Xavier Diallo had been playing the cello since he was nine years old, which meant that for seven years the instrument had been growing with him the way a tree grows with a fence, each of them shaping the other. His first cello had been a quarter-size loaner from his elementary school, varnished a violent orange, with a wolf tone on the D string that his teacher charitably called character. His second had come from a church basement sale. The one he played now, a warm brown instrument with a repaired crack along the bass bar that you could feel under your thumb like a healed scar, belonged to the city youth orchestra's instrument library, and he treated it the way other boys his age treated things they had earned: carefully, and without being told.
He was sixteen, a sophomore at a public high school on the east side of Baltimore where the music room had one working radiator and a piano that had been tuned, by general agreement, to itself. He played in the school orchestra, which was small, and in the youth orchestra, which was not, and on Saturdays he took the bus across town to a church hall where a retired conservatory teacher, a patient woman who charged by the month what she thought a family could pay, wrote the amount in a ledger in pencil, as if the figure were negotiable with the past. Xavier practiced in the morning before school because the rowhouse walls were thin and his father said a cello at six in the morning was a kindness to the neighbors compared to a cello at ten at night, and because in the morning the house was quiet and the light came through the kitchen in a way that made the scales feel less like an obligation.
His father, Moussa Diallo, was a counselor at a middle school three bus stops from their house, a man who had kept, for twenty-six years, a practice of writing down the name of every student he counseled in a series of clothbound notebooks, not what they had said, only that they had come, because he believed the record of having been listened to was itself a kind of property a child should own. His mother, Renee Diallo, had been the chief of police of the city for four months. She had come from out of state, from a department two time zones west, after a search that had taken the mayor the better part of a year, and she had arrived in Baltimore with a reputation that preceded her in the way weather precedes a storm: competent, exact, uncharmed by ceremony. Most of the officers in her own department had never met her. She had addressed the command staff, she had toured the districts, she had stood in roll calls and learned names at a rate her aides described as unnerving, but the patrol force of a city is a large country, and a sixteen-year-old boy detained on a curb would not have been able to pick her photograph out of a lineup of chiefs.
The Diallos had talked about this, in the way the family talked about everything that mattered, at the kitchen table, without drama. When the appointment was announced, Moussa had said to his son: your mother is going to hold an office that some people will use as a reason to treat you better and some people will use as a reason to treat you worse, and both of those are wrong, and neither of them is under your control. What is under your control is the record you make of yourself. He had not meant it as a speech about police stops, but it became one, the way family sayings migrate. The family's rules for being stopped were older than the appointment and had nothing to do with it. Moussa had taught them the summer Xavier turned thirteen, at the same kitchen table, with the seriousness of a man teaching the use of a stove: hands where they can be seen, voice level, answer what is asked and nothing extra, ask for a supervisor if things go wrong, and remember badge numbers the way you remember a phone number, by repeating them to yourself twice. Renee had listened to all of it and added only one sentence, which was: and then you call us, and we will handle the rest of it from the record.