Before the next teardrop falls #10 is a quietly devastating small-format work from Deborah Roberts's ten-part series completed in 2022, combining mixed media and collage on panel to construct a portrait that carries an outsized emotional and political weight. The young subject emerges against a flat black ground, a compositional choice Roberts uses throughout the series to underscore the erasure of visibility that Black boys so often experience within American social structures. Rather than offering the viewer a face of composed innocence, Roberts presents a figure dressed in the striped overalls of a prison inmate, paired with an expression frozen in a raw, unsettling scream. That collision of childhood and carceral imagery is not accidental. It is the precise territory Roberts maps, where coded symbols interrupt the expected language of youth portraiture and force a reckoning with the assumptions society places on young Black boys before they have had the chance to simply be children. Roberts has spoken openly about the urgency behind this body of work, insisting that Black boys deserve the space to be as vulnerable as they genuinely are, and that the culture must resist the impulse to project threat onto them before offering them care. That conviction is embedded in every formal decision in this panel. The intimate scale, just 25.4 by 20.3 centimetres, compels a close, personal encounter with the subject, resisting the distancing that larger institutional formats can encourage. The signed work is presented framed and represents Roberts at a mature, critically engaged moment in her practice, coinciding with a period of significant international attention to her examination of race, gender, and the weaponisation of beauty standards against Black identity. For collectors, it offers both a formally precise object and an entry into one of the most morally serious conversations in contemporary American art.