Featured Nonfiction

• This Is My American Country

  Allen M. Price

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  On the day it was reported that Jacob Blake was handcuffed to his hospital bed, paralyzed from the waist down after being shot in the back seven times by a Wisconsin police officer, my mother called me upset, and said, “We should give up on this land and move to another country because America’ll never accept Black people. America’ll always see us as subhuman.” She had just finished listening to video clips of film director Spike Lee and Los Angeles Clippers head coach Doc Rivers say the same thing. My sixty-six-year-old mother retired from Rhode Island Hospital on February 21, two days before twenty-five-year old Ahmaud Arbery was fatally shot while jogging in Glen County Georgia by Travis McMichael and his father Gregory who after killing Ahmaud spit on him and called him a “fuckin nigger.” Just three weeks later, on March 13, three Louisville police officers fired twenty-six rounds of out of control bullets into Breonna Taylor’s apartment and neighboring homes, striking her five times. For at least five minutes the twenty-six-year-old EMT lay where she fell in her hallway coughing, gasping, dying, receiving no medical attention for more than twenty minutes, according to the dispatch logs. Three months after that, on Memorial Day, Minnesota police officer, Derek Michael Chavin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while George repeatedly said, “I can’t breathe”, and shouted, “Mama, Mama…I’m through!” to his mother who was deceased.

  The years we spent struggling, fighting to financially stay alive had been as hard as the fight and struggle to be accepted by white caste society. For most of my life my mother had two, sometimes three jobs. Now in retirement she was going to need a part-time job to supplement her social security income that didn’t provide enough money to pay all her monthly bills. Up until I was fourteen, we couldn’t afford to empty the cesspool more than once a year, only allowing me to take a shower on Sunday’s, the rest of the week I washed up in the bathroom sink with a face cloth. I was also only able to flush the toilet after going poop. Never once did I hear my mother blame white America for it. She went on finding ways to make ends meet, picking up a job here, a job there to the point that I became a latchkey kid at six years old, letting myself in the house after school, cooking my dinner, taking care of my springer spaniel dog, Lady, putting myself to bed, and not seeing my mother until the next morning.

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