5
Tabanca Time
In this chapter, I aim to funk the clock by funking with the temporal pace of this book. I do so by entering what I describe as an interminable interlude in tabanca time.1 In Trinidad and Tobago, tabanca refers to a painful feeling of unrequited love, from loving someone, particularly a former lover or spouse, who does not love in return. A tabanca is not induced strictly by romantic relationships. In fact, it is no coincidence that tabanca rates seem to skyrocket toward the end of Trinidad carnival. The soca artiste Bunji Garlin details the symptoms of tabanca in his song “Carnival Tabanca,” while bemoaning the thought of having to wait an entire year before carnival returns. Without festival, Garlin and other feters are more susceptible to a host of symptoms, including fever. These symptoms only intensified during COVID-19. Many hopeful revelers suffered from acute feelings of loss and longing in the absence of J’ouvert, fete, bacchanal, and any opportunity to “jump up,” “wave up,” “free up,” “break way,” “ramajay,” “pelt waist,” and/or “get on bad.”
Like Garlin, I too have a tabanca. It is not a tabanca for time, but for who and what time has taken. What follows is more than a disclosure—it is, in truth, an exercise in time travel and part of a retroactive healing process. This exercise may do little to alter the course of time. Still, there is something generative within any refusal to allow linear progress narratives to proceed when so many poor and racialized subjects are attempting to reckon with racialized violence that allegedly resides in the past. So as white time urges so many to “get over it” and “put the past behind you” (despite the past seeming to lie ahead), I will take this opportunity to linger in tabanca time: a melancholic state located in what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “pastness”—which is not independent of the present.2
My biography informs my scholarship, but I do not treat my biography as scholarship. My hesitation to treat my biography as empirical evidence emanates not from concern over the pressures to remain “objective” or “neutral” or uphold similar racialized world-making logics. Rather, I am apprehensive about perpetuating the interpellation of Blackness through abjection and making my pain fungible and thus what Saidiya Hartman terms a “conduit for identification.”3 Here I am referring to the way in which empirical evidence is so often privileged over experience and embodied knowledge. As Renato Rosaldo writes, “By invoking personal experience as an analytical category one risks easy dismissal.”4 It is worth noting that incorporating aspects of one’s biography is regarded by some as an acknowledgment of positionality and evidence of reflexivity. Like Rosaldo, I “make no claims for neutrality, detachment, and impartiality.”5 As Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us, “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them. This dichotomy is the root of all violence.”6 My hope is to avoid such pitfalls and instead help expand a critique of time through an assessment of another source of time theft—namely, migration and deportation. I treat this chapter as an interminable interlude, a perpetual and ongoing “break.” Deported time is one such break. Postremoval there is no resumption of family relations. There is no opportunity to “catch up.” In fact, “catching up” is a misnomer because it presumes that the temporal coordinates of family relations can be charted linearly on a spatial plane that has not already been dissolved by deportation.
Deportation did not emerge as a theme in any part of my fieldwork. I do not seek to create a (false) equivalence between my father’s story and the experiences of the youths at Run-a-Way. Instead I seek to funk with the pace and space of this book by resisting the teleological aims of writing and storytelling. I do not come from an academic lineage or socioeconomic privilege. Though my parents do not have any letters behind their names, they still taught me more than those that do. Despite the toxic culture of individualism permeating the university, I learned that “life is a mission [pronounced me--shän], not no competition [pronounced ko-m-pe--te--shän].” Such sayings were uttered by my father and modeled by him and my mother. For most of our upbringing she held us down by working in local bookstores and what, back in the day, we called “health food stores.” By contrast, my father dodged “legitimate” work before I was born. Before I came on the scene, my auntie Sandra helped sponsor my father’s passage from Trinidad to Boston in the late 1970s. He made the journey with barely a secondary-school education (the equivalent of some high school in the United States).
Even though my dad had few “legitimate” jobs as an adult, he was quite a diligent child. On nonschool days, he and his brothers would work from six in the morning until six in the evening. They traveled over the Churchill-Roosevelt highway by way of donkey cart to harvest cabbage, bhagi (a kind of spinach), baigan (eggplant), okroe (ochra), dasheen bush (taro leaf), and bok choy, which they later sold in the croisee in San Juan. Farming on an island, though, was not the best job to list under “previous work experience,” especially in the concrete jungle of Boston. Still, my dad managed to find work as a porter at a hotel in downtown Boston. My mom worked at a nearby bookstore in Copley Square, and they met on the subway, or the “T”—specifically the Orange Line.
At that time, my father was merely “service,” not a “service worker.” When white guests bemoaned the long wait for their bags, they rendered the carrier of the bags (i.e., my father) illegible and thus dysselected from the category of human. Sheraton management regularly conflated my father’s ontological status with guests’ property. As a natty dreadlocks who preached self-reliance, my father soon grew tired of, in his words, “making white people rich” (mind you, my mother is white). He knew that if he “applied himself” he could transgress time by making in a single day what many white bosses made in a week. Lacking both the prospects of advancement and personhood as a porter, my father decided to “fire de wuk” and began selling weed throughout the streets of Boston.7
My dad did dirt where he lived and moved through places like Dorchester, Roxbury, Mattapan, Hyde Park, and Mission Hill as if he were raised there and not in the economically depressed villages within San Juan. In the wake of increasing violence in the early 1990s, Boston’s racialized enclosures acquired new names such as “Deathchester,” “Glocksbury,” and “Murderpan.” As ominous as these labels sound, they were not hyperbole. Though my father only sold weed, he still posed a threat to competitors. The dangers of “pumping” any “product” in Boston in the early ’80s proved dangerous to the dealer and those closest to them. Once my father’s name started ringing bells, his rivals responded with stickups, making threats to my mother’s life, and violating the code of the street.
Beyond the dangers of the fast life, Roxbury was literally on fire throughout the ’80s and early ’90s. In 1981, Roxbury’s Highland Park neighborhood was deemed “the Arson Capital of the World.”8 The culprits? Gentrifying forces and predatory landlords. Property owners found a simple solution to reconcile increasing property values with the actual incomes of current residents: they could set their own properties ablaze and collect the liability insurance. In Streets of Hope: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Neighborhood, Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar document not only attempts to gentrify Roxbury, but also residents’ organizing efforts in response to such destructive forces.9 Explaining how arson became an opportunity for landlords to cash in on the suffering of poor people, Medoff and Sklar write, “A fire is of financial benefit to the developer … because: 1) it drives out low-income residents without the cost of waiting for attrition and without the potential political resistance to mass evictions, 2) it does the work of gutting the building for rehabilitation, 3) insurance provides tax-free, interest-free financing for the rehabilitation of the structure.”10
Blocks in Roxbury were hot in more ways than one. Though my father maxed out (in height) at five feet five inches, his reputation in the streets kept growing and his hustling drew the ire of many enemies, including the police. He would eventually get “caught up” and was regularly arrested for attempting to survive in spaces where social life and social death coexist and sometimes compete. My mother told me a story about my father being arrested on Cambridge Common while my brother, Ja-Ja, and I were playing in a sandbox. According to my mom, someone asked my father for weed, but he ignored the request. My mother warned him not to sell the guy anything because he was a cop. The dude was persistent, though, so my father eventually made the transaction. Before they could return to their lunch on the Common, my parents found themselves surrounded by police. The entire incident must have lasted only a few minutes, as my brother and I were still doing our kid thing and were largely unaware of what had just gone down. Whenever the police arrested my father and identified him as just “Black,” my mother expressed confusion and frustration that they did not acknowledge his Indian ancestry. When she brought the discrepancy to his attention, my father did not respond. The classification was only further confirmation of who he was/is.11
As we grew older, my brother and I learned that a “nine-to-five” was not the only way to stay alive. At the same time, my father’s line of work was not appropriate for show-and-tell or bring-your-parent-to-school day. So we learned to lie. And we were nice at it. We were young, but we still knew the code of the street. So when my elementary school teachers would bring actual police into class in an attempt to desensitize all the poor Black and brown children to cops, I knew “Officer Friendly” was suspect. He would try to convince us to drop a dime but failed to recognize that we were ahead of our time and time itself. My father’s fictitious jobs tended to rotate between plumber, construction worker, and artist. In fact, under “Father’s Occupation,” my birth certificate still reads “Artist.” “Plumber” was almost true. Although my father did not finish secondary school in Trinidad, he did come close to completing a trade program in plumbing. My mother supplied plumbing textbooks to try to pull him away from the streets, but he had little patience for books that seemed to take time without offering anything in return. I am certain my father would have found a way to funk the clock as a plumber or an artist. Still, the opportunity to defy time and the state simultaneously was one he could not pass up.
My mother and father separated when I was two years old and Ja-Ja was one. We remained in Boston for a few more years, though, seeing my father whenever possible. My mom still came through for my dad whenever he was in a jam, but she would eventually reach her limit. Concerned that she would be unable to keep us safe from the streets and the state, my mom decided to move to Providence, Rhode Island. During our elementary school years, she would drive Ja-Ja and I to Dorchester to spend weekends with Dad. Once we hit middle school, my brother and I were able to make the trip on our own by bus. We would arrive at Back Bay Station and end up waiting for some sign of my father coming up Dartmouth Street in a car often different from the one he had driven during the previous visit.
“I Deh Ya!”
My father never wore a watch, but he always seemed to know what time it was. Knowing the time, though, did not mean he was on it. The traditional nine-to-five was not my father’s gig. Instead he hustled from sunup to sunset, sometimes with us present. There was no time to lime.12 Still, when people would call demanding to know where he was at, he usually responded by saying, “I deh ya” (I’m [t]here). Perhaps he truly believed that “any time is Trinidad time.”13 Once our impatience got the best of us, my brother and I would call or page Dad from a pay phone at Back Bay. When we eventually got ahold of him, he had the nerve to kick the same bullshit line to us, telling us he was “deh ya.” In actuality, he was probably still in the hood and on the grind. Is it ironic that clockers funk the clock?14
Ja-Ja and I usually calibrated our spatial and temporal orientations according to our father’s presence or absence. Sometimes it felt as if our father was cool with leaving us alone but had a harder time parting ways with the streets. Many mornings, we would wake to find ourselves by ourselves at my father’s crib. At first we were both concerned, but eventually we learned to adapt to our pop’s part-time presence. So, too, did my sister Amina and my brother Noah. Although we were not raised in the same homes, we all grew accustomed to the fact that my father was not always “deh ya,” but like the Spinners sang, he was around.
The Transmutation of Space and Time
My father started living fast around the same time Randy Crawford started singing about the “street life” in her song of the same name.15 Crawford sings that you can “run away from time,” but that does not mean time won’t catch up. Perhaps my father thought he could forever funk the clock and perhaps remain forever young. Time did not let my father get very far once he transgressed it. Instead, time held a grudge and sought revenge through space—specifically, containment in carceral space. Despite what some may think, selling herb in urbanized space is not easy. Living the fast life meant that my father was restive and rarely at (his) rest. Instead he was often held captive in the prison-industrial complex—a key site of temporal dispossession and domination. Communicating with my father through collect calls or a glass wall at South Bay Correctional Facility or Nashua Street Jail should have been intolerable but instead became banal.
I had a hard time reckoning with the metamorphosis of the space surrounding Nashua Street Jail, which changed from a place of excitement to a key site of incommensurable agony and impossible healing. You see, the jail was just under a half mile from the Museum of Science, Boston—a regular field trip site for kids in Providence and Boston public schools. Changes to the spatio-temporal location of schooling are something that many public school kids welcome, especially if they were learning in Providence public schools in the mid-’90s. There was a time when I felt warmed by the sight of the Charles River, the Charlestown High Bridge (now the Zakim Bridge), or the Museum of Science because I knew I was a little closer to my father. The enchantment did not last long, though. Maybe it was the fact that from the right vantage point, I could look across the Charles River, see Nashua Street Jail, be reminded of my father’s time there, and know there were many other people like him still there for doing what they had to do to survive in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, and other racial enclosures outside Boston.
The Museum of Science was not the only space that acquired a new and sobering meaning. In addition to weekend visits to the jailhouse, we also spent a lot of time at Dorchester District and Roxbury Municipal Courts. As a kid, I was unable to recognize the incongruity of a site of Black social death adjacent to a center of Black social life: namely, Dudley Square. Still, for many children, there is something intriguing about being in a majority-adult space that feels both serious and sobering. It was as if we had transgressed kid space to sneak a peek into the future. Unfortunately, the preview was not as promising as we would have hoped. I never really liked the inside of the courtroom. I was more interested in the murals on the walls outside, which sometimes served colorful camouflage used to conceal the structural violence within. Even at a young age, I knew that any courthouse filled with mostly Black and brown bodies made the legal system a primary site of racialized violence and captivity. Though my father did time, his time was never done. As much as he tried to funk the clock, the hands of time have a long reach, and they would eventually catch up with him.
Deported Time
Just as there are consequences for using time that does not belong to you, there are juridical protocols established to punish those for unauthorized use of space/land that does not belong to them. My father violated both temporal and spatial boundaries. As a result, the border followed my father’s family as soon as they crossed it.16 It followed them to Dorchester, Roxbury, and other poor urbanized spaces in Boston. The border maintained close lines of communication with Boston police and reminded officers to presume my father and uncles guilty until proven less guilty. In 1996, under the guise of “good border control,” Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) deported my father. The last time he was arrested in this country was around the start of 287(g) agreements that enabled the INS to cooperate with local police and round up “bad migrants.” My father was the one that many immigrant-rights activists had in mind when chanting, “We are not criminals.” In turn, “law abiding,” “hardworking,” and “desirable” migrants and their advocates esteemed themselves and their worth at my father’s expense. As Lisa Cacho writes, “Because undocumented immigrants are marked as indelibly ‘illegal’ across various institutions, mobilizing support for undocumented immigrants’ rights requires negotiating accusations of criminal intent… . By appealing to the needs of family members, immigrant rights advocates and their sympathizers attempt to lessen the perception of undocumented immigrants’ criminal culpability by emphasizing their commendable commitments to their families.”17 I would eventually learn how the INS and its successor, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), came to be key regulators of time and temporal redistribution. In privileging the “good” migrants over the “bad” ones, INS and ICE increased the time of “lawful permanent residents” through the expedited removal of those deemed “unlawful.”18
The last moment of coevalness I shared with my father in this country was when he was being escorted out of a courtroom in the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in Government Center. I was fourteen years old at the time. My mother and Ja-Ja were also present. None of us, including Amina and Noah, had a chance to say goodbye, show any type of affection, or say anything to my father that might preempt the perpetual pain inflicted by deportation and deported time. Instead we watched our father escorted out of the courtroom through double doors in an orange jumpsuit, chains around his ankles, waist, and wrists. Damn, I’ve been betrayed. Orange was supposed to be my favorite color. It was hard, though, to feel betrayed by a system that never cared for me and my father in the first place. Still, I could not help but wonder what kind of wretched system would deny a child the chance to hug, kiss, or even touch his parent before they are forever banned from the only place the child knew to be their home. Most survivors of the terror of la migra know that deportation is a process, not an event.19 The aftermath of deportation belies a specific temporal location. It was then and there, here and now, and awaits so many of us in the not-yet-here.
Deportation requires time and space to collaborate in highly malicious ways to ensure that the deportee remains suspended in space and time. The absence of a loved one creates an unwanted space, specifically a void. This emptiness, though, is as temporal as it is spatial. For example, without him inside it, my father’s crib on Humboldt Avenue Was hollow and devoid of coevalness. Postremoval train rides on the “T” required traversing not just space but time as well.20 And despite being hemmed in by other riders, I remained unaccompanied in my spatio-temporal journey. Parks were not what they used to be. Rather than remaining a place of play, Malcolm X Park became the site of psychic violence. Any attempt to hoop would require me to go back in time and retrace my father’s footsteps through the park’s deepest recesses and most discreet paths to the secret spot where he would enter his “heavens” and “hold a meditation.” Though I would not take my first sociology course for another six years, the “familiar” was quickly becoming “strange.” But the familiar was made strange not by the sociological imagination, but by deportation.
Postremoval, families and children of the deportees are left wondering how to move forward when deportation puts life on pause. Is it possible to make up for time that is taken rather than lost? What strategies help to maintain relationship continuity with the incarcerated and deported?21 Some may try to reassure those directly impacted by incarceration and deportation that time will heal all wounds. But how can time heal the same wounds it is complicit in inflicting? Is the rapper Nature right when he says, “The foulest thing about time, it still ticks when you’re gone”?22 Perhaps. It was quite clear that time had no problem ticking once my father was gone. Postremoval, I often felt that each tick (of the clock) brought another lick.23 How could time proceed so mercilessly and act with such impunity, as if it were not complicit in the evisceration of such a central spatio-temporal organizing part of our lives?24
Despite my wanting to treat this chapter as an interlude, deported time exceeds containment within an interstice. Postremoval, there is no “picking up where we left off.” There is only the obliteration of relations and the constant fumbling to pick up the pieces of what was. We would occasionally send my father and uncles barrels through local Caribbean shipping companies in Boston. Even though the barrels were filled to the brim with appliances, tools, clothes, and food not available in Trinidad, it was hard not to see them as only half full. Visits to T&T left a similar void and, in truth, only increased my anxiety and feelings of guilt. My father would always remind us to come and “check” him (or pay him a visit). He saw other deported fathers lose connection with their children in “foreign” and did not want us to forget about him.
When visiting my father, I was always extremely conscious of how to “use” time. As eager as I was to have a heartfelt conversation with my dad, it never felt that easy. Even as his child, I always had a hard time seeing him as approachable. When we asked him questions, he would pretend as if he did not hear us and simply remain silent. We were so intimidated that we refrained from asking the same question twice. This meant that most of the burning questions I wanted to ask were ironically placed on the back burner until the day before I left Trinidad or the half-hour car ride to the airport at five in the morning. I was young but empathetic. I knew that unloading all that was heavy on my mind, conscience, and heart would increase whatever burden my father was carrying. How could I disclose decades’ worth of experiences within the span of a half-hour ride to an airport? Who would be there to help my father carry the hefty weight of emotions, ideas, and questions once he dropped me off and began the drive back to the ghetto? I have never heard my father describe himself as depressed. But he didn’t have to tell it because it showed through his stoicism. I have seen my father cry only once. It was when I told him how I felt about his loyalty to the fast life. I told him that it felt like he put the streets and hustling before his family. I expressed frustration over knowing that he got to play the fun parent role, while my mother had to do the more challenging work of checking us on our misbehavior and making sure we were clothed, fed, and sheltered, all while holding on to the anxiety of whether she could keep us safe.
As I grew older, though, I became even more cautious about confronting my father. I tried to put myself in his position, without obliterating his suffering, and imagined what it must feel like to be so alone.25 Deportation is a form of punishment that takes on a sort of autopoietic character as deportees are left to question their integrity and their personhood.26 There is a sense of total powerlessness when the state forcibly removes a loved one through incarceration, deportation, and/or killing and then inflicts further pain through surveillance and retaliation against that person’s family. Still, unloading my feelings on my father began to feel far too selfish. I knew he would not speak to anyone. He rarely, if ever, goes to the doctor, and therapy is nearly an anomaly in Trinidad. I had to hold the hefty weight of wondering how my father would react if I were to try and communicate the extraordinary pain and anguish I felt after his deportation. Would he dig himself into further isolation? I could vent to loved ones, but who would he talk to? Would he stop writing me letters? Would he stop calling? Would he lose an appreciation for life? Deportation left all these questions unanswered because I was too afraid to ask.
In the wake of my father’s deportation, time inflicted greater pain through space (or the absence of it). Not being able to share space with my father meant that we could not share time. In fact, racialized violence took whatever time we allegedly had, through phone taps, tampered and stolen mail, the letter S on customs declaration forms (I assume the single or multiple Ses refer to some form of “selective screening,” similar to the four Ses found on boarding passes, which stand for Secondary Security Screening Selection), sliced-up suitcases (presumably part of the Transportation Security Administration’s “random” search process), being placed on “restricted” fly lists, and interrogations and detainment at the border. Racialized surveillance is another form of time theft. Due to my father’s fear of being monitored, most phone calls to him remain largely unintelligible and end with an abrupt hang-up. One of the most torturous effects of deportation is subscribing to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s claim that “there is no outside.”27 I remain uncomfortable disclosing too much information in handwritten letters or when speaking to my father by phone. Such experiences are more evidence of the impossibility of revisiting the past. There is no “making up for lost time,” precisely because time was never lost in the first place. It was stolen, along with my father.
With age came new ways of analyzing my father’s removal. I wondered about the inadequacy of “cruel irony” to describe what it means to be deported for selling what is now “decriminalized” and legal in most US states, including Massachusetts. My father never referred to what he did as “crime.” He called it “survival.” Saidiya Hartman’s engagement with Du Bois’s notion of “open rebellion” illustrates the transmutation of survival strategies into “crime”: “What was crime, but the open rebellion of an individual against his social environment? There was a widespread feeling that something was wrong with a race that was responsible for so much crime and that strong remedies were called for. Yet, how could they not rebel against the circumstances that made it impossible to live?”28 If my father’s hustling lifestyle was an act of rebellion against “circumstances that made it impossible to live,” why was he removed? Why were there no retroactive clauses to pardon him and others whose survival strategies were transmuted into “criminal activity”? Like most Rastafari, he maintained that ganja was the “healing of the nation.” So why did my father’s past take precedence over his prescience?29 The fact that I have yet to receive a “reasonable” answer to these questions is only greater evidence of the violent history of reason and the blanket immunity granted to progressive time as it marches onward, trampling over the multiply marginalized and dysselected.
The collusion between space and time sustains the prison-industrial complex and deportation regimes. So as I strive to think about ways to funk the clock, I must also think critically about the importance of transgressing space, including borders, jails, and prisons. When time comes to serve not only as a measurement device but also as a tool to protract pain, resistance to time becomes irresistible. As much as I have attempted to make space and let my biography inform my scholarship, there are so many stories left untold. It is easy to assume that returning someone to their country of origin marks the culmination of the removal process. But just as the border followed my father when he entered the United States, it passed the baton to immigration authorities in Trinidad, reminding us that deportation is a process and not an event. My father is still stopped, frisked, and shaken down by T&T police. During one of my previous visits, we were flagged three times in one trip at police roadblocks. After we were ordered out of Dad’s Nissan Sunny, police searched the car and us, while other officers looked on, tightly gripping their machine guns strung over their chests. They were holding their weapons so tight you would have thought the guns were trying to escape.
One of the worst encounters with police took place during the one trip that all my father’s children were on together for the very first time. We were on our way back from a river in St. Joseph when a jeep filled with police passed in the opposite direction. Each of the five officers maintained ice grills at each one of us as they passed. In Trinidad, it is fairly customary for drivers to greet one another, when passing on roads so tight that driver’s-side mirrors must be pulled in to avoid being broken off. I do not recall my father offering such a greeting to the officers, though. The officers’ scowls communicated everything my father needed to know about what was to come. Less than a minute after the police passed, they turned around and were right behind us. The cops sounded the siren and pulled us over as if we had just been in a high-speed chase, rather than driving ten miles per hour down a dirt road. They jumped out of the jeep with their guns drawn on all of us. By that time, most of us were accustomed to the shakedown. Most people who have been confronted by cops know that police are experts at asking the same condescending question in as many ways as possible. “Rastaman, yuh have any drugs in de vehicle?” “I smellin’ weed, rastaman. Yuh sure yuh ain’t have nothing in de car?” “Raise de trunk, nah. Wuh yuh have deh?” Despite my father maintaining that he had nothing on him, the police continued questioning all of us. My father explained that we were all his children, visiting from “foreign,” which is why we did not have any “ID cards” to present. Eventually the police let us go. The car was not the only thing left in disarray after the incident. Being humiliated, disrespected, and violated in front of all his kids left my father’s ego, pride, and dignity in shambles. We spent the ride back to San Juan processing the violence and listening to our father’s advice on how to comport ourselves when encountering police. Such incidents reminded us that “making up for lost time” with our father was both impossible and inaccurate. Our time was taken, not lost. So we should not be surprised when Dad still urges us to “teef time.”
The state’s antipathy to my family did not begin or end with my father. Two of my uncles were also deported. One died tragically in 2011, five years after returning to Trinidad. Back in the United States, the devolution of the state and the evisceration of social services and educational and employment opportunities required other family members to carry on tradition and hustle hard. So in the spirit of neoliberalism and the need to create an entrepreneurial self, other loved ones took up the charge of “personal responsibility” by dabbling in the fast life. They did so not because they wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps, but because legitimate opportunity structures never let them step foot in the door. So rather than remaining on the path of the straight and narrow, they choreographed insurgent temporal movements, including dipping and dodging, swerving, and sidestepping. They were not in any rush to be the last hired and first fired. They were in no hurry to be exploited by (s)low-wage work intent on taking their time and garnishing their wages. They were not about to make haste by working twice as hard to get half as far. And despite fatalistic conceptions of racialized youth in poor urbanized space, they were not in a rush to die. Instead they hustled to live.