Midnight Blue

If you’re not from Chicago, I should explain that when you walk through neighborhoods, you can tell a lot about them by the presence of signs posted on lawns or displayed in prominent windows. In some neighborhoods, you’ll find mostly Black Lives Matter, and in others, you’ll find I Back the Badge. Blue Lives Matter, too. American flags with black and blue stripes indicate a police presence or a show of support.

I am the oldest daughter of a white Chicago police officer.

I also marched to support my college students during their on-campus Black Lives Matter protests. They chanted, “We were born this way. We can’t change the color of our skin.”

~

One of my earliest memories is playing possum in my toddler bed, waiting for my father to come home from work late at night. I would wait to hear the key turn in the door, then the click of his military black dress shoes and the chair scraping across the dining room floor. This was the sound of him climbing as high as he could to hide his gun on top of the China hutch, so that we could never reach it. Then I would skid to him in my feet pajamas, singing the theme song of The Greatest American Hero. “Who could it be? Believe it or not, it’s just me!”

I will not tell you my father is a hero because he served to protect for thirty years, and he wouldn’t tell you that either. He would tell you he joined the force because his father had before him. He would tell you it was a job—nothing more—not an identity or a vocation. He would tell you he was grateful for the benefits.

When I was three years old, I ran to my father in my feet pajamas and threw my arms around him. Sometime that year, he had a gun held to his head for the first time, but I only found out about it twenty years later when we were all together on a family vacation. We ran into my father’s former partner at a brunch buffet in Las Vegas.

“These are my daughters,” my father said, introducing all three of us with tears in his eyes.

My mom translated for us. “Greg saved Dad’s life when you were small,” she said.

My father was a rookie, he says, and while he was brushing snow off of the squad cars one morning, a local homeless guy grabbed his gun from its holster and held it to the back of his head. Everyone in the precinct knew the guy was an addict who suffered with mental illness and hated cops. Greg was able to wrestle him to the ground without the gun going off. This was 1980. I was three. My mother was pregnant with my first sister; my second sister hadn’t been born yet.

~

I do not tell my students that my father is a retired police officer. I refer to him as a city worker or a government employee—a working-class, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. My husband says this is cowardly, but if I told my students, they might not trust me anymore.

Many of them get pulled over on their way to school. They get pulled over for broken taillights or driving five miles over the speed limit.

I drove with a broken taillight for several weeks last year, and I always speed if I’m running late. I have been pulled over only twice in my life, and I’ve been given warning notices each time.

~

The Fraternal Order of Police hosted family-friendly picnics every summer of my childhood. The kids rode all the rollercoasters for free at Great America; they spent the hottest days at water parks and the evenings at kiddie concerts. I used to beg my father to take us, but the answer was always no.

“Why?” I asked once.

“Because I don’t like cops,” my father said.

~

My sister stayed out late for her bachelorette party with our other sister, and a couple of college-age bouncers started playing keep-away with their purses. My sisters swore at them and bawled them out as they tried to grab their purses back. A few minutes later, the bouncer’s friends, the police, were there. A few minutes later, my sisters were dragged down the street with their faces scraping the sidewalk. A few minutes later, they were handcuffed in the back of a paddy wagon, but somehow they didn’t make it back to the police station until several hours later. They were kept in the back of the wagon, in the dark, while the officer driving and the one in the passenger seat made jokes about sexual violence and threatened that they would never see home again. My sister’s wedding day, the following week, was tainted by this memory.

Had I been there, I might have known how to code-switch, how to say in a syrupy voice that my father had been a police detective for thirty years. “He started at Fillmore, then went to Headquarters, then Cabrini, then Belmont and Western, then back to Cabrini again. Can I go now? Thank you, sir.”

~

Maybe my sisters don’t know how to use my father as a Get Out of Jail Free card because he has explicitly told us not to, or maybe it’s because he always cushions his job description with the disclaimer that he wasn’t “a real cop.” If you meet “real cops,” they will say the same thing of him, so my father just beats them to the punch. He did his rookie years on the street, it’s true, but he spent most of his career organizing and directing a popular summer camp for kids who lived in “at-risk” neighborhoods. He scaled up climbing walls with his campers, taught them how to tread water, watched them dance and lip sync, made sure they ate breakfast and lunch. He gave them rides home, and the parents and grandparents always seemed to like him.

~

My sister’s husband said he was going to be a police officer like my dad, a good one who helps the shorties. He studied hard for the exam and scored the highest of any test taker in fifteen years. The highest score always gets to choose their district, so Alex chose Humboldt Park. He had heard that the immigrant business owners were getting shaken down by their local police, that the gang problems were only getting worse, and he knew something about that, plus he spoke heritage Spanish.

My sister wore a miniature of his police star around her neck, grilled expensive steaks for him and his new teammates, waited up for his key to turn in the door late at night. She made nice with the wives even though they were a little much, and she set up backyard games for their kids. She also tried not to notice that Alex was drinking heavily every night.

They—his new friends—filled my sister’s yard with stories. Once, she said, they told her about the homeless men who slept under the viaducts, the ones who begged for change near the expressway. “You know they’re all heroin addicts, right?” they said to her. Then they laughed about how they beat up the addicts for fun, because the stink just made them sick. Alex started drinking a little faster then, and my sister decided it was time to go to bed.

What she remembers most is the story about Alex finding a pair of three-year-old cousins wandering around the Humboldt Park swimming lagoon one night when it was entirely too late for that. Alex’s friends admitted to my sister that they were going to just leave the kids, because their parents were gangbangers and lowlifes, and surely the kids knew how to walk home on their own by now. They made fun of Alex for holding the kids’ hands and helping them find Grandma’s house; they laughed about Mendoza the savior. His friends called him soft and said he’d better get hard real quick because this was only just the beginning. My sister told him in bed that night that she was really proud of him, but he became a drunk anyway. A seizure-having, drinking in the morning, bleary-eyed drunk. Because he started to hate everyone. Most of all himself.

~

My mother always kissed my father on the mouth when he had to wear his uniform, when they needed extra bodies. For the Taste of Chicago, the Memorial Day and Bud Billiken parades. He always loved the parades.

~

My sister was divorced at the age of twenty-seven.

~

Once, my father picked me up sick from school and I had to wait while he finished his work day. A fourth-grader at the time, I made a big show of drinking my can of ginger ale to impress the teenage boys who were waiting for their punishment. They must’ve been 14 or 15, not even old enough to drive, but to me, they looked like grown men.

“Who she think she is, drinkin’ her pop like that?” one of them asked.

“She think she in a commercial or something.”

“I bet she have a stinky pussy.”

The boys broke out laughing and I sat there, humiliated like only a fourth-grader can be, but I didn’t tell my father they made fun of me because I was too afraid of what their punishment might look like. Somewhere, my female instincts told me that they were boys and not yet men.

~

Cabrini Green was the second place where my father had a gun held to his head. I can’t remember if I was in high school or college at the time, but it doesn’t matter. I didn’t hear the story until much later. He was in his fifties by then and he’d been kicked out of Youth because of a beef with a new lieutenant; his punishment was Cabrini. The story goes: he was releasing a kid early so he could be home for the holiday weekend, but the kid’s grandmother couldn’t pick him up because she had too many babies at home to look after. When my father pulled up in the squad car, the residents took notice. The elevators were broken that day, as they usually were, and some drug dealers caught my father in the stairwell, told him he wasn’t going any farther. There was a big deal happening the next floor up, and he was not going to ruin their day.

“Okay,” my father said. “I’ll take him back to jail then. That what you want? Okay.”

The women, my father says, came running out from every corner of the building, and beat on the men until they agreed to let my father take the kid home. “Let that baby see his grandma! Let that baby come to the picnic!” But after my father had made the drop-off and wished Grandma a good holiday weekend, the dealers cornered him again in the stairwell. Before he knew it, he said: gun against his temple and three more pointed at him. This was Cabrini in the nineties: no air conditioning, shitty electricity, and broken plumbing; whole place smelled like shit and rats. My father claims he spoke slowly, and softly.

“I don’t give a fuck about whatever you’re doing,” he breathed. “I’m not interested in arresting you. I just wanna get home.”

A child scurried past and my father lifted him up like a human shield.

An hour later, he came home to us and went to bed early.

~

In the third grade, we said the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning and sang patriotic anthems in music class, but I learned the states in alphabetical order on my own. I taught this song to Jason Vera, my childhood friend and competitor. His father was a police officer too, and though our parents were never friendly, we couldn’t get enough of each other. Jason and I knew all the state capitols, and no one could ever stump us. The capitol of Nevada is not Las Vegas, you idiot! It’s Carson City, of course. I know the capitol of Florida is Tallahassee, but can you spell it?

“What’s your favorite?” Jason asked me conspiratorially one day.

I considered Madison because I’d been there, and Honolulu because I had always wanted to be a hula girl, but I finally decided on Springfield, because it was mine, and pointed to it on the wooden peg map.

~

I checked into a hotel in Springfield, Illinois for a teaching conference recently and when the manager asked what I did, I told her I taught English at a Catholic university.

“At least it’s Catholic, huh? All these college professors are so damn liberal. ‘I love the blacks. I treat officers of the law like criminals.’ How can anyone learn anything? Maybe college professors have always been this liberal and I just didn’t realize it. But you’re Catholic, so you’ve probably still got your American values.”

Code switch. Code switch. Code switch.

“I love my students, that’s for sure. Have a good evening, ma’am.”

~

My students are primarily Black and Latino. They do their homework, study in the library, juggle two or three jobs all at once. They write circles around me, some of them. They write to save their lives. I drink after work sometimes because they put me to such shame.

~

Jason Vera had a boys’ only birthday party in third grade, the year we were learning our own country. During an unsupervised game of cops and robbers, he accidentally and fatally shot himself with his father’s work-assigned revolver. The line to see his tiny, closed casket was several city blocks long. My parents say I didn’t speak for a week after the funeral.

I can’t stop thinking about kids who grow up in neighborhoods plagued by gun violence. I can’t stop thinking about what it does to their developing brains, and more importantly, what it does to their hearts.

I still remember most of the state capitols, though a few of them have been lost. I can still sing the state song, though now it’s a little off-key, and I still put my hand over my heart for the Star-Spangled Banner, but the emotion is far more complicated.

~

Many of my high school friends are cops now. We used to see each other occasionally—grab a beer or bowl a few. But then one of their wives, who was also a cop, started spewing racial slurs in the middle of a bowling alley one night, and I felt like all exclamation points. They had been, once upon a time, good kids, but now they were monsters walking among us. My father said maybe it’s because they didn’t go to war—that’s why they shoot when they’re not supposed to. Maybe that’s why they’re so afraid.

My friend Ted told me the night I left the bowling alley, with my head on fire, that I’m a teacher so I see the best in people, but they’re cops, so they see the worst. “People tell us they have AIDS, then spit on us and smear their blood on us,” he said, “so that you can sleep in a comfy bed at night and feel safe.”

“Just stop!” I screamed. “Just stop. You make me sick.”

I don’t code switch with them, but I do feel superior to them, and they know it. We haven’t seen any of them since my son was born; their influence feels too dangerous.

~

My sister’s neighborhood on St. Patrick’s Day: the only Republican ward in Chicago. They have a few good restaurants and too many bars. My sister lives there, she says, because houses are affordable, and she’s a public school teacher, so she has to stay in the city.

I told my family that I didn’t want to go to the parade in that neighborhood; I’d rather go downtown or not at all, I said. I stood with my arms crossed on the parade sidelines with my three-year-old and my mother, wearing shamrock beads and a green mustache. My son ran around, catching hard candy and clapping for the teenage marching bands. But then a mass of angry people (mostly men but some women, mostly white but some Latino) came marching down Northwest Highway carrying banners that screamed Blue Lives Matter.

My mother said, “My hands are shaking. This is horrible.”

“Why?” I asked, challenging and angry. “It is,” I said, “but why?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “My husband was a cop for thirty years, but this just feels so threatening.”

“Because it’s a movement designed to weaken another movement,” I said. “Because they’re racist pieces of shit. Let’s go home now. Let’s get out of here.”

~

A couple of my writer-friends just green-lighted a network television show in which they will explore the racial tensions and the police force in Chicago; they’ve titled it The Red Line. The day after their pilot was announced, a blog called Second City Cop shared the announcement and commented that it sounded “like yet another lib-tarded disaster in the making.” The blogger also suggested that the FOP ban its members from working on the show.

The ensuing comments were bloated with thinly veiled hate speech.

“The real actors of the Red Line already have their own show. It’s called the 10 o’clock news.”

The blog has millions of followers.

~

I am afraid of our police department. And I don’t have a black son. The harder thing to admit: I’m afraid of abolishing the police department, too.

People are dying every day here, and most of them are not cops. People are dying every day, and many of them are innocent bystanders.

A single mother moves from the Sudan to give her sons a safer, better life. One of them is murdered by the time he’s twelve years old, because he joined a gang, because he was desperate to fit in, just like the rest of us.

A police commander sees a store owner getting robbed at gunpoint and he knows the Pakistani man, who came here for a better, safer life. The commander intervenes and is shot dead on the spot. I wonder about his teenage daughter. I wonder if she finds comfort in the blog.

Too many children sleep on floors instead of beds to keep themselves safe from bullets. Too many children don’t know that other children are forced to live like this. Too many grown people say it’s their parents’ own damn fault.

This city burned to the ground in the Chicago Fire and people came from all over to rebuild it. We are failing. We are burning again. This time, slowly.