Joey Franklin

Worry Lines

Worry Lines

1.
I look concerned. Nolan, our middle child, tells me as much one night while we sit reading together on the couch.

“Where did you get those lines?” he asks and runs a finger across my forehead. I lift my eyebrows and allow him to press his finger into the furrows of my skin. I shift my brow up and down and pull a goofy face until he giggles.

“Those are my worry lines,” I tell him, and we drop into a conversation on the topography of faces, on crow’s feet and frown lines and the forces of gravity, age, and sun damage that will eventually change his boyish complexion into a tired, creased one like his father’s. “You’ll have them someday too,” I say. “But not for a long time.”

What I don’t say is that gravity, age, and sun damage are really only part of the story. I don’t explain that we call them worry lines for a reason; that anxiety, stress, exhaustion, and fear can engrave themselves on our faces. That for some these lines might mean “marriage is impossible,” or they might mean “I don’t know how I’m going to feed my family,” or “what if my cancer comes back” or “how am I supposed to raise this boy in such an ugly world?”

What I don’t say is the thing he’ll eventually figure out on his own: that whether we like it or not, all of us wear our faces like a metaphor.

2.
“Worried,” is not the adjective George Zimmerman used on the evening of February 26, 2012, when he called 911 to report a “real suspicious guy” walking through the neighborhood. But worry is the word. “This guy looks like he’s up to no good,” he told dispatchers from his car. “Or he’s on drugs or something.”

There’d been a rash of break-ins around the neighborhood. Doors had been forced open. A laptop stolen, a bicycle too. Strange young men lurking on lawns, peeking in windows. One woman hid with her son in a bedroom while invaders tried to steal her television.

In the year prior to Trayvon Martin’s death, residents had made more than four hundred calls to police.

Zimmerman was studying criminal justice. He worked as a fraud investigator for a local insurance firm, and he captained his neighborhood watch. Several times in the past year, he’d called police to report suspicious behavior, and the suspects, according to Zimmerman, were always black.

“Assholes always get away,” said Zimmerman to the dispatcher, shortly before hanging up and getting out of his car. Zimmerman didn’t like bad guys, and the police were slow.

The “bad guy,” in this instance, was Trayvon Martin. You know his story. A seventeen-year-old boy visiting the neighborhood with his father. He’d made this visit several times, and that night he’d walked to 7-Eleven for a snack: Skittles and a can of juice. Zimmerman’s “real suspicious guy” was on his way home from a convenience store. His hoodie was up. The rain had begun to fall.

3.
On Wednesday evenings in the predominately white suburb where I live, my boys attend youth night at a church down the street from our house. They play basketball and soccer, plan campouts, and eat junk.

Occasionally, when they’re bored, they talk their youth leaders into playing a game they call 007. The boys fan out into the neighborhood on foot, and after a good head start, the leaders follow in a car. The rules are simple. Get from one side of the neighborhood to the other without the adults catching you. Good, clean fun.

It’s not uncommon to see boys hiding in the bushes, cutting across lawns, crouching behind parked cars, and hiding under hoodies while bemused youth leaders roll slowly down the street, eyes peeled.

4.
Trayvon Martin noticed George Zimmerman at about the same time Zimmerman noticed him.

A car slows down in the rain. A strange man follows a teenage boy with his eyes. The boy stops and looks back at the man in the car. Trayvon is worried. He’s on the phone with a friend, and he tells the friend he’s being watched. That’s he’s being followed.

“Run,” says the friend. “You better run!”

When Trayvon Martin takes off, Zimmerman gets out of his car. “He’s running,” Zimmerman tells the dispatcher, and he curses. Over the phone comes the sound of wind and hard breathing. The dispatcher wants to know if Zimmerman is following the boy. “Yeah,” says Zimmerman.

“We don’t need you to do that,” says the dispatcher, and his voice sounds worried.

A few moments later, Zimmerman hangs up. He’s still agitated by the “suspicious” young black man in the hoodie walking around the neighborhood. He sets off after him, and a few moments later, Trayvon Martin is dead.

5.
Every year or so we buy new hoodies for our boys, or at least a new one for our oldest son, Callan. The ones he grows out of get passed down the line. Callan prefers his hoodies black, and he wears one almost every day, the drawstrings pulled even, the hood left down to avoid messing his hair. Nolan likes a zipper, but the color doesn’t matter. When he’s sitting outside, he draws his knees to his chest and pulls the hoodie over his legs to stay warm. Ian, our youngest, wears hand-me-down hoodies that always start out a little too big. The sleeves hang unevenly on his shoulders, and the unzipped sides flap in the wind as he runs.

I’m raising three white boys in the suburbs, and when one of them wears a hoodie, it’s always just a hoodie—a practical bit of outerwear, comfortable and convenient. We worry about them getting cold. They worry about wearing a bulky jacket at school. The hoodie is a win for everyone.

6.
According to the people closest to him, Trayvon Martin was a good kid. His father, Tracy Martin, and his mother, Sybrina Fulton, describe Trayvon in their memoir, Rest in Power. “My son had been a life force, a teenager who had hopes and dreams and so much love,” writes Tracy Martin.

Trayvon played junior league football, worked at his father’s business, and got decent grades. He planned to study aviation, he listened to music nonstop, and he worked odd jobs to pay for his growing collection of Air Jordans.

Sybrina Fulton described her son as “a mama’s boy, always with me, always affectionate.”

As he got older, “his teachers generally found him pleasant and smart. But there were some dark clouds, too,” writes his mother.

His junior year, Trayvon started skipping classes, his grades slipped, he vandalized a locker—he ended up with a ten-day suspension from school. “He was a good kid,” writes his mother. “But Tracy and I started to worry.”

Later, after Trayvon’s story became headline news, conservative talking heads would point out that Trayvon’s Twitter profile showed a picture of him flipping off the camera; they would remind their audience that Trayvon had a tattoo, that he smoked weed, that he must have dealt drugs, that he was six foot two, and that he dressed like a “thug.”
On Fox News, Geraldo Rivera said, “I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was.”

7.
As a parent, I’ve got a lot I can worry about. What are the boys doing on the computer? What are they texting their friends? What music are they listening to? Who are they hanging out with at school? Are they talking back to their teachers? What’s really in those sci-fi novels they can’t put down, that video game, that TV show with all the angsty teenage kissing?

I worry in general that all three of my boys will be meathead teenagers who drive too fast and never say “thank you.”

I worry they’ll let their meathead friends talk them into teenage hijinks like egging houses and snowboarding off the roof.

Someday, I tell them, you’ll find yourself on a Friday night hanging out with other boys, and you’ll need to be the voice of reason—I show them grainy YouTube videos as evidence: a boy squealing in pain when a lit firecracker explodes in his mouth; a boy slamming into a mailbox as he’s towed on a sled from behind a pickup truck; a boy breaking his elbow as he tries to pull a handstand on a skateboard. Endless videos that all offer the same lesson—being careless can get you hurt.

8.
Tracy Martin recalls some of the advice he received when he was a young man: “The first thing that was instilled in me was to be patient, careful, and respectful to everyone I met, not just because it was the right thing to do, but because it could be the difference between life and death.”

He tells of some white boys in a passing car who threw bottles and shouted the N word at him, and of how that car turned around, and how he remembered his mother’s counsel. “If you see somebody coming at you with any kind of racism, run.”

Tracy Martin continues: “I told my kids, including Trayvon: ‘If you see yourself about to get into a racial confrontation, eliminate yourself from the equation.’”

Writer Liz Dwyer describes the fear—“poisonous at its core”—that she felt after the birth of her son: “I was now responsible for raising a black child and, in America, that means my kid is always in danger.”

Laura Murphy, former director of the ACLU Washington legislative office, writes about what she calls the “disturbingly contradictory signals” she and other black parents send their children about how to be safe in a white world. Walk too quickly and you’ll look suspicious. Walk too slowly, and you’ll also look suspicious. Don’t hang out with too many friends, because you’ll look like a gang, but don’t wander by yourself, because you’ll look like you’re up to something. And yet, Murphy writes, “there is essentially nothing that parents can tell their Black children—especially young men—about how to survive in this world that will protect them from violence.”

Cartoonist Barbara Brandon-Croft describes worrying about her own son in a similar way. “I had to give the Trayvon talk to my son and his friend as they headed out to the park last night. . . . I told [them] that if they are approached by anyone of ‘authority’ (fake cops included) that they had to be ultra polite (‘Yes, sirs,’ and ‘Yes, ma’ams’). . . . I told them that although it may not be fair, I would rather have them humbled than harmed . . . or worse.”

9.
Speaking on the day of George Zimmerman’s not-guilty verdict, Barack Obama said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin.” Today, I think, I have three sons, and none of them look like Trayvon Martin. But that’s not entirely true.

Callan is about the same height and weight, same build. Has the same love for music, same preoccupation with girls, same affinity for hoodies.

I describe Callan as “pleasant” and “smart,” the way Trayvon Martin’s mother has described him, and I’ve seen those “dark clouds” that can hang over a teenager’s days.
How, then, do I explain my knee-jerk inclination to see these two boys as different? Prejudice? White privilege? A lack of imagination? Something else?

“Empathy is tricky,” writes journalist Sherronda J. Brown. “We can only identify with the pain of others through the understanding and profound feeling of our own suffering, but that only exists when we are able to recognize a shared vulnerability.”

In essence, I’m predisposed to see Trayvon Martin as different from my son, not merely because Trayvon Martin is black, but because in this country, his blackness and my whiteness mean that there are real limits to our shared vulnerabilities.

To call these boys different risks perpetuating the notion that racial violence is not my problem. But to call these boys similar risks downplaying the consequences of racial violence altogether.

10.
“How can I show you the hole in my heart?” writes Sybrina Fulton, in the introduction to Rest in Power. “It’s almost impossible to convey the devastation and pain, the bottomless loss, heartbreak, and helplessness—the feeling of being broken into pieces that will never come back together again.”

I want to say I understand. That I have some idea of what it would be like to lose my son the way Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin lost theirs. But even writing that sentence feels like an overstep.

As if “lost” were a sufficient word for what happened to Trayvon. As if my white son could ever be taken from me the way Trayvon was taken from his parents. As if I could ever fathom the true weight of American racism.

Perhaps the most radical empathy I can embrace as a white person, then, is to admit that given the full cultural, historical, and psychological context of what it means to be black in America, it may be a genuine impossibility for me, and for most white people, to ever understand what Trayvon Martin’s family has gone through.

11.
What’s missing from the story of Trayvon Martin is Trayvon Martin’s side of things.

We have only his parents’ memoir, a friend’s testimony, and the recording of a bystander’s 911 call that has preserved a boy’s voice yelling for help; also, the few photographs online: the bright smile of several snapshots and the haunting gaze of that hooded selfie.

But there is that other witness—the killer and what he saw, the stereotype he indulged, and the image he perpetuated—the black teenager in the hoodie, “suspicious,” “up-to-no-good,” “on drugs or something.”

Not to mention the brawling pundits, the internet conspiracy theorists, the dueling politicians. Trayvon was a saint, or he was a thug; either he never saw it coming or should have known he had it coming.

As if the whole country saw Du Bois’s “double consciousness” play out in Trayvon Martin’s story on cable news: “This sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

12.
“Because white men can’t police their imaginations, black men are dying,” writes Claudia Rankine.

Because my white sons will grow up to be white men in America, they must learn to police their imaginations, and I must teach them how.

But is it enough to hold a little family tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. every January? Or enough to watch Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, or enough to play the Hamilton soundtrack on Saturday mornings while we clean the kitchen?

Of course not.

They still get up each morning and go to a school where they’re surrounded by so many other white faces, and how can their world feel anything but right to them—white and right.

We need to have a Trayvon Talk of our own.

“We can’t actually teach humans to have no prejudice at all,” writes Robin DiAngelo. Instead, what we often do is teach our children to pretend prejudice does not exist. “Ideally, we would teach [our children] how to recognize and challenge prejudice, rather than deny it.”

Which may be one reason I am writing this essay.

And one reason I worry so much about writing this essay—my little nod to white privilege before I retreat to my typical oeuvre: teenage romance, parenting guilt, and my somewhat dysfunctional childhood.

Du Bois writes: “All art is propaganda,” but I wonder, propaganda for what?

If this essay is my halting attempt to recognize and challenge prejudice, how often does the rest of my life effectively deny that prejudice exists at all?

13.
If YouTube can offer my boys a primer course on teenage stupidity, then what can it teach them about prejudice, privilege, and the dangers of the white imagination?
Cell phone videos, dash- and body-cam footage, closed-circuit television: in a world of denial, disbelief, incredulity, victim blaming, and willful ignorance, these electric eyes help white people see, if we’re willing to look.

Videos of white people calling the cops on black kids for selling water without a permit, on black men for barbecuing in the park or waiting in a Starbucks, on a black student for falling asleep in the common area of her own dorm, on a black couple for checking out of their AirBnB, on a black babysitter for eating with two white children at a Subway.
Not to mention videos of more deadly white violence—cops gunning down kids playing in the park or shooting black men during routine traffic stops.

Routine—that’s the word, and that’s a problem.

But from all this, what lesson? Consider James Baldwin: “It is the Black condition, and only that, which informs us concerning white people.”

14.
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates explains to his son that it took becoming a parent to understand the tight grip of his mother’s hand, and the fear and love she felt for him. “She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one would be brought to account for this destruction because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of ‘race,’ imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.”

Tracy Martin writes: “I knew the justice system wasn’t color-blind. There’s one set of rules for us and a different set for other groups. . . . The rules for us—for African Americans—had been in place for a long time in this country. And the rules were not going to help us. So from the beginning, I was worried.”

According to Sybrina Fulton, the prosecutor’s opening statement came down to a simple question: “Who was more afraid in the moments before the confrontation, the seventeen-year-old minding his own business? Or the grown man with a loaded gun?”

With no definitive witnesses and no way to get Trayvon’s side of the story, Zimmerman’s lawyer would successfully argue self-defense. “No injuries are necessary to respond with deadly force,” said the lawyer in his closing arguments. “The statute is clear—a reasonable fear of bodily harm.” Zimmerman had the right to stand his ground.
In other words, Trayvon Martin is dead, but his death is no one’s fault. The law is the law. Our hands are tied.

Or worse, Trayvon Martin has no one to blame but himself. If he hadn’t been walking through that complex in the rain. If he hadn’t been wearing that hoodie. If only he’d kept running. If only he hadn’t asked the man with the gun, “What are you following me for?” If only he hadn’t stood his ground.

15.
“His is the story of a life cut tragically short,” writes Trayvon Martin’s mother. “But it’s also the story of a boy who in death became a symbol, a beacon, and a mirror in which a whole nation came to see its reflection.”

And it’s Sybrina Fulton’s last metaphor that has me thinking. If Trayvon Martin is a mirror, does he, like a mirror, reflect only what stands before him? Does what I see in Trayvon Martin depend more on what I bring to the encounter than any fact of his life?

Perhaps Trayvon Martin’s death is an embodiment of black tragedy, or a consequence of white delusion; certainly his death and the uproar that followed underscores the great and terrible racial divide in America, but before all that, he was a son and a brother and a friend, a human being built of love and mystery and infinite possibility.
How can we ever build a bridge to span America’s racial divide if we do not build it from this reality—what should be the first facts of every human life. What progress can be made if white America does not embrace the humility and compassion necessary to get to know boys like Trayvon Martin well before they’re transformed into metaphor?

16.
When my son Nolan asked me about my worry lines, he did not realize he was asking one of the oldest questions of the American experience—namely, what’s there to learn by merely looking at a person’s face?

He has no idea how often our history has turned on that question. How often we’ve failed as a nation by getting that question wrong.

I love that he’s paying attention though, that he’s looking around with such careful eyes, brimming with curiosity, and laying the groundwork for a few worry lines of his own.
In a world where too many people are convinced they have all the answers, I find some hope in a twelve-year-old with a heart full of questions.

Originally published in Delusions of Grandeur: American Essays (Nebraska 2020).