Miss Pennie has been there for every important moment of my life. Everything I’ve learned, I can see now, came from her. How to be the kind of father who can raise daughters. How to love. How to navigate this world. I see a lot of kids ask, “Why?” As in “Why are we here? Why is there war? Why are people hungry?” And they get a spanking for asking too many questions. Miss Pennie demanded that we ask “why,” and believe me, I took her up on that. I wanted to know why there was hate in the world, why my school wasn’t teaching me about our history, and why it felt like, from the schoolyard to the candy store, white kids were treated differently from Black kids.
When I asked her why, she would answer, “I know what it’s like out there, and I’ll teach you the truth so you understand. But I’m also going to teach you how to survive.” She told us we weren’t allowed to wear braids or saggy pants. This was not because she thought they looked bad or “ghetto” but because she knew what could happen if we were judged to be somebody we weren’t. Miss Pennie was always in my business, scared of what society would have in store for me, a young Black man, if I wasn’t on alert, reminding me that racism was real and I’d have to work twice as hard for anything I wanted.
Before Trayvon Martin’s murder brought it into some white people’s consciousness, Black families have always known, as my mom knew, that if I looked like I was in the wrong neighborhood, or if there were a case of mistaken identity, I could be put down for the crime of walking while Black. I was always reminded that being Black was dangerous, that people would see my skin as a weapon, a threat. But my mom’s lessons didn’t sink in until I was twelve years old, when a man named James Byrd was murdered in Jasper, Texas, lynched and dragged behind a truck. It brought the history that I was learning to life: the beating and lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and his mother’s insistence on an open casket so the world could see what they did to her baby. Mamie Till was also a teacher, like Miss Pennie, and I saw myself in Emmett Till’s disfigured face, and I saw my community through the eyes of James Byrd, eyes that were popping out of his skull as he was dragged by the neck from a chain, and I cried until it hurt.
The lynching of James Byrd happened just a hundred miles from my house, and it felt like it happened a hundred yards away. A mental line was drawn in the sand for me, and I don’t think I was ever the same again. I saw Black leaders running around, asking for justice again, for another tragedy of a slain Black man. It felt like nothing had changed from Emmett Till’s day. It felt like we were being hunted and trophied, to be mounted on someone’s wall. I have never admitted this before, but I was scared to walk home at night by myself out of fear that I could be next. For a long while, every time a pickup truck rumbled around the corner, my breath caught in my chest. This was Texas, so pickups were everywhere, which meant that for a while my heart just raced nonstop.
I wasn’t the only one in the Bennett household on edge. I remember the time Martellus decided he was going to get lost for the whole day—normal kid stuff—but he didn’t tell anybody, and my father went searching for him, guns cocked, loaded, and thinking that the worst could’ve happened to his young Black child.
It made us feel threatened. But it also held a poisonous message that being Black was inferior, that somehow we deserved to be hunted and killed. In Louisiana and Texas, we’d see stories on television of shootings, deaths, Klan marches. In school, we never learned how Black people built this country. We built America, for free, but in class our contributions were invisible, at best there to entertain, or the same lesson about George Washington Carver—as if we were slaves, invented peanut butter, and became entertainers, and that’s our entire story. We built the White House. We built the Capitol Building. We built the Light of Freedom on top of the Capitol Building. That’s this country. The Light of Freedom, built by slaves.
Being born Black is a preexisting condition in this society, with a set of stressors that you can’t understand without living in our skin. It’s not just the fear that you’ll be the next James Byrd or Trayvon Martin or Sandra Bland. It’s hearing dumb shit in school about America being the “land of the free” and having to speak up to remind my teacher of slavery, and seeing all the faces change expression, from getting red with anger to others rolling their eyes, with looks of relief on the faces of people who had been thinking the same thing. I felt like Kevin in The Wonder Years, if Kevin had been Black and had to face an ass-whupping every day for trying to tell the truth.
I’ve tried to tell people in Seattle—and I love Seattle—that, yes, Seattle has its problems, but there are parts of this country that are a lot worse when it comes to these issues. Of course there’s racism in Seattle. But in Texas, it’s right in your face. You’re hearing about people getting hanged. You’re seeing the KKK. There are Confederate monuments to people who owned your great-grandparents that you have to walk by every day. Until you’ve lived in that area, you just don’t know. Some of the stories my grandfather told me, even what my
