Ten years later; what Trayvon Martin means to me

2.26.22

On this day a decade ago, my childhood came to an end. I didn’t know it at the time, though. In fact, as unceremonious as it sounds, I don’t even know where I was on that particular night, and it wouldn’t occur to me until almost a year later that something important had been taken from me in a similarly unceremonious fashion. To this day, I still have a hard time articulating what that something was, but I understand how its absence feels.

It would be both cliché and disingenuous to say that the thing that had been taken from me was my innocence. After all, I was sixteen years old, in my junior year of high school, and on the east side of Indianapolis. I hadn’t been innocent in a long time.

At sixteen, I was sneaking out to meet up with girls (sorry, Ma), drinking, and getting into various misadventures with my friends. By the time this particular day had rolled around, I’d been sixteen for over six months, and I was enjoying the newfound freedom of being able to drive without an adult passenger. I’d been involved in martial arts, and after being in a few competitions (and a few real-life scuffles), I learned I was decent at it. Due to its physical nature, I finally started to get some meat on my bones after being skinny all my life, and between that, the waves I used to rock, and my peach-fuzz facial hair, I was feeling pretty confident. I was enjoying the moment.

Even though I’d been around girls, there was one in particular— this quiet, nerdy Black girl who was the complete opposite of everything I portrayed myself to be— that I couldn’t stop thinking about. I was way too much of a mess at the time to make any serious moves on her, but we did go to prom together.

All in all, life was good. I was a sixteen-year-old kid, and I was enjoying being just that. I was in the moment, and I wasn’t too worried about the future; it was so far away. 

At the same time, though, on this night ten years ago, a kid my age had his future abruptly taken from him. His name was Trayvon Martin.

The news broke relatively quickly, and in the weeks and months that followed, seemingly everything changed. My mother and I went through a rough patch in our relationship as her grip tightened on almost every aspect of my life, which, to me, was supposed to be a time of adventure and freedom. 

This was only exacerbated by the change that occurred in me as I started to notice the pertinence of things I’d always been warned about growing up as a Black boy, but had written off as the cynical musings of people (like my mom) that lived so immediately subsequent to the Civil Rights Era. The warnings she’d given me about wearing hoodies, riding around in my 1986 Grand Prix on certain sides of town, and even being outside after the streetlights came on began to feel applicable. Instead of heeding them, though, I met them with defiance, as I began to do with seemingly every facet of my life. 

My mouth got me into a lot of trouble at that time as my unwillingness to comply became more and more apparent. I know now that I was trying to maintain some level of agency and control over my life to cope with the realization that as a Black boy in America, my body and future were often at the mercy of people other than me.

I refused to do everything I felt I had been instructed to, both by authoritative figures and society. I got into fights outside of school, and as stress and aggression became my new norm, the only thing that did stay consistent for me was my dedication to martial arts. Part of that was because it felt good to hit things, and part of it was because my sensei was one of the best and wisest men I’ve ever known, and he probably felt it important to keep me from being overwhelmed by something I failed to notice in myself: the pain of being forced to grow up too quickly.

In the months between my Junior and Senior years, the trial for Trayvon Martin’s killer had gotten underway. Simultaneously, personal friends of mine had also died or gone to jail, many of whom were also Black boys around my age. I’d began to understand how things worked, and my cynicism had reached its height.

Whenever the trial was broadcast, I claimed not to care, stating that there was no point in tuning in knowing what the outcome would be. Secretly, I did tune in, though. I caught the news segments in passing, and read articles on the Internet, and listened when the adults spoke about the trial, hoping that the worldview I’d adopted was wrong. And I did still have hope. I had hope that this country had outgrown its past transgressions and finally become a place of liberty and justice for all. I’d hoped that this boy’s family would finally be the one to achieve closure, if not just for Trayvon’s sake, for ours as well. Honestly, I’d just hoped people would do the right thing.

Most of all, I’d hoped that somebody would prove to me that the time I’d spent hardening my heart to the world around me was a mistake. I did hope, but I never changed direction.

July 13th, 2013 was the day I fought in my last competition. I’ll never forget that day. It was a Saturday, and it was the summer after my Senior year.

Back in those days, MMA and martial arts weren’t as widely accepted as they are now, and consequently, some of the rules were a bit mire sketchy. I was grinning the whole ride back from Akron, Ohio (where the tournament took place) after a great fight against a kid almost twice my size (let me tell it) and winning a pretty sizable trophy to boot.

My grandmother was out of town, so my grandfather and I had decided to pick up some takeout before we went home. Upon walking into the kitchen to eat, out of force-of-habit, my grandfather turned the TV on. As soon as he did, the headline that has been burned into my mind ever since flashed before my eyes: 

Trayvon’s murderer had been acquitted.

I don’t think I sat down to eat or even washed my hands. I stared at the TV for a moment before setting my trophy down and wordlessly excusing myself for the night. My grandfather didn’t try to convince me to eat, or even scold me for my rudeness. He knew that my hope had really died in that moment, not in the months before in which I feigned a jaded façade, and he left me to mourn it.

I went into the den, closed the door behind me, and turned the TV to the same channel as in the room I’d just left. And despite my earlier mix of ease and fatigue after the win, I continued to watch the verdict as I began to do push-ups.

As it turned out, all the fighting I’d done up until that moment was just practice.

A decade after Trayvon’s murder and almost nine years after the verdict, I wish I could say that the violence has been replaced by peace. I wish I could say that the chip has fallen off of my shoulder, and that the hatred in my heart has subsided. In all honesty, though, I haven’t sat with my back to the door since I was sixteen.

I still exercise and do martial arts regularly. It’s still a vent. Every time I go for a run, I’m outrunning the police. Every time I punch the bag, I’m beating up a racist, or a person that would hurt children, or any other kind of bully I can think of. Every time I’m going to fail on a rep, I’m Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in the king’s court, and I don’t fail anymore.

It feels good until I remind myself that Killmonger’s story was a cautionary tale.

There are still times when I try to embody the person I was supposed to become. When I’m babysitting my little cousins, or with my friends, or even speaking with my coworkers and colleagues, I’m the one who keeps everybody smiling. I tell jokes, and play with the kids, and give more of myself that I even have to give, and I do that because I don’t ever want people to feel as hopeless, bitter, and burnt out as I have for ten years. 

Admittedly, sometimes I feel cheated when I think about the version of me those people get: a man that’s full of light, and kind, and always leads with love. That’s the man I was supposed to grow into. Instead, I’m this.

And then, I wonder what kind of man Trayvon Martin would’ve grown into if he was given the chance.