Caul Baby by Morgan Jerkins (read any book .TXT) 📕

What Hallow did not expect while she traversed one block after another was disorientation. It had been five years since she’d really seen Harlem beyond her block, but she knew that her neighborhood had changed when she noticed many shops that hadn’t been there before: a Japanese crepe shop and nail salon side by side, an artisanal cheese store, and a bagel store with exclamatory announcements about matcha lattes and golden turmeric tea painted on the windows. At the Starbucks, where she took a small round table near the window for herself, she watched the many people who came in and out—white joggers, white parents with small children, white students decked out in Columbia University apparel. The entire Starbucks staff save one girl was Black, and the music playing overhead was Frank Ocean. Hallow also reasoned that a good portion of the people who stuck around to drink their beverages and eat their egg, ham, and cheese sandwiches were not from the area either, just from the fragments of conversation that she picked up:

“. . . my street corner is too loud on the weekends . . .”

“. . . people congregate outside of my building at all hours of the night . . .”

“. . . I wonder if they will build more cafés around here . . .”

“. . . I love living in SoHa . . .”

Hallow’s eyes almost rolled out of her head when she heard that distasteful portmanteau. Thankfully, upon checking the time on her cell, she figured she could start walking toward St. Philip’s. Once she passed the train station at West 135th and Malcolm X, she saw that there were many police cars on the corner of West 134th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. At first, she assumed there’d been a terrible accident because the police car lights were flashing. But there were no other passersby watching to see what was going on. Some of the police officers leaned against their cars bantering with colleagues or eating breakfast food. When she looked in her pocket for her phone to verify St. Philip’s location, this was the intersection where she had to make a right. She swallowed a wad of spit and turned right only to find the police officers patting down a line of Black women who were shifting their balance from left to right and blowing in their hands as they waited to enter the church. Though Hallow didn’t have much experience with the police to pull from, she remembered Abyssinian Baptist Church for Sister Evans’s funeral, and didn’t recall any of the cops there patting her or her family down.

She took her place at the back of the line behind a young woman who was rubbing her hands together then cupping them over her cheeks. She had black-and-cerulean ombré braids and a septum piercing, and when she made eye contact with Hallow and smiled, Hallow seized the opportunity to strike up a conversation.

“Cold day, right?”

“Heh. Hell yeah. It’s brick out here.”

Hallow didn’t quite understand the phrase, but she nodded all the same. “What are all these police officers doing here?”

“Being pigs, that’s what. They can’t deal with Black women coming together for anything, so they harass us, patting us down like this. Why the hell would we bring weapons into a church anyway? We aren’t loner white boys.”

“I see . . .”

The young woman looked Hallow up and down and said, “Where you from?”

“Oh, I’m from here. I just don’t get out much.”

“I see.”

When it was Hallow’s turn to be patted down, she was shocked at how roughly the Black female officer grabbed her breasts and crotch, turned her around, dug deep into her pockets—even put her fingers through her hair. Fortunately, the officer did not command Hallow to remove her coat and reach underneath her baggy sweater, because she worried that her caul might draw a spectacle. After the inspection was over, she was greeted by two other Black women who stood at the entrance to the sanctuary to give pamphlets and a meeting agenda to all the attendees. The room was packed. All the chatter was made more uproarious by the acoustics from the dramatic high ceilings and the stained-glass windows. Hallow sat toward the back and flipped through the pamphlet, where she saw advertisements for all kinds of events and organizations: volunteer shifts at homeless shelters, food and school supply drives, coupons for local hair salons, campaigns for city council members. Within that pew, amongst all the women, Hallow felt like she was a part of something larger, and she could not have been more excited.

The town hall meeting began thirty minutes late, and the emcee made a joke about Colored People Time, or CPT, to defuse the antsiness that many felt. After the emcee, who went by the name of Abeni, asked everyone how they were doing, the crowd fractured into different kinds of reactions: some shouted out that they were good, others excessively sucked their teeth, and a few stated their concerns about the excessive police presence outside. To bring the group back together, Abeni apologized for the cops and led a ten-minute meditation so that everyone could refocus their energies on discussing Asali Givens. The town hall format was that if someone had something to say, they would be given two minutes to speak—no exceptions. At first, there were women who spoke of efforts to donate to Asali Givens’s lawyer and family household expenses and others who sought to organize a call-in where they would not only call up their representatives but also send letters to Asali as she sat in jail awaiting trial. But when the topic got onto Amara Danville, the women disregarded the format and jumped at once to get a word in.

One woman with a reddish brown bob stood to her feet and said, “Mm-hmm, girl. She’s a piece of work.”

“Do y’all think she’s gonna run for district attorney?” Abeni asked in the microphone at the altar.

“Of course! That’s why her name is in all the papers. The press wants us to remember it. Tuh.” The older woman, who was encouraged by others