Mother Jones; Courtesy of Carvell Wallace; Macmillan Publishers
Editor’s note: It is hard to briefly summarize the poignancy, vulnerability, and harrowing beauty of Another Word for Love, an exceptional new memoir from the journalist and podcaster Carvell Wallace, who infuses vignettes of his hardscrabble journey from boyhood to middle age with philosophical ruminations on culture; family, love, sex, inner torment, and just about everything else worth pondering.
In the following short excerpt (printed with the publisher’s permission from a chapter titled “The Finger”) Wallace is a 15-year-old kid in Van Nuys, California, who decides it would be cool to emulate the Black TV detective Sonny Spoon by sidling up to a newspaper box outside a 7-Eleven and copping a free paper off someone else’s quarter. But the indignant quarter-bearer decides to teach Wallace a lesson. —Michael Mechanic, senior editor
I guess I mistimed it or forgot to grab the handle or something because while my hand was in the box the guy tried to slam it shut. He didn’t want me to have a free paper.
I got most of my hand out, but my finger remained inside the box, trapped between the metal edges of the door. He kept pushing. I didn’t care about the paper anymore. I just wanted my finger out. Neither of us spoke. We looked into each other’s eyes while he pushed with all his weight on my finger, which was now being crushed between the two sharp metal edges of the door and the box. It was a sunny day. I looked for something in his eyes, pity, remorse—maybe if he saw me, saw that I was a child, he would let me go. He did not. I saw a shaking in his eyes, desperate, trembling fear, his face red, his veins popping, his blond mustache vibrating with effort.
I finally pulled my hand from where it was trapped but not before the flesh was ripped off by the metal, exposing white meat on my middle finger, at first pale and throbbing, then quickly covered in blood, which rose from within my finger like water being squeezed from a dish sponge. A large flag of skin dangled from the bottom of the nail, translucent in the afternoon light.
We both stood in silence for a moment. Then the man quickly made for his car. “Do you see what you did?” I yelled, waving my finger at him. It was all I could think to say. It felt risky. Confrontational. I normally would not have said anything. I did not like confronting people. But I was shaking.
He looked at me once more from inside his car, his face flushed, before he backed up and sped out of the parking lot into traffic.
This was my fault, I reasoned at the time, for wanting to be like a cool detective. What a childish thing to do, playacting stuff I’d seen on a TV show that got canceled after 15 episodes.
On that day I saw for the first time that there are those who would rather see flesh ripped from a Black child’s body than to see that Black child get away with stealing a newspaper. I looked directly into his eyes. I know what a person like that looks like up close. I know what it’s like when they breathe on you, when they are sweating inches from you, when they are pushing with all their might on you.
It’s a small thing. My finger healed. I’m not even sure, now, which hand it was.
But also, a thing like that, it goes on forever. It is almost everything. Not everything, but almost.
Sometimes I think if you’ve never had a white man look at you the way I was looked at that day, then with all due respect, you may not understand anything, anything at all.
