by Etienne C. Toussaint
May 18, 2026
The candles were everywhere. That is the first thing I remember—their light flickering on Wheeler Avenue, a few blocks from where I grew up in the South Bronx. I was 14, holding a dry-cleaning ticket for my mother’s dress.
Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, had been shot 41 times by New York City police officers in the vestibule of his apartment building. He had reached for his wallet. They thought it was a gun.
People were saying his name, saying they could not believe he was gone, wondering whether this time would be different. Others answered their own questions: It always ends this way, the cops always get a pass, this is how the system works. And some said nothing at all—just stood staring, or walked past trying to look unbothered, as if violence had become weather in the neighborhood, ordinary as air.
I stood there in that light and felt something shift. I was about to graduate from elementary school as my class valedictorian. I was on my way somewhere. My teachers had told me so. My mother had told me so. I was doing everything right. But that night I understood, without yet having the language, that success did not guarantee safety. The world I was entering had rules not written with me in mind. There were walls I had not built but would still have to face.
I did not yet know that those walls would become the architecture of my vocation. Diallo’s death did more than teach me that policing can be brutal. It taught me that the world was more dangerous for people who looked like me. And somewhere on Wheeler Avenue, without choosing it, I stopped being a child.
My grandmother, whenever she asked about school, had a way of leaning forward, veins rising in her neck and forehead, eager to hear my grades even though she could barely read. She knew an A meant I was going somewhere further than she could go. But when news like this came, she would simply say “bondye” in Creole, speak a silent prayer, then turn to me: “Etienne, don’t go by there. You have to be careful, you know. Stay home. Do your homework.” She said it as if the words could hold the world in place a little longer. Yet even as she spoke, I could see in her face a silent knowing—that homework and staying home were not enough.
Later that night, after I gave my mother her dress—the one she would wear to my graduation—I crumpled the dry-cleaning ticket and let it fall into the trash. But even after it had left my grasp, I still felt the weight of Wheeler Avenue in my hands. And a few months later, even after I had walked through the doors of Regis High School in Manhattan, I still did not understand the tradition I was entering.
The candles were everywhere. That is the first thing I remember—their light flickering on Wheeler Avenue, a few blocks from where I grew up in the South Bronx. I was 14, holding a dry-cleaning ticket for my mother’s dress.
Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea, had been shot 41 times by New York City police officers in the vestibule of his apartment building. He had reached for his wallet. They thought it was a gun.
People were saying his name, saying they could not believe he was gone, wondering whether this time would be different. Others answered their own questions: It always ends this way, the cops always get a pass, this is how the system works. And some said nothing at all—just stood staring, or walked past trying to look unbothered, as if violence had become weather in the neighborhood, ordinary as air.
I stood there in that light and felt something shift. I was about to graduate from elementary school as my class valedictorian. I was on my way somewhere. My teachers had told me so. My mother had told me so. I was doing everything right. But that night I understood, without yet having the language, that success did not guarantee safety. The world I was entering had rules not written with me in mind. There were walls I had not built but would still have to face.
I did not yet know that those walls would become the architecture of my vocation. Diallo’s death did more than teach me that policing can be brutal. It taught me that the world was more dangerous for people who looked like me. And somewhere on Wheeler Avenue, without choosing it, I stopped being a child.
My grandmother, whenever she asked about school, had a way of leaning forward, veins rising in her neck and forehead, eager to hear my grades even though she could barely read. She knew an A meant I was going somewhere further than she could go. But when news like this came, she would simply say “bondye” in Creole, speak a silent prayer, then turn to me: “Etienne, don’t go by there. You have to be careful, you know. Stay home. Do your homework.” She said it as if the words could hold the world in place a little longer. Yet even as she spoke, I could see in her face a silent knowing—that homework and staying home were not enough.
Later that night, after I gave my mother her dress—the one she would wear to my graduation—I crumpled the dry-cleaning ticket and let it fall into the trash. But even after it had left my grasp, I still felt the weight of Wheeler Avenue in my hands. And a few months later, even after I had walked through the doors of Regis High School in Manhattan, I still did not understand the tradition I was entering.
