For some people, just living can at times feel a little like a crime
By MARY JO MELONE
Published March 22, 2004
No police report was taken. Nothing had happened. It was all a misunderstanding, the officers said.
But as far as Jesse Tucker was concerned, something real and palpable occurred that morning in mid February.
Tucker had just finished doing some drywall work on a small, unoccupied yellow house in St. Petersburg's Old Southeast.
He was taking the trash to the curb when he saw three police officers coming toward him with their hands on their holstered guns. A woman was standing a short distance away. That was him, she said of Tucker. He was the man she said she saw trying to break into the yellow house.
He looked at the woman. He knew many people on the street because he lives elsewhere in the neighborhood and had been working on the house for the previous six weeks. The owners lived just yards away. He had never seen this woman before. She was white. He figured she must have been house sitting.
Tucker explained why he was at the house. The police left. The whole exchange took all of five minutes. But the five minutes stuck with Jesse Tucker and always will. Episodes like this are the background noise of his life. For he is that constantly under-suspicion character, a black man in a white world.
Tucker is not a menacing figure. He is 47 but his smooth, sculpted face makes you peg him at 30. He's a gay man, muscular, slender and seems incapable of raising his voice. His manner is so gentle, his speech so thoughtful, that you could mistake him for an academic.
"Life is difficult enough, but when this happens," he said, referring to the incident, "it just pushes me over the edge. Then I pull myself out of the hole."
When we met at his house last week, talking about that February day seemed to drive Tucker back into the hole. At times, his eyes teared up. He took his outstretched palm and softly banged it against his chest, as though he was fighting to keep the words from rising up in his throat and flying out.
"One of the things I get all the time is that I'm overly sensitive," Tucker said.
The people who tell him this are white people, who consider themselves his friends and who think they are being helpful. When they learn of his experiences they say, "That's just the way it is."
In a way, they're right. Tucker said he has been stopped by police on the beaches, pulled over on the interstate. It doesn't matter where he goes. He remembers a white woman in California suddenly pointing a stun gun at him when he passed her on an oceanfront boardwalk, a white man in a national park screaming epithets at him out of the blue.
Tucker lives perpetually on guard, expecting the worst, with his antennae up and ready to pick up danger signals. He frets that one wrong move on his part could be misunderstood, that he could be shot by the police.
All this may leave him infuriated or humiliated. He may get a sick feeling in his gut. He may start thinking about whites the way some of them think about him. But he doesn't fight back. He takes the opposite tack. Total compliance. Going limp, he called it.
Tucker told me a story. One day, he heard the police just beyond his back yard arrest a man. For drugs, Tucker figured. The police had the man down on his stomach. One officer had his knee on the man's back. Tucker heard the man cry, "Just kill me."
Jesse Tucker understood. The man was tired of running, tired of jail, tired of his life. Sometimes, Tucker said, he too feels tired. He's tired of putting up with the suspicions, the insults. He's tired of having to be constantly on the defensive, tired of being told he is thin-skinned.
"It would really be nice to live someplace where I was just Jesse," he said.
Wherever that is.
I cannot fully grasp Jesse Tucker's world. I can't imagine what it's like to know that your very appearance both marks and dismisses you - marks you as a threat and then renders you invisible, without a split-second's regard for where you were born, how you earn a living, whom you love, what you dream.
"What do you have to do to be okay?" Tucker asked me. He was half-pleading. "I'm a good soul, alive, and working."
