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MAGNITUDE AND BOND

We are each other’s harvest;

We are each other’s business;

We are each other’s magnitude and bond

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

Just as I am beginning to adjust to all the changes that becoming a Brignac brought on, I have to adjust to what it means to set them aside. My father’s family loves me, but with only four years together, I am still not fully part of their everyday. Which is to say that with my father out of sight, so am I, and it will remain this way for all the years he is gone.

I do not see them.

We do not talk on the phone.

We are a part of each other’s past; and looking ahead toward an unknowable future, it begins to dawn on me the full measure of the role that my father played in the family, the literally magnetic role.

Gabriel pulled us closer. He was the reason for our family to all come in from the rain. Together. With him gone, there are no more uncles playing baseball every weekend, my cousin Naomi tells me. We go, for a time, to the same high school, and she is the one who keeps me in the loop.

There are no more football Saturdays together.

There’s no more poor man’s gumbo eaten together over laughter and shouted conversations.

There are holidays, but without Gabriel’s healing spirit to make the room easy, I can’t imagine what those holidays are possibly like. And anyway, I am not invited.

Still I have come to love Gabriel and he loves me and we seek to stay connected.

I cannot go to see my father without an adult to take me and even if I could, I don’t want to go alone. Gabriel and I stay in touch through letter writing. Our letters are brief. My father always opens his in the exact same way:

Dearest Patrisse,

I hope this letter finds you well . . .

In each letter he apologizes. He says he misses me. In each letter he promises us better, brighter times.

In my responses, I tell him I miss him, too. I say I cannot wait to see him again. But in the letters we do not speak of the prison itself, his experience inside, locked up and away. We do not talk about what he was convicted of, although I suspect it’s drugs because drugs are what I know most people seem to be getting locked up for. But in those letters, those weekly notes, it’s almost as though he could have been writing from a school or a country far, far away. Which is why I do not tell him about my life, either, the interior of it and in particular Monte, who, right behind my father, is also sent to prison.

There comes a day when I am at dance class and it is Monte’s job to come and pick me up. He doesn’t, but I don’t panic. He has, by that time, started acting strangely. There was the day he burst into my room excited and full of love. This is for you, Trisse, he had said, and handed me a ten-dollar bill, all crisp and fresh. Before the night was over he returned, eyes desperate and pleading. Trisse, can I get that ten dollars back, he asked softly but insistently. Of course I gave it back, along with a piece of my spirit.

But my mother, whom I call on the day Monte doesn’t come to get me, tells me to take the bus home, which I do, giving me time to think about my brother. I figured he was getting high, the cause of the wild mood swings, the hours spent locked in the bathroom when I’d hear him sobbing.

Monte, I’d say from one side of the door. Monte, let me in! I love you!

Go way Trisse, he’d sob, and then refuse to speak anymore.

Except when he did speak more. Because that was the other side of him. There were days and nights when my brother did not sleep, when he chattered on incessantly, was sure like no one has ever been sure before that he could grab this thing, this life, by the horns and go! I don’t, we don’t, know which Monte will greet us on any good morning, on any long night. And in many ways, we just go with it, I just go with it. We don’t know what else to do and, besides, doesn’t Monte have a right to his inconsistent space? He never knows how the world will greet him, after all.

I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested. Once, when I was 12 we were just walking down the street, Monte and I, and a cop we saw regularly came up to us.

Are you Monte Cullors? he barked.

Yes, my brother responded.

And that was it. In front of me he handcuffed Monte and took him away. I had no idea what for. To this day I have no idea what for. All I know is that this was a common occurrence. And not just with Monte. It’s hard for me to think of a boy in my neighborhood who didn’t spend time in juvenile hall, or wasn’t arrested at least once.

It is interesting to me now to think that at the time this was happening, a time when my mother worked multiple jobs that still barely amounted to a livable wage, a time when Alton had been closed out of the industry he’d given his life to and no replacement had been offered or created, and a time when Gabriel was given prison rather than treatment, Americans, Black and white, were deeply involved in the final push to end apartheid in South Africa. At his trial at Rivonia, Nelson Mandela would say the following in his famous “I Am Prepared to Die” speech:

Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships . . . poverty and lack of human dignity. . . . The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion. . . .

They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions—that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school.

He continued,

Poverty and the breakdown of family life have secondary effects. Children wander about the streets of the townships because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go to school, or no parents at home to see that they go to school, because both parents (if there be two) have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to . . . a growing violence which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous. . . .

Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing. . . . Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society. . . .

Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent.

In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising. Monies were being spent unequally for schools. Our programs were cut. Our parents had the most meager of jobs. Our families were torn asunder. I begin to realize this when I am provided a basis for comparison. Like the one I get when I am still in middle school at Millikan.

There, I am close friends with Tiffany, a white girl who goes there. She, like the other children, lives in Sherman Oaks and there comes a day when she invites me home with her for dinner. I go. And as the sun begins to set, we, the whole family plus me, gather in a fully separate dining room and the sweet, round man who is her father asks us about our day, what we learned, what we cared about and dreamed of for ourselves. Have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up, Patrisse?

It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.

Have I ever known such a moment in my own home? My mother is gone before 6:00 in the morning each day and home after 10:00 at night. This is our life. This has always been our life. And while we live and we love and we laugh, there is also an unmitigated and unmitigating arc of pain that is there, has always been there, just below the surface. We suspect that things are not supposed to be this way but we aren’t sure what the other way is.

But in any case I am having dinner at my friend’s home, at her table, with her parents and I will tell you now that the sweet, round man, the father who asked his daughter—and me!—about our day and our dreams, I will tell you that over a few visits and discussions about life and where I lived we, he and I, come to realize that we know each other, the father and I. Or, at least he knows my mother.

He is, this father, this gentle inquisitor of my days and my dreams, to put it frankly, our family’s slum lord. He owns many buildings there in our Van Nuys hood, our poor hood. Our colored hood. Our building is one of the ones he owns. He is the very same man who allowed my family to subsist without a working refrigerator for the better part of a year. The coincidence is so shocking to me. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I think if I say something, someone would think I was making it up, eating a big meal with a friend whose sweet father doesn’t care that my family has no way to do the same. I could understand someone thinking I was lying, embellishing, at the least, for dramatic effect.

But I wouldn’t have been. And I’m not now.

It is as true as the fact that our Van Nuys neighborhood, bordering as it did the wealthy white neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, was ground zero for the war on drugs and the war on gangs. There could be no spillover of us, the others, the dark others. We, our poverty and our music and our different foods and our reminders that they, the residents of our pretty adjacent neighborhood, were wealthy only at our expense, could not seep into the neat white world of Sherman Oaks. Of course that’s not what they said, that they didn’t want to be reminded of what it took to keep themselves rich.

It was the 1990s and what was mostly said—in carefully chosen language—was that being born Black or Mexican was enough to label you a gang member, a dangerous drug-involved criminal. And there were few leaders, save for perhaps Maxine Waters, saying that it was all bullshit. A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang. And it was mostly boys rounded up in those years. Boys, the initial wide swath of collateral damage in the war on gangs, the war on drugs, both of these names code for round up all the niggers you can.

There was no education plan for us—school budgets had been decimated and a decade before Reagan had declared ketchup was a vegetable so that’s what we were fed, we who counted on school breakfast and lunch to get through the day. With no education plan for us or thought about us becoming arbiters of our own destiny or self-determining contributors to an economy designed to reward only a few, the only plan left for us was prison or death.

If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy. And the apprenticeship for this kind of work, the work that gets done in prisons, it started young. It started when Monte and his friends were way little. Little boys were cycled in and out of detention centers, places where they were trained and tracked, readied for longer stretches in prisons far away. They were often beaten and abused, regularly humiliated by having to strip, piss and shit publicly, left to discover their sexuality in the presence of people who hated them, and then they were sent back out to tell people they were hard, they were strong and they were a human testimony to other little boys: This is your future. Get ready. Man the fuck up.

And although I don’t agree with this approach to public safety, I suppose it could be argued forcefully that the removal of one difficult person, the local thief or bully, perhaps, makes a community more safe.

But for us, for Black people, the mass incarceration of first our fathers and later our mothers made our lives entirely unsafe. There were almost no adults who were there, present to love and nurture and defend and protect us. There was almost no one to say our dreams and our lives and our hopes mattered. And so we did it ourselves, the best way we knew how.

This, more than anything, was the evolution of gangs in Van Nuys. The groups of kids they first called gangs were really young people who were friends, they were my friends, and they took a defensive posture against what looked and felt like an actual advancing army that came in on foot and came in police cars for which the county had appropriated ever more dollars to patrol us with. And worse than the cars, most frightening of all, were the helicopters overhead. At all hours of day and night they hovered above us, shone lights into the midnight, circling and surveilling, vultures looking for the best next prey.

And there was Monte. My Monte. My brother.

He and his friends—really all of us—were out there trying to stay safe against the onslaught of adults who, Vietnam-like, saw the enemy as anyone Black or Brown who moved. He and his friends were not only busted but sent away for:

1. Tagging

2. Underage drinking

3. Carrying two-inch pocket knives

4. Cutting class

5. Being kids

6. Talking shit

7. Talking back

8. Wearing the same t-shirts. Literally.

And the gang statutes were written so broadly that even members of Congress, under their definition, could have been arrested. The ACLU would document that,

Gang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities—such as riding the bus with a friend or picking a spouse up from work late at night—illegal for people they target.

They further argued, rightly, that,

One of the most troubling aspects is that they often give police overly-broad discretion to label people gang members without having to present any evidence or even charge someone with a crime. Police are left to rely on things like what someone looks like, where they live, and who they know. As a result, there is a great potential for racial profiling, with a particular impact on young people of color. Despite the documented existence of white gangs, no California gang injunction has targeted a white gang.

Kids were being sent away simply for being alive in a place where war had been declared against us. And the propaganda, the rationalizing of how much we needed to be destroyed, we the generation called super-predators, was promoted by people who were Republican and Democrat, and, save for a few, Black as well as white. It was such convenient reasoning: the hoisting of responsibility on the narrow, non-voting shoulders (and after too many busts, never-voting shoulders) of 13 year olds, 14, 15 and 16 year olds, thereby absolving grown people of any responsibility themselves. As soon as you said drugs, as soon as you said gangs, you didn’t have to talk about what it meant to throw a bunch of adolescents together in a community with no resources, no outlets, no art classes, no mentorship, no love but from their families who were being harmed, cut daily, themselves.

And it didn’t matter how poorly conceived and executed the gang statutes were, what with their siphoning off of millions and millions and millions of dollars into police departments and away from everything that any rational parent or adult knows a young person needs in order to succeed—good schools, creative outlets, arts and sports programs and space to just be still. But so ineffective were these laws that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed. Which is why with no one else on our side, we sided with ourselves. For better and for motherfucking worse.