Marrying Black.

One of my favorite parts of marriage is going to sleep next to the same person every night. As someone who likes to starfish in the middle of the bed, I was surprised by how much I care that Jason is there when I’m falling asleep. If I go to bed before him, I don’t sleep well until I know his body is there next to me.

I knew about systemic racism and police brutality before I got married, but let me tell you what, it hits different when you sleep next to a black body every night.

It took me a while to really wrap my head around this. I grew up in a white town. I couldn’t go a day without seeing a confederate flag. My high school had less than 10 BIPOC. When I say my hometown is white, I mean white. I was taught that racism ended with the civil rights movement and that it’s best to be colorblind.

I see my own privilege in the freedom I had growing up there. I never had to question if the police thought I was a threat. If I got pulled over my only concern was if I was going to get a ticket or not.

Ferguson happened in my freshman year of college, which started my own dismantling of the world and beliefs I had come from. I started to see reality. I was angry.

I’m still angry.

But now, I’m scared too.

It’s no longer a rage at the way the system treats “them,” but a gut-wrenching realization that it could be the person I sleep next to every night. Here are a few snapshots of how that plays out in everyday life.

About a week after the Jacob Blake shooting Jason came home from the grocery store shaken up. I was working on a project and didn’t have my phone near me to see his texts. He had broken up a fight between two girls outside of the Food Lion. He also had a knife floating around the floorboards of his car. It would have taken very little for that scenario to end with him not coming home.

We drove to a wedding in VA a few weeks ago. I offered to take the first leg, as long as we could switch so I could do my makeup before we got there. We got on backroads faster than I expected. Instead of pulling off to the side near someone’s house, we swapped seats at an intersection, hoping no one would pull up.

We went to Durham to have a socially distant hang on a night when Raleigh had a curfew. I refused to let Jason drive home because it was safer if I drove past curfew.

I unexpectedly had our anniversary weekend off and we started to plan a last minute getaway. Wilmington was off the table because a month earlier 3 cops were fired for talking about how ready they were for a second civil war and to “slaughter n******.” We looked at getting away in the mountains, but after the attempted lynching caught on camera and several other suspicious deaths we didn’t feel safe going. We ended up just staying home.

I had him text me when he got back from a walk in a white part of town, but trusted he could break into our house when he got locked out without problem because we live in a black neighborhood.

Those are just a few. Being married to a Black man adds a lot of calculations into day to day life.  Don’t get me wrong, it's work worth doing but it’s work nonetheless.

(Sidenote: I’m tired after just a few years of doing this work. It’s impossible for me to fathom what a lifetime of it is like without concluding that all Black people are superheros for their continued excellence in the face of oppression. But forreal.)

I’m terrified that Jason will become a hashtag instead of the body that sleeps next to me. That people will chant his name instead of hear his laugh. That the body I restlessly wait to lay down next to me will be killed. That’s what marrying Black is like.