SOST. LOUIS

Walking While Black

An anonymous story about something that could only happen in the Gateway City

He was a Black man in Plaza Frontenac just walking around, but I wasn’t with him. I was with my mom and sister in the Junior League Christmas Bazaar. We were eyeing kitschy holiday decor. Transported, I didn’t even realize my dad had left. He was aimlessly walking around, killing time till his mesmerized daughters and wife came out of their spell.

We finally did, and my mom asked “Where’s your father?” Then we saw the police but didn’t think it had anything to do with us. Not this law-abiding family that had lived in white neighborhoods for as long as I’d been alive. We regularly visited Frontenac (not the mall but the city) because that’s where the Junior League’s offices were, and my mom was a member. So this couldn’t be us.

But it was us. My mom started yelling, and I worried my dad was being arrested. Maybe we were all being arrested. I wasn’t sure why, but I was 10 and terrified.

My dad and I walked everywhere together in our white neighborhood. “I’m going to walk the dog. Come with me,” he’d say. Or “I’m going to the corner grocers, come with me.” It was for the company, he said, but also because he thought a Black man with a kid looked less threatening, more likely to be presumed innocent.

But that day I wasn’t with him, and he was presumed guilty. This did not turn into a deadly altercation. But a Pandora’s box had opened for us, though we didn’t know it, and the world had shifted for me, and I did know it.

Send your So St. Louis story to jsrogen@riverfronttimes.com.