No, I Am Not OK
By Aimee Meredith Cox
A makeshift memorial after the deadly shooting of a 1-year-old boy in Brooklyn, NY. Photo courtesy of the author.
“Are you OK?”
It was an ominous way to wake up: a ping from a text 15 minutes before my morning alarm would have buzzed. The message was from a friend—not a close one, someone more accurately described as a friendly neighbor.
“Are any of us OK right now?” I thought but didn’t text back. Our text history showed that this was only the third message I had ever received from her in the six years since we first met. Had it been sent by someone I was close to, it may have seemed nice— comforting, a sweet way to wake up. But because this was not the nature of our relationship, what I felt was anxiety. Was I OK?
“Yeah, I am. Why? Are you OK? Is something going on?” Fully awake, I wondered if another tragedy occurred while I slept. In fact, there was: the fatal shooting of a 1-year-old baby boy, Davell Gardner Jr.
I live in the heart of Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn, on a block like many others: one that has both rapidly changed over the past decade, and stayed the same. Over half of the brownstones are still owned by Black folks who either inherited the property from parents, aunts or grandmothers, or bought them in the early ‘90s when this part of Brooklyn had yet to appeal to white buyers and was still considered no man’s land—a territory that you didn’t cross unless you had to, because this was the only place you could afford to live.
But the reality is my neighborhood was never considered a no man’s land or disenfranchised or devastated or bleak to the many Black people who live here and continue to cultivate the cultural richness and intangible aliveness that makes neighborhoods like Bed-Stuy prime geographies for flag planting and cooptation.
Since I moved to Brooklyn in 2009, a substantial number of properties in the neighborhood have been bought up, first by Hasidic Jewish and then Chinese and now Australian real estate corporations, only to be populated by young white kids fresh out of college. But despite or maybe because of the influx of transient young white couples overtly striving to wear the now pejorative title hipster, my block is still hot—in the best and most vibrant and the worst and most dangerous senses of the word.
We still have block parties where “block uncles” skewer hot dogs on the sidewalk on small round, rusted-out BBQ grills while kids from Atlanta and Charlotte visiting their extended family ‘up north’ play in rented bounce tents in the middle of the street. Wiry young Black men still gather on corners talking trash and making smart and playful jokes as you walk in between the maze made by their feet and their overturned bikes. These same young men have beef with the other young men who live a few streets down. The park at the end of our block, a mix of outdated swings, ladders and monkey bars; a too small—on purpose—basketball court, and an open expanse of blacktop used for skateboarding, outdoor training and drug trafficking, is supposedly the territory over which they fight for ownership.
“The illumination is unsettling in that it already designates the entire square block from avenue to avenue a crime scene.”
I read and take phone calls on the green wooden benches scattered on the perimeter of the playground in the summer days when the sun makes staying inside feel like an offense against the fleeting nature of the season. At night walking home from the bodega, I pass the generator-run stadium lights the NYPD set up in the late spring to flood the park with a glare. It’s so bright you can read the lettering on the candy wrappers pushed to edges of the basketball court: Banana Now & Later…TWIX…dubble bubble. The illumination is unsettling in that it already designates the entire square block from avenue to avenue a crime scene. I step off of the sidewalk before I approach the lights to walk in the darkness of the street, feeling the secrets and safety in shadows.
I don’t expect to find any mention of the shooting on the news, doubting if another street shooting in Brooklyn or the Bronx is noteworthy to people in the media who assess which traumas are legible, which worthwhile to cover. So, I log on to the Bedford-Stuyvesant Facebook page where I find a post about the shooting. Scrolling a few comments down, it is revealed that the victim of the shooting was a child. I inhale the details: a bullet…ongoing tensions between ‘gangs’…a one-year-old shot and killed on impact in his stroller…a family in the park. And exhale the analyses: why were they out that late with a baby? this is what happens when babies have babies. that park is a mess. ya’ll still want to defund the police?
Am I OK?
The rest of the day, maybe even the rest of the week as the facts of the shooting become clearer, my understanding of it becomes hazier. I, like the friend who sent the text and my neighbors on my block, and the elder Trinidadian man who manages the hardware store on the corner, continue on with the daily activities that make our lives feel habitual and, therefore, normal in this time of pandemic uncertainty and overwhelming Black precarity. My response time to emails shortens and I am quick with solutions to the minor inconveniences that pop up during the course of the day but have felt like disasters since COVID.
The thought of the death of this baby must fade, become sketchy, for mundane and normal life to go on. The thought of this baby must stay with us in sharp and cutting clarity for new life to emerge.
“The thought of the death of this baby must fade, become sketchy, for mundane and normal life to go on.”
As it turns out, the shooting of an infant is newsworthy—and the cameras and casters descend. They set up lights to join those already in place by the police in front of the metal gate circling the park where a small memorial has formed. I convene on the corner with my neighbors to watch. We are too far away to hear what is being said, intentionally so, and are comforted watching lips move. I pretend the correspondents are telling a different story.
A few days after the shooting, the park is converted into a make-shift fair. Astroturf appears to cover the blacktop lot with a few scattered tables of logoed merchandise for giveaways. Uniformed cops play basketball with the neighborhood kids. There is a DJ. He alternates between calls for everyone to dance and unrehearsed testimony on gun violence and police-community unity. My next-door neighbor, a tall bearded Black man who lives with his 90-year-old mother, taps my shoulder and holds up a Black Lives Matter t-shirt. “There’s more over there,” he says, pointing to one of the white plastic tables.
A police van is parked directly in front of the memorial every night for over a month. The glaring lights now emanating from the top of the vehicle dwarfing the carefully placed rows of white and green candles. The young men usually stationed at the corner have moved to the side of the small taqueria where they are shaded by a tree with low hanging branches under the light from the small restaurant. The owner, a twenty- something woman from Mexico City, is friendly with the young men but frustrated by what their presence is doing to her business.
“It’s because they are in a silent stand-off with the police across the street,” I tell her between bites of my tostado. I am sitting on the low wooden fence encircling the big tree near where the young men will soon take up residence when the sun goes down.
“I am angry for the carelessly murdered baby. I am angry for that baby’s family. I am angry for the young men who may or may not have been a part of the beef that led to this baby’s death.”
“My friends are like, ‘We told you not to open there. The block is too hot.’” Natalie sits down next to me. When Natalie first opened, before I met her, I resented the intrusion of what I thought was yet another bespoke, quaint establishment intentionally opening in the heart of the hood to attract an adventure-seeking clientele moving in and out of Bed-Stuy like tourists. But I have watched her build relationships with our neighbors, especially those who will never be patrons, and share homebound stories of heading back South—for her meaning Mexico, and for the elder neighbors meaning Alabama, South Carolina and Tennessee. I am reminded that there is a way to enter in and eventually become a part of a community.
I finish eating and feel the low burn of the anger I have been trying to ignore for the last two weeks. I am angry for the carelessly murdered baby. I am angry for that baby’s family. I am angry for the young men who may or may not have been a part of the beef that led to this baby’s death. I am angry for Natalie and the impossibility of merging capital and community on this block. I am angry for everyone who passes by me on these Bed-Stuy streets with a quick nod and intentional eye contact to make up for what our masks conceal.
I leave Natalie and walk over to the police van.
“Hi officers,” I begin. “Can I ask you why you are posted up in front of this memorial. Is it for protection? Is it symbolic?” I don’t really know what I am asking but ask anyway. There are two cops in the van, both Black. They continue playing games on their cell phones as I start talking.
“Sure. Yeah. All of that,” the officer closest to the door responds to me in a practiced polite tone. “We don’t want there to be any retaliation.” He puts down his phone and steps out of the van to face me on the sidewalk.
“Existing while Black in America has always required that we calibrate ‘ok’ on a different register.”
“But you know, this was bound to happen. I support Black Lives Matter and all of that, but when you start talking about ‘defund the police’ it will be us that gets killed. This gun violence and territory claiming doesn’t impact white communities….” He keeps talking, but like the newscasters, his lips move to no sound and everything gets hazy again. These soft edges of semi-comprehension providing a comfortable landing to rest things on when there is too much to hold. I don’t want to stay long enough to hear him use the phrase “black-on-black crime.” I walk away, moving past the candles and the frayed satin ribbons tied to the gate. I decide to stay on the sidewalk this time.
I am not OK. We are not OK. To be OK in the midst of devastation is the American way. Resilience is fetishized so we don’t have to question why so many of us—Black, brown, poor, living in the wrong neighborhood or in the wrong body, or on the wrong part of the block—require so much of it while others maneuver incredulously around our open wounds. I am not OK even though the relentless repetition of injury and death can have the effect of bludgeoning me into a numbness that mimics the indifferent state we call alright.
With each new incident, it becomes harder to face the sedimented layers of history and inextricably interlocked systems that allow almost every context to become the ideal site for the slow, steady and insidiously private or swift, spectacular and very public demise of Black people in this country. Existing while Black in America has always required that we calibrate ‘OK’ on a different register. I want to make peace with not being OK—because performing otherwise is a dangerous lie that, like a powerful anesthesia, supports the illusion that we can seed change without seeing and feeling everything.
Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor in the departments of Anthropology and African American Studies at Yale. Her first monograph, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship, won the 2017 book award from the Society for the Anthropology of North America and a 2016 Victor Turner Book Prize in Ethnographic Writing.