The Force

by Don Winslow

She stands at the counter and puts together the salad she has for lunch, carefully arranging the ingredients in a plastic container. “I get you think that only other cops can understand what you go through. Y’all feel aggrieved because you’re blamed for killing Freddie Gray or Michael Bennett. But you don’t know how it feels to be blamed because you are Freddie Gray or Michael Bennett. You think people hate you because of what you do, but you don’t have to think that people hate you because of what you are. You can take that blue jacket off, I live twenty-four seven in this skin. “Here’s what you can’t understand, Denny—what you can’t understand, because you’re a white man, is the sheer . . . weight . . . of being black in this country. The sheer exhausting weight that presses your shoulders down and tires your eyes and makes it hurt just to walk sometimes.” She presses the lid on. “And you were right last night—sometimes I do hate my patients and I’m tired, Denny, tired of cleaning up the things they do to each other, we do to each other, and sometimes I hate them because they’re black like me and because it makes me wonder about myself.” She puts the container in her bag. “So that’s what we go through, baby,” Claudette says. “Every damn day.