but I can’t. three cops in Kentucky got away with murder last night. a prayer is grief caught somewhere in my throat between may the Lord bless you and keep you and I can’t breathe.
an it aint easy being wheezy sign decorates the door. an inhaler with stick arms and legs and a smile punctuates the end of the phrase. it’s supposed to be a joke, but I can’t laugh.
what can I do for this Black baby that someone else hasn’t already tried? how many mothers have prayed for Black babies and how many of those Black babies grew up to be hunted anyway?
I look at my phone and there are no notifications. a few months ago, when this was all trending, I think I would have at least gotten one message by now. one person would have told me they made it home safe the night before. and later in the day, a friend would text me and beg me not to come downtown because it wasn’t safe. this past summer, while I was delivering medications to babies in the hospital, my friends were in the streets being pepper sprayed. police scattering them, scattering loved ones. police in every street, police covered in the full armor of riot gear.
I think about how people were sharing their whereabouts whenever they weren’t home. people sending cash apps for bail funds and first aid kits and tear gas masks. I remember seeing the national guard set up in their tanks patrolling the side streets nobody thinks about. police blocking all roads to downtown. the mandatory curfew. and the morning I woke up to a building on fire.
that building burned into dawn. I cracked my window after driving off the exit just to smell if it was real. smoke seeped in and followed me to work. the fire burned into morning, into midday, during my lunch break. I stopped with my cart full of single dose prescriptions and stared out the 12th floor window. nurses whispered behind me at their station while the smoke rose in front of us.
there is still burning months later in this quiet room the sun hasn’t had a chance to rise in yet. a heart monitor dings softly in the corner, lulling the baby into a dream. I watch the baby roll over and wheeze a little, tangling their oxygen tube up in their chubby limbs, their fingers stuck in their curly head of hair.
I hear my mother’s disembodied voice saying, “you know, I always pray for the babies. I don’t get a chance to go in their rooms often. but when I do, I always pray for them.”
even after a decade of working in this hospital, my mother has never told me about how she performs an EKG. but when I hear her voice at times like this, I imagine it. I see her disappear into a baby’s room. I hear her saying the Lord’s prayer to them while they squirm and bat away the sticky readers on their little bodies. she is gentle. she has the patience only a mother could have. no matter how many times her children have kicked at her stomach and cried she has always come back to nurture them. she smiles at them and says, “Amen.”
but I am not my mother. I can’t read the heart of a person. I can’t say a prayer without it feeling pointless.
how many Black mothers prayed no one sold their children away from them just to have them sold anyway? how many Black mothers prayed in church all their lives just for their churches to be bombed or shot up? and how many prayed for the safety of their families just to have their babies slashed from their bellies, sent back to them in rolled up gym mats, their corpses bloated and swollen full of river water, or not be sent back to them at all? how many babies are ocean waves now? how many ancestors prayed to a white Jesus and how many were let down by him? how many were killed by people who look just like the one they prayed to?
I don’t know. my mother wishes I’d pray more.
all I can do is place the oral syringes in the medicine drawer next to the inhaler so that the nurses will find them easily. all I can do is stand here and bite my bottom lip so that I don’t cry aloud, so that I don’t wake the baby. I close my eyes to stop the tears and I see smoke. it plumes, clouding my head.
