Split
Whistles Mean So Much
A whistle blared. My breath quit and I tightened. Locked my jaw. Pressed my hand to my chest. Silenced.
The kids’ decibels dropped from 90 to 0 at that sound. The typical taunting and bickering between the siblings broke, and eyes popped.
My oldest kid typed in the corner. He was playing Minecraft with a friend, their iPads joined via FaceTime so that they could chat while gaming.
More whistles sounded, and my daughter, sitting at the table, whispered, “What is that?” Even my little guy was freaked into quiet.
We were indoors, but the sound was clear and loud. In south Minneapolis in the midst of the ICE occupation — even as white people — whistles split you.
Split like run away, get inside, hit the lights, hold your breath. And split like move toward the threat. Walk — be calm, don’t frighten the frightened or they’ll shoot — and whistle, record, witness. Alert those neighbors who need to take cover. And split like split into two — one hides, one protects.
The little guy repeated his sister, “What is that!”
My oldest paused, but the FaceTime friend kept chatting away.
Which meant, in my head in that half a second, that the threat wasn’t at the friend’s house. The whistles must be here, outside.
My youngest two looked to me. How should we be feeling right now.
“Where is that whistling!” I said. Not calm, not collected, not stable or sturdy. Entirely a human who has felt in her body day and night for a month the threat and confusion and disorientation of a neighborhood whose parents have patrolled for ICE presence at their school bus stops and playground corners and whose neighbors bring with them everywhere their passports and birth certificates and whose friends move donated food from food shelf to backpack to hiding children’s darkened apartments and whose own kids have worried about the safety of classmates who still take the risk to come to school even when they might go home to a vanished family.
“Whoa whoa whoa, that’s just me, that’s a show, just a show,” a voice said.
“Mom, it’s a show. It’s TV,” my oldest said. He heard the FaceTime friend’s dad say it.
“A show. It’s just a show,” I said. I gripped my neck.
“Yes, sorry, sorry,” the dad said. He laughed.
He laughed because he knew what the whistles meant.
My other kids, like gazelles who simply dance away after shaking off a lion, tittered at one another and soon the decibels climbed up to 72, 75, 85, and so on.
I’m a human first.
Aren’t we all?
Signal chats continue, and the school safety plan was reviewed at the PTA meeting last week. But, allegedly, ICE will withdraw in the next week.
They leave behind wreckage. Family and community trauma, economic set-back, neighborhood catastrophe.
Minneapolis will rebuild. It’s been building already — strengthening bonds and creating new relationships. And yet, there was so much damage done.
What else.
I’m reading Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Stories of Horror and especially like “Unbeknownst” by Matthew Vollmer, and of course Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” every morning.
I thought I could check out of reality with a Star Wars spin-off and watched the first season of “Andor,” but frankly it’s too real to be comforting (but it’s very good).
And I’m hosting the next online get-together of Short Story Club in a couple of weekends.
Stay safe and well and keep reading as much as possible.
Yes. Thank you for describing the complexity of what the sound of a whistle has come to mean here in Minneapolis. I had the occasion to work Temp Work on a school playground in a suburb last week. They were pleased to learn that I already had a whistle, so I didn't need the new whistle they were handing me. I said, "Lots of people in Minneapolis have whistles these days." After the ICE occupation of Minneapolis, we'll never look at a whistle like we used to - to communicate with children on a playground, or to referee for sports.