Carry

by Toni Jensen

The rate alarms. Still, having helped raise my little brother, I was sure I could raise a boy. Given what boys are encouraged to become in this, our America, I was not sure about raising a girl.

  If you have a room full of women and a separate room full of men, all but one of the women not only will know what I mean by the phrase “arrange her face,” but also, as the words are spoken, she will execute the maneuver. In the room of men, only one or maybe two men will have any idea what I mean, and perhaps one will move the muscles of his face accordingly, and perhaps not. When I say I thought I was carrying a boy, what I mean to say is that I wanted for the child I carried a life where the life—down to the facial muscles—remained theirs.

  My daughter is born a daughter in the early morning hours on December 21, 2006. It’s the shortest day of the year and this year also one of the coldest. As we headed to the hospital the day before, Pittsburgh seemed hushed by the cold, perhaps, or by how little sun breaks through the winter gloom this time of year. Even the birds were quiet in the trees, huddled together, their wings tucked into themselves.

  We arrive at Magee Hospital on the twentieth, and in the late afternoon that day, as I labor in my room, as my daughter resists being born, a teenager is shot and killed four miles away in Homewood. His name is James Stubbs. He’s seventeen. He’s just left school for the day when he’s shot through the neck and dies. He’s holding his cellphone.

  Soon another teen, Joseph Hall, will be accused of his murder. The evidence is thin, is based on no forensic evidence and on testimony that is changed and changed again and then recanted. Still, Joseph Hall is convicted of third-degree murder, is sentenced to seventeen and a half to thirty-five years in prison.

  I am leery here of calling these two boys or men and so am settling on teens or teenagers. They are Black, and I know the disrespect, the connotation boy so often holds when it’s lobbed toward Black teenagers, Black men. I am a middle-aged woman, and if I wrote the word boy, I would only be meaning that I see these seventeen-year-olds as not yet grown. I am meaning I see them with a mother’s eyes. I am meaning I’m old enough to be their mothers, and I know they were and are loved. But I know the connotations and power of language. So they are teenagers.

  Because I know, I am even more leery of making these two men before they are. I am more leery of what happens when we call a Black teen, a Latino teen, a Native teen, grown or man before he is. The leap from man to thug to criminal to “of course he deserved it” to “of course, he did it” is in this, our America, an everyday leap. I am tired of the semantics of this leaping. I want to be still. If white boys get to be boys through their thirties, and sometimes indefinitely, sometimes into perpetuity, then these two get to be teens a moment longer. Except, of course, in life, they don’t.

  James Stubbs’s cousin Lawrence Godfrey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette his cousin liked to play basketball, and that “he was never into gang-banging or street stuff. I don’t know how this could have happened.”

  I want Stubbs and Hall both to be seen as not yet grown, as children still, as somebody’s children, the way my girl, the next day, is seen as baby, as infant, as someone’s child, as belonging to a particular someone. They are statistics, yes, and also they are teens—are goofy and basketball-loving and particular. They are loved by their people, their families, their uncles and aunties, their mothers.

  II.

  It’s dark, and the hill is steep, and the flashing lights go on behind me as I reach my house. It is two months before I give birth. I am still having a boy. I pull my car into its spot out front and park. He’s been following for about two miles, his car drawing closer and closer as I draw closer to home. Even when he makes the move, it’s just lights, no sound. He’s probably worried about who lives in the house, about who might come out from nearby houses or the apartments across the street, about who I am. His is a logical worry.

  Webster’s primary definition of the verb worry is the British one: “1 dialectal British: CHOKE, STRANGLE.” The other definitions include:

  2a: to harass by tearing, biting, or snapping especially at the throat

  b: to shake or pull at with the teeth // a terrier worrying a rat

  c: to touch or disturb something repeatedly

  d: to change the position of or adjust by repeated pushing or hauling

  3a: to assail with rough or aggressive attack or treatment: TORMENT

  b: to subject to persistent or nagging attention or effort

  4: to afflict with mental distress or agitation: make anxious

  The police officer behind me is experiencing worry in the most American of senses. He’s worrying over the neighborhood, that he’s crossed the line into a place where he’s much more likely to be shot.

  Webster’s definition of the phrase worry line is “a crease or wrinkle on the forehead or between the eyebrows,” with its first known use in 1972. Most Americans would recognize the way I’m using it here, though—as a marker between neighborhoods or blocks. Turn left, walk two blocks, and you’ve crossed the worry line. Did James Stubbs have his phone out to call for help? Did he know by leaving the school he had crossed the line? Sometimes, of course, the front door of a school does not in fact act as a line of safety. All of which is to say, in this, our America, the worry line is redefined daily. It is in constant motion.

  The British, of course, also have worry lines, but they don’t have gun crime like we do. In London in 2018, fifteen people were murdered by gunshot, and the same year, forty people were murdered by gunshot in Pittsburgh. A Guardian headline on crime in London indicates worry: “London killings in 2018: how homicides in the capital rose to a decade high,” while a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s headline about their citizens’ deaths the same year reads, “Pittsburgh gun violence dips in 2018 as police clear more homicide cases.” In 2018, London holds 8.136 million people; Pittsburgh has 302,500 people in the city proper, with a greater metropolitan area of 2.36 million people. Though they may have similar worry lines, London’s worry over gun crimes seems lovely to me, decent and civilized.

  Without leaving my car that night, I have no way to convey to this officer that his worries are unfounded, that I’m not a threat. There’s also no way to leave the car without becoming perceived as a threat. So I sit, seven months pregnant, the baby pushing and kicking into my bladder, and I wait, and I worry.

  The street is dark. Hip-hop blasts from the apartments, filtered by the TV laugh track from the house next door. A nice old man and his wife live there, and the sound is up because the man is hard of hearing. The kids in the apartments across the street play their music, one sound layering over the next, over the even louder next, like an auditory game of chicken.

  I don’t hear the dogs inside my house, but they are part and parcel of why we live here. I brought two large dogs into the relationship, into the move, my boyfriend, a third. Combined, we bring to Pittsburgh about 220 pounds of furry black dog. It’s hard to get anyone sensible, anyone in the neighborhoods surrounding campus, to rent to us—given the dogs, given that my boyfriend works part-time, seasonal work, temporary.

  Chatham College, which later that year becomes Chatham University, sits in tony Squirrel Hill, which borders the equally posh Shadyside. In addition to how no one will rent to us, we also can’t afford to live there. The architecture in those neighborhoods is similar to where we live—tall, two-story brick buildings—but the yards are a little wider, the lawns slightly more lush.

  When I think now of that time, I remember most the voice of an older woman, a landlady who owned one of the very few rentals we could maybe afford within walking distance to campus. On the phone, I told her I’d be teaching creative writing in the new MFA program at Chatham, and when she asked about my boyfriend’s job and I told her—archaeologist—she said, “But what does he do?” When I explained in my loudest, clearest voice what a field archaeol
ogist does, she said again, this time with less patience, “But what does he do?”

  It became clear this was a neighborhood for doctors and lawyers and perhaps a stray accountant. She had sighed a little when I’d told her I was beginning a job teaching at the college. “Oh,” she said—the small sigh, followed by a larger one—“you’re a teacher.”

  Where we live, where we rent a house in Pittsburgh’s South Hills, the buildings mostly are brick, two or three stories, built in the 1920s and ’30s. Pittsburghers know one another by neighborhood, and yet ours is hard to define. We’re one block off Allentown, two blocks from Beltzhoover, at the southernmost part of what some might try to pass off as Mount Washington.

  Put another way, Mount Washington is a solid lower-middle-class to middle-class neighborhood, known mainly for its steep hills that afford the city’s best views of its other neighborhoods, its downtown and stadium lights, its rivers and bridges. People take the Incline, a cable car from the late 1800s, to a stop near Emerald View Park. People go there in the early morning to watch birds or hike, to watch the sun rise.

  Nearby Allentown is known for being situated near other things—the Mount Washington views and the Southside neighborhood’s bars, the Beltzhoover crime.

  Beltzhoover, when we move there in 2006, is known by outsiders mainly as the territory of the ZHoove Crips, who have been at war with the gang from St. Clair Village. The shooting death of sixteen-year-old Keith Watts, Jr., in 2005 is at the center of that fight, but bad relationships between the two gangs go back to the eighties.

  Many are killed the summer we move to our neighborhood, the closest to our house the shooting death of nineteen-year-old William Roberson IV. Roberson has no gang affiliation, has no ties to either neighborhood. He’s shot as he waits for a bus at a stop in Beltzhoover, less than a mile from our house.

  I don’t know any of this yet. I know Allentown is where I go to get the best takeout pizza, and Beltzhoover has the best Italian food. It’s still early days, early October, and it’s unseasonably warm, the last gasp of summer-like weather, the dog days interrupting fall.

  When the officer exits his car, he keeps one hand on his gun, the other on a small flashlight, which he shines into my eyes and all around the car, once, twice, three times. It becomes clear he is not thinking of Italian food or pizza takeout. It becomes clear he’s both nervous and displeased about being in our neighborhood.

  It has already been a long day, which has turned into a long night, and I would very much like to climb the stairs to the house and then climb more stairs to the second floor, to the bedroom, to the bed, more precisely, to fall into the bed and into sleeping like tomorrow, perhaps, will be better.

  I have taught two classes, met with four thesis students, attended a faculty meeting after which I learned I would not be receiving any maternity leave. I’m seven months pregnant. It’s legal in this, our America, for any workplace to deny paid maternity leave if the woman is in the first year of her job. I have been told I can take unpaid leave, but no one is sure how this taking might affect my health insurance benefits, and I am, of course, quite sure unpaid leave will leave us homeless.

  My boyfriend, the father of this child, is out of town working at his “but what does he do” job, which pays about twelve dollars an hour.

  This job is my first tenure-track job, after graduating with my PhD, though I have been teaching undergraduates for almost a decade. It takes the college almost four months to reimburse me for our moving expenses from West Texas to Pittsburgh. It takes almost two months to get a first paycheck. We rent the house, a two-and-a-half-story Victorian, because the property manager drives us through the nicest part of Mount Washington, the nicest nearby neighborhood, to get there. We rent the house because of the dogs, because we’re poor and because it’s beautiful—tan bricks, a wide front porch, hardwood floors, stained glass in some windows.

  Our house sits right off Beltzhoover and Warrington Avenues. The crime rate in Mount Washington is average for Pittsburgh, which is to say, about 37 percent higher than average for the rest of the country. The crime rate in Allentown is 176 percent higher than is average for the rest of the country, and Beltzhoover is higher still. When I check the current statistics near our old address recently, in 2019, there have been seven arrests, four assaults, one burglary, one theft, and one case of vandalism.

  Our house sits right in front of a bus stop, and the city buses provide a steady commotion as they jerk to a stop out front, as their doors whir open and hiss shut.

  The Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center buses pass by, too, taking kids to Head Start or elders to local senior centers.

  For the first few weeks, my head swiveled every time one passed. Were there other Native people in Pittsburgh? And if so, where were they? The idea for the Council Center had been first proposed in the late sixties when “members of two Native American families in Pittsburgh sought to overcome the feeling of ‘floating’ in the mainstream,” or so say the Center’s promotional materials. The actual Center had first been housed near me, in Homewood, but had been moved in the seventies to a suburb, Dorseyville, a half hour’s drive in good traffic.

  I was the only full-time fiction writer and teacher in my new job. There were dozens of fiction students and only one of me. There also was this baby I carried. They hired me because they liked me. They hired me because I’m Métis, though no one there in that year learned to pronounce Métis. They hired me because my face is one that is read over and over as lovely, as nice, as compliant. I think often that I should not be held responsible for other people’s misreadings. My face is a very clear face. But in order to read it, you have to be willing to look. You have to be willing to read a woman’s face as something other than compliant.

  I had been hired, in part, because I was Métis, yes, and though no one said this aloud, all my invitations to faculty or donor events were occasions for people to query me about my Indianness, to query me about social or racial issues about which they felt a real, true Indian would have opinions. It was part of what was making me tired already.

  In the 1700s, there had been more of us—Mohawk, Onondaga, Cayuga, Iroquois, Seneca, Lenape, Shawnee, Wyandot, Mohican. The 2010 census revealed Pittsburgh’s population to be 0.2 percent American Indian or Alaska Native.

  The census also reveals Pittsburgh to be almost 67 percent white and 23 percent Black. My neighborhood balance is closer to the inverse. So this statistic startles me.

  In 2016, the Public Source reported, “Eighty-five percent of Pittsburgh homicides have had a black victim,” and added, “Police attribute violence to very few individuals. In other words, these aren’t neighborhoods brimming with violent criminals. Residents often feel helpless.”

  Before being accused of and then convicted of third-degree murder, Joseph Hall was a literal choirboy. He sang in the Afro-American Music Institute, which was founded by his grandparents. By all accounts, he and his mother are good members of their community, are good neighbors.

  James Stubbs’s uncle was Ken Stubbs, who called his nephew a good kid and told a local TV reporter after his murder, “It’s just what’s happening now.” Eight years later, Ken Stubbs also was shot and killed in Pittsburgh. Stubbs had owned businesses in Homewood on Hamilton Avenue. Another neighborhood business owner, William Baker, told Heather Abraham of CBS local news, “He’s always been a gentleman to me. He’s always treated me with utmost respect. It is a shame. I’m sorry to hear that. I mean that sincerely.”

  What does it mean to show respect in life and in memorial? What does it mean to show up for each other—for your wife, your neighbor, your co-worker, your community, your daughter or son?

  While we live in this house in our Pittsburgh neighborhood, the nice retired man next door will have his front door gang-tagged because he yells at the kids selling drugs in the alley. My boyfriend a
nd I will feel helpless, as will the nice retired man’s wife, as will his son, who is a state trooper, and still nothing is done. He is at the hospital having chemotherapy when the kids tag his house. The tag reads, “Die, old man, die,” without the direct address commas I’ve added because the old man is a lovely man, is deserving of both proper punctuation and some dignity.

  He doesn’t die, though, at least not while we live there. He throws leftover food on paper plates over the chain-link fence into our yard and makes friends with the dogs through pasta, pizza, bits of ham sandwich. It takes me a very long time to consider his lack of appetite, to connect it with these paper plates. Once I see it, I marvel at how much he loves his wife, at the love it must take to get out of your sickbed, to make the walk to the yard, to throw the food where she won’t see it, where it will be consumed, where there are three waiting mouths.

  On good days, the neighbor continues to patrol his backyard fence along the alley. He hangs on.

  Our house was once the neighborhood dealer’s house or at least the grower’s, though I don’t know this at the start. The delivery kid still deals and distributes directly behind our house, his moped revving all hours in the alley, the city buses shuddering and hissing to a stop all hours out front.

  The policeman brings all this knowledge to the traffic stop. After I hand him my license and registration, he says, “What is your business here?”

  “I live here,” I say.

  “You have Texas plates,” he says.

  “They’re not expired,” I say, losing my patience. I know better than to give any cop any back talk. If one-third of stranger killings are committed by police, how many of those are the deaths of women like me—alone on a street in the dark, exhausted and afraid and saying the wrong thing because of this awful combination? But this is how tired I am. This is the state of me.

  He asks then for me to step out of the car, and I expect when he sees how pregnant I am, this will end shortly. It doesn’t.