Op-Ed: I Get Karmelo Anthony, I Carried A Knife To School Too

The knife rested comfortably in the kangaroo pouch of my borrowed Polo Hi-tech. It was 1994 and much like everything I wore back then, none of it was mine—mostly because my body betrayed me. 

By the time I was in 12th grade, I’d reached my full adult height, 6-foot-2, but I only weighed 150 pounds. My father used to say that if a feather coughed on me I’d fall over. Baggy clothes were in style, but my clothes were super baggy whether I wanted them to be or not. In fact, I was so thin that even when my pants were buckled and my belt was pulled tight I could slip them on and off like sweatpants.

And nothing I owned fit. So I started borrowing clothes because high school was tough, and no matter how much I hunched my shoulders, I couldn’t disappear. In ninth grade, right around the time I’d memorize my locker combination, I watched a white kid get jumped by three bigger guys. They locked him in a classroom and beat him bloody. That same year, Thracy, one of my closest friends, got jumped. They got him at lunch. Everyone got suspended. My lunch was after his and a friend caught me in the stairwell. 

“Don’t go to lunch,” he said. “They’re going to jump you, too.” 

I walked the halls until I got sent home. Later that night I heard my mother on the phone with Thracy’s mom. The next day my mother took me to school. She told the principal. He took out six different yearbooks and asked me to point out the boys who were threatening to jump me. 

My mom stopped the whole process, “Wait, you’re using yearbooks like a police lineup?”

She took me out of the school that day. She sent me to live with my dad. By 11th grade I was put out of school. I’d used up all my chances at a school that many would give their right leg to attend, but at this point I was fully in the street. My father sent me back to my mother. 

That’s when I started carrying the knife. I knew this school from ninth grade. I knew that they bussed two buses of knuckleheads from a tough neighborhood that many lived in as a last resort. I knew these neighborhoods from go-go tapes where you claim your block or your apartment complex, or your hood like soldiers claim military affiliation.

This was months before they killed CJ. They thought he was someone else. Two teens chased him, beat him and gunned him down. CJ walked the same path home that we all did. He lived in the same complex I lived in. CJ died on the same block as the high school. 

The two teens were charged as adults. 

I’ve always found that phrasing odd.

Charged as adults. 

It’s really the only thing a teen can do legally as an adult. Be charged. 

So I wasn’t tripping carrying the knife, I was actually steadying myself for what I knew was to come. Because it always comes. 

I was shadowboxing myself into manhood. That’s what I used to call it; too big to be a kid and too young to be an adult. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t throwing punches in the air. Forced to navigate the difficulties of urges, and rejections, and insufficiency, and blemishes with no guide map. This is around the time you learn to become embarrassed of your parents, and the car they drive, and the money they don’t make. Because high school is hard. Super hard. Arguably one of the hardest things many will do in their life.  

So I watched as folks took to X with their sanctimonious takes as to why a kid would have a knife in his backpack, I know because I did it; every day in my borrowed Polo Hi-tech because wearing the wrong thing was enough to get you jumped on. Because speaking up for yourself was enough to get you jumped on. Because just being, just existing, sometimes is enough to get you jumped on. Every day I would walk in the side entrance of the school and up to my locker. The jacket stayed on and the knife stayed with me. Sometimes I thumbed it in class to remind myself that although I felt lonely, I was not alone. Mostly it stayed as a reminder that should something break out I had something with me to even the score. And I hate to say this, but I 100% would’ve stabbed someone should something have happened, and not because they deserved it, but because I was afraid and in the funhouse mirror of adolescence, which sometimes shows something like a reflection, I believed that I was standing up for myself.

I cannot speak to Karmelo Anthony or what happened on that day that created an empty chasm that got filled in by everyone else’s racial experiences. But I know that no one sets out to put a knife in their book bag, it also doesn’t just happen to be there. The knife I carried was because I’d seen what happened and I didn’t want that to be me. Under any circumstances. Ever.

So I carried a knife in the kangaroo pouch of a borrowed Polo Hi-Tech jacket because I was afraid and I can say that now. I’d heard the stories of the N.Y. kid who moved to our area and got jumped by three guys; at one point in the fight, he hit the floor and got kicked in the stomach and shit himself and I knew then that wouldn’t be me.

So this is not in defense of Karmelo Anthony. I hate that this tragedy has befallen a high school. I hate the mugshot photos of a broken child just as much as I hate the video of a crying, grieving mother left to discuss her son’s life in memory. 

This is an American tragedy no matter how you frame it, and that cut has drawn sides in what feels like the beginning of a race war. Because you have to pick a side. And it’s eerie to think that a consequential decision as a teen can change the landscape of America, but remember when I told you high school was hard? This is what I meant.  

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