Crime & Punishment
Last night, I witnessed a crime.
We were doing the dishes after dinner when my partner looked out the kitchen window and said, “Someone is creeping around their garage.” I looked up in time to see a black man walk into the neighbor’s garage across the street.
“You should record this,” I said as I paced across the kitchen and grabbed my phone off the island. I started recording just as the man started running. “He’s running! He’s running!”
“Is he really?”
“Yeah, he’s running, he’s running.” Pause. “My camera’s going to pick him up. Look at him, he’s running.” He was running across the lawns and would soon be across the street from my house. “Go out, go out,” I ordered in the hopes that my partner could confront him or get a look at him.
My partner walked out of the house and down the driveway. He drew his gun and yelled for the guy to stop. The guy did not stop. He turned around and ran away behind the houses. I stood in the driveway and called 911 while my partner knocked on the homeowner’s door.
After I got off the phone, I walked across the street and showed the homeowner the video. I texted it to her. My partner walked around to show where the thief escaped and revealed that he’d left his shoes. He literally ran out of his shoes trying to flee the incident. My partner dropped the shoes — a black pair of Crocs — on the ground. “They have Mickey Mouse-shaped holes,” I observed.
Mickey Mouse holes. What an odd choice for a thief.
A few minutes later, it would all make sense. My partner, who’d driven around the neighborhood to see if he could spot the guy returned. Simultaneously, a fiesty African-American woman came back, the thief, who it was now plain to see was a preteen boy, returned. She was huffing mad, saying she knew he was up to something. Just knew it because of the way he’d been outside creeping around with no shoes.
She was positively snorting flames when she watched the video and witnessed the crime firsthand. She smacked the boy. Grabbed his shirt. A hand flew hard into the side of the boy’s head. He sniveled and wept. “You better not cry!” she raged.
She eminated a miasma of shame, rage, and frustration. Every blow. I’m doing my damn best. Every shake. How dare you! Every fistful of shirt, every jerk this way and that. Do you know how this is making us look? Because surely I was not the only one aware that you had three white women and one white man watching a black woman punish a boy for stealing from a neighbor’s garage.
“You gonna go to jail,” she told him. She assured us, “He’s going to be punished.” My insides squeezed like a sponge. Oh, please don’t. Abuse isn’t the kind of punishment that curbs reckless behaviors. I remember the excessively forceful spankings, the time my dad held me in the air by my ankle and spanked me for asking if a friend could stay for dinner, the 2x4 AKA “the board” dad eventually used for “punishment”….
As she and the boy walked away, she pivoted, “This’s my grandson. He’s staying with me. His mama’s got some issues.” My heavy heart sank to the next level. Oh. Dear. This kid, more than anything, needed love. He needed someone to put their arms tight around him and to show him how to feel safe in a world that he was clearly learning not to trust.
And her. I’m not shaming her. As a mom who routinely yells at my children and who forgets to temper my temper before I shout, “What do you think you’re doing?” or “What mess is this?” usually peppered with colorful ephiphets and fresh, new explitives, I know how hard it is to be a mom. A single mom. A woman. We live our lives buried in shame. We live our lives filled with fear that our failures will be revealed and that they will be put on display for the world to see. We so desperately want to be loved and fulfilled ourselves. We want the world around us to see us as being “good”. Good moms. Good women. Pretty women. Healthy women. Desirable women. Well-behaved women.
Thus so when our children act out, we take it personally; even the least narcissistic, the least enmeshed, of mothers will feel like their children are somehow a reflection of them only because society has convinced our egos that story is true. We are having to relearn that our children are their own people. We may have created them, we may be raising them, but their choices and behaviors and apperances and actions are not a reflection on our success as human beings.
But in the moment, it’s so easy to forget that. In the moment when your ego is screaming shame, shame, shame, shame, SHAME ON YOU, it’s easy to forget that and to react.
The evening’s commotion left me depleted. I felt powerless. I told my neighbor after my partner drove his truck back to the house that, “I wasn’t comfortable with any of that.” She agreed but pointed out that “that’s their culture”. She was saying that kind of punishment was “black culture”. That culture, I know, does exist, but that culture is also the result of a centuries old generational trauma. It’s a learned behavior. It’s the reason my dad spanked me so aggressively. He was spanked because his ignorant farmer family, used to getting cattle and other farm animals to bend to their wills through brute force, used the same methods on their children and possibly wives — remember, it wasn’t that long ago that spousal abuse was legal, that you could rape your wife without any repercussion.
We sometimes deny the reality of systemic oppression or deny that past traumas, traumas that occurred so long ago, are still alive and thriving today, but last night, standing in my neighbor’s driveway, there it was, plain as day, in black and white.
The solution isn’t to deny the existence of pain or trauma or fear. It’s to open up dialogues and to share stories. It’s to make mental health care accessible. It’s to respect people’s experiences even when those experiences are “other” and to accept that when someone says they’re bleeding from the inside out and that something did hurt them, it did. Denying people of their reality is murder, and we murder people — one another and ourselves — on a daily basis. It’s a crime, and it has to stop. We have to stop punishing each other. We have to stop punishing ourselves.
Denying people of their reality is murder, and we murder people — one another and ourselves — on a daily basis.
