Читать книгу When They Call You a Terrorist - Patrisse Khan-Cullors - Страница 13

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BLOODLINES

She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.

TONI MORRISON

Yet for all the ways that middle school challenges me, for all the culture shock and for all of my struggles with the math and science courses, there is one incident that defines it more than any other, and it has everything to do with police and nothing to do with police and everything to do with poverty and nothing to do with poverty. It has everything to do with being Black and nothing to do with it.

Just before I cross that sixth-grade elementary school stage, just before I head off to Millikan and Sherman Oaks, a confident graduate about to rush headlong into the next chapter of my life, my mother and I are out, shopping for groceries. At some point between the Cheerios being put in the cart and the milk, she turns to me and says, I need to talk to you when we get home. Okay, I say, though I wonder, Why not talk to me now?

At home, after the groceries are put away, she guides me into her bedroom, onto her bed, patting it for me to sit beside her. I do. She takes a deep breath. This is not a conversation that she wants to have. And then she just blurts it out. Alton is not your father, she says. He’s Paul’s and Monte’s and Jasmine’s. But in between Monte and Jasmine, we broke up and I fell in love with Gabriel and we had you.

Gabriel? I ask. Do you mean that man who has been calling the house for the last few months?

Yes, she says. Gabriel is your father. It is a statement that makes no sense to me.

Do you want to meet him? she asks.

Her words confuse me. I don’t know what to say, what to think. I don’t want any of this. In the background my mother is saying something about running into Gabriel, exchanging numbers, her telling him about me. But I barely hear these details. I am in prayer: Can everything be the same? Please, God? Please?

I look at my mother but none of this comes out. I try to speak but cannot. I pull and pull from a place inside me I cannot name and then I say, hard and quick, That would be okay. I want to meet my father.

From the time my mother tells me about Gabriel until I meet him a month later, there is no conversation about him in our home. There is no backstory. No this is how we met. This is how we fell in love. This is where you really come from. We are a family of survivors and a family of doers, but we are not a family of talkers. We do not process, my family, we do not take it all down to the bones of it. Gabriel goes undiscussed, exists almost like an imagined friend, or else someone I meet in dreams that are hazy, not quite knowable, but still present.

But there is this one time, this one conversation. It happens with Alton, the only father I’ve ever known. Six years he’s been gone from our home. Six years of him visiting only, and us never knowing when. I am 12 and I will not connect his disappearance from us to any larger social or structural disruption but only to the idea that we, the kids, must have done something wrong to make this big, loving man go away. I will not know how he had been disappeared from himself, disappeared from the only life he’d ever known: 20 years on the line at the GM Van Nuys plant and then nothing. Alton will find jobs well below his skill set at garages, but he will never again know stability or a living wage. And all I will know then is that I love him and I miss him. Alton with all his big emotion and laughter. Which is why on this day when he comes through the door, unbidden and loud, and says, Come on girl, let’s go get something to eat, I am grateful and bound out behind him. Little shadow follows big shadow.

We walk down the block holding hands. Down past the 7-Eleven where we get our groceries. Down past George’s Liquors, where I will one day buy cigarettes. Down to the small hole-in-the-wall, the Mexican spot with the name no one ever seems to remember. We order tacos, but before I can start eating, I look up at Alton, his brown face gleaming with sweat in the Van Nuys sun, and I see them, the tears, they are falling freely, incongruently with a man who looks like he does, all muscle tip-to-tip, a man who started lifting weights when he was 14 years old and never stopped.

Alton and his Jheri curl, his 501 jeans with the super-hard crease down the center, his Stacy Adams shoes. Alton and his 18-pack abs that peek out from the silk shirt he always wears mostly unbuttoned when he isn’t working. Alton whose masculinity is ripped from the headlines. His tears push for real.

Am I still your father? he asks.

Of course, I say.

We pause.

And then, about my mother: I didn’t want her to tell you, he says. I never wanted you to feel like you were half anything, step nothing. Like you weren’t mine. You’ve always been mine. I didn’t want you to feel different.

I cannot figure out how to respond. I have not been prepared for any of this. I only know I do not want to betray him, my Alton, my father. I want him to just feel what my 12-year-old heart, my 12-year-old brain, cannot find the words to say. I wish right then we would simply say I love you a million times but we don’t. It isn’t what we come from. We say nothing and just eat and are silent. But the tears are a sign. Everything is changing and I feel guilty. It all feels like my fault.

But I have to meet Gabriel.

A month after the conversation in the bedroom with my mother, and three weeks after the tacos and tears with Alton, I meet Gabriel for the first time. We make plans, a date, and I watch out the window until I see him walk up to our broken iron gate. He rings the bell and I am the one who lets him in. I am left breathless when I see him; we look exactly alike.

We don’t stay in the apartment long. My mother and he do not hug. She is not a hugger. But they are cordial. After five minutes we leave. We get on the bus and head to the movies, although what we saw is gone forever from my memory.

He does not have a car yet. He rides the bus to see me. We ride the bus to our date. I am awkward with Gabriel the whole time, unsure of what to say, how to act. It makes no difference to him. He hugs and kisses me throughout the day, the way you might do with a newborn baby, which in a way, to him, I am. I accept his affection, but do not return it. I am not yet comfortable with this new father in my life.

Gabriel tells me he lives in a home for sober adults. He tells me right away he’s in recovery from crack addiction. I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.

But without health care beyond LA County USC hospital, we can’t know about my brother. We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out. We are the post-Reagan, post–social safety net generation. The welfare reform generation. The swim or motherfucking sink generation. And, unlike our counterparts on Wall Street, where crack is used and sold more, we don’t have an employee assistance plan.

Later, when I am home, none of my siblings will ask me how it went. Did I like him? What did we do? I have shared everything with these three people: Monte, Paul and Jasmine. Secrets, fears, rooms, triumphs, disappointments. They all eventually tumble out of us. But not this one. This story is tucked inside a world only I live in.

And then one day after I meet Gabriel, my mom and I get into a terrible argument. I don’t recall what I say or do, only that I am angry at everything and everyone and I am talking back to her and she slaps me hard across the face. My brother Paul intervenes immediately. He takes me in his arms and he holds me. It seems like hours. He holds me and rocks me, my six-foot-two, 180-pound muscle-bound brother.

You will always be my sister, Paul whispers to me.

You will always be ours, he says.

A week after the movies comes Gabriel’s graduation. My father’s graduation. He’s been in a Salvation Army drug and alcohol treatment program. My mother is the one who takes me to it. We do not speak during the ride, but she has made sure my face is clean, my clothes are neat. Her daughter is presentable. We arrive at the Salvation Army, which is a church and also the sober living house where my father resides. My mother and I go to the graduation. I see my father for the second time. He is one of nearly 20 men who will be celebrated.

His large, almost unwieldy family—my family now—have gathered and no sooner does he rush to greet me, to scoop awkward me up, than so do they. I am awash in their kisses, their hugs. There are uncles, two of them that day, and three aunties. My father is one of ten siblings. This is your grandmother, Gabriel tells. She is small, short like me, five feet two, and her name is spelled Vina, but it’s pronounced Vi-KNEE. I don’t know why.

But Grandma Vina comes from Eunice, Louisiana, and her father was white and her mother was Creole. She—my new grandma—has long gray hair down to her butt, although she wears it brushed back into a bun. She is wearing sweatpants and sneakers and a t-shirt. I will learn that she is a Scorpio and that family is everything to her, her proof of life, of meaning. I will learn she cusses a lot, has a fourth-grade education, and my father was her first son and the first child of her own choice. She had two daughters before him but she didn’t raise those girls. I will learn that my aunties Lisa and Barbara were the products of rape.

A white man got her, my father tells me once when I ask why Auntie Lisa and Auntie Barbara always seem so angry.

A white man got Grandma Vina, and she was very young, he says. She couldn’t raise them girls. That’s all I know, he says, and we never speak of it again. No one does.

These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.

But I love my new grandma immediately, as soon as she smiles wide as the ocean and says, Well, well. Look at Ms. Brignac, after giving me the biggest hug of all hugs right before Darius, my father’s only other child, joins in. He is 20. I am his lost-and-found sister. We look at each other. We pause for a moment. We hug.

My father’s family is a cash-poor family, unlike my mother’s. My mother’s family is middle class. The only reason that we are poor is that my mother got pregnant young, which violated Jehovah’s Witness rules, sex outside of marriage and all that. They shun her and for years she will work and work to get accepted back into the Kingdom Hall, back into love. She sort of makes it, eventually, over years, but never in enough time to climb back into middle-class safety.

But my mother’s family, my mother’s world is nowhere to be found in this Salvation Army, in this church, in the rows and rows and rows of pews. Just this new world and I feel like an astronomer who has suddenly discovered a new planet. But a planet without Paul without Monte without Jasmine without Mom without Alton. A planet without the me who exists alongside the people I live and fight and love with.

I don’t know how to sort my feelings, which is why, with no other choice, I set them aside. And soon enough, when I am in the presence of Grandma Vina and my father and my uncles and aunties and Darius, they stop occurring to me. I am officially two Patrisses. My mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter, which don’t quite add up to one whole child.

But on this day, I don’t concern myself with that. I listen, instead and intently, as my father gives a speech about having his family back. He talks about healing and he talks about our right to it. As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of other supports, including the general sense that their life matters.

But what is consistent in this moment—and all the moments that will follow that I am in 12-step rooms—is that I will learn there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.

And on this day, in this hour, my father is humble.

My father apologizes.

Have I ever heard an adult apologize?

Did Alton ever say sorry for leaving us, for us being hungry? Did GM ever apologize to him or the hundreds of others whose lives were entirely disrupted by its closure—with no plan for what they could do next to support themselves and their families, no plan to continue a life with dignity? But here is Gabriel apologetic and public and I have no context for it. My mother is secretive. Ours is a home where grown folks’ business is grown folks’ business. Gabriel is public. Even in the moments of shame. He always returns to truth and honesty. He talks to the audience but I know he is really talking to me, talking to his family. He praises us. He thanks us for not throwing him away, for staying by his side when he went to prison, which is how our society responded to his drug use.

Later, when I get home no one asks me, How did it go? What was it like? Who else was there? I don’t remember any conversation at all, as though there wasn’t this whole universe growing just outside our door. I remember going into my room, going to sleep, getting up the next day and heading to school. And everything was everything.

From this point onward, Gabriel is immediately and continually present. After the Salvation Army graduation, he starts picking me up every single Friday and we go to Grandma Vina’s house, where there is always a huge collection of family members. My father’s family is a sports family, with football games, college and professional, held up like holy moments. But it doesn’t really matter. Football, baseball, basketball, golf for goodness’ sake, tennis, hockey. You name it, my uncles had the stats on it. But nothing was like the weekends of football and my Grandma’s poor man’s gumbo—gumbo without the seafood, only chicken, in it.

Now and again in these moments I think of Paul, Monte and Jasmine—and Alton—whose presence is far less predictable. I wonder, though briefly, what that feels like, to watch me disappear each weekend with my found father. But with no answers, no guide, mostly I just bathe myself in these loud, Southern people who look like me and who dance like me and slowly and slowly, I begin to feel like one of them, feel like a Brignac.

I learn to look forward to things I’d never before considered, like Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays. Coming up in the Kingdom Hall meant we never celebrated these things; they’re not in the Bible and we took the Bible pretty damn literally. I used to go, as a fourth grader, to school with my Bible and my Watchtower. I would read aloud from them to my classmates and I never, never felt like I was missing anything by not celebrating Christmas because being in the Kingdom Hall made me feel special, anointed. But now I am with another group, Catholic people, and they love God and they celebrate and eat food and laugh and cuss, although they don’t exchange gifts because who has money for gifts? But the love fills us to overflow.

Eventually, Gabriel, who could always find some low-level job no matter what, gets a car of his own—a gold-colored Lincoln Town Car, and we’re really off and running then. He does things my mother never could, my mother with her job piled on job, shift piled on shift. But Gabriel has the time and more, the heart for me and my now early teenage friends. We pack his car with our bodies and our stories and he drives us to movies, to pizza, to wherever our 13-year-old hearts desire. He never tells us we are too loud although surely we are too loud.

But it isn’t only movies and friends and family and football. Gabriel is deeply invested in his healing and one day he says, Come on, and we jump in the car and drive into the San Fernando Valley, the real hood part, Pacoima, and we pull up to a church and get out. Come on, my father tells me, and I follow him down into a room where a small group of men are meeting.

There was never a time in my childhood that I can recall when people did not call me an old soul, and maybe that’s why my father thought I could handle being in his 12-step meeting. Or maybe because, like me, he always wanted a road dawg with him. But while I remember how overwhelmed I was by men talking about things they’d done that had hurt their families while they were struggling with addiction—their absences from family life was a repeated theme—and I remember my father talking about hiding, how he never wanted his family to see him high, what I recall most thinking about was that the honesty was life-giving. As I attended these meetings over the years and after I spent time working as an adult counselor myself, I wondered: Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.

But more than anything in those first years, the meetings make me closer to Gabriel, closer to my father. We go for an hour and I listen to men tell their stories and cry and I watch them hold and support one another and then my father finds some small spot to eat—there was a Filipino place he loved best—and we process his life, our life, what it means to build and be in a relationship together.

I’m not here to take you away from anyone, he tells me more than once. I’m just here to add to your life in a way that’s good and useful. I believe him. I lean into him, my spirit does. Children so rarely get to see adults be so honest and open and accountable in a way that is grounded, not reactionary. I could not name it then, how these conversations left me, but they start to change me, begin to commit me to being the same.

Still, it isn’t all intense meetings and talk of failures and sobriety. It is also many weekend barbeques at the park where my dad and his brothers play baseball. They’d formed an adult league, uniforms and all, and during the season, we all go and cheer them on and eat. These are the moments I love the most, the moments when the animosity between siblings falls by the wayside, and they only happen when my father is present and well, I am told. When he is absent, the games are, too.

But when he is present, we make time in the park, and the siblings, not all from the same father, come together. The first two girls who hadn’t been raised by Grandma Vina, the girls who were children of my grandma’s rape, even come. My father is the third child and the first child of her choosing. My grandma had been a mistress and my father was the only baby from that union. The next set of children were born after her marriage to a man no one speaks of anymore, a man who was abusive, physically and emotionally. My Grandma coddles these children, even now, perhaps trying to soothe the wounds their father caused, while Barbara and Lisa seethe in the background, their father the white man, their father the rapist.

When the anger boils over, as it often does, it is Gabriel everyone goes to. Gabriel is Switzerland or maybe the original idea of the UN. He processes with them, pushes them to forgive, to choose love. He uses his thin brown body and his big beautiful heart as salve, as medicine. With Gabriel any one of them, any one of us, can appear unmasked and unafraid and he pulls us close. He tells us he cherishes us. Makes us feel things will settle and be all right. Look at me, he says. He reminds us love wins. And for me, a girl from a home of little verbal expression and even less physical expression, I start to know a freedom I hadn’t realized I needed. I start to feel something like home in my own skin and sinew, bones and blood. I want this never to end. To go on and on. To forever be the normal I know. Only nothing is forever.

And as it was three years before, it is my mother who tells me. A week maybe more has passed and I cannot reach my father and this man who has called me daily, this man who has never missed a weekend, is suddenly a ghost. I make calls, my mother does too, and then one night she sits me down on her bed.

It’s your father, she says. He is going back to prison.

And in the room where my mother once told me that I had a new father, the room where she has now told me I have lost my new father, I collapse. I know prison had been part of Gabriel’s life, but it had not been part of the life we shared together. Our life together was about healing. I have no concept of my father this way, captured, in chains.

And my father, gone but still present, a space in my heart. I don’t understand, I sob to my mother. She tells me it’s true. She tells me my Grandma Vina is the one who confirmed it.

Mom had called and called in this age before the ubiquity of mobile phones and after three weeks, maybe four, she got Grandma Vina. And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening. I don’t even learn—although I guess—that he is reincarcerated on a drug charge. But I don’t ask. I don’t know to ask.

It will be more than a decade before I meet the advocate and scholar Deborah Small, who will say that this is a nation founded on addiction—the production of rum and other alcohols, tobacco, sugar. And now, she will say, they put people in prison for it. Prison was not always the response to drug use, she will say to a me who is grown and able to process what became of a man I loved.

But when I am a girl, a teenager heading into my junior year in high school who is crying in my mother’s bedroom, I only know one thing. If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?

In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it’s locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time. A generation of human beings, Black women, Black children and Black men, including my father and eventually my brother, who are viewed as having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners.

Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.

And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding. Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.

There are no rulebooks to guide you through losing a parent to incarceration, although the year my father goes back, there are literally ten million children living in the United States who know this loss.

But there are no self-help books and there are no prayers.

Michelle Alexander has not yet written The New Jim Crow.

Barack Obama has not yet been elected and has not left office with the largest reduction in federal prisoners in history.

The racially discriminatory sentencing imbalance between crack and powder cocaine has not yet been addressed.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have not yet flowed into non-profits to fight mass incarceration.

Bill Keller has not left his high post at The New York Times to assume leadership at the Marshall Project, and Justice Strategies has not created its blog for children of the incarcerated.

Angela Davis has not yet asked us, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Ruthie Gilmore has not yet done breathtaking research on prisons in California and beyond.

But in the small world you occupy in El Barrio in Van Nuys, you do not know that there are millions of teenagers and children feeling what you are feeling, experiencing what you are experiencing, the disorientation, the loss of stability, of safety, the sure knowledge that you can wake up one morning and find anyone, maybe everyone, gone.

You only know what you can calculate:

He will miss your high school performances.

He will miss your graduation.

He will miss four birthday celebrations—your eighteenth!

There will be no more Thanksgivings at Grandma’s, no Christmases.

The kisses and hugs that once embarrassed you and then sustained you will also be gone.

You do not have words to explain any of this, the full measure of the loss. Do words even exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures that approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like?

This is why you tuck it away quietly in secret pockets.

This is why you act like you are fine.

This is why you go to school and pretend that algebraic equations that never add up to your father coming home make some kind of sense.

This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.

I can’t breathe.