With the single blast of a lawman’s rifle, the short and unfulfilled life of Jordan Edwards ended. No more games. No more proms. Not another group text or A- or football practice. He was just 15 years old.
When I was 15 and a little younger, I adored a man named Travis. He befriended me when he was a star football player at the local high school and I was a precocious squid who quoted his stats back to him. He’d come to my games and sit in the stands, often by himself, as I tried to pile up points while wearing his jersey number. He was one of the few black faces there. He watched as Robert E. Lee Academy played James F. Byrnes Academy and some other school named after some other racist waited in the wings.
Eventually he took his talents to college, playing football far away but never leaving my mind. When I got to college, we’d text. Our friendship was unique, especially where we came from. In a place where Dixie Youth Baseball was created because parents didn’t want their kids playing in the newly integrated Little League Baseball, and where high schools didn’t fully integrate until faced with a 1994 Department of Justice order, a black teenager mentoring a young white kid was peculiar if nothing else.
One day I got a text. His wife had birthed their second son. They named him Jordan.
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When I was 15, I was stupid. I once stole my sister’s car and drove with only a learner’s permit to the local golf course. I never got there because I hit a car full of drunks who’d just returned home from the beach. My luck was solid gold. They didn’t want to risk a DUI by calling the cops about the wreck. We left the scene with only a handshake agreement to later meet.
That summer, I ran with a crew of friends hell-bound for all manner of mischief. One night, we attacked local street signs with paintball guns that looked all too real. We found house parties at various lake and creek houses. We drove an hour out of the way to Buster’s the only store that would sell a 15-year old undrinkable shit like Mike’s Hard Lemonade, but only if you claimed be a friend of Mary Faye.
I remember spring break, where students from the surrounding private schools would gather at houses in the tiny beach town of Garden City to drink away whatever we thought were problems. Once, the cops came with blue lights blaring and speakers screaming. To the left were Laurence Manning Academy Swampcats scampering away. To the right, Pee Dee Academy Eagles dove into the bushes. I tried to talk my way out of trouble.
And no one got shot. When I finally turned 21 a few years later, I celebrated on my Facebook page that I’d survived my youth without an MIP—the common moniker for “minor in possession.” As young white kids growing up in the heart of the Confederacy, the worst that might happen to us was a ticket our dads could probably make go away with a few phone calls. I don’t remember anyone getting arrested, including the kids who once pointed at an old woman an Airsoft pistol that looked just like a real handgun.
When Roy Oliver, the Dallas police officer who killed Jordan Edwards, rolled up on the party Edwards was fleeing, he reportedly yelled to the kids, “STOP THE CAR, MOTHER FUCKERS!” It might be that police have gotten bolder, brasher, or more boisterous since the end of my innocence in 2004. It might be that for kids like Jordan Edwards, that innocence never came. Oliver approached Edwards not as a child whose worst decision was fleeing the cops at a party being busted. He approached Edwards like he might have approached a hardened criminal. He spoke to Edwards like he might have spoken to an enemy combatant in Iraq. It’s the height of white privilege meshed with the agony of black anti-innocence. Even while committing crimes, my friends and I were treated with the kid gloves only applied when you know a coarse word might lead to retribution. It was like we were protected with a sort of SuperConstitution, the First Amendment of which must have been, “Ruin the future of a talented white kid and you’ll pay the price.”
But not for Edwards. Even his right to Equal Protection was stunted by assumptions of his criminality. Jordan Edwards was protected by a bootleg version of the Constitution, drafted in secret by “respectable” members of suburban city councils and urban business associations, where black children are deemed guilty at birth and never innocent without a timely presentation of suitable credentials. In death, Edwards’s story has only drawn mainstream appeal and support upon his anointment as an acceptable victim by white people who apparently get to decide where one stops being Michael Brown and starts being a young Dr. King.
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“Where can I cop one of those Mixers jerseys?” I asked after Crystal posted yet another picture of Jordan’s winning basketball team. It felt to me like they’d won every goddamn tournament they’d entered. Travis appeared in the back of that picture. He’d helped coach his son’s team to another championship.
“Put it on your wedding registry and it’s yours,” Crystal replied.
As I filled out my short roster of groomsmen for my wedding, I thought about the people who’d helped to shape me. I thought about who had been there in the beginning, and who’d influenced me to become the person my fiance might want to marry. As a man of many sisters, I’d never had the benefit of a brother. Travis was the closest thing I’d had growing up, and when I got new jobs or bought my fiance’s engagement ring, he was one of the first people I’d told.
I prepared this afternoon the cards for those I will invite to join me standing near the river where we’ll wed. I flipped through cards at the store that might properly present my thoughts. I found Travis’s card poking from behind a plastic presentation of two kissing elephants.
“Thanks for always being my hero,” it said, Superman adorning the corner. I’ve never been one for comics, but I’ve been one for heroes. I sat down to write a few words and thought about who my friend had been to me and why he was so important. I ran out of room as I recalled the watch he once gave me when I was supposed to be the one giving him a graduation present. I thought about the dad he had become and how, in the future, I hoped I could be half what he was.
I wrote to him that when people had questioned me, and how I’d come out of a segregation academy and a town like ours to think like I think, my answer was always him. There are things he taught me about race without saying a word. The sullen realizations that your friends and extended family are full of shit cascade through a young man’s brain when the stereotypes of racism bang headlong into the reality of one of the best men I’ve ever known.
But there are some things about race I can never know. Twice now a young black boy slain in a high-profile police shooting has gone to his grave with the name Jordan. Twice now I’ve thought of my friend and his sons. I’ve thought of the talks they must have. I’ve thought of how the excitement of watching a kid grow into a man is muted by the worry that manhood for black children comes at whatever point a police officer decides he looks like a threat. With every inch Jordan grows, he moves faster, solves his math problems quicker, and says things to his parents they’re surprised he knows. With every inch he grows, he’s a step closer to hearing the “talk.”
My friend takes up the heroism of black parents who maintain their optimism in a time where pessimism just won’t do, despite what they know. It’s a type of worry that goes beyond whether their child might get stranded in their first car. It’s a type of worry that worries over whether the police officer stopping to help is truly there to help.
Jordan Edwards was one of ours, taken too soon. He belonged to a family and to a black community that deserved to see the promise of his unfolding life. So, too, is Roy Oliver ours. A creation of a police state designed to ensnare young black boys before they’re able to become young black men, Roy Oliver is every bit our responsibility. His actions in taking the victim we’ve deemed “respectable” are the price we pay for our belief that all those black kids we don’t know—all those black kids who don’t play on our kids’ teams—might be the dangerous ones.
Back in Garden City, the real housewives of SCISA will still throw their parties. The next generation of rabble rousers will still disrupt the peace and live to tell about it. And black parents will be forced to pray that their kids live up to an unfair standard of perfection, and more, that trigger-happy, rifle-bearing cops will give them a chance to prove their respectable credentials before assuming criminality from their black skin.
(And Travis, the card’s in the mail).