The Daily - The Sunday Read: 'Facing the Wind'

Episode Date: June 21, 2020

In today’s episode of The Sunday Read, Carvell Wallace considers why, for his kids, a global pandemic that shut down the world was not news — it was the opposite of news. It was a struggle that had, in some ways, always been a part of their lives.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

I don't think my kids have read the piece yet, but they were really excited to be fact-checked by the New York Times Magazine. They thought that was the coolest thing ever. My favorite moment of fact-checking was I wrote a line in there about how my daughter sometimes gets in fights with me and then apologizes. So the fact-checker was like,

do you get in fights with your dad and apologize? And my daughter said, I apologize for how I said it. I don't apologize for what I said because I know that what I said is right. And just to see that exchange happen in an email, I really loved that. Hey, my name is Carvel Wallace, and I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. And I'm going to be reading my essay called Facing the Wind, Raising Black Teenagers Amid Pandemic and Protest.

You know, I was a parenting advice columnist for years before I wrote this piece. And what I see, both in my own life and in all the parents that I heard from is that parenting is messy and it's confusing and your kids behave like monsters and you behave like a monster. That's all part of it. And our job as parents is to show up honestly, continually, and to be present with our kids, however that looks. however that looks. I wrote this piece a few weeks ago. I started it.

And at that point, we were talking a lot about the killing of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery. And when I look at this piece being published this week, a week in which many of us are reacting very deeply to the murder of the activist in Florida, Toyin Salao. This one hits me so deeply for so many reasons. And part of it was because she was a teenager.

She was the same generation as my children, and I think about the ways in which when men are killed, everyone jumps into the street and hashtags it immediately, and I want myself and my son and my daughter to know that that's not enough, that what women and trans women and trans people face is many orders of magnitude beyond what we've been talking about so far. And it's almost like you can't even write fast enough to keep up with this. But I guess that's where I want our conversation to be, and that's where I want us to go as we move forward from this.

That's where I want our conversation to be, and that's where I want us to go as we move forward from this. So here is the essay, and I hope you enjoy it. Before I saw them silhouetted by the fog of tear gas and the light of police helicopters, back when the crisis we were in meant that our world was uncomfortably quiet rather than uncomfortably loud, my teenagers and I were in need of things to do. The options were limited. There was a pandemic. I could not take them to the mall or drop them off at a friend's house

from which they would go to a movie and wander around downtown having all kinds of experiences I would never know about unless one of them went horribly wrong. I could not take them to a museum and listen to them complain about how boring everything was right up until they became obsessed with an exhibit they couldn't stop talking about in the overpriced cafe. The world was closed to us. We only had the living room, the inside of a car, and a nebulous place known as outside. Their whole lives, I have been the kind of parent who has dragged them through a series of adventures I hoped would split the difference between enriching and inexpensive.

My own father was a master of this. master of this. I remember him taking me and my brother to watch planes take off from Washington National Airport, or strapping us into the front seat of his cab so we could eavesdrop on his conversations with fares, from nuns to prostitutes to congresspeople. When my kids were little, and I was really broke, I tried to live by this same ethos. A favorite adventure was to pick a random bus line here in Oakland and ride all the way to the end and back while the kids clambered on their knees in the plastic seats watching the boulevards pass. I was trying to show them that there was enough beauty right in front of us, in the neighborhood, on the bus, at the library, to sustain us.

There was beauty in the trees and the graffiti, the taco stands and the people. We belonged to a world. Our neighborhood was one that none of their Disney movies or Nickelodeon shows ever told them was beautiful. I wanted to deprogram them, help them see that beauty was feral and wild, democratic and free, that it belonged to us, wherever and however and whoever we were. With the world closed, we had to search further. I piled them into the car to go for drives. Often, I would have no idea where we were going until we were halfway there. A teacher in my college theater program, a director, once told me that when she was struggling in a rehearsal,

she would sit in the last row of the theater and announce, I have an idea. She would then begin a long, slow walk toward the stage, and by the time she got there, she'd better have had an idea. It wasn't until I had kids that I understood this. We have visited beaches and forests, brackish inlets where seals bob and cranes perch. We have driven to the campuses of colleges my daughter wants to attend to find halls emptied and coyotes roaming free through parking lots. We have driven to the edge of the land in overwhelmingly white Marin County,

where a parks official told us we had to go back to Oakland because they didn't want our germs there. Because we are Californians, most of our important conversations happen in a car. Maybe we don't know how to talk meaningfully without the crutch of parallel gazes, a shared view on the world passing outside. I used to think we were all seeing the same thing on those rides, but my son once showed me a video he had shot from the back seat, and I was startled to see myself in the rearview mirror.

I looked so severe, so lost in dark thought, even as we were, in my mind, enjoying a chill Sunday drive through the empty city. I realized in that moment that I had almost no idea what my son saw when he looked at the world. My children were 13 and 11 at the time of the 2016 election, and it was in the car the morning after that they asked me what had happened. I didn't know exactly what to tell them. I have an unfortunate need to explain everything as completely as possible, to offer them the grandest view. I worry it is too much for them, but they are stuck with the father they got. So I thought about it for a long time.

As long as it took to get to the freeway and past the first two exits, the gas station, the temple, the curve where I once saw a car spin out late at night, barely missing me at 70 miles per hour. That night, I kept driving, and another car seemed to stop to help, or at least I decided it did

as I continued into the darkness, my heart still in my throat. Finally, I told my children that one of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this. Do I believe in loving everyone, or do I only believe in loving myself and my people? I told them that their mother and I had each decided at some point in our lives that we believed in trying to love everyone. But there were some people who simply did not believe in loving everyone, and that was just the way it was. I told them that their mother and I had made our choices,

but we could not decide for them what kind of people they would be. They had to decide for themselves. They were quiet. Maybe this was a pivotal moment in their young lives. I wanted to think it was. But maybe they tuned out after 30 seconds, letting their thoughts wander to things more present and graspable, like what I had packed in their lunchboxes.

On one trip in late March, we ended up across the bay in San Francisco on the top of Bernal Hill, a windy, grassy rise near the geographic center of the city. Under normal, non-quarantine circumstances, this is a trip that could take 75 minutes one way, but we have not had normal circumstances for a while. It took 15 minutes. It took 15 minutes. On the way there, I took a detour to show them a building in Bayview where I used to work at a non-profit. This was before they were born, before their mother and I were married. I had never shown them this part of my life before, but somehow it felt time.

The streets were empty. The world would soon be theirs. Perhaps it already was. Why wouldn't I tell them every single thing? When I worked there, I helped run a youth gardening program. We managed several farms and the housing projects, grew vegetables, sold or donated them to residents, taught kids about nutrition and nature. They came to our program torn between what most would consider two worlds.

On one hand, incarcerated parents, siblings lost to violence and addiction, and a world that treated them as throwaways. On the other hand, organic farming of strawberries. I was in my early 20s and in over my head, as almost everyone who works with youth is, but I knew that I really liked the kids, even the difficult ones. I liked their wit and brilliance, their hunger for something positive. I liked their wit and brilliance, their hunger for something positive. I liked their gallows humor about working in the fields like slaves, their consistent clowning of my white hippie co-workers. Mostly, I liked the way they kept coming back, day after day, to share the simple, timeless miracle of seeing food grow from the ground. The organization eventually folded after the city, amid allegations of

corruption and misuse of funds, barred it from receiving municipal contracts. Its executive director went on to a high-profile job with the city, but on the first day of quarantine, a former co-worker sent me an article about how he was now facing federal charges in a bribery scheme. He and I never talked often, but he would occasionally summon me to his office and take me into his confidence, maybe because I was young and black and seemingly impressionable. Once he asked, who else is doing for our people what we're doing? Let someone else step up if they don't like how I do business. Some 20 years later, I still don't know what I think about that. I know he was wildly problematic.

I also know that one of our farms, a beautiful multi-acre farm, still stands today in a neighborhood where for decades the only place to buy food was the liquor store. We arrived at Bernal Hill about 20 minutes before sunset and began climbing the dirt path on the south side. I lingered far behind the kids so I could take videos of them silhouetted against the vast azure sky, grass undulating at their feet, and because I simply could not walk the hill as fast as they could. My knees hurt, my breath felt thin. Stuck in the house, the kids vacillated between intense goofiness, door-slamming arguments, and a zombie-like trance as they methodically worked through every show, YouTube video, and TikTok ever made. But here, outside, despite the fact that they are 14 and 17, and one of them is taller than me by at least two inches, they ran together as if they were still little, as if they were briefly enjoying the childhood everyone told us

they should have, their laughter echoing off the hills. We reached the top where the wind is ferocious. My daughter, who brought a blanket, rushed to the windiest spot she could find, called out for her older brother's attention, faced the golden sun, and lifted the blanket over her head like a flag. The sudden beauty of the moment stung me, and I could think of nothing to do but take a video. Here is a 14-year-old girl, standing atop a hill in the middle of a global pandemic, at a moment in which I am thinking more than usual about death. My personal death, our collective death, the death of the planet. She faces the wind with all of her bodily might,

exulting in the confrontation. The magic hour light is a cinematic gold on her face. The wind whips her hair. Her hoodie and black track pants cover her like modern armor. I was reminded of soldiers planting the flag in Iwo Jima. Of the viral photo of a shirtless Palestinian protester holding a flag in a slingshot. Of Eugène Delacroix's liberty leading the people, I was reminded of the intense, unflagging, unselfconscious strength of my daughter. My teenagers have, on the whole, taken the pandemic much better than their parents have.

My daughter especially found our daily briefings of coronavirus developments tedious. She suffers from anxiety, and in the beginning we understood her impatience as a healthy expression of her stress. But lately I've begun to wonder if it's not something altogether simpler. She's just bored of hearing the adults in her life bemoan the world we clearly created. Her generation has known nothing but chaos and impending doom. She was in third grade the first time our minivan was diverted from the road on the way home from school by a phalanx of officers in riot gear. She was six the first time she asked me about climate change. Her white male sixth grade teacher said the N-word with a hard R.

Her seventh grade science teacher gave the class the New Yorker article about the West Coast's inevitable city destroying earthquake. She was 12 when an 18-year-old Black woman was murdered in what many feared was a racially motivated attack on the same BART platform

where she catches the train to school. She has lived through school shooting drills, neo-Nazi rallies in the park where she used to play, police murders, car break-ins, sexual predators lingering outside her schoolyard, and weeks of wildfires that turn the sky orange and make it impossible to breathe outdoors. A global pandemic that shuts down the world was not news to her. It was the opposite of news. It was something as old as her life. She found a perch on the top of the hill to sit in the sun, fashioning the blanket around her legs to protect herself from the wind.

Sometimes my daughter resents being dragged along on hikes. Her resistance is mostly good-spirited, a quick eye roll, but every once in a while, she hits within herself an obstinance that borders on the self-destructive. She tells me she'd rather sit alone in a parking lot than walk with us along a trail, or that she's going to call her mother who is an hour away to pick her up because she doesn't want to wait for 30 minutes. In these moments, she has a kind of scorched earth policy on airing her grievances. She will, in the knife-like and breakneck style of a 14-year-old, tell me I always have to be right, tell her mother she's manipulative and passive-aggressive, tell all of us she doesn't

care about our feelings. It hurts in a way that little else does. Later, she will apologize. It hurts in a way that little else does. Later, she will apologize. Later, we can have an honest, gentle talk about these feelings. Her wisdom in those talks leaves me speechless, just as her sudden nihilism sometimes terrifies me and leaves me shattered. My son and I venture downhill, watching the grasses blow in waves like green velvet.

He talked to me about his relationship. He had questions about what to do with another person's feelings. I started by trying to tell him what I know, which I quickly realized was not much. So I ended up telling him what I don't know, what I struggle with, how much time I've spent trying to control what others think of me or treating every opportunity and intimacy as though it were life or death. I told him how I did not know how to love myself, so I looked to other

people to love me, and how rarely that worked. He likes to argue with me, and I guess I like to argue with him because we do it all the time, about politics, movies, school, money, work. He has admitted that he will often go to his friends and argue the very same position he resisted so fiercely when I was arguing it. It's how I learn, he once told me. Can you learn by listening? I replied, because his sister is right.

I do always need the last word. Because his sister is right. I do always need the last word. On our way back up the hill, a red-tailed hawk flew past his head, seemingly within inches. Silently, it swooped toward the top of the hill and began bobbing in the wind. An old woman walking the trail with her cane beside her looked at both of us and then at the bird. It's an auspicious sign, she told us. At the top of the hill, hikers began to gather and watch,

careful to keep their distance from one another. No one talked. The kids watched with me for a little while, but soon they complained of cold and boredom. I gave my daughter the keys, and they trudged back toward the car. Soon, I was alone. I could feel the wind whipping through me as though I were made of nothing permanent. Something happened to me in that moment.

Something to do with the cold, the wind chipping holes in my body, something about the hawk just being a hawk and not a person and reminding me that I don't have to be a person forever. Something about experiencing this beautiful moment with my kids and then my kids going away because it was time for them to go and be warm on their phones and maybe figure out what kind of burritos they want me to get them on the way home. I remember when my son was being born and the midwife described labor. On one side, there are all the women who have not given birth. And on the other, there are all the mothers welcoming you with love and open arms.

And in the middle is a long, dark path that you and only you must walk alone. Something about my getting older, a thing I definitely didn't think I was going to be doing. Something about having once held my dying mother in my arms and knowing that I, too, will one day be one of the dying, maybe even soon. maybe even soon. Something about realizing that no matter how much I try to prepare my children for the fact that their father is only a man, a man who will one day grow old and weak and die, they won't fully realize what that means until it's too late. Something about all of this reminds me that I am, in the end,

walking this alone, even though we do, on this Wednesday, go and get burritos together. A few days later, my daughter is telling me that her mother doesn't care about her mental health. She is crying, so I try to stifle my laughter. I can think of no person on earth who cares more about anything than her mother cares about her. A few days later, I criticize the way my son does or doesn't help around the house. He blows up at me. He tells me he's tired of my parenting. He tells me that he

knows I don't approve of him and that he doesn't want to hear what I think. It occurs to me that my children are sometimes irretrievably selfish. How much of that is their age, their development, their generation? How much of it is me? The next day, my son sits me down to talk through his theories about race and media. A couple days later, he tells me again that he wants nothing to do with me. At one point, he watches the video of Ahmaud Arbery's killing. The black jogger was running in a quiet Georgia neighborhood when three men in pickup trucks chased him down, including a retired law enforcement officer and his adult son, who shot him multiple times, claiming they believed he was a burglar. For an hour, I listened to my own child work through the horrifyingly mundane process a young black man goes through when he watches another young Black man be killed.

This can't be. It makes no sense. Why would they do that? They're going to prison, right? After a while, my daughter joins. Dad, have you seen this video? I don't watch these videos, I tell them. And then I pause before I say, I've been seeing them since I was your age. I don't look at them anymore. I can think of nothing else to do but tell them the truth. I've been seeing these videos my whole life, I say. You want to know what my trauma is? It's this. It is a sentence that feels reckless, sharp in my mouth. I don't know why I say it. Maybe just because it's true. sharp in my mouth. I don't know why I say it. Maybe just because it's true. I don't know if they understand. I don't know if I do. I only know that it is incredibly sad to admit to your children that you've been seeing videos of black men being killed since you were their age and you

haven't been able to stop it. I only know that I have spent a long time avoiding loving myself so that if I am killed, it won't be that great a loss. I only know that it is hard to show them how to love everyone if you're not even sure how to love yourself. I know that it is time to tell them the truths I have been afraid to tell them until now. They say nothing. The conversation doesn't end until we've handled some logistics. I'm taking them to do laundry tomorrow. What's our plan for Mother's Day? Can I help my daughter with her math homework?

Of course I can. They tell me they love me. To be asked for life advice in one moment and to be told you are a bad parent and have ruined your child's life the next, this is what parenting is. It is a thing you do alone because your kids cannot and must not understand

all of what you are living. It is terribly painful that my son thinks I have ruined his life. He's not entirely wrong. I am a wildly imperfect parent. I have lost my temper, neglected his emotional needs, taken his normal childish behavior as a personal attack. I have made tremendous mistakes. Perhaps the biggest mistake was bringing him into a world where we all have to wear masks, where riot squads assemble in front of our minivan,

where the climate is on a collision course with the destruction of the human race, where encampments of houseless people grow larger and wilder every day, where he can watch himself be murdered over and over again just by clicking a link. This is the world I let be created. Under my watch. They know this. They blame me for it. They are right. It hurts my heart. Also, would you like dinner? What movie should we watch? Tell me about your day. Parenting,

like life, is heartbreak followed by reality, followed by love, followed by loneliness, followed by despair, followed by jokes, followed by loneliness, followed by despair, followed by jokes, followed by exhaustion. If this is what you are experiencing, you are doing it right. If you are returning over and over again to watch the simple miracle of growth, you are doing it right. Less than three weeks later, both of them were at a protest in downtown Oakland after the killing of George Floyd. They were too young to be there on that first night when we knew there would be tear gas and violence,

but too old for their mother and me to stop them from walking a few short blocks to the center of it. Too old for me to tell them that when unarmed Black people are killed, they shouldn't go into the streets. So I made my own way down to run into them. Nothing was coordinated yet. It would be a few days before students at our daughter's school would organize the city's biggest and best-managed demonstration, some 15,000 people. Our city is no stranger to protests. I have walked these same streets for climate marches, women's marches, for justice in the wake of the murder of a teenager on a train platform, the police shooting of an unarmed black man on a different train platform. My son's school

is only a few blocks away. He has, I presume, ditched class here, shopped for shoes here, watched drug deals and fights here, gotten boba here, gotten sandwiches from the shop where the lady knows every student by name, sat on a bench after school here, just growing up minute by minute, experience by experience. When I finally pushed through the crowd to find them and their friends, all masked, I felt for a moment that I was seeing strangers and not the kids I used to push around in a double stroller and feed baby carrots to. Soon, I found myself explaining how to stay safe, how tear gas works, how to tell what the police are planning, which direction to go if the front line pushes, how to avoid

getting penned in on a block, how to tell when it's time to retreat to where it's safer, how to tell who among the protesters to trust and who to be wary of. I had the feeling I often have with my teenagers, that everything is happening too fast, the world is closing in too quickly on them, that I have no way, no time, and no energy left to prepare them for all of it. I eventually persuaded both of them to leave with me, even though there was a part of them that wanted to stay. Even though the chaos and darkness, at least for a moment,

made more sense to them than anything any adult could tell them. Why should they listen to us? Look at what we let happen? A week or so later, I would watch them come home from another teen-led protest, this time to the mayor's house to demand the removal of police from public schools. They would come home positively giddy, bursting with pride, energy, power, and a sense of hope that in my own life I don't ever remember feeling. But that first night, as I tried to fall asleep, the image that stayed with me was my son's

17-year-old frame, indistinguishable to the police and security cameras from any Black man's, from anyone's baby, silhouetted against the light from a police flash bomb, the terror and glee in his eyes as he saw it finally acknowledged that everything is on fire. I didn't take them to that protest. I didn't want them to be at that protest. It's just that I had no choice but to meet them there. This was recorded by Autumn. Autumn is an app you can download to listen to lots of audio stories from publishers such as the New York Times.