Our Trespassing

My mother filed a complaint that I couldn’t imagine was the first. It really was all the neighbors seemed to talk about that summer—what the courts were, what the courts would be, or what the courts should’ve been. Many worried about their children, who they’d wanted the basketball court for in the first place, being unable to use the recreation area because of the players’ daily games. These parents wondered why their dues should go up while foreigners from another zip code used the courts for free. I could hardly sympathize with this argument. During the first week after the gates re-opened, the new basketball area sat as empty as the tennis courts ever had. My father even mentioned something about a sign that went up in nearby suburbs, advertising the new court to anyone who wanted to use it. This was most likely the neighborhood association’s attempt at conjuring the illusion of money well spent. I suppose they assumed that whoever showed up would look like the majority of the people who lived in the neighborhood. It’s like what my father always says about assumptions.

I steered clear of the basketball court for a while. I replaced my daily tennis practice with morning jogs. I ran at least two miles every day, sometimes as many as five. My body remained thin and long, but my legs grew strong.

It did not take long for me to realize that my status in the neighborhood had changed. A lot of the adults and teenagers in the area knew me from the tennis courts, but just as many did not. Every evening, as I jogged over hills, off sidewalks, between villages in our area, I saw many of our neighbors. Many of them glared at me. Rather quickly, I deduced the reality—they thought I was one of the basketball players. To remedy this, I modified my look. I wore shorts that ended well above the knee. I shaved my knotted Afro to a tight military buzz. I even wore a shirt that read TENNIS on the front. None of these things made a difference.

“Go home!” one teenager shouted at me on a blue evening in July. He clearly didn’t understand that my home was just around the corner. That he could look from his back porch and, without squinting, see mine. I wanted to tell him, but I kept running. Just as I’d known how far the basketball players would go to defend their pride against threat, I knew how far the neighbors would go to defend their home against invasion. I didn’t dare fight back.

For as much as I disliked the basketball players’ presence, I developed some sympathy for them, given our common dilemma. It didn’t take much for me to imagine what they were going through. My father spoke of an occasion when he saw a man parked in the lot beside the court, blaring “You Belong to the City” from his vehicle while the players played. My father believed these actions were inevitable, but my mother did not. She filed another complaint.

After a while, I figured that it would be okay for me to jog past the basketball court again. I imagined the basketball players had larger matters to attend to than making fun of me, and I was right. On the first day I saw them, they all stood outside the fence, pulling at the gate. There was a lock on the outside—one that was much fancier and difficult to break than what a person might find on a high school locker. When the players saw me approach, one of them stepped forward.

“Hey, man!”

It was Keith, the same boy who’d yelled at me a few weeks before. Now, he jogged towards me, down the short grassy slope leading towards the sidewalk. His long arms flopped by his side. Behind him, the other players stood, tugging at the lock, trying different combinations, crowded together beneath the no trespassing sign posted on the gate. I paused my workout and waited to hear what Keith had to say. When he stopped in front of me, he spoke with a soft voice, much softer than it had been the other day, and smiled as well. I could tell that this was his form of an apology.

“Have you got the code for the lock?” he asked.

“No,” I replied, because it was true.

“Damn.” Keith turned towards the other players, who were now watching our interaction. He threw up his hands, as if to say “no luck,” and some of them smacked the fence. Keith looked at me and shook his head.

 “White folk, man. You believe this shit?” he asked.

I hesitated to answer. I thought of how my father would respond. He was the one in our family always talking about white folk. His grievances had always been this way, but that summer especially, there was much cause for complaint. With the videos appearing on the news, and the evening protests downtown, my father sat at the dinner table with some new revelation, some universal wisdom about white folk every night.  His lectures preached on how they would do this, and we should do that, until the whole world was split between a them and an us. Even before the vote to replace the court, my father assured, “White folk won’t never let go of their country club sport. Not for no negro game.”

 There was a time during my childhood when I rolled my eyes, or defended white people against my father. I argued that there was no difference between Black people and white people, and that he was racist for insisting otherwise. After these past weeks of neighbors’ scowls, I wasn’t so sure. Regardless, I knew how to respond.

“I know,” I said, invoking my father. I shook my head and grinned. “White folk.” Keith laughed at the way I said this. He smiled.

“All right, well take it easy brother.”

“You, too,” I replied. I supposed we were cool now.

I imagined that would be the last time I saw the basketball players. It looked as though the neighborhood had won. Simple as that.

But the next time I ran by, it wasn’t the players struggling outside of the fence. It was the head of the neighborhood association—a blond woman holding a clipboard, tugging at the gate to the area. There was a crude, makeshift lock on the fence, and the old one was gone. The woman looked exasperated. The basketball players were nowhere to be found. When I drew close, she turned towards me with a snarl.

“Do you know who did this?” she asked.

I shook my head and kept running. I could see her watching me as I moved down the road. She drew out her cellphone and dialed a number. As far away as the next block, I could hear her yelling at someone.

“…then they cry about oppression…”

 I turned the corner.