G-mo and Faith, their hands reaching in to touch us while we pray—and whether they believe in God or not, whether they’re praying with us or not, I know they’re reaching in so that we’ll know we’re not alone. We’ll know there’re people who want justice for Tyler, too. That they’re hurting also. It’s enough to make the pain bubble up, and tears leak from my eyes. Faith keeps her hand on my shoulder the whole time.

  When Albert Sharp finishes his prayer, we stand in a straight line, holding hands, megaphones in front of our faces. And we start chanting. Our chant is simple, and it doesn’t take long for everyone to join in, to become one powerful roar of voices, wanting and needing so desperately to be heard.

  “Sterling Point P-D, stop brutality! Sterling Point P-D, stop brutality!” We chant this on a loop, getting louder each time, until our voices crack and dry. And we all do a rally wave–like effect, where one person starts to raise their hands in the air and shout, “Don’t shoot me!” and then everyone else follows.

  As the sun beams and blinds me, I put a hand over my eyes like a visor and look across the way, but I can’t quite hide from the hate. There’s a line of angry police officers wearing bulletproof vests and helmets, with plastic shields in one hand and rifles in the other. Some cops are holding leashes attached to equally pissed Rottweilers with foamy mouths and spiky collars. They got all this military gear. For a while, I just take in everything I see, listening to Mama and Ivy and G-mo and Faith shout the chants beside me.

  I hear another kind of screaming. I look back over at the line of police officers, and I see a few of them on top of a protestor, one of them with his knee in the protestor’s back as he lies sprawled on the ground. A black kid who just keeps repeating that his phone isn’t a gun, but they don’t even give a shit. They slap on the cuffs anyway.

  A phone isn’t dangerous, I tell myself, and neither is black skin.

  Ivy clears her throat. “Listen up, ladies and gentlemen,” she shouts into the megaphone. All the chaos and noise comes down to a whisper. “We are here today for a few different reasons! To fight for our homie Tyler Johnson. To take a stand against police brutality and demand change and justice for all. We’re here to say we’ve had enough. No more. We shouldn’t be afraid of the people who’re supposed to protect us. We just shouldn’t have to be. Peace and equality shouldn’t be this hard.”

  The crowd cheers and applauds, and I feel Faith’s arm loop with mine as she rests her head on my shoulder, her hand on my chest as if she needs to feel my heartbeat, to know that I am not going to combust from all the feelings pent up inside me.

  Ivy slips out her phone and reads something off the screen. “Our lives matter! Oscar Grant mattered! Freddie Gray mattered! Michael Brown mattered! Jordan Davis mattered! Eric Garner mattered! Tarika Wilson mattered! Dontre Hamilton mattered! Sandra Bland mattered! Trayvon Martin mattered! Tanisha Anderson mattered! Yvette Smith mattered! Tamir Rice mattered! Alton Sterling mattered! Philando Castile mattered! Jordan Edwards mattered! Don’t forget—Emmett Till mattered!”

  The last one sticks and makes me feel nauseous: “Tyler Johnson mattered!” I raise my fist, all clenched and tight. Ivy, G-mo, Faith, Mama, and a bunch of others put their fists in the air, too. And we look like an ocean of multicolored fists. The fist in the air originated as a symbol of black power and pride, but it’s also a symbol of solidarity and unity, and I think the fact that so many protestors showed up says a lot about how we stand as a people, and about how we can bring change. Together.

  I look to my left when I see something move out the corner of my eye. I notice a kid wearing a white T-shirt with #TYLERJOHNSONWASHERE written in thick black Sharpie breaking away from the crowd and walking closer and closer to the cops. The dogs are barking, and the boy—a white boy I recognize from Ms. Tanner’s class—stomps his feet hard on the ground to send the dogs jumping back. It only makes them more pissed.

  I think to myself, I don’t know what he’s about to do, but it’s not going to be good.

  It feels like the world is moving slower as the boy crosses over the cutoff line, entering into dangerous territory.

  Suddenly, the line of police officers breaks and disperses into our crowd. I hear a few bangs and pops. Rubber bullets hail down on my skin like sharp droplets from the sky.

  Bodies fall over, crying out.

  Rage and hate in the eyes of the people who’re supposed to be protecting us.

  People run in all directions, and I lose Faith, Ivy, G-mo, and Mama in the crowd. I spin around, looking for Mama, trying to find her in the mess of faces blurring by, cringing in pain. I run down the block, away from the chaos, and stand there, looking at it all with my hands on my head.

  My lungs feel tight.

  Feet heavy.

  I hear the shattering of glass. I turn to my left and see a group of people with ski masks on and bats in hand busting the windows out of nearby cars and school buses and news vans.

&nb
sp; No, I say to myself. This isn’t how this is supposed to go.

  Faith comes running toward me. She links arms with me.

  “What do you wanna do?” she says. “Join the riot? If these pigs want to play dirty, we can, too. Two can play that game.”

  What the hell, Faith? No. I try to remind myself that I don’t believe in violence. But a part of me wants to say fuck everything, fuck everybody, fuck the peace. If they want to do this, then we can get ugly back. And sometimes, anger is the only way to really get people to pay attention—to listen.

  But I know this isn’t how I want to remember Tyler. The rage built up in me isn’t going to bring him back. I shake my head at Faith, and she nods, like she respects my decision. And we stand there and watch as the protest falls apart around us.

  Some guys hop on top of cars and news vans, vandalizing and stomping on them. The shattering of glass plays on loop until there’s no more unbroken glass in sight. The protestors don’t leave Sojo Truth High intact either. The entrance door has dents in it, and its glass window is shattered. Some of the classroom windows have been beaten in as well.

  I watch someone light a trash can on fire and throw it across the way toward the police cars, and suddenly it bursts into flames, creating a line of fire. Someone even tries setting a parked school bus on fire as a small crowd of people cheers, but they can’t get it to work right. Instead, they just kick it, throw rocks at the windows, and destroy the seats on the inside.

  I see a flash of Mama’s face and run into the crowd to grab her arm. She’s with Ivy and G-mo. I see dark purple lumps on her arm. She’s been shot with rubber bullets.

  I pull her over to the side where Faith is standing.

  I collapse on the ground beside her. “Ma, Ma, Ma. You okay?” My heart is beating so fast inside my chest right now.

  She nods and flinches when I try pulling her up, holding her arm.

  “You sure?”

  She lifts herself off the ground, moving her arm around. “I’m good.” I brush her back and shoulders to remove all the dirt and rubble. She tries to get back out to the protest with everyone else.

  I grab her arm again. “Where’re you going? We should head home before this gets worse.”

  “Hell no,” she snaps. “Tyler got a shot to the chest and two in the stomach and died. I’m gonna stay here and make my voice heard.”

  And that’s exactly what she does.

  The entire street becomes a panorama of oranges and reds and yellows. Fire everywhere. Rocks and bottles and cans fly through the air, and I can’t keep up. We all try to stick together in a small group to protect one another from harm, but we’re also shouting, “No justice, no peace!” and “We’re so tired of this shit, man!” The muscles in my neck are starting to get sore from screaming. I can’t believe we even have to do this.

  People are suddenly wearing gas masks now. Others are using their shirts to cover their noses and mouths. I look behind me, and police are rushing toward us with firework cannons.

  Boom! They fire into the crowd.

  Boom! They fire again.

  Smoke funnels everywhere on impact. I choke, and my eyes burn and water. And this anger inside my chest wants to come out. It’s choking me and I can’t breathe between these tears.

  Fire trucks arrive, and the cops start spraying people with water. The ground becomes slick, and people slip and slide in the street.

  Protestors are getting in their cars and moving to different areas, escaping the riot before the police start shooting real bullets.

  Mama grabs me and we run to the car. Ivy, G-mo, and Faith follow behind. We all wheeze and wheeze for oxygen until we get away from the scene and can breathe in clean air.

  Before, when I heard about black and brown kids getting killed by the police, I didn’t think protesting was worth it, that it would do anything at all. I used to think that protests were stupid because they wouldn’t change anything, especially not a racist’s mind. But now I see: This is only the beginning of a long fight. It’s my turn to speak up and resist.

  • 27 •

  I can’t draw worth shit, but I spend the next couple weeks sketching the same picture of a boy with a low fade and a wide nose, flat like a pug’s, standing in front of a black hole, one leg engulfed in dark matter, the other in the light. It’s been yet another failed experiment to distract myself, to worry less about whether Officer Monster will get indicted and put in jail for what he did.

  I’ve tried everything, even drowning myself in my music, but nothing seems to work—nothing seems to stop the grief from grabbing me by the throat and choking the oxygen right out. I almost think that I get worse as each day passes. I sleep. I wake. I sleep. I wake. And I keep on doing that until they seem to become one and the same.

  All my days are a hazy, unhappy mess inside my fragmented home, and outside my window, where real life waits in all of its shadows, the sun getting consumed by the hand of the night, I see white people walking happily down the street and it’s a goddamn aching punch in the gut of something people like me don’t quite yet have: freedom.

  I wake up and eat my Lucky Charms slowly. I wake up wondering how many mornings and nights I’ve got left. I wake up trying to convince myself that it was all just a dream. But this only brings more grief. Because this shit isn’t a dream, man.

  One day my brother was here, and then the next, he wasn’t.

  And it’s such a strange and depressing thing to wonder how many days it’ll take for Mama to stop kissing Tyler’s urn. How long it’ll take for her to stop talking to it in the morning and at night.

  My Mondays become Wednesdays and my Wednesdays become Fridays and my Fridays become Mondays again. At least, that’s the way it seems. Time has become such an agonizing thing to bear. There’s only this moment right now, the next one, and the one after that. And I realize that the saying was bullshit all along. Time does not heal. It only anesthetizes.

  Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays are days that I spend with Faith. And it’s so nice to have her around. Her presence, though it comes in tiny doses, is like a drink that I down to blur out all the bad things that have happened in my life.

  Faith’s also teaching me how to be the only child, which guts me as much as it dulls all this hurt. But I find ways to turn the hurt into anger and the anger into lonely and the lonely into busy, even if it means trying to push through the pointless schoolwork Ms. Tanner drops off at my house every day and drawing shitty-ass stick figures and black blotches of ink.

  Faith is doing work for her college one Monday night, flipping through a textbook. I sit on the edge of her bed, watching her, trying not to think about the fact that I have to get my application done since I got an extension, and I don’t think I’ll be able to. Isn’t it fucked up that my brother is gone, and I might get to go to MIT because I fit the kind of black boy category they’re looking for?

  “What’re you thinking about?” Faith asks, glancing up from her book.

  “Nothing,” I lie. She waits, and I let out a sigh. “Just about college. What I’m going to do.”

  “You’re still being considered for MIT, right?”

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  “You seem so excited about that,” she says with a small smile.

  And the thing is, once upon a time, I really did think I was excited about it. “I used to be. Not so much anymore.”

  She closes her textbook. “Why not?”

  “Because of everything. Tyler. I don’t know.”

  “It can be hard to feel like you’re moving on with your life. After Kayla died, I felt like I didn’t have the right to go to school or anything like that.”

  I’m nodding, my eyes tearing up. I’m so fucking sick of crying.

  She puts a hand on my knee. “You don’t have to feel guilty.”

  “You know, before he died, I told him that he didn’t have to do what was expected of him. Everyone looks at us and expects us to be into the drug life because we’re black, and I t
old him he didn’t have to go down that path. But I’m doing the same thing, in a way. Applying to MIT just because people say that’s the best school to go to.”

  She opens her textbook again. “Sounds to me like you’re not actually that excited about MIT.”

  When I get home, I tear open an Oatmeal Creme Pie and stare at my computer screen, looking at MIT’s website. And I exit out. Open up another tab and start looking at other colleges. Best schools to double-major in science and African-American history. Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like Howard University, where a lot of famous black people went. Taraji P. Henson, Chadwick Boseman, Diddy, Zora Neale Hurston, and even Thurgood Marshall.

  My bedroom door creaks open.

  “Hey.” Mama smiles warmly at me. She’s wearing a black-and-white sundress. “You’ve got a visitor.”

  I feel my eyebrows furrow. “Who is it?”

  She places a hand on her hip.

  I minimize my tabs and lift myself up to go check, walking down the hall and into the kitchen. A girl is sitting at the table, but she stands as soon as I walk in, chair scraping back against the tile. It’s the girl from the hearing, Daphne, with a sweet potato pie in her hands.

  She has a look in her eyes like she’s hugging me in her head.

  “What’re you doing here?” I say, and immediately regret how rude I sound—but I don’t like reminders of Tyler, don’t like reminders of the hearing. And a part of me is pissed at Daphne, too—for being there, for being the last person to see Tyler alive besides his murderer, for just filming and not doing anything to stop it.

  But I know it wasn’t her fault. If she’d tried to stop the officer, she might’ve gotten killed, too, and no one would’ve ever seen the video. Mama and I might still not have any idea what happened to Tyler.