Side-Eye

by Courtney Duke Foster

He didn’t say anything to me as I grabbed my keys and my hoodie, just gave me a look out the corner of his eye without turning to fully face me. The kitchen was dim and quiet, partially lit by the cloudy afternoon daylight and the glow from the microwave. The only sound was the whir from the plate of leftovers heating up. But that look was loud and clear in the secret language he had been teaching me all my life.

I wasn’t meant to be here. I was not planned, not unwanted, just not planned. My parents were on the older side when I was born, both on their second marriages. Mom was 45 with no kids and had given up on the idea of having any. Dad was 47 and had raised two daughters, who were grown when I came along. Mom passed when I was ten, and everybody else had moved out to the county by then, so it was just me and my dad most of the time after that. He took me everywhere. I loved cruising the streets with my twin, as people would call us, because, along with my face, I had inherited from my dad the ability to speak volumes with a sideways glance. Whenever he spotted something that wasn’t quite right in the city, he’d pause and take it in with a side-eye. Early on, I misunderstood. I thought for sure he was mad at somebody the way his jaw tightened as his brow furrowed over his dark brown eyes. I’d say a quick prayer that it wasn’t me, but I learned fast there was so much more than anger in that look, and sometimes it wasn’t anger at all, only fear or sadness or disappointment or all three. I also learned that side-eye always preceded a man to man talk about how I should carry myself or what it was like growing up in Baltimore in the 50s and 60s. Overall, life was good, according to my dad.

They didn’t have much money. Every now and again, they had to eat ketchup on crackers for dinner, but they were rich in the way it mattered, in culture. The same culture that he immersed me in 24/7. 

He loved, loves, Baltimore. But his love was tested in 1968 when he watched the city he loved burn. Dad’s love story always took a heavy and somber turn when he got to the part about his community racing through the stages of grief after Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated straight to rage that could not be consoled or contained and led to destruction and devastation that has never been fully repaired. Sometimes, he’d stop in front of a vacant lot and describe the business that had occupied that space so fondly and vividly I could see it, and I could see myself in it. 

Dad’s side-eye screamed at me not to go as I reached for the doorknob. I wondered if my grandfather had looked at him like that when he left the house that night in 1968. I wondered if I would look at my own son like that one day. I wondered if we would ever be able to stop looking at each other like that, to stop screaming with the fire in our eyes.

I sighed and my gaze fell to the old kitchen tile. “It’s a peaceful protest, Dad. It’s not right what they did. They killed him. I gotta go. It could have been me…”

He moved away from his leaning spot against the counter and pulled me into a hug. “I know. Be aware of your surroundings. A peaceful protest can heat up faster than you know. Stay woke…”