For the first time Loretta turned and looked at her.
"Tamir Rice was twelve," she said. "Do you think that officer would have waited until he was twelve? Do you think they check?" She turned back to Marcus. "Two seconds. That’s how long it took. They pulled up and that baby was dead in two seconds. And you want me to sit him down and explain it to him with a chart? With a book from the library about feelings?"
"I want you not to beat him," Danielle said. "That’s all. That’s all I’ve ever asked you. I asked you the day you moved into this house. I asked you when you smacked his hand at Easter and Marcus said it was only a pop. I sat in that chair you’re standing next to and I asked you to your face—"
"You asked me," Loretta said, "with your London accent and your gentle parenting and your husband with his big job and your house with the good schools, to raise a Black boy in Georgia like he was going to grow up in a storybook. And I said yes ma’am to you, because it’s your house. And then today I watched that baby point a rifle at a sheriff, and I’m sorry, Danielle, but you do not know. You do not know what this country does."
Danielle stood up.
She was not a tall woman, but she stood very straight, and when she spoke her accent had thickened, the way it did when she was very tired or very angry, the vowels of South London pushing up through eleven years of Georgia.
"Don’t you dare," she said. "Don’t you dare tell me I don’t know. My brother was stopped and searched by the Met eleven times before he was twenty years old. Eleven. I counted. I used to wait up for him. I have stood in a police station in Croydon at two in the morning with my mother crying beside me because they’d had Andre face down on the pavement outside a chicken shop for matching a description. I know. I married your son knowing. I had his child knowing. I know exactly what this country does and what my country does and what every country does to boys who look like mine." She pointed at the ceiling, toward the room where their son was sitting with his headphones on. "And what I know, Loretta, is that what you did to him this afternoon won’t stop a single bullet. Not one. All it does is teach him that the people who love him the most are the ones who’ll hurt him the worst."
The kitchen was very quiet. Upstairs the faint drumbeat went on and on.
Loretta looked at Danielle for a long moment, and something passed over her face that Marcus could not name. Then she turned away from her, deliberately, and looked at her son.