'Whatever the reasons, the police sergeant and I placed our Black bodies on the line to obstruct brutality, as the white doctor and the white nurses sat and watched in silence'
Illustration: By Blacksneakers She was loud, her insistent voice rising above the clamor in the ER. This day the department was full. Adults with chest pain. Children with rashes. Pregnant people with miscarriages threatened. The regulars who stopped by because, although it was only noon, they were already too drunk to walk home. Others requesting STD checks.
“Get out! Get out of here!” a patient screamed. I could hear a man speaking to her in tones too low for me to discern individual words but stern enough to reveal the malice in his voice. The woman’s voice sounded like Ms. Wells but also different. This voice was trembling.I couldn’t be the only one to hear the shouts coming from the exam room. But the ER nurses in their station nearby remained sitting, some typing, others chatting. I looked at the doctor to my side, an ER physician like me.
I didn’t move. Despite the cop’s clenched fists bending his notepad in half, despite his flaring nostrils that seemed to suck all of the oxygen out of the room, I did not move. “I am doing an investigation,” he repeated. Was he Police Commander Jon Burge in Chicago who, from 1972 to 1991, racially targeted and tortured more than 100 Black people in custody in ways that included electrocution, suffocation, rape, and false imprisonment?
That day in the South Bronx ER, a Black male nurse, hearing my screams, came to check on me. I asked him to wait in the room and keep watch while I stepped out to report that officer to his supervisor. I was young and naïve and felt that my phone call would somehow lead to corrective action. I ran to the other side of the ER to a phone tucked away in the doctors’ alcove. With each button I pressed, I moved past thoughts that stating my name and location would lead to NYPD retaliation.
My colleague fidgeted at his station. When he finally found his voice, he leaned over to whisper: “I think you should know that cop said he was going to arrest you for something like interfering with police work. He came back with his partner to the hallway, but then they left. I think they said they’re coming back with their sergeant.”
If I was put into that police car, how would I return? Would I return at all? Maybe my life would be stolen, as had those of other Black women, Black babies, Black girls.Kathryn Johnston, 92 years oldKayla Moore, 41 years oldShelly Frey, 27 years oldCharleena Lyles, 30 years oldI contemplated the countless other souls who, murdered by police and failed by legal systems that never intended justice or liberty or life, have been erased from history, left as agonizing gaps in time.
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