“Uh huh.” She began on her pancakes, so I did the same.
“And he was cool with it?”
“I think he would have been disappointed if I wasn’t out here,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why? Did you not tell your folks?”
I shook my head. “Not really, no. But …” I didn’t want to get into the intricacies of my family situation just yet. “So, your pops was cool with it, huh? What’d he say?”
I was thinking about my father, and how he didn’t speak his approval aloud, how it almost had to be a secret between us.
“He said, ‘well, Lila. I suppose some change can’t be clandestine. It has to announce itself. It must be bold and ostentatious.’” She mimicked a James Earl Jones voice and puffed out her chest when she spoke, and then we were both laughing.
“You lyin’,” I said. “Your pops did not say that. No one says sh … stuff like that. Not for real.”
Lila shrugged. “I swear. He really did. It’s just the way he talks.”
“What is he? A latter-day Frederick Douglass?”
“A political science professor.” She squeezed a syrup packet onto her pancakes and because she was talking with food in her mouth put up a hand to shield me from the view.
“Where?” I asked. “Lemme find out he’s a professor at my school.”
And when she tells me where her father teaches and that she goes there too, I try not to smile. Her college is only thirty-five minutes away. Less. It feels like the stars are aligning.
“Then he won’t be pissed you got arrested?”
“I don’t think so.” She half-shrugged and swallowed her mouthful of food. “He likes that I do racial justice work.”
I said nothing. I don’t think I “do racial justice work.” Of course, I believe in racial justice, and I’ll put some skin in the game at times like this, but am I really doing the work? Nah, not really. I’m a tourist.
“I think before all this, he thought it was kind of theoretical for us, you know, people in our generation. I don’t know that he realized that we’re serious, y’know?”
I nodded.
Am I serious? I don’t know that I am. It is more accurate to say that I am not un-serious about racial justice, but I readily lay claim to the ‘we’ she casually tosses out there.
“Because of where we live, where he teaches …” Lila was energized by talking about her father. I could tell he’s very important to her, that his opinion means a lot. “The Black folks there, they’re … not exactly on the frontlines of systemic oppression, y’know what I mean? Or at least not in a way that’s as visible. So, we have our little campus group or whatever and he thinks it’s great that we’re talking about sociopolitical theory and questioning the capitalist bedrock of American society. But I don’t think he realized till this moment that we aren’t just playing. We’re working to dismantle all the things that are keeping our people down and build something new.”
I just listened. To all of those words, and all those earnest phrases. I wondered how many of them were hers, how many she believed.
Lila had stopped eating just to make sure she got everything she had to say out. Her eyes, which minutes earlier were clouded over in remembrance of a dead Black man’s pain, were fierce and determined.
“So, yeah, he knew I would be out here. I think he’s proud of me.”
“Does this mean you’re planning to be a civil rights lawyer or something?”
“I have no idea.” She smiled. “What about you? How’d you wind up out here getting arrested?”
Looking down at my plate, I reached for my fork and stabbed at a piece of sausage, stalling.
“I mean, it’s not … it just didn’t feel like the kind of thing any of us should just watch on tv, y’know?”
It sounded weak, compared to her fiery treatise on “the capitalist bedrock of American society” but it was all I had.
“No. Yeah. For sure.” Lila nodded, cutting off another piece of pancake.
I tried to shake the sense that I was disappointing her. A girl like her would probably be into guys who were super-woke and had been paying attention to all this stuff long before someone’s life got snuffed out on camera.
“How about your family?” she asked. “How’re they gonna feel about your criminal record?”
“We’re not legit gonna have a record, are we?”
Lila laughed. “No. I think we just got a citation. Why? Are you planning on being a lawyer?”
“Hopefully. Yeah. Not civil rights probably, but yeah.”
“Cool.” Lila started eating again. “So … how’re they going to react to all this? You said your family doesn’t know you’re out here, so what’s it gonna be like when they find out?”
“I don’t know.” I answered honestly. “Because my pops is not a political science professor, so …”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t understand. Not that he would want you to get a citation. But he must get it, right? Because …”
She broke off and I knew what she was trying not to say. As a Black man, he had to get it. There was no way he wouldn’t.
“True. But …”
Lila looked up. “But …?”
“My family situation is … different than most. Complicated when it comes to stuff like this. Sometimes.”
“How?” She asked the question reflexively then quickly shook her head. “I mean … I didn’t mean … It’s none of my …”
“Nah. It’s fine. It’s just that my father is a Black man, but my mother … is not a Black woman.”
Lila didn’t look surprised. She nodded.
“I guess that might make the conversations a little different in your house sometimes. But maybe not.”
“Nah, they’re different,” I acknowledged.
“How so? If …” She stopped herself again. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“I don’t mind,” I said.
And I didn’t. Because most people didn’t ask. The fact that my parents were an interracial couple was something that people tended
