THE NATION OF ISLAM WAS FOUNDED ON THE BASIS OF PEACE AND AS AN ANSWER TO A PRAYER OF ABRAHAM TO DELIVER HIS PEOPLE WHO WOULD BE FOUND IN SERVITUDE SLAVERY IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE IN THIS DAY AND TIME.
But the email put different words over my head. Because I had been deemed insufficiently compliant with the day school rules, it read, it was the system’s decision to allow charges to be filed against me—despite me being a minor and shit. And, yes, our passive-aggressive landlord charged that shit: brought arson charges against me and let me know by word on the street, phone call, email, regular mail, planes, trains, automobiles. We was headed to court.
*
My last supper I spent perched and posted at my usual spot. Vista was making her rounds and came and leaned against the dumpsters. “Boy, you should at least get you some pussy ’fore you go to jail.”
“I’m going to trial, not jail, Vista. And it’s the Youth Control, not jail.”
“Same difference. You need to stop arguing words and go get laid ’fore this rite of passage.”
“Nobody wants to have sex with me, Vista.”
“Nonsense! It’s so many fast little bitches lookin’ to get fucked, you should get a gold medal for being a virgin, baby. How old are you?”
“Fourteen in a few days.”
“They put fourteen-year-olds in jail?”
“I think so.”
“Damn. It’s a cold world where they’a throw a child in a cage. Now look at this, honey dip. Tell me she couldn’t warm you up.”
That’s when I first seen you, Jacq. Across the courtyard. You was hella tall for a girl. That was the first thing that struck me. How long and thin you were. Vista kept talkin’: “Baby girl need to save that natural shit for the white folks. Must be living with her daddy. Ain’t no way one of these store-bought bitches would send her daughter out of doors lookin’ like young Angela …” I stopped listening to Vista and made up my own story about you: you lived with your daddy weekends, but you was your momma’s child. I pictured the return trip across town, your momma in the hills, a woman with status in her eyes, poised above you with a hot comb in her hand, unkinkin’ it, flattenin’ it, cussin’ up a storm about naps and naturals and men’s nonchalance.
Lookin’ at you, honey-dipped, beanpole tall, and wire thin, with your highwater jeans, your Beverly Hills Polo Club T-shirt and face mask, and all that trappy, nappy hair atop your head, I couldn’t imagine you living amongst us. The way you walked, so cautious, barely out the door and already had your arms crossed over your chest, bracing yourself for whatever might come next; eyes alive to anything that might be watching you. What, I wondered, must she think of this new, old place? Where living spaces, apartment doors, and porch steps melt into bedrooms and barbershops and beauty salons and homeless sleepers and Mexican tamale stands? Idn’t it strange? Idn’t it sad? Idn’t it so much humbler here than the words that spill from the mouths of the rappers your daddy, your momma, one of them, maybe, probably both, never let you listen to?
You peeped me, looked my way with a stare more certain’n I imagined could come from someone who moved so cautious. We met eyes and yours kinda narrowed and got dark in the sunlight, and I seen that about you and I flinched and dropped my eyes to the plastic lid where I sat leanin’ like a layer of human waste glazed across the dumpster. When I looked up again, you was already walking the other way.
“Baby girl kinda cold with it,” Vista critiqued as, close by, a few fireworks crackled loudly, flaring ’fore falling silent, unexploded. “You seen that heel turn?” Vista kept talkin’, not noticing. “Someone should tell the little girl it ain’t no catwalk out here. Shoot, she probably wanted to holler at you, then seen this old lady choppin’ it up with her crush, ain’t want the competition.”
I didn’t say anything for a second, just watched you go. Then the fireworks went off, shuddering the ground like a earthquake ’bout to begin, or the warning ’fore a war.
*
Not a lotta news came outta Rockwood, good, bad, or in between, so when my misunderstanding transformed into an indictment and word got out around the Rock, boss, it caught a fire—so to speak. Negroes crammed theyselves by the dozens into the courthouse— not to support me, mind you, just to see the sentencing of the child who had tried to light Rockwood on fire. If I was acquitted, wadn’t no one gonna scream “Thank Lord Jesus” the way they did when O.J.’s sellout ass got off for killing them folks. Folks stay shook about fire danger in California, a whole en-tire state suffering from PTSD, so even though arson wadn’t anywhere in my intentions, these folks wanted me locked up. Most of the onlookers was probably rooting for a ten-year adult prison term. I did my best in trial, despite the odds, which was: all the evidence, plus the testimony of Mr. MacDonald and several tenants who did not appreciate they building nearly going up in flames.
Finally, Judge Kahn asked, “Why, young man, did you choose to endanger the place that you call home?”
I hesitated to answer. Now I had seen a couple court shows, hundred-year-old Judge Judy and whatnot, but a juvenile hearing works different. I ain’t know the rules. I don’t believe my public defender knew them either. I looked to the man whose rule was all I knew. Daddy stared forward, at me, at the judge, at the whole courtroom. His face said not a thing, a book with no words. I hesitated to try to explain his solution. I looked to Momma, who was masked up, but still I could see stress lines breaking like fault lines across her forehead, creasing her eyelids, making black crack like melanin wadn’t magic at all.
For all her enchantments, she was still a sometimey saint who knew her way around a negotiation in the ghetto with her people way better’n she knew how to talk across a courtroom to a man in a robe with my life in his hands. I thought about her dinner plate, which the solution had saved. I thought about her Jamaican moment that had bought us the most beautiful of dinnerware, and I prayed for one kinda island insurrection or another to start up right there in that courtroom, Haitians, Jamaicans, whatever could set your boy free. But she remained silent. All there was, I realized, was my voice: “My mother ’s dinner plates were getting infestated with mold, sir. Smelled like a car engine, I remember, but it worked on a plate. It cleaned it. I wanted to clean everything. You know we got a high rate of illness in Rockwood.”
The judge put his index fingers to his temples like two pistols point-blank to his brain. “Infested. The word is ‘infested,’ not ‘infestated.’ At any rate, proper English be damned, I believe the health hazard to which you are referring is, in common parlance, according to urbandictionary.com, the ‘ghetto flu.’ I’ve read the literature on this. Anthropological research. Apparently, culturally, it’s related to the viral outbreaks of the past, ’20–’21 especially. This is a kind of cultural residue from that dark time. A vaccine created by Stanford scientists was proven effective for the so-called ghetto flu years ago, pushing the most virulent influenza mutations to the margins of American medical concern. Nobody even wears those ridiculous, ineffective masks anymore. If illness is more prevalent in your neighborhood than, say, my neighborhood, why, that has to do with the poor health choices and genetic predispositions of the people who surround you, young man. It has nothing to do with any virus. Do you understand that point of scientific fact?”
Facts: There’s vaccines for the flu, which is all good and whatnot, but it ain’t like the ghetto flu is a one virus hitter quitter that you can bang a syringe into and call it cured. It’s hard to keep still, let alone kill. It stays on the move, switches faces and names like a fugitive. You’d need as many vaccines as stars in the sky to truly get rid of it. I didn’t know how to tell this to Mr. Your Honor, though, without pissin’ the man off even more’n he already was, so I just kept my mouth closed.
“Did you ever think to ask your father what the ingredients were and why it smelled, quote, ‘like a car engine,’ unquote? What were its ingredients, young man?”
I knew enough not to look to my old man for the answer on that one. The w
hite man had stole everything from the black man for five hundred years. He had a thousand ways to backdoor your brainchild, put a patent on it and call it his own. And the A-rab’s not no better, he would say if pressed. Tell anyone wanting to know your formula that the game is to be sold, not to behold.
So I said what I knew the old man would say: the ingredients was bleach, vinegar, and Candomblé. They was Santeria, they was Cuuuba and Afreeeca. How could a bald man cut hair so good? Loas. How had a GED genius come near patenting a code-switching app? Orishas. And a lead detector and a mold remover to boot? Ain’t nobody’s business but mines, the old man would say if challenged. Heck, his own son knew not one single ingredient in any of his solutions, having never wasted the time it would take to ask him how he had invented his inventions.
But the judge wanted answers.
“Candomblé? Santeria? Young man, you disgrace those cultures, which you are totally ignorant of, which, as an African American, you ignorantly appropriate. Having vacationed in Dakar and Havana, I find your ignorance insufferable and your obstinance disturbing. I want to illustrate for you,” Judge Khan said at sentencing, “that this was a very serious crime. Given different circumstances, your act of premeditated arson could have had a much more severe, even deadly outcome.”
I couldn’t see myself as no arsonist. I understood my actions as misunderstood, maybe ahead of my time. But that was not the moment to voice that idea. It sounded like I was about to get off light, so I kept my mouth on mute.
“Even many teenagers fifteen years and older are charged as adults in matters of arson. There’s two categories of arson: 451 and 452. 452 is for reckless burning, which is what your defense claims that you’ve perpetrated: you were just trying to perform a neighborhood deep clean, you didn’t understand you could hurt people or destroy Mr. Michael McDonald’s property. I don’t know that I buy this defense, given the smell that the solution emitted and the fact that your father went to such pains to make it inaccessible to anyone else in the home. But, then again, the public schools in Oakland have a fifty percent dropout rate, so perhaps my expectations are too high. Even in 452s, the reckless arsonist can be convicted of a felony and sent to federal prison. That is serious enough. 451s are even worse. Again, just imagine if you were a couple years older, son, and if we were to take seriously some of your statements to police and to the court that you view Mr. Michael McDonald as a, quote-unquote, ‘slumlord’ and a, quote-unquote, ‘racist’ and, rather paradoxically, a N-word ‘who ain’t been here in years.’ Your subsequent actions could very well be construed as an attempt to willfully and maliciously destroy the property and displace the tenants of someone whom you have cultivated a racial animus toward. Wouldn’t you agree that this might have been the way a judge, maybe even me, Judge Khan, might have seen your case?”
I was not about to cosign none of that, so I just stood there stone-faced, lookin’ like every sociopath on the news feed. I looked at my parents. They sat still as lizards bakin’ in the sun.
“If you were fifteen, we could move to have your 451 PC charged as an adult, and even though the damage was minimal to nonexistent, you would still be vulnerable to the following: One, ‘if an inhabited building is burned due to malicious arson, the defendant can be sentenced to up to eight years in prison,’” the judge read off his phone. “Two, ‘if the defendant’s or someone else’s property is burned as a result of the malicious arson, the defendant can be sentenced to up to three years in prison.’” Mr. Your Honor turnt off his phone. “You’ll realize, given all that could have transpired, and not even touching on the potentially disastrous loss of property and life that your stunt could have caused, that you are a very lucky boy, son, even though I am not granting you the minimum juvenile sentence of a finger-wagging warning and a mandate that your parents not allow you on the internet for a few days”—his phone buzzed and he pocketed it—“nor even twenty-one days detention. No, your criminal behavior is rooted in an antiwhite, antiauthority attitude, the kind of mentality that brought about the damaging antipolice protests (riots, insurrections, really) of recent years. The root of all our country’s troubles, the reason right-wing Americans had to rise up in retaliation.” He was drifting off topic and I realized that I was drifting into jail. “Indeed, there is potential danger to the community from you if your mentality is left unchecked. Your anarchist, insurgent tendencies must be put a stop to, now. Detention is the best deterrence …”
**✦
As the Youth Control bus pulled off with first light, its shaky-ass acceleration was all I got for a goodbye to Oakland. It only took a few minutes rattling around like a quarter in a washing machine to leave city limits. Oakland is small. I had never appreciated that before. I was hella unappreciative before. Most mornings in my life had started with the sun, and I hated it because it meant I had to do Daddy’s bidding. But now I appreciated how first light came in against the night, escorting the morning. It’s the early-morning colors that I remembered when I was incarcerated and Homer, who gotta be a hundred poets given one name, spoke to me about the dawn, its fingers and roses. And even though when I was first in this motherfucker we call “the town” I had held most everything at a distance, now I knew I would miss all the common, normal shit: parties that ended in rowdy-ass second lines in the courtyard, brothers pirating basketball courts with East Bay funk dunks, the flashy Iranians in they plush velours, jewelry dripping off they necks and wrists as they stood outside they storefronts selling us they dreams.
Dogtown, Jingletown, Funktown, Chinatown, the Fruitvale, and Deep East, all our neighborhoods fell into my sudden past and we fled off to whole cities I had never heard of, places that to this day I couldn’t point to on a map if you paid me; towns that was just orchards and vineyards and city limit signs that sprang up and was gone ’fore we could read them to know where we were; and the Youth Control bus just kept going.
Out there deep in the California countryside, we seen the sky turn orange. An official, judge-type voice came over the intercom, tellin’ us there was a fire ten miles up the way, no need for concern. Someone asked, “Y’all got masks for us?”
The intercom clicked off.
The bus turnt into a straight-up oven and we cooked inside that mug. I looked out the window and watched as the sky filled with black flecks of ash that fell like so many black snowflakes on fire. The whole sky went black with smoke. A guard marched down the aisleway and snapped shut all the bus’s windows, but not ’fore I tasted what I was pretty sure was a cinder. It crumbled into hot dust on my tongue. I put my head back and swallowed it and imagined that I was one of them cinders released by fire from the earth to wander the atmosphere, headed where the wind went.
**
The California Youth Authority was abolished, I don’t know exactly when, only that it was a punishment-based institution which ended its own life from hella corruption and brutality, COs setting up gladiator fights and whatnot. Around the time of the protests and all that, back when I was knee-high to a Nike shoe, folks got woke to the injustice of it all and realized that knockin’ hard heads in they hard heads wadn’t accomplishing anything but creating more and more super predators, or whatever it is Hillary Clinton called me ’fore I was born. COs lost they jobs, program directors got fired, and some good people came in and renamed the system Juvenile Justice somethin’-somethin’. They shut down all but a couple of the real-deal youth prisons and sent all the baby gangsters back to local detention centers. The good folks who marched for *8:46 got control of the justice system in California. They took it apart just like they tried to do to the po-lice, defunded that shit, one-eighty’d everything, and made policies to try and save us instead of killing us.
From what the inmates who needed a whole hand to count how long they’d been in told me, Juvenile Justice was the best of times, from handin’ out new masks every day and lettin’ damn near everybody go home every time an outbreak of the flu ripped thru the facilities—back when it wadn’t a questi
on that that shit existed—to sendin’ kids to Buddhism camp for good behavior. Even for those who was fresh in and wadn’t eligible for privileges or who didn’t behave so properly, the local detention centers still hooked it up kinda nice. Didn’t matter that a stocked library and meditation sessions and yoga and internet and gift cards courtesy of the State of California was like the last things you’d think to give a prison full of supposedly predatory children, it’s what them white folks decided to implement. Mugs read and meditated up a storm and things was more peaceful. It was good times for some time.
Then somehow, some way, someone turnt out the lights on all that. While black people was paying bills and dying from the virus, the white people who didn’t like the white people in charge, not to mention all the protesting and marching and murals for murdered black men going up and statues for dead white men coming down and cops being brought up on charges, took charge and took out they frustrations on us. The name of the facility changed again: the Juvenile Justice system, formerly called the Youth Authority, got turnt into Youth Control. Certain systems within the system got privatized. (This was years before there was private security all over Oakland, so back then I couldn’t tell you what that meant, but I knew it wadn’t good.) The rehabilitators and yoga teachers and librarians was out. Flu interventions was out. Masks was out. “Increased accountability” was in, whatever that means. I think increasing accountability just means counting shit till it disappears, but I don’t know shit.
All’s I know is I got locked up right when all them reforms to reform the reforms got formed. Like, inmates eighteen to twenty-five, who had been put in big-boy jail by our white allies, was crowded back into the Youth Control with us kids, just like in the old days ’fore all the reforms. The only perk that ain’t get reversed was that the youth prisons that got shuttered ain’t been and won’t never be reopened. That would cost money, and one thing California ain’t tryna do is spend more money on us. (It’s also why they ripped the gift cards right ’fore I got there.)
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 7