the way it was before

Four years ago today, I got hit by a car while walking across the street.

It was a warm March, just like this one has been. Warmer still, because a few weeks back I had hugged Ntozake Shange and asked Me’Shell Ndegeocello if she wanted to join my table at dinner (she declined). The day before, I had sat next to Toni Morrison at lunch. A month later, I would have drinks with Edwidge Danticat, but I didn’t know that yet. I only knew that it was damn near 80 degrees on one of the last days of winter, my teaching week was done, and I was going to change into a t-shirt and some flip flops for the first time in 2012 and walk across the street to pay my cable bill in person.

I was in the crosswalk when it happened, three-quarters of the way across the street. I had seen a car coming from my right and kept walking, asserting, as was my habit, my pedestrian right-of-way in the face of Ohio drivers who never seemed to know what a crosswalk was for. The car was zooming, but I had seen that many times before — the speed-up and then the hard brake right at the edge of the white lines. By the time I realized this one wasn’t going to stop, I was directly in the middle of the lane. My mind launched into calculations: if I went forward or back, my foot might land under one of the tires. If I just stood there, facing the sidewalk, I wouldn’t have the footing to stay upright. And so I whirled toward the car and put my hands out to brace myself against the hood. My lower body was still whirling when the driver hit me. My upper body was staring him straight in the face. He was a white man, maybe in his early thirties, balding. “What the hell?” I said at a conversational volume, almost quietly, through the windshield glass. We stared at each other for some moments in shock, until an older Black gentleman on the sidewalk called out, “Are you okay?” As much as my driver’s education had taught me that pedestrians had the right-of-way in all marked and unmarked crosswalks, it had also taught me never to state that I was okay when involved in an automobile accident. And so I said nothing in response.

I looked down at the pavement. One of my flip flops had broken. “You need to call the police,” said the gentleman on the sidewalk, and when I hesitated, he said it again: “You need to call the police.” “If that had been me driving,” he added the second time, “they would’ve been hauled my ass to jail already.”

And so I shuffled into the Cable Co-op, where Ralph the manager, whom I’d met many times before, found a chair for me to sit down while the driver pulled into the parking lot around the corner and came inside. I answered all of their “Are you okay?”s with “I don't know”s. It was as vague an answer as I could manage while clinging to the politeness demanded by my Ghanaian immigrant upbringing.

A fire truck came and an ambulance, which I refused, having learned only recently what my co-pay was for an ambulance ride. The paramedics left me with an ice pack that I still have to this day. Two police officers walked into the building and entered in their “Are you okay?”s for the record as well. Then one of the officers took over and turned his attention to the driver. 

“How fast were you going?” the officer asked the driver.

“Uhm, I dunno. Thirty miles per hour?” said the driver and then, “What’s the speed limit on this street?”

“Twenty-five,” said the officer.

“Oh, then maybe twenty-seven?” offered the driver.

“Twenty-five,” said the officer — fixing his gaze for a moment on the man who had driven into me — and then wrote that number down.

The officer looked at the driver’s license and registration and proof of insurance. “Weiss,” said the officer to the driver. “That’s German.”

“Yeah,” said the driver.

“So is mine,” said the officer, now friendly and smiling, “Feuerstein.” I will never forget his name.

“Well,” said Feuerstein to Weiss, “You did the right thing by stopping, so I’m not going to give you a ticket.” To this I said an incredulous nothing. The conversation seemed to have little to do with me anymore. A year and a half earlier, I had gotten a ticket for instinctively swerving to avoid hitting a raccoon that lay dying in the road. When my car ended up in a ditch on the opposite side of the street, the officer who came and shooed away the kind, helpful bystanders left me with a citation for “Failure to Maintain Reasonable Control of the Vehicle,” which I had to stay in Oberlin two days before Christmas to defend. Now, under cover of shared German ancestry, the man who had not avoided but rather driven into human-me was walking away with a chummy warning. “Nobody was hurt,” said Officer Feuerstein, gesturing obliquely toward me for good measure. I could feel my ankle starting to ache beneath the ice.

By the time I made it home, I was limping. Within two hours, I lay on my bed crying under the extra ice packs that the paramedics had left with me. My period came early that night, only one week after the last one had ended. My body felt like someone had wrapped a wide, hot, metal band around my middle and was pressing it deeper and deeper into my flesh. I wouldn’t shake that sensation entirely for over a year. 

I learned some things that day that I already knew, about the nominal value of my Black female body to these two men with the German names — the one who was, by profession, sworn to protect it and the one who drove into it because, by his own admission, he “just wasn't paying attention.” I also learned that I was magical, that, by my own strength, I could stop a car that was coming for me at 30 miles an hour. And then I learned many things that I had never known before. That, in this small town, my neighbor would insist the next day on driving me to the emergency room. That, in this small town, people would know what happened long before I ever had a chance to tell them. That, in this small town, those same people would bring by so much food that I could barely keep up with it. That, in this small town, a ticket could be issued retroactively six weeks later when a friend who was on City Council called a personal meeting with the City Manager and Chief of Police to express his outrage.

I learned some things about time, too, and about my body. I had never taken a sick day from teaching, and I didn’t then either. Five days after the accident, I stood in front of my Immigrant Narrative class, and the effort of lifting my arm under the weight of a single piece of chalk was so great that I cried with 21 students behind me and my face to the chalkboard. I threw everything I could at the problem: acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, physical therapy, orthopedics. I had a procedure where steroid injections into my lower back left me in more excruciating misery than the accident itself. Every practitioner I saw told me that the damage was in my soft tissue, and therefore I should recover within eight to 12 weeks. When the thirteenth week came, and I still couldn’t sit in a chair for longer than two minutes without experiencing unbearable pain, I started to despair. One day, driving home from the chiropractor with no relief, I suddenly came to understand how a person could want to take their own life. My body didn’t feel like my body anymore; it felt like a vessel for pain. Now that I had passed 12 weeks and the pain was still with me, there was nothing to suggest that it would ever go away. The thought of that was more terrifying to me than the idea of not being alive anymore. I called my therapist the very next day for the first time in over a year.

It is now four years later. I still startle when a car approaches me while I’m crossing the street. I’ve taken to paying all of my cable bills online. My right knee tells me, within 48-hours accuracy, when it’s going to rain. My left wrist hurts when I’ve been typing a lot, my right elbow when I’ve been using a mouse. My lower back still burns when I sit for long periods of time, but now I can make it a few hours — depending on the chair. In April of 2012, I cried on the phone with one friend about how I was going to miss the PhD graduation of another because I could not imagine sitting for the two-hour drive up to Michigan. In May of 2012, I missed my ten-year college reunion because I couldn’t bear the hour-and-a-half plane ride from Cleveland to Philadelphia. But a couple years ago at Thanksgiving, under strict orders from a mechanic who restarted my dying car battery, I drove all the way from Oberlin to Chicago — five and a half hours — without stopping. Last May, I made a transatlantic flight — seven hours overnight from JFK to Heathrow — to visit friends who were teaching in London for the term.

I’ve learned more things in these four years than I ever would have imagined, about how my own body works and about how empathy works and about how communities work, too. I’ve learned to ask for help without thinking of it as a sign of weakness. I’ve also learned that weakness is okay. I’ve learned to take help when it’s offered and to respond to the wisdom of my body when it’s telling me to stop. I’ve learned to accept that, as young as I am, my body may never go back to the way it was before 4:30pm on that warm Thursday in March. I’ve learned to celebrate every moment that I feel okay. Last week, I stood in class with 21 students at my back, lifted my arm, and smiled with my face to the board — because on that day, the weight of a single piece of chalk did not bring me to tears.

Today, knocked down by a respiratory infection, I took my second sick day ever in eight years of teaching. I asked my student Writing Associate if he would be willing to facilitate class, and he responded with a detailed lesson plan. I did some work from bed in the morning and watched the end of the Shaun the Sheep Movie in the afternoon. I sucked on raw garlic and gargled apple cider vinegar to ease my sore throat. I went out to vote and mail a letter and then came back home to lie down. I texted with a friend who reminded me that she still had the ice pack I lent her in November, the special one I bought to wrap around my waist back in 2012, when the ice was with me every day because my upper body felt so heavy that my lower body could hardly bear the weight alone. When I went to text her back, I caught sight of the date on my phone and realized that it was March 15, exactly four years to the day.

Five straight months have gone by that I’ve been without that ice pack. And I didn’t think about it once.

Tuesday, March 15, 2016