Testing the brick’s heft in the palm of his hand, Darryl felt the rough edges graze his fingertips. Weighing about 5 pounds, the standard red clay brick he found in the ally measured 8-inches by 2 1/4-inches by 4-inches.

He wondered how much a football weighed, maybe as much as a 16 oz. can of Colt 45 Malt Liquor. Why did he think that? Shit, he was a walking, talking black stereotype of himself. That’s what the white man does, he thought, turns Black people into ads to harm their own community. Next thing you know I’ll be chain-smoking Kools, Darryl thought.

Staring back at him, his reflection shined in the plate-glass front store widow. Looking harmless, he knew he wasn’t harmless. No, Darryl was a Black man getting even for centuries of bondage, humiliation and death. Slave ship death, whipping death, lynching death, poor health death, police brutality death, enough death to fill history books never written about Black people and never taught even if they were.

The brick felt light, like a strong bird ready to fly.

The Sneaker Prince lights burned above the closed store, its display window highlighted with row after row of expensive running shoes, cross-trainers and other stylish brands for which children across the country had killed other children for years.

Why did sneakers mean so much to children who owned so little. Darryl thought he knew but didn’t really know anything. Why did Black people rob and steal and kill and sacrifice the future? Why did some Black people survive poverty and others succumb? Why did Black men and Black women kill each other in the name of love? Why did Black children die with a bullet in the brain?

Jews didn’t die like that.

Of course, some recent killers targeted Jews in mass murder synagogue attacks but that’s not what Darryl was talking about. The Jews he saw in the neighborhood lived in modern yet ancient tribes, dressing alike in black and white, wearing scraggly beards and curls, fur hats and fedoras, hanging with their own, speaking a garbled Yiddish gibberish nobody else could understand and raising their daughters to obey and serve the way their wives obeyed and served.

No Jew ever called Darryl sir. No Jew ever spoke to him on the street. No Jew did anything but take his money and isolate himself in his Jew tribe even more than before, like the Sneaker Prince, hawking his wares in a mixed neighborhood where too many Black people, particularly the elderly, struggled to survive.

Darryl had seen too many Black children in the hospital wearing hand-me-down clothes and cheap discount store sneakers. All those beautiful, new, shiny shoes sparkling in the light before him now threatened to send him over the edge.

The brick felt like magic in his hand, a simple weapon to turn dark to light. Leaning to his left, Darryl drew back his arm and tightened his grip on the brick. Bending his elbow and tightening his bicep, he harnessed enough basic physical energy to release the brick and send it smashing into the glass.

Darryl wound up and fired, feeling like David stoning Goliath.

Societal self-defense justified his action. Let the Sneaker Prince inflate the damage and file a big insurance claim with another Jew who never compensated Black people for their losses.

Darryl was through the broken widow before the last glass shard fell. Filling his arms with as many shoe boxes as he could carry, he climbed back to the street as the security alarm screamed. Within seconds a homeless man pushing a shopping cart climbed into the store, returning to fill his cart with boxes and run laughing down the street. A group of five teenage boys and two teenage girls screamed, laughed, cursed and ran in circles on the sidewalk, jumping up and down before they, too, disappeared through the open window and ran through the store grabbing whatever they could carry. A pack of young boys looking like high school athletes showed up for booty as well.

Darryl walked away with seven boxes balanced in his arms.

Black pain legitimized the looting. Payback exonerated the looters. Getting even explained the crime.

Jew or no Jew, the white man started this shit.

From now on Darry planned to take whatever he could carry until he couldn’t carry his own weight and carry on anymore.

Put it on my bill, he thought.