‘I have a black son in Baltimore’: Anxious new parents and an era of unease

BALTIMORE >> He assembled the crib and mounted the bookshelves. She unpacked the bedding and filled the closet with onesies and rompers. Then husband and wife stood in the nursery and worried. Bill Janu, a police officer, is white. Shanna Janu, a lawyer, is black. As they eagerly awaited their baby’s birth this spring, they felt increasingly anxious.

They had chosen not to find out their baby’s gender ahead of time. But their nearly two years of marriage had been punctuated by the killings of African-American men and boys in Ferguson, Mo.; Brooklyn; Cleveland; North Charleston, S.C.; and Baltimore, all at the hands of the police. Bill Janu, who longed for a son, tried to reassure his wife. Shanna Janu emailed him one article after another, warning of the perils that face black boys.

As the due date approached, Bill Janu found himself praying for a girl.

In the delivery room at St. Agnes Hospital, after more than 20 hours of labor, the infant finally arrived, red-faced and wailing. The newborn had Bill Janu’s blue eyes and Shanna Janu’s full lips and nose. The new father exulted. Then he felt the weight of his new reality.

“Now, I have a black son in Baltimore,” the white police detective remembered thinking as he cradled his baby boy.

Wesley William Janu, born on May 23, 2016, smiled for the first time during a summer bloodied by the worst confrontations between African-Americans and the police in decades: The back-to-back killings in July of black men in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., followed by the killings of five officers in Dallas and three more in Baton Rouge. This month, protesters burned buildings and clashed with law enforcement officers in Milwaukee after an armed black man was shot to death there by the police.

The violence has been wrenching for families like the Janus, an interracial couple struggling to straddle the nation’s racial fault lines in a red brick row house in a quiet corner of Baltimore. But the heated national discussions over policing and race feel particularly piercing for a black woman born in the South and her white husband who wears a badge.

They know their son is taking his place in the world at a time of promise and unease. Wesley will learn to sit up on his own during the final term of the nation’s first African-American president. He will celebrate his first birthday in 2017, the year that will mark the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision that overturned state bans on interracial marriage.

By the time he is 28, more than half of the population in the United States will very likely be members of ethnic or racial minority groups or mixed race, according to the Census Bureau.

Yet this is also a time when black and white Americans find themselves deeply divided. In Wesley’s face, there are glimpses of the country’s racial future, yet that future often feels uncertain and unsettled.

Born in Louisiana, Shanna Janu grew up in a predominantly white suburb in upstate New York, joined a white sorority in college and married a white detective. Yet these days, she fears that racism and bias might be “hard-wired” into society and wonders how that might affect her family.

She worries as her husband holsters his Glock .22, kisses her goodbye and heads out the door to pursue gun runners and violent criminals in this predominantly black city. Will he be a target now on the street?

She worries as she has adjusted to the rhythms of round-the-clock feedings and diaper changes. What dangers might Wesley face as a teenager at the hands of the police?

And then there is the racial divide that runs right through her living room, the issues that occasionally create a rift between husband and wife. Shanna Janu, 31, is a strong supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement, for instance, while Bill Janu, 42, argues that some of its activists “do more harm than good” and spew “a lot of hate” toward the police.

“Am I being a disloyal law enforcement wife because I do feel so strongly for Black Lives Matter, because I do feel such a strong affinity for the movement?” asked Shanna Janu, describing her internal turmoil during 12 weeks of maternity leave.

“I try to see both sides of it,” she said. “It leaves me a little bit torn.”

The warnings flashed on Bill Janu’s cellphone after nightfall on July 7 as he cruised through downtown Baltimore in his unmarked police car. It was his first inkling that a calamity was unfolding. 

“Watch your back,” one friend texted.

“Be safe out there,” another wrote.

At home, Shanna Janu was trying to erase the image of a dying black man from her mind. She had delighted that day in one of Wesley’s milestones, when she realized he was following her every move with his eyes, and recorded the thrill in an app tracking his development.

But then, as she was nursing her baby, she signed onto Facebook and there was Philando Castile, slumped and bleeding in his car in Minnesota, while his girlfriend filmed her confrontation with the officer who had shot him.

Shanna Janu scrambled to press the pause button, but she had already seen too much. She sat stunned on the sofa, with Wesley in her arms, reliving her fears about his future.

She was asleep by the time Bill Janu came home. By then, he knew why he had received the urgent texts. Five Dallas police officers had been shot to death that night. Shaken, he stayed up all night, flipping between CNN, MSNBC and Fox until dawn. Only then did he talk to his wife about what had happened in Texas.

“All I wanted to do was hug her,” he said.

The couple met six years ago, casually introduced by mutual friends who were shocked when they got together. Shanna Janu, who is wry and bracingly frank, had vowed never to date a police officer. She had grown up hearing her parents’ stories about ugly encounters between African-Americans and the police in the segregated South.

She remembers the day her father was pulled over. She was 7 at the time, sitting in the back seat. And she still remembers the pains he took afterward — checking and rechecking his turn lights and headlights — to ensure that it would never happen again. “Bullies,” she said, matter-of-factly describing the men she assumed joined the force.

Bill Janu, who is stocky, bald and bearded, looked like a character in a television crime drama. He had spent a decade in the military and a decade on the police force, mostly in a specialized squad that focused on gun sales and gun offenders.

But he was unlike any officer she had encountered. He was silly and cracked her up. He had studied marine biology in college, loved travel and art and shared her nostalgia for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the cult television series. (The Janus named their son and one of their dogs, Buffy, a Maltese poodle mix, after characters in the show.)

His father, who abhors interracial relationships, stopped speaking to him. Bill Janu was undeterred by his disapproval, and by the stream of news articles and blog posts that Shanna Janu emailed him, warning about the challenges facing interracial couples and parents of biracial children.

But the pain still surfaces. A year ago, Bill Janu bumped into his father while he was visiting family near Cleveland. His father stood up without speaking, strode to his white convertible and locked the door. Bill Janu chased after him, pounding his fists on the car windows.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” he remembered shouting before his father drove off.

Sometimes, the Janus manage to put that aside, the knowledge that their son might never meet his paternal grandfather, and their fears about what he might face as a young man.

They lose themselves in the cocoon of their two-story home, shouting out answers to the contestants on “Family Feud,” chatting about the summer electric bill, the paperwork for day care and their perennial efforts to prod Wesley to nap just a little bit longer, which most recently involved the purchase of an outfit called “Baby Merlin’s Magic Sleepsuit.”

“He slept for three hours!” Shanna Janu announced gleefully to her astonished husband one recent evening when he arrived home from work.

They focus on Wesley — Bill Janu calls him “Little Man” — on the grip of his fingers, the pout of his lower lip, the way he scales tall buildings with his eyes. “I think he wants to climb them,” joked his father, who envisions his boy hurling a football and sliding into home plate.

But this summer, the ugliness of the outside world has always seemed to intrude.

Just days after the Dallas shootings, one of Bill Janu’s colleagues, an officer who had attended his wedding, narrowly escaped a spray of gunfire. Some in the department worried initially that the assailant had intended to ambush the police.

Two weeks later, as Shanna Janu was pulling the new sleepsuit out of the package, Bill Janu called to tell her that his squad was bracing for protests. The state’s attorney in Baltimore had announced that she was dropping the case against the officers charged in the death of Freddie Gray, a black man who was found to have a fatal spinal cord injury after being transported in a police van. Shanna Janu, who works for the federal government on the Affordable Care Act, was still on maternity leave.

“There’s going to be rioting — is that’s what you’re saying?” asked Shanna Janu, her phone tight to her ear, as she bounced Wesley on her hip.

This city remained calm. But this month, the fires were burning in Milwaukee. And the Justice Department released a scathing report, accusing the Baltimore police of systematically stopping, searching and arresting black residents for minor offenses, often without cause.

Wesley is blithely unaware of the tumult. But his parents have already begun preparing what to tell him, when the time comes.

Don’t do things that bring too much attention to yourself, even if your white friends are doing it. You can’t go running around in a hoodie. Don’t run into someone’s yard and grab a ball. If a police officer tells you to do something, just do it.

Shanna Janu considers herself the no-nonsense, practical parent, but the list fills her with sadness. “Black boys aren’t allowed to be innocent or young,” she said. “They don’t have that privilege.”

Bill Janu felt bewildered at first by such talk. He is the optimist in the family, the dreamer. He had never imagined such a discussion with his son. “You wouldn’t have to explain that to a white child,” he said.

He said he had lived most of his life “with blinders on.” His conversations with his wife have opened his eyes.

In the past, Bill Janu said, he often assumed that the black boys he saw on impoverished street corners were criminals-to-be, youngsters destined for handcuffs. Now, he looks for the exuberance in the faces of the wisecracking, jostling boys still savoring the waning days of summer.

He hopes that other police officers will see that, too, someday, in his son.