Is there a boy? Marion asked me that fall, when Miah was new. And I lied and told here there wasn’t one.
Marion is Ellie’s mother. Interestingly, the first two words of the novel are “My mother” but throughout she addresses her mother by her first name. There is a rift there, you see. Mother abandoned daughter and the rest of the family for a weeks before returning not once, but twice. Ellie does not appear to be suffering from Borderline Personality Disorder, but one does not need to be a BPD sufferer specifically to suffer long-term consequences of parental abandonment. Miah is Jeremiah, the boy that there is in Ellie’s life, well, it’s a complicated relationship, too.
Jeremiah was black. He could feel it. The way the sun pressed down hard and hot on his skin in the summer. Sometimes it felt like he sweated black beads of oil. He felt warm inside his skin, protected. And in Fort Greene, Brooklyn—where everyone seemed to be some shade of black—he felt good walking through the neighborhood.
But one step outside. Just one step and somehow the weight of his skin seemed to change. It got heavier.
And there’s the epicenter of the complication. Ellie, see, is a white Jewish girl living in the Upper West Side. Jeremiah—Miah—is a black kid who calls Brooklyn home. You know, just like Radio Raheeem in Do the Right Thing. Except that, well, that’s not exactly true. Miah wouldn’t mind you thinking that his life in Brooklyn is similar to that of the characters in Spike Lee’s provocative masterpiece, but the reality is that Dad is a successful filmmaker and mom is a best-selling novelist (who, separated, live across the street from each other) and he has just transferred to the same exclusive private academy as Ellie. So, Jeremiah is actually closer to being Spike Lee, Jr. than he is to being Mookie.
“Stop.”
Not only is the police officer not identified, he is not even described. Because, of course, it hardly matters. His name or what he looks like is utterly beside the point. It always is. There is no individuality among law enforcement officers because they are supposed to seen as nothing but a cohesive, coherent entity. And entity with invested really with just one and only one single element of authority: whoever you are—but especially if you are a young black male in a society with some level of racial bias—you do what they say. If they say give you license, you hand them your driver’s license. If they say, put your hands in the air, you put your hands in the air. And if they say “Stop”—especially if they say “Stop”—then you had better just stop anything you are doing no matter what it is you are doing, and no matter what the reason you are doing it.
