Orange Line

by Gautam Premnath

It’s sometime in the early oughts, and I’m on my way home from work. After leaving my office I’d stopped by the UMass Boston library and checked out a new edition of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Now I’m reading it hungrily on the T. It has on its cover a detail from a nineteenth-century painting. A black slave – a young girl with wide eyes and a pursed mouth – looks out from the canvas. In the background looms a white woman: a pre-Raphaelite beauty with pale skin and flowing hair. That, and the book’s title, are what my fellow commuters can see, should they choose to look in my direction. That, and my absorption in the book.

I’m so absorbed I don’t hear what the guy is saying until it’s already created a crackle of nervous tension running through the subway car. The same words, over and over again.

Imma slit your throat.

Imma slit your throat.

Imma slit your throat.

I look up. He is looking straight at me. He is saying those words to me. What the hell?

Some folks have already started edging away, as far as they can get in the crowded subway car. Others are moving in closer, to get a better look at the unfolding scene.

My first thought, weirdly, is relief that this is happening after I had already switched lines. If this were happening on the Red Line there’d have been a whole bunch of UMass students among the watching crowd, including some of my own.

Now I’m on the Orange Line, heading for the last stop: Forest Hills. Along the way it cuts through Chinatown, Roxbury, the Hyde Square barrio. Most of the folks around me are black and brown.

This is a hard town to love, but I do love it. I love the scale of the city, the feeling that you can walk it in a day, hold the whole place in your hand. I feel such a jolt of anticipation every time I walk onto the shabby, riotproofed UMass campus, built on the former site of the city dump – two decades later, it will still feel like the best job I’ve ever had. There are parts I don’t move through with such ease. Places I know to avoid on nights when the Red Sox have lost, or won. But the Orange Line – the run-down, dirty, crowded Orange Line – has always felt like a safe zone.

Imma slit your throat.

He’s my age, maybe – early 30s? Black, disheveled, skinny, drunk. Stinking of booze, filthy clothes, dried sweat. Nothing in his hands except a telltale brown paper bag. I am not scared of him – well, not physically scared. But I don’t know what to do.

10 years earlier, less than a year after Desert Storm, a pickup full of white boys had screeched to a halt as I walked down a dark street in Pittsburgh. Two had jumped out, faces hard, eyes shining. I was 21, skinny, scared out of my mind. An instinct kicked in and I walked toward them slowly, bare palms up and out, fighting my incorrigible instinct to lower my eyes. I don’t want any trouble. One of the boys sized me up, rolled his eyes scornfully, and slowly climbed back into the cab. The other hesitated and then followed suit. As the pickup pulled away I sank to the sidewalk, shivering, my mind racing. How was that not a curb stomping? What exactly did I do to evade that fate?

I belatedly realize that the khadi kurta I’m wearing has probably marked me out for this guy’s attention. I’d been wearing one that night in Pittsburgh. I had brought a few kurtas when I first came to the States as a student at 17: khadi to sleep or lounge in, and a raw silk one to wear to “ethnic” events. The collection had grown over the years, and at some point I had made a decision, barely articulated even to myself, to wear them more often in public space. Unlike the normie drag of pocket tees and flannel overshirts I otherwise wore, this was a sartorial choice that provoked response. Raised eyebrows from my department chair, polite fumblings from my students, a namaste from some rando in Downtown Crossing. [On my first time back at Logan Airport after 9/11 I had stepped out of the way of a rifle-bearing National Guardsman and he’d looked me in the eye and gravely intoned (in Arabic) Shukran.] But I noticed above all the way it shifted how people of color responded to me. From other desis I more often than not got studied disregard. Other black and brown folk, though, were more likely to catch my eye, say hello, or simply give me that look that says I see you. And in particular, from black men of a certain age, a familiar pattern of response: Eye contact. A slow nod of the head. As salaam alaikum, my brother.

Imma slit your throat.

More recently a sk8rboi called me the n-word as I walked down a Cambridge street. That time I drew myself up to my full 6’3” , got in his face, and told him to fuck off while his crew rolled on the floor laughing.

I know when to deescalate with white people, when to step to them. I don’t know what to do with this guy. He’s black, he’s vulnerable.

Imma slit your throat.

Who is this guy threatening to kill me? What do I say to him? What kind of dialogue is possible between us? I can’t even look him in the eye.

I begin to talk to him – pleading, presenting my credentials, even showing him the book I am reading. What the fuck am I doing? I don’t know. I’m just vomiting out all the glitchy thoughts in my head. I still can’t look him in the eye.

Meanwhile the folks around me are yelling at me to knock it off.

Stop talking!

You’re making it worse!

The loudest are a couple of Latine teens. They know from street hassle. They are trying to protect me. Maybe to protect both of us?

As the train pulls into Jackson Square I make a decision and rise quickly from my seat. The guy begins to lurch to his feet, looks set to follow me out onto the platform. The two teens move quickly between him and the door, blocking his path even as they bundle me out of the car. I watch him sink back into his seat as the doors close. Our eyes meet for the first time and we hold each other’s gaze as the train pulls away. I can see my reflection in the train window: I look confused, heartsick. I can’t read the expression on his face.