My co-worker, Sylvia, at International Foods in Kenner, LA hipped me to Stevie Ray Vaughn! I ain’t gonna lie, every Saturday night we used to get off work and smoke weed in her truck while she cried and moaned about her husband! My peeps remember that store was always poppin’! I was the FIRST Black person they ever hired(and of course, they thought I was always trying to steal)! Hiram and his wife, the owners were the biggest thieves so they thought everybody was like them; but I digress. Besides the lessons I learned driving cab in N’Awlins I learned an even more valuable lesson working there. Until then my encounters with police were with NOPD(yeah, I know, they were corrupt as fuck but they were good to me). So, naively, I though Kenner cops would be cool too. They weren’t!
Sylvia was cool! A white lady whose husband left her for a younger woman and her son went effing crazy and went to Bonnabel HS and shot his teacher and a cop! Went to juvenile detention and once a month I had to work 14 hrs Sunday and Monday so she and her husband could go visit Lil Greg. I only worked there a year and a half. I
So you may ask, well, Sandra, “How would you know?” I know because 6 months after I called the police because a late teen was going around the neighborhood making the little kids fight. He tried to make my son do this but he didn’t, he came and told me. The cops didn’t go look for this kid. What they did,
Tonight, I asked my now adult son if it was ok if I shared this story…and my son said, go ahead!
My heart was broken and for the longest, I said, “Fuck ’em! And especially the Fuck the Black one for upholding a fucked up racist system for a paycheck!” You should be lawyers and judges who rectify what’s wrong in policing in America! It may seem that I want to destroy the racist policing system. No, quite the contrary; I know we need the police. What I also believe is we need equitable and quality policing that sees the people they serve and respect them. After all, they work for us, right? Somewhere along the way, police have forgotten that.
P. S. Sylvia used to ask me over for BBQ’s after the family reunited(she and Big Greg got back together) and I would always refuse…I never told her why! Maybe I should have…Maybe I should have told her that there were two separate sets of justice in America…one for white people like her and another for me and my son.