Was He Black
Working at Speedway isn’t my first rodeo working at a gas station. When I was in my early twenties I worked the graveyard shift at an On The Run gas station in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
At the time I was living in a condemned house. Legally. Well, not sure how legal, but I paid rent if you can believe. It was this massive old place with two great rooms, French doors, crystal doorknobs, a spiral staircase, four bedrooms, and a huge yard. Most of the windows were busted out and ivy was growing along the walls inside the house. There was no heat and the water wasn’t drinkable.
It was perfect.
I had long hair then. Wore muu muus. Pushed a shopping cart around town collecting things I found along the road so I could make art out of them. One bedroom became a sculpture making room. Another became a room for making giant sheets of handmade paper using old screens from storm windows and screen doors. Upstairs was one enormous room lined with shelves filled with bowls and containers where I organized everything I found. Broken reflectors. Rusted metal. Marbles. Car parts. Strange little objects nobody else wanted anymore or had lost. It was winter and cold enough inside the house that I had to wear a parka indoors.
There was a spider living between the toilet tank and the wall. If you know me, you know that’s a big deal. I’ve always been deeply afraid of spiders. But somehow I made friends with her. I named her Ruth. Every time I stood there to pee I’d say hello and talk to her a little, mostly because I was trying to convince myself she wasn’t going to attack me. Then one day I came home and her web was torn down. She was gone. In the toilet was a huge dead rat. I was genuinely sad.
To this day I still call all spiders Ruth.
There was an On The Run gas station down the street that I walked to all the time. I was a perpetual insomniac back then and did most of my writing and art making at night. I was always in there buying coffee or whatnot at two in the morning. That’s where I met Adam. Adam worked the overnight shift. Long hair. Pudgy. Awkward. Funny. Smart. He had just graduated high school. One night he told me I should come work there too. So I did.
One night I was working alone when a young guy came through the door sometime in the middle of the night. Tall and thin. Maybe nineteen or twenty. His eyes were dark and bloodshot, too wide open. Intense. His voice was deep, quiet, direct. Almost flat. He came behind the counter, flashed what I think was a gun, and told me to give him the money. Honestly, I barely even saw the weapon. Just a quick flash of metal. It happened so fast that even now I’m not completely sure what I saw.
I opened the register and scooped out the bills. I remember asking him if he wanted the change too. He said no. As he walked toward the door he told me not to call the police until he was out of sight. I said okay. I think I may have even told him to have a good night as he left.
The strange thing is I never really felt afraid. Or at least not in the way I was apparently supposed to. It all felt weirdly transactional. Matter of fact. He needed money. I had a drawer full of it. The gun, or whatever I saw, felt weirdly beside the point.
That probably sounds weird, but the overwhelming thing I felt looking at him wasn’t fear. It was sadness. Recognition maybe. Like some part of me understood how a person could end up there. He didn’t feel cruel or hungry for power. He felt desperate. Like someone whose life had narrowed down to one terrible decision after another until eventually he was standing behind a gas station counter at two in the morning demanding cash from a stranger.
After he was out of sight, I locked the doors and called 911. The police arrived fast. They questioned me for maybe fifteen minutes before putting me into the back of a police car because they had already found a suspect and needed me to identify him.
It was still pitch black when we pulled into a parking lot. The officer turned on his high beams and told me the guy could not see me. There were five or six white cops standing around a young black man handcuffed on the ground. One of them had a foot on his back. Like it was some rodeo. The officer asked me if that was him.
I remember my whole body tightening immediately. I wanted it not to be him. I wanted him to escape. Seeing all those white men hovering over a black man made me feel sick. But it was him. Everything had happened so fast that my brain could barely catch up to what was unfolding around me. I had never really interacted with the police before.
Back at the gas station I finished my shift. Nobody sent me home. What stayed with me afterward wasn’t even the robbery itself. It was what people said after they found out. For days, over and over again people asked me the same question.
“Was he black?”
Not “are you okay?” Not “were you scared?” Not “what was he like?” Just:
“Was he black?”
Every time somebody asked it I felt angry. Like they wanted me to confirm the thing they already believed about black men. I usually answered with some version of “why does that matter?” or “why would you ask me that?”
But the worst part came later in court. Before the hearing started I was standing in a small room with the prosecutor and a detective while they reviewed the details of the case with me. Except they kept saying things that weren’t true. They described threats that hadn’t happened. Violence that didn’t happen. Fear I didn’t actually feel. I interrupted them and told them that wasn’t what happened.
I could tell they were frustrated with me and finally said that if those things had happened they could push for a harsher sentence.
They were asking me to lie.
That disturbed me more than the robbery itself. The robbery at least felt honest in its desperation. This felt dishonest while pretending to be moral.
There was a small window in the door behind them. Standing behind the glass was the young man who robbed me. He stared directly at me and mouthed, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”
And standing there with him threatening me through the glass, I still felt more disturbed by the people asking me to lie than I did by him.
I remember wishing I hadn’t identified him. Wishing I could take it back. But there was surveillance footage. He had already confessed. None of it mattered anyway. So I took the stand and answered honestly. And when they asked if I felt threatened, I told them the truth.
“No, I didn’t feel threatened.”
I still think about him sometimes. I wonder what happened to him. Did he go to prison? Did he get help? Did his life get worse? Did it harden him further into whatever circumstances put him in that gas station to begin with?
The whole thing changed me. Not for the better. I walked away from that experience feeling less certain about the justice system than I did before. Less trusting of power. More aware of how easily truth bends once institutions become invested in punishment. And every time somebody asked me “was he black?” it felt like they were trying to turn the whole complicated mess into evidence for the thing they already believed about black people.
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