In the last two minutes Tommy gets down to the core issue faced by all children in our age-segregated and racially-polarized society, a threat that hits black children the hardest, and then hits the other races they interact with by way of the resulting hateful expression.

One of the skills I developed as the ghetto grocer was “putting paper on people,” documenting every workplace transgression so that I would be able to terminate them for threatening coworkers—fellow black coworkers. Firing a person for a pattern of harassment is very difficult to do and avoid paying their unemployment. The number of times middle-aged men threatened violence against coworkers for trivial things was astonishing. So, when Jetty called up Nelson and left him a threatening voicemail, I fired him for the cookies he didn’t rotate, three weeks in a row, not for the voicemail I never listened to while standing in front of the #10 can green been display.

I understand Tommy a lot better now.