Black Girls Must Die Exhausted

Genres: African American Women's Fiction; Family Life; Friendship

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“It’s a good thing that this is only the first book of a trilogy, because after getting to know Tabitha, you won’t want to leave her at the end. . . . Written intimately as if you’re peering into the mind of a close friend, this book is a true testament to the stresses on women today and how great girlfriends (and grandmothers) are often the key to our sanity.”  — Good Morning America

The first novel in a captivating three-book series about modern womanhood, in which a young Black woman must rely on courage, laughter, and love—and the support of her two longtime friends—to overcome an unexpected setback that threatens the most precious thing she’s ever wanted.

Tabitha Walker is a black woman with a plan to “have it all.” At 33 years old, the checklist for the life of her dreams is well underway. Education? Check. Good job? Check. Down payment for a nice house? Check. Dating marriage material? Check, check, and check. With a coveted position as a local news reporter, a "paper-perfect" boyfriend, and even a standing Saturday morning appointment with a reliable hairstylist, everything seems to be falling into place.

Then Tabby receives an unexpected diagnosis that brings her picture-perfect life crashing down, jeopardizing the keystone she took for granted: having children. With her dreams at risk of falling through the cracks of her checklist, suddenly she is faced with an impossible choice between her career, her dream home, and a family of her own.

 With the help of her best friends, the irreverent and headstrong Laila and Alexis, the mom jeans-wearing former "Sexy Lexi," and the generational wisdom of her grandmother and the nonagenarian firebrand Ms. Gretchen, Tabby explores the reaches of modern medicine and tests the limits of her relationships, hoping to salvage the future she always dreamed of. But the fight is all consuming, demanding a steep price that forces an honest reckoning for nearly everyone in her life. As Tabby soon learns, her grandmother's age-old adage just might still be true: Black girls must die exhausted.

Release date: July 27, 2021

Publisher: Harper Perennial

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter One

The day I turned 30, I officially departed my childhood. Not the pigtail braids, devil may care, “don’t get your Sunday church clothes dirty” kind of childhood. At 30, I just knew it was the end of the dress rehearsal. I was officially grown. And to me, that meant a checklist. Education? Check. Good job? Check. Reliable transportation? Check. Down payment for some property? Check. Dating options limited to marriage material? Check, check and check. That checklist, I had it on lock. But then, at some point, once you get into it, the 30’s throws some major curveball your way and you realize that real life, not just adulthood, is what happens between the lines of that checklist. You learn that life isn’t really about checklist-type problems. And that’s when you have to find out who you really are, because one minute you had all the answers, and the next, you’ve got none at all. So of course, just when I started to gain a comfortable rhythm with regular life kind of concerns, my body went ahead and did the unthinkable.

“It’s bad,” I heard the doctor say. “I wish I had better news. The reality is, Tabitha, you’re only 33, but without taking significant steps in the next six months, you may never be able to have a family.” I had already left her office, but her voice still trailed me into my car, and stayed with me into my drive to work, echoing in my mind on continuous loop. The only merciful interruption was the real-time computer-generated interjections of Google Maps, steering me around the stubborn LA traffic. Even worse than getting bad news was that it was going to make me late. In my profession, late was tragic; but, on the day of our weekly newsroom meeting, late could mean you just lost the assignment that would’ve made your career. And for mine, I had already fought, cried, bled and eaten far more than my fair share of ramen noodles.

My mind was racing, so I’m sure it paraphrased, honing in on what was really the most important consequence to a person like me. In reality, the doctor could have been diplomatic. Maybe she said, “you’ll never be able to have biological children” or something like, “you won’t be able to use your own eggs to have children.” But, what I heard did not sound like hope. I had hoped to have “it all” and for me, that included being a wife and mother. In my mind, this version of family was going to be my family. This was going to fill the gap in my life that I had learned to ignore, but could never manage to completely forget. Only, the news on this morning, placed that all in jeopardy. I learned that I have something called Premature Ovarian Reserve Failure. Gotta love that kind of name, right? Rather than a much more friendly “disorder,” the word “failure” is already wrapped right in. So, there’s just no sugar coating this kind of bad. You know what this type of “failure” is caused by? Stress. The crazy thing is, if you asked me just an hour ago, before that appointment, I would have sworn that I wasn’t. “Stressed?? I’m not stressed,” I insisted. Well, really, I protested, but my doctor was unconvinced. Instead, she informed me that studies held all the unfamiliar warnings I’d wish I’d heard before. “It could be little things that you just aren’t noticing,” Dr. Ellis said. “Something happens that seems small at the time, or you’ve become desensitized, but it all adds up. Either way, the test results don’t lie.” But to me, those were just numbers and words, mistakenly delivered to me, but meant for someone else because I did not feel stressed. At least, not before leaving the doctor’s office. I was even normally unfazed navigating the infuriating molasses maze of morning traffic. I could proudly say, I barely cursed, I never had an episode of road rage, I held the door open for people, smiled at strangers and I always made time to put on some lipstick. What was there to be stressed about? Before today, everything was going according to plan—I was dating a “paper-perfect” man, suitable for marriage and tall enough for kids; I was up for a promotion; and I had just met my savings goal for a down payment for my very own first dream house. Sure, my family-making hormones were starting to bubble, but I thought I had time. And time meant that family was always something I planned to have, but that didn’t need to be the focus of my thoughts. I focused on my career, my friends, spending Saturdays with my grandmother and loving on Marc, who hadn’t quite mentioned marriage, but I’m sure would eventually. No need to rush Tabitha. That’s what I’d tell myself in every one of those moments even the slightest hint of “where is this going?” started to rise in my belly. Who needs to be pushy about things when you have time, right? With today’s news, I was just starting to discover how very wrong I was.

In my well-ordered world of focused professional upward mobility, crossed-off checklists and comfortable semi-serious dating, I thought I had prepared for everything. So, how was it being ripped apart at the seams by one little doctor visit that was supposed to be routine? I only went in for a very simple follow-up to review the results of my regular blood tests. I should have known it was a problem when Dr. Ellis insisted on seeing me in person, rather than just sending me an email. Evidently my fertility numbers matched those of a woman about to receive her AARP card. “Your body is working too hard to produce an egg each month,” she said. “It seems like there’s been an imbalance going on for some time. The good news is that we caught it while there’s still time to pursue options in front of you.” Options? In my mind, having a family was never an option. It was a given. Options were for things like the shoes you pack on vacation, or where you decide to meet your friends for dinner when nobody can quite decide what they want. But, I’ve always known what I wanted, at least since I was 9 years old. Because…because at 9, my dad left and married his mistress. Whoa. A memory triggered that I had long ago stuffed into the attic of my mind, far underneath even the dusty schoolbooks and scattered old pictures of my 33-year old life.

Crap. Distraction caused me to miss my turn, promoting Google to reroute me, proving a perfect metaphor for the moment. How did I get here? It’s not like I forgot that I was single or forgot to have children. Not possible. It hummed in the background on every night out with my girls, every trip to the supermarket and every solo tax return. And once I turned 30, no matter my accomplishments, educational or professional, there was no chance of escaping the question, “so, how come you’re not married yet?” I could almost see it written in cursive on perplexed faces, along the wrinkled expression lines crossing well-meaning foreheads. In the eyes of the even more curious, “what’s wrong with her?” twinkled in Morse code. It felt as if people thought that my degrees came with a free Mrs. option that I didn’t elect for at graduation. It just wasn’t that easy.

All along, I’d done my share of dating. Dating for me was always for the family you hoped to make, even at some level when I was “just having fun” in my 20’s. So of course, in my 30’s, I was dating with the care, intensity and dedication of a second job. Unfortunately, up to this point, dating itself hadn’t yet made for any relationship that I was sure should or could turn into a long-term plan—not even with Marc. It just seemed that once 30 hit, all the folks for whom marriage meant something, especially the men who considered having a wife and family as an accomplishment in its own right, they’d already taken their nearest best option to the altar. The men that were left and still single, well, they considered it an accomplishment that they had neither wife nor child, and never got “caught up” or “caught slippin” which likened falling in love to unprotected casual sex. They treated love like a disease you catch, and if real adult commitment was the incurable version of it, then for them family was basically death. And goodness knows, I wasn’t trying to kill anybody—what I wanted was that same-page kind of love, the kind between two people where there were a lot more answers than questions.

So, in spite of my very best efforts and stilettos, even while dating, I’d been as single as a wrapped tampon. Except, for the past year and a half, I was better classified as not exactly single-single. I would have to admit; it took me a while to get centered on what seemed to be more of the right type of dating track for my type of goals. When I started dating, I bee-lined for the boys with hot bodies, actor dreams and table-waiting futures. Coming back to LA from grad school, I realized that I should probably find another responsible “adult” with whom I could at least pretend to build a future. What I got was a doctor who was too busy for me, an artist manager from the music industry who wined and dined me for a month and then ghosted me, and a seemingly mature single dad in his late 30’s who gave me the key to his apartment on our second date and then asked for it back when his mother came to visit two months later. Then, of course in-between, there were the “deceptives” and “time wasters,” who wanted extensive emotional relationships, but in the end only wanted to be friends. LA guys were a special breed, and not just because people came to chase after neon-vivid dreams of wealth and fame. So, when I met Marc, who seemed in every way an educated, handsome professional guy with a healthy amount of swagger and decency, I wasn’t trying to stray too far to the left or the right. At the beginning, I felt lucky, but as time progressed, lucky turned into love, for the both of us, in spite of our schedules. Even when my visibility at the news station started to increase, and I got a lot of offers and attention to make up for the time away from me that Marc spent working, I ignored them, because they weren’t men of Marc’s caliber. Plus, he had my heart. He made me smile, and laugh and when we were together, I felt like the most beautiful and sexiest woman for ten miles. He just had that way about him, that same way that made me feel so lucky in the beginning. Our relationship had long-term potential, although with a heavy emphasis on potential. It wasn’t lost on me that we still only spent weekends together and I hadn’t met his family or shared a holiday. Yes, I knew that I didn’t have forever, but I thought I was doing the right thing—find the right guy, and then give him the time and space he needed to make some moves toward a future together. In the year and a half that we’d been dating, he never once brought up marriage, so I didn’t either. And neither one of us brought up the topic of kids, other than at first to discuss birth control measures. He’d sometimes acknowledge that someday they would be very nice to have, and I’d agree but never push, no matter how badly I wanted to. Knowing that Marc wanted to be a father was enough for my checklist. I thought that I could just wait him out until we got to the right place in our relationship. I just always was so sure that there was time. Today, the shock was still settling in my stomach that there was not. The doctor told me that all I had was six months, at best.

I hit my palms against my steering wheel in frustration, thinking of all the amount of diligence spent not get pregnant, only to find myself in a situation that when I’d hope to be able to, I possibly couldn’t. Ugh!The idea of the clock running out on my fertility felt like every bad date, every tough breakup and every guy that I turned down in high school had all turned into big, permanent cracks in my life’s sidewalk. I hated the idea that maybe these people had taken something from me that I could never get back. Dr. Ellis said, “options,” but I couldn’t help but to think, what really were my options? Up to then, the only options I’d been concerned with were the stories that I’d pitch in the newsroom, restaurants for dates with Marc and maybe my dream of which little house I’d buy. Now, my newsroom pitches would become do-or-die opportunities to get my next promotion, dates with Marc would turn into critical conversations and my little house evaporated into an expensive egg freezing procedure that I couldn’t even afford. But this car ride from the doctor’s office was no good time to get started on that. I was already late for work andfrazzled.

In between weaving through Los Angeles traffic, what I really needed to do was steal the time at red lights to repurpose my visor as a makeshift vanity and slap a barebones makeup “beat” on my face. It was a special trick controlling a steering wheel with one hand and contouring with the other, especially since my hand was still shaking. My reflection looked back at me with a grimace. This day, I was definitely without my usual “pretty.” I was a television reporter and yet not a “classic” beauty. So, success for me meant there was the 50% premium on standards to meet, my hair to straighten, and masks of makeup and appropriateness to wear over my brown skin. I managed it all with the composure that you’d expect of a professional, and most of the time, without a second thought. Was this stressful? The need to conform to a standard that I couldn’t naturally meet? Well, today it was. Today, my mind let well-settled ideas unspool themselves from my usual tightly-wound spindle of coping. Today was the first time in a long time that my appearance felt like a burden that I wanted to just let go of. Even as I fought to resume my makeup routine, my mind perched on the verge of becoming an unraveled mess, struggling to find order in the loosely connected thoughts plucked from forgotten memories and the life plans that might no longer apply.

At a time like this, I wanted to call my mother. Well, I wanted to be able to, but the kind of empathy that this situation required was not in her wheelhouse. I was supposed to deliver grandbabies, not one, at least two and she always told me that she was hoping for three, so that she’d always have a little one to shop for. My mom talked about grandkids all the time, even though she lived on the full other side of the continent in Washington, DC. This conversation was her version of an Outlook reminder for a recurring meeting or appointment. We’d speak on the phone about all things unrelated, catching up on life in our respective worlds, and suddenly, like a ping, the topic would pop up and insert itself into polite conversation like, “so how are things going with Marc and when can I expect to meet my grandchildren?” It didn’t help that I was an only child, at least on my mother’s side, so her only hope of being a grandmother. And I guess all along, I felt like I somehow owed her that. It was her idea of becoming, the next step of her own plan after my father left us for Diane. My idea of family didn’t come from wanting to become someone new; my idea came from wanting to go back to who I used to be. Crap. The robotic voice warned me of a traffic slowdown on my route and I was still twenty minutes out from work according to the navigation ETA. I was close enough to take a shortcut through my old neighborhood and save myself at least 5 minutes on the way to the station. I decided to take the turnoff.

I last lived here, in View Park, with my parents. It was a neighborhood of black professionals set off on the southwest side of Los Angeles. We weren’t living large, but we were living “black folks” fancy. This wasn’t all the way ritzy, like the really rich entertainment-types in Bel Air and Malibu, but was especially comfortable. I remember that. Even more than the LA mega-mansions and the Hollywood Hills contemporary showplaces, these were still the kinds of homes I dreamed about most often. Most were ranch layouts, of varying sizes from small to spread out as far as what seemed like a full block. Lawns were always immaculately manicured and palm trees lined most of the streets, some of which gave the perfect view all the way to downtown. We owned our own home with a palm tree and a lemon tree out front, and I had my own room. I hated the color, but my mother picked out what it was supposed to be—a pale sickening pink “for princesses.” I thought it looked like Pepto Bismol. I certainly didn’t think of myself as a princess growing up—sometimes, I thought of myself as a teacher, or a doctor, someone with a career—who put both feet on the ground every morning, got dressed, and fought her own battles. My mom learned her fairytales from her mother and Walt Disney, but I learned mine from Oprah on TV.

Back then, my friends and my school were all within walking distance and so in the evenings, with just a short walk and no bus ride, I was able to get my homework done quickly and get to indulging one of my favorite hobbies. I was probably a little too old for it then, but I still absolutely loved to play with my collection of Barbie dolls. Their pink world, I didn’t mind. Pink just was never the right color for my reality. For those dolls, I had everything, the dream house, the Corvette, you name it. With them, and their pink, anything was possible from one day to the next. I used their thin Barbie bodies to make my own role models who lived the way I wanted to, with their own cars and their own houses that could be decorated as they saw fit. It was a space that I could control amidst the perfectly organized, designed and implemented perfection that surrounded me in every other aspect of our lives as a family. My mother married my father almost directly after college, and as far as I knew, her career focus was my dad, building a perfect life for him and playing the role that she had always believed that she was best suited for—a beautiful, supportive homemaker, and eventually, mother.

On our very last evening as a family, the 9 year old me played in my fantasies, sitting on the floor in clothes still wrinkled and dirty from school recess. I was startled in a moment by what sounded like a roiling piecing wail from my mother coming from the kitchen. I had heard the back door close and thought nothing of it because it was the time that my dad usually came home. Or, the time that he used to return, before he started spending nights away on work trips that had been coming up with increasing frequency. Scared for my mother, I rushed into the kitchen to see her sitting at the table with her head in her hands and my dad standing near the door with his jacket over his arm and the strangest look on his face. They seemed lost in their own moment—my mother sobbing and my father standing there, until they finally noticed me when I managed to get some kind of sound out of my mouth.

“Wha…what’s wrong, Mommy?” I asked. My mother, upon hearing my small voice, took in a sharp breath. I think that she had forgotten that I was in the house. She turned and looked at me—the memory of her usually immaculate makeup running down her eyes today would make me think of a Picasso painting or some real-life version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” Her glistening eyes searched for and found mine and she said in a frighteningly serious tone, “Your father is leaving us for his other family.” And there it was, as she turned back to sobbing, this time collapsing in heaves on the table.

“Oh my God Jeanie, I can’t believe that you would say that to her!” my dad shrieked, throwing his briefcase against the kitchen floor. I stood still like a prey animal while my immature mind processed what I had heard. What? My dad, leaving? What other family? Leaving? Where’s he going?

“Daddy, you’re leaving?” was all I could muster as an echo of what I heard. “When?” I started to cry-talk, questioning with escalating panic and heightening tone. My father came over to me, kneeled down and looked me in my eyes.

“I’ll never leave you Tabby. There’s some things your mother and I need to discuss. Can you go to your room and I’ll come see you in a bit? I promise I won’t leave. I promise. Ok?” Something about his reassurance bought a temporary calm that allowed me to break from the sight of my sobbing mother and walk back into my room and close the door. I didn’t want to hear any more of whatever that was going on in the kitchen. I tried to resume my scene—my blond Barbie had been teaching her friends about something that we had learned in school that week—but, suddenly those dolls didn’t seem that interesting anymore. In that instant, their world felt as fake and plastic as their slippery rubber legs. I put them away and tried to keep to my routine, washing up, putting on my night clothes and eventually getting into my bed. I laid on my back, with my hands folded across the top of my entirely flat chest, staring at the ceiling, waiting who knows how long until my door eventually opened, and my dad came in. He walked across my pink shag carpeting to my princess pink bed and finally sat on the edge. It was that conversation that turned that day into my very first “D” day—I learned that there was a Diane and that there would be a divorce and that my dad was eventually not going to be living with my mother and I anymore. So indeed, there was another “D” discovered on that day, deception.

The concept of an “affair,” and the fact that my dad had had one was something I’d learn on a different night—one of the many to follow that my mother sought comfort in the glass after glass of wine that loosened her lips to release the truths I would have rather not known. My mother spoke not one word of it, and neither did my father, but when I finally did meet her, and laid my own eyes on her face smiling to excess, white teeth, rose-colored lips, brown hair and bright blue eyes, it was only then that I realized that Diane was white. It was the stereotypical insult added to injury for my mother. An actual white woman was something that she could imitate, but never be.

The betrayal of Diane was further stinging to my mother because my father’s mother, my grandmother, the other and original Tabitha Abigail Walker, was also white. When my mother and father got married, my mother was under the impression that she would be my father’s choice for his adult life. And not that there was any friction between my mother and my grandmother, but, until I was born, Granny Tab was the only other woman in the world that my mother had ever had to compete with for my father’s attention. When I was younger, I remember Granny Tab’s bright blue eyes and her box-dye brown hair that always bopped just above her shoulders as the perfect bob, and her schoolteacher glasses that sometimes hung on a metal chain around her neck and sometimes perched on the end of her thin English ski slope nose. She spent her career as a teacher in the LA Unified School District and retired while I was in middle school. It was really Granny Tab who taught me how to read, to write my name in cursive and helped me not fail Algebra. Growing up, I never used to think of my grandmother as “white,” really. She was just my Granny Tab, and “hey Mrs. Walker!” to the rainbow of kids in her classroom when I visited. I knew that she was from West Virginia, but she didn’t talk about it much, and we didn’t spend any time with her side of the family. From my understanding, things didn’t go over so well when she married my grandfather, but my grandfather wasn’t someone we talked about much either. All I knew about him was that he was a black man from the same town as Granny Tab; they were married and then they divorced when my dad was little, only for him to disappear shortly after. Sometimes I wondered what could have happened to make someone as warm as Granny Tab turn away and never look back. Those thoughts never lasted long because she radiated enough love on her own to make up for all the missing folks from her side. So, for her, “family” was the family she chose, the family she made (minus the family she unmade), and the family my dad made after that. Up until Diane, my dad’s end of things was mostly black—my mom, and me. He and my mother met at Howard University for goodness sake.

Even with a white grandmother, “whiteness” never played any role in my identity. As far as I was concerned, there was no difference between what my dad was and what my mom was, and by extension, no difference between either of them, and me. Thinking about it, I suppose she could have, but Granny Tab never “wore” her whiteness as if it were a badge or some kind of cape, or default setting relative to my “blackness” or “brownness” so to speak. She just simply was, and I was, and together, we all just were. I would have never dared utter the words “mixed” or “bi-racial” if someone asked me my cultural, racial or ethnic identity. And that wouldn’t be because I was making some kind of political statement or a choice of one thing over another. It just would be most accurate to say that it never occurred to me that I had a choice of it at all. Only on thankfully rare occasions would I ever have to take into account that my grandmother and I were in any way different, because to me, ever since I was a little girl, she had always been my much older “twin,” my adult best friend, and the reason that I was proud to be named Tabitha Walker. But once the Diane thing happened, all kinds of lines that had never existed before started to pencil themselves into our lives and all kinds of questions that we’d never thought to ask needed answers.

With all this upheaval in my childhood, I guess I started brewing my own version of an innocent and loving revenge. It happened unintentionally, almost like the slow seeping of Granny Tab’s summertime “sun tea.” It’s just what happened to the development of my thoughts after my dad’s wedding to his former mistress. It was unpleasantness I never liked to think of, the truth of him leaving my mother and me for his “other” family that grew its own roots in my mind, eventually grafting itself onto other thoughts of insecurity that teenagers develop, making ugly knotty turns. Eventually, those thoughts grew new vines and branches until it became my mind’s interpretation and conclusion that this new family was his “better” family, one that he chose over the one filled with just my mother and me.

Where in school and studies, I found a near immediate way to channel the loss of the home life and family structure that I had known, it took my mother some time to get there. Living with her in the time just after my father left was a series of dark days. She was never cut out to work or struggle, so having to do both eroded the essence of the dignified beauty that she had always prided herself on being. He had turned us into castaways, on the raft of a life unmoored from its only purpose—my mother was a planet spiraled off into space without the rotational gravity of the sun.

When stability was lacking, in the midst of all of the tumult and my mother’s challenging window of self-doubt and confusion, Granny Tab was always a safe haven for me. When things got too heated or too cool at home, she was a short bus ride away. On the worst days, especially when I was younger, I would go straight to Granny Tab’s house and climb into bed with her, bury my head in her shoulder crook and cry. If I didn’t have to go to work, that’s exactly what I’d do today. She’d wrap her arms around me with no words, just holding the space for me and for us. She was strong in that way, the quiet way, the way of just being there and not needing to fix what couldn’t be fixed by anything other than tears and time.

The blaring sound of a horn behind me pulled me out of my reverie and stopped my accompanying hypnotic mascara application at the green light in front of me. I was just five minutes from work now, but the flood of difficult memories and the swirling in my mind had taken my attention off of the flow of cars ahead. I dropped my hand holding the wand to my lap and held the bottom of the steering wheel while I screwed the tube back into a single piece. Pulling my thoughts and my eyes back to my reflection in the mirror, I could see that I was just one lipstick application away from being presentable—except my lipstick, wasn’t in my makeup bag. Crap—it was in my purse—on the seat.

The sudden acceleration of my car combined simultaneously with a clumsy reach for my purse, catapulting it onto the floor, open side down. Out of the side of my eye, I saw the contents scatter in a Rorschach pattern all over the passenger side floor. Oh crap. I allowed myself a quick glance down and then quickly brought my eyes back to the road and eventually to the rearview mirror. I saw the lights before I heard the siren. That can’t be for me…I thought to myself. But, there it was, the patrol car, behind me, definitelybehind me.

No. No. No. No. No. Not today Lord. I had no idea why he would be stopping me. And in this current climate, wearing brown skin, nothing about seeing the black and white pattern of a police cruiser made me feel safe. Nothing at all. Now, more than ever, it made me feel like my life was in danger.

Immediately, my heart started racing, creating a throbbing in my ears and lending a hollowness to the sounds all around me. I turned down the radio, and looked for a place to pull over to the right side of the street. I couldn’t help that my hands were gripping the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles looked almost white underneath the usual golden brown of my skin. My breath was now shallow and quick, even though I tried to slow it down to avoid full on panic. Dammit. My purse and all of its contents were on the floor—including my wallet. At some point, if he asked for my ID, I was going to have to reach for it. Oh my God. I don’t want to reach…for anything.

My cell phone was on the passenger side floor as well. I can’t even record this. Who will be my witness?What if he thinks I’m reaching for a gun and it’s just my cell phone? I’ve never even held a gun…never…not even a toy gun like Tamir Rice, but he still got shot, didn’t he? Of my greatest concerns in the moment, I couldn’t control what or who he saw or thought when he looked at me. There was no good way to explain that I had parents and friends and a whole office of people who were waiting for me. As disjointed and dysfunctional as they may be, I did have a family. I had some kind of a family. I hoped that he understood that whether or not I showed up for work, or for dinner, it would matter to someone. It would. I’d be missed—I knew that much. I couldn’t explain to him that…oh my God, he’s coming. I looked up from the array of lipsticks and loose change scattered around my upside down purse on the floor and into the rearview mirror and saw that the officer was walking toward me. He was tall, with a solid build—close-cropped blonde hair and he was wearing mirrored sunglasses that looked cold and invincible. His hands were at his utility belt as he approached—the belt that carried his weapons, so many weapons. I could only pray that he didn’t use any of them on me today. I had no idea why he would, which was just as scary as the fact that, based on everything I’d seen, I also couldn’t name why he wouldn’t. I just wanted to get to work. How could I know whether or not I would make it there safely today?

I saw him approach the driver’s side of my car and I was exceedingly careful not to move one inch from my positioning with my hands on the 10 and 2 position on my steering wheel. He motioned for me to roll down the window. I whispered silent prayers as I slowly moved my left hand to the window controls. The window obeyed and descended into the door.

“Ma’am, can I please see your license and registration?” the Officer asked. I hesitated, near tears. Try to hold it together, Tabby. But you can’t reach, not for anything. You already know what they do to black people who reach. I was petrified. Everything was on the floor, everything. What if he thought…

“Ma’am—license and registration,” he repeated, a little more insistent this time. I struggled to manage my breath and to find words at the same time.

“I…I…can’t…I can’t—I don’t want to reach…It’s on the floor…I’m sorry, I’m just really scared right now,” I blurted. The words all came out of me in a blustering hurry of word dribble. My mind was racing, my heart was racing, and my hands were wrapped so tightly around my steering wheel at exactly the 10 and 2 spots that I could imagine that callouses were starting to form. I didn’t want to die and suddenly I found myself in a situation where I had no idea how to stay alive. The widely-played video of Philando Castile ran through my mind…the sound of the gunshots ringing as he reached for his wallet, seemingly obeying the officer’s command, echoed as a warning that the wrong breath, the wrong move, the wrong anything could end me in a cloud of unwarranted bullets. All I wanted to do was to go to work. All I wanted to do was to make it out of this situation alive.

“Oh for Christ’s sake. Ma’am. Can you please step out of the car?” The officer looked at me with shifting intensity. Oh Lord. Oh my God. This is how it starts. I remembered the video of Breaion King’s traffic stop, where the police threw her tiny doll-like body onto the ground with the shattering force of unexplainable rage. I tensed and held on tighter to the steering wheel. Oh my God. He’s going to hurt me. I felt the stinging in the back of my throat as tears of helplessness threatened and pushed against my eyes. I tried to fight them back. I tried to breathe. I tried to remain calm and maintain clear thinking. My life depended on it. My life depended on everything that I would say and do next.

“P..p...please…” I struggled with this simple word as my trembling had doubled in intensity and had moved up to my neck and creeped into my jaw. “I’m…I’m on the news—I’m on T.V. I’m just trying to get to work. I don’t want you to hurt me. I just want to go to work,” I pleaded. It felt as if I were begging for my life. I thought of my grandmother—my mother—even my father. But none of them could protect me from this moment. In this moment, I had no right or ability to protect myself. I would become his victim.

“Ma’am. Get. Out. Of. The. Car. I am not going to hurt you. Do it slow and do it now. Unlock the door. Unlock the door. I am going to open it. You’re going to get out. Ok? Do that now.” I felt his growing impatience. Dear God. Please help. Please help me now. Please please please help me. Please. I’m going to unlock this door God. Please be with me. Please. Saying nothing, I managed to nod my head ok, and slowly, slowly reached my left hand down to unlock my car door. The officer took the outside handle and pulled the door open. “Now unbuckle your seatbelt and step outside please. Just here. Step outside of the car.” I replaced my left hand on the steering wheel and peeled my right hand off of the leather to slowly reach for the seat belt release. There I was again, reaching.

“I’m just going to put my hand down to unbuckle,” I said. “I don’t have anything anywhere on me. I’m on television. I’m a reporter. I’m on television….I…” I forced the words out with heavy labor. Anything more than a whisper felt like I was going to unleash the scream of terror that was building inside of me. And I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream so badly with my entire soul—LEAVE ME ALONE! LEAVE ME ALONE! WHY WON’T YOU LEAVE ME ALONNNNEE! But I said nothing. I held it in. I held my breath and unlatched my seatbelt and let it release across my body. And slowly I turned and pulled my shaking frame upwards and outside of the physical protection of my car to face the officer. Oh God please help me. I closed my eyes and lingered in one final prayer that I released to float outwards on my exhaled breath.

The officer stood in front of me briefly—I could tell he was considering me, even from behind the emotionless stare of his mirrored aviator sunglasses. He took in a breath and his rigid posture softened a bit.

“I can’t believe it has come to this,” he said with his hand reaching upwards for his sunglasses.

“What?” I said, frightened about what that could mean for me in the next moments. The officer shook his head and pulled off his sunglasses. Officer Mallory. M--A--L--L--O--R--Y. I tried to commit that to memory and looked for the badge number. 13247. Mallory—13247. Ok, got it. Oh no, I forgot the numbers. He looked at me with blue eyes squinting to adjust to the light. He leaned forward just slightly to repeat himself.

“I just said, I can’t believe that it has come to this. This. Look at you—why are you so afraid?” he asked with seeming earnestness. “I’m not going to hurt you. Listen,” he hesitated. “I’m going to touch you. Is that ok? I’m not going to hurt you.” I paused, confused about what he was asking me to allow. I was not certain that I had any true agency or choice in the moment. I shook my head, saving my energy in case I would need to scream. He slowly lifted his hands up, placing them gently on my shoulders. I caught the glint of a gold wedding band on his left hand. Maybe he had a family—a daughter. Maybe he could understand what it was like as a parent to think about his innocent daughter not making it back home. “What is your name?”

“Tabitha…,” I said, struggling with even my most familiar words against the violent trembling in my body. I felt unsteady in my heels. Strangely, his hands stabilized me slightly. “Tabitha Abigail Walker. I’m a reporter on KVTV news. I’m just trying to get to work…” I said, trying to make a case for my safety—to make him understand that mine was not a name that would just disappear. If that registered with him, I didn’t notice. He continued just as before.

“Ms. Walker. Seeing you…like…I…I just can’t believe this. Look…” he said, searching for his words as he sought out my direct eye contact. He moved his head until his eyes met mine directly. “I’m a third generation cop. Ok? Third generation. My grandfather was a cop—and my dad. They’re the reason I put this uniform on every day. Every single day. To them…to me, this uniform means service. It means honor. It means everything opposite of whatever it is that’s making you stand here in front of me like this.” He paused again, and then continued. “And don’t think I don’t know—I do know…I’ve read the stories—seen the videos, too. The same ones you have. But that’s not what this uniform means to me. Ok? That’s not what it means. Do you understand that?” I struggled to take in his words. All I could do was look him in his eyes and let the tears fall from mine.

The air hung heavy between us for a moment and neither of us spoke. I couldn’t say anything, even as some of the tension started to drift out of my body. There are just some moments where words cannot perform their duty. There are just some thoughts that are bigger than words. It was in this space that we stood, in consideration of each other until we could find the next space of our shared reality. It was my turn to speak.

“I’m sorry…I’ve just seen so much…I didn’t mean...it’s not disrespect…I’m just…afraid…I know I maybe shouldn’t be this afraid…but I am,” I tried to explain. His words had touched me because I could see them echoed in his eyes. I wanted to believe him, so I started to allow his reassurance to calm my racing thoughts. “What happens now?” I asked. He took another long breath and dropped one hand from my shoulder but kept his eyes locked with mine.

“I pulled you over because you were driving erratically. You missed a light back there and it seemed like you might have been on your phone.” He broke eye contact with me and glanced over into my open car and returned to meet my stare. “From the looks of things, you probably weren’t, but you also weren’t paying attention. I want to let you go—but I need to make sure that you’re going to be safe driving. You said you’re heading to work. Just take some time and collect yourself before you get back on the road. Can we agree on that?” He paused to search my eyes for a response.

“Y…yess…yes. I can do that,” I managed to respond, grateful to not have to fully explain the distractions of my morning.

“Ok. I’m going to let you go,” he said with a lingering pause, signaling that he was considering his next words carefully. “I can’t pretend to know what’s going on in your mind. I have no idea. But, we’re not all like what you guys are seeing and hearing about,” he finished, then turned and walked away heading back to his patrol car. I stood still, considering the moment and his final words to me.

“Neither are we,” I said quietly. “Neither are we.”

I turned slowly back towards my own car and allowed myself to drop into my seat and closed the door. With my hands back on 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, I let my face drop onto the center of it. The cascade of tears came with heavy sobs as the entire weight of the morning’s events released itself from my body with the force of a thunderstorm. It shouldn’t be this way—nothing should be this way. I should have more eggs. I shouldn’t have to be this scared. I should have been at work already.

I am Tabitha Abigail Walker, a black girl in contemporary America, and I am personally and emotionally spent. It’s not even 11 am and I already feel as exhausted as my egg supply.