My little brother is a tall, Black man who has a penchant for wearing all black, including a signature mysterious-looking black fedora, but he was a timid, gentle kid. Once when our entire neighborhood of kids saw a single lost sunfish wandering around a tiny brook we passed on our walk home from school, we all went home to get canned corn, safety pins, and string, and then hurried back to make fishing poles out of sticks. There must have been at least ten of us inexpertly flinging very questionable fishing lines into the brook to try to catch that poor, confused fish. Unexpectedly, my 7-year-old brother was the one who, against all odds, managed to hook it. Because it was unexpected, my brother was absolutely terrified when he pulled the pole back and the tiny fish flailed toward him like a pendulum. My brother screamed and turned to flee. Unfortunately, he failed to drop the pole, so when he looked behind to assess the danger, to his horror he saw that the Jaws-like sunfish was inexorably chasing him. Tears and utter panic ensued.

He was the sort of child whose bedroom was covered with wood, nails, wires, and electrical equipment. At six years old, he decided he was going to build a roller coaster in our backyard one summer morning, and excitedly gathered wood, tools and supplies. The rickety one-foot-square that was as far as he got before he realized an entire working Cyclone roller coaster was probably not going to materialize before dinner, stayed in the yard for months as a testament to his optimism.

He drove me crazy, wearing button-down plaid shirts buttoned up all the way to the top like someone who doesn’t understand how school hierarchies are decided. It made him look like a very small, bookish professor, and this was not far from the truth. One night, he startled our entire family, right around the same time as the roller coaster idea,. We had just gotten home and were walking from the car to the house, and he piped up and commented, “That’s a Gideon moon.” We all scoffed, “There’s no such thing as a Gideon moon.” He insisted, and finally, in tears, ran to his bedroom as soon as we were inside the house. Moments later, he reappeared, carrying my father’s heavy college science textbook. Flipping through to the middle of the dense tome, he found a small drawing and pointed to it. “See? That’s a Gideon moon, and that’s how the moon looks tonight!” We crowded around, and saw that since he was only six, he had misread “gibbous moon” as “Gideon moon.” That is the day that I learned what a gibbous moon was, too — taught to me by my little brother who was seven years younger than I.

He continued to demonstrate the depth of his intellect when we got a Franklin Ace computer (an early Apple knockoff,) and he learned his new love: computer programming — a love he sustains to this day. He taught himself BASIC, and then moved on to other programming languages. When he missed the middle school bus, he would walk the five miles while reading C++ programming books, and he was one of the first kids I knew who navigated early online chats with other computer programmers. He was a gentle genius — wouldn’t have known what to do in a fight, and was not interested in doing sports, or hanging out with kids around town. He was most comfortable in his electronics-strewn bedroom, teaching himself how to do the computer work that would later become the cornerstone of his adult career.

It’s a good thing, too, because that is the thing that kept the Enfield, Connecticut police from ultimately arresting him and dragging him to jail when he was about 12 years old. When they came inside the house while he was home alone one afternoon, and interrogated him without my mother present about their suspicion that he had robbed the store up the hill behind our house, he was terrified. When they questioned him about his whereabouts and looked through our house, he was too little and too frightened to know that this was illegal, and he was too vulnerable to have been able to resist anyway. But through his very real fear, he had the presence of mind to remember that his timeline of actions on his computer had a timestamp, and because he had taught himself the inner workings of programming language, he knew how to access that timestamp. Once he showed them the proof that he had been actively working on his computer at the very time that they accused him of robbing a store, the police backed down and left him alone again. We all arrived home to a very distressed and crying little boy who had just had a crash course in being Black in a mostly white town.

The ease at which Black boys are viewed by white people as scary, intimidating, and older than their years is disheartening and has nothing to do with who Black boys really are (which are just children trying to live their best life.) This racist lens was a major factor in my brother’s harassment by the Enfield police, and it was a major factor in the shooting of 16-year-old Ralph Yarl, a Black boy in Missouri who accidentally went to the wrong house to pick up his brother on April 13, 2023. Ralph is an academically gifted band kid who plays the clarinet and other instruments, and is on the Science Olympia team at his school. He plans to study chemical engineering at college when he graduates. But a white man who was unable to see past his own negative and racist biases about Black males, saw only a menacing and expendable threat on his doorstep, and shot him in the head twice to annihilate that imagined threat. Ralph came perilously close to joining the long line of Emmett Tills and Tamir Rices — Black children who were murdered with impunity for the crime of being Black boys in America. My brother could have been one of them, too.

Black children in America deserve to live the same long lives as the hostile and racist white people who eagerly, and with great malice, seek to exterminate them.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton and works in Greenfield. She writes a monthly column and can be reached at columnist@gazettenet.com. The title of this column is taken from a Maya Angelou quote. 

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