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Throughout my childhood, my parents were constantly lecturing me about respecting authority, working hard and preserving our family’s good name. I was born in Red Deer, Alberta, and soon after, we moved to Oshawa, where my father was a mental health nurse and my mother a registered nurse who worked with the elderly. My parents immigrated to Canada from Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the mid-1970s. That afternoon, my imposing father and cocky cousin had trembled in fear over a discarded Kleenex. “Yes, Uncle,” Sana whispered, his head down and shoulders slumped. “You realize everyone in this car is black, right?” he thundered at Sana. We drove off, overcome with silence until my father finally exploded. After Sana returned, the officer let us go. The cop seemed casually uninterested, but everyone in the car thrummed with tension, as if they were bracing for something catastrophic. “He’s going to pick it up right now,” he assured the officer nervously, as Sana exited the car to retrieve the garbage. This was the first time I realized he could be afraid of something. My dad isn’t a big man, but he always cut an imposing figure in our household. “Yes,” my father answered, his voice shaky, like a child in the principal’s office. A hush came over the car as the stocky officer strode up to the window and asked my dad if he knew why we’d been stopped.

Within seconds, we heard a siren: a cop had been driving behind us, and he immediately pulled us onto the shoulder. Catharines, Sana tossed a dirty tissue out the window. One day, we took Sana and his parents on a road trip to Niagara Falls. I was his shadow during his visit, totally in awe of his confidence-he was always saying something clever to knock me off balance. He was tall, handsome and obnoxious, the kind of guy who could palm a basketball like Michael Jordan. The summer I was nine, my teenage cousin Sana came from England to visit my family in Oshawa.