“It was a nearly perfect afternoon cloudless, the sun warm on my shoulders, food in my garden and in my refrigerator, my bills paid when I bent to tug free a head of new garlic to throw in with the potatoes and chard Id planned for dinner, and my back seized up. It would be days before I could stand upright, let alone work in the garden, without pain.
“I wasnt thinking of it, though it seems my body was: the seemingly insignificant run-in Id had with the police the night before. For a black man any encounter with the police is tense, and that tension had found its way into my muscles, if not my mind.”
