Watershed

March 16, 1991

“This is not television. This is not the movies. This is real life.” This was how Deputy District Attorney Roxane Carvajal cautioned a jury before showing them the last seconds of Latasha Harlins’s life, as captured by a security camera on March 16, 1991. The video showed the fifteen-year-old girl first struggling with Soon Ja Du, the owner of Empire Liquor Market and Deli on South Figueroa Street, then walking away, and finally falling down, having been shot in the head by Du.

I imagine March 5, 1991 while she was still abbreviation. I imagine myself:
high on sugar, Rap City, a boy. I imagine the Black man canvas under police
batons that mark him in symbolism blotted all over my screen. Pretty sure I
quickly memorized his name. I imagine March 16, 1991 when ticker tape
announced hers first & last; that I began the reluctant task of dispensing the
surprise of death into my fifteen-year-old imagination. I imagine that in her final
seconds it was surprise holding her upright before she crumpled into death;
surprise that fifteen was it. Surprise at the lump in her throat that had been for six
years her dead mother; that kept her company & quiet yet moved like stone
from tomb to tell this woman on this day that she had no intention of stealing
orange juice. Surprised maybe that legs trained on the track & in elaborate gum-
boot dances could not find power to escape heat so hot it was cool entering
the back of her UCLA Bruins cap. The curl in the bang that tickled her neck
flattened under the flow & weight of blood that met & darkened her dark blue
Dickies. Or surprise that it was 1991. Urban legends, not newspapers & sound
bites, recorded Black girl bodies as flimsy opportunities for entry, if they recorded
them at all. Surprised that her Black girl body was about to be history.

Maybe she heard her favorite music instead of the whistle that is the speed of life
passing around & through; all the Black girl bodies living & dying during that time,
like mine, imagining Mrs. Jewell, the wooden boards of her corner store holding us
barely. They creaked under the after-school weight of our bodies brown as; sassy with
hunger & salty insults hurled in the direction of her veiled mostly naked assaults like
spilling change on the counter to avoid contact with our skin. The women who knew:
Mrs. Rosita, my grandmother tried to bake & freeze us away from her store. I imagine
they did not want us to fall into a death with surprise & didn’t trust what entered us
from her spotted hands.

I imagine Tami’s skin light like a beacon to boys not as bright as the one I imagine
she followed having been raised Baptist. I imagine she was pregnant as the rumors
hissed by one of those probably also hissing boys & only as hot as any Black girl
body that moves through life with such velocity, who hears music over the whistle
& moves to it. I am not able to imagine if she held her body upright through
the hemorrhage, whether it was big or little, or how it might have surged through her
body like a bullet or the steadied pace of disease. When I remember Tami I only
imagine myself high on sugar, Rap City, & a boy; fifteen; abbreviated & impenetrable.

Celebratory Note

“Watershed” is a poem that cuts into the heart of the American racial dilemma with scalding clarity. This, alone, would make the poem an essential piece to read, but “Watershed” also captures the ongoing anxiety and vulnerability that, unfortunately, remains a chronic feature of the Black experience in this country. I was moved by this poem’s descriptive precision, deep empathy, and unflinching honesty.

—Tim Seibles, 2025 judge of the Graybeal-Gowen Prize