But MoMo wants blood. “Nah, fuck that. That ain’t enough for me. I want that nigga leaking. Plus, my mother told me if a man put his hands on you to find the closest brick, bottle, stick, or whatever, and don’t stop swinging till you see the white of his bone!”
“Damn, MoMo, you don’t play. I swear you are a stone trip. One minute you’re miss prissy diva with your cute outfits and pocketbook, next minute you turn into a beast on some Incredible Hulk–type presto-chango, punching dudes in the face. Girl, what I’mma do with you? You ain’t no joke, ma.”
Acknowledging her gangsterness makes MoMo grin. Smiling is a great sign for rational entry. I seize the moment. “MoMo, I know you want revenge, but hear me out. You still have an open court case and so far it looks like it’s close to getting dismissed. Remember, mama, you were looking at a possible five years upstate, so if you pop off now and get rearrested, it’s a wrap. I can’t let you go out like that, sweetie. And besides, you know you can’t wear your cute poom-poom shorts up at Bedford Hills, Albion, or Taconic.”
MoMo starts shaking her head affirmatively. I think she’s taking it all in, looking at the big picture. Thank God. “Besides, nobody is worth you risking your freedom, to be sitting in a cell while they’re home free, enjoying the summer. And trust and believe, you gave Kadeem something to think about. You clocked him nice and got the last punch. Let us deal with him at this point. As for you, I need to know it’s dead.”
She makes a promise to dead it, and since she has proven to be a young woman of her word, I believe her. But then it dawns upon me—she’s slick. “And I need you to tell me that you’re not gonna get your shorty or anybody else to come up here and make it hot, either. Any more drama in and around the building could get the entire program evicted from the premises because you already know they don’t want us here. And this is a safe space, neutral territory for all the youth who come here, regardless of whatever set* you represent back in the hood. We need it to stay that way. Don’t bring the hood beef to our front door. Promise me that, ma. Look me in the eye and give me your word, ’cause word is bond, right?”
MoMo shakes her head in disagreement. “Well, I can’t control what my shorty do, ’cause once he gets his mind to do something, there ain’t nothing I can say or do that’s gonna stop him. That’s just how he is.”
Oh, Lord, it’s gonna be a wild-wild west Brooklyn brawl at our front door any day now. “Now, MoMo,” I say with my hand on my hip, head tilted, poised to court her ego, “you know you run your shorty; you got his nose wide open and on lock. If you dead the beef and say it’s done, then it’s done. I already know you pull his strings, not the other way around.”
She basks in the accolades, giving me her signature sheepish grin and coy giggle. “You already know how I brings it. Damn, Sista Liza, ain’t no winning with you. All right, I got you, word is bond, I’mma tell my shorty to fall back.”
Whew. The remainder of the afternoon, Jay and I hold a peer mediation with MoMo and Kadeem. MoMo takes responsibility for throwing the Molotov cocktail with her words. I’m proud that she has taken the high road. But Kadeem refuses to admit to hitting her and, though I’m disappointed, I am not surprised that he chooses to remain infantile, taking the cowardly road of denial. MoMo is willing to grow and self-reflect, albeit kicking and screaming. Kadeem stays closed and unwilling to change, refusing to do self-inventory.
MoMo eventually got her case dismissed; Kadeem got rearrested months later for robbery.
It is a constantly changing flow of motley-crew characters and band of bad-news bears that come through our doors on a regular basis. Some have stayed around for years, some for months, but almost all come back periodically to touch base and say hello because this is a safe place that doesn’t judge them. It’s a place that helps them navigate the rough terrain of urban adolescent life and untangle from bad decisions. It’s a place that advocates for them in court and lambastes them in private, all the while recognizing their potential and applauding their successes, no matter how big or small. It’s a place where second and third and sometimes fourth chances are championed.
My days frequently flow between calm and chaos, and no matter how colorful and draining, the kids keep me coming back and showing up. If it weren’t for the obnoxious schedule of traveling to Rikers so ridiculously early in the morning, I would probably still be out on the island, because I grew to love my boys. Now with this new job and normal schedule, I am at least able to carve out time to write in the evenings and on weekends.
I took Sun’s advice and created a performance piece that combines some of my classic poetry hits with music along with excerpts from my one-woman show, The Peculiar Patriot. It’s a musical narrative of how a starry-eyed actress-turned-poet wound up teaching incarcerated kids for fifteen years and performed The Peculiar Patriot in thirty-five prisons for three years.
People often asked if I was still performing and where had I been all this time, so I answered their question onstage. Writing and performing The Bitch Is Back (which later became Down the Rabbit Hole) was a perfect comeback show. My artist is alive again. I have my mojo back and I hit the stage, performing the work in Manhattan and Brooklyn. My old boss and former principal, Phil, even came out to support. My passion is resurrected. I’m thinking creatively again and my dream is back in focus. Even though I am still working a full-time job to pay bills and support my art, I know that the day will come when my art will financially support my life. I still believe in that dream. And working with teenagers, wayward rascals, and urban rug rats keeps me fully present, authentic, and grounded. The kids give me profound inspiration and purpose. The wounded teenager in me connects with the wounded teenager in them, which creates a spontaneous bond I seem to be unable to shake. My sister, who always believed in my dreams, frequently reminds me: “Lee-Lee, you’re an artist; it’s what you’re born to do—act, perform, write, create art, and tell stories. And working with kids is a part of your purpose that you can’t separate from. It too, like your art, is a calling. If you had one without the other, you wouldn’t be happy or fulfilled. Pray for balance, baby.” This journey has indeed taught me balance.
The dream of writing and acting for a living is the pulse that’s driving me. It’s alive and percolating, and it’s no longer in conflict with my purpose for teaching. It’s not an either-or, but rather, it’s that both the Dream and the Purpose can harmoniously coexist. How they will merge and what it will look like in the end, well… (insert shoulder shrugging), I don’t quite know. God is in the details for that. But what I do know is watching kids grow and seeing their potential blossom ever so slightly right in front of my eyes is enough to convince me that I must continue to sow seeds of love in what some would consider barren ground. I’ve seen moss grow on rock.
Afterword
It’s been eighteen years. I never thought working in jail with incarcerated youth would become an integral part of my life’s purpose and now, my identity. As my art continues to blossom, grow, and demand more and more of my time, walking away from the barbed wire, the slamming of electronic gates, the jingling of CO keys, the ringing of alarms, and the shouting, fighting, crying, and laughing of young captive souls trapped in cells isn’t easy. Who am I if I’m not in jail being challenged by and going head-to-head and heart-to-heart with my hard-rock, shorty-roc foul-mouth lambs… okay, lil’ lions? I am first and foremost an artist, a creative being wired to give testimony on the stage and on the page, using my instrument to tell stories by weaving poetry, theater, and prose, fact and fiction, and a combination of it all to reflect a slice of our human experience. I aim to edutain—educate and entertain. But this journey in the trenches of mass incarceration for almost two decades has solidified the warrior-abolitionist-freedom-fighter-revolutionary spirit in me. It’s who I am and what I do. I want to liberate these young people.
There is something profoundly divine with each opportunity I am given to bear witness to a young person at their lowest point, at rock bot
tom, scared, confused, temporarily broken, and to be able to stand in the valley with them and speak life into their future, shining light on an otherwise false, dark vision. Where they see despair and a dead end as inevitable, I see a flickering flame, a glimpse of the sun they can’t quite see. I know their future is still unfolding. I am convinced God is still working on them and that their journey in jail, oddly enough, has the ability to connect them to their spiritual and emotional growth. The misadventure in the bowels of the beast many times serves as a much-needed wake-up call that redirects their focus and is a speed bump to slow down their race toward destruction in the streets. It’s a gift inside a curse. The younglings are no different than our sacred Black ancestors, who were genius alchemists able to bloom like a lotus out of the wicked, treacherous swamps of violent oppression. If prison is the new plantation, then my boys (and girls) at Rikers are the crops, Black and Brown cotton bursting with laughter and life. As the late, great Tupac Shakur once said, “I might not change the world but I want to be the spark in the brain of the one who does.” This is my prayer.
During my eighteen-year sojourn working with incarcerated youth in various capacities (freelance teacher-artist, Board of Education teacher, re-entry specialist, program counselor, court advocate, big sister, thug mama, and friend), I learned that our children who wind up in the bowels of the mass incarceration beast have bountiful resilience, breathtaking creativity, and tremendous promise. They deserve our fierce attention, unyielding nurturing, and iron fist with a velvet glove kind of love. They don’t need sympathy but rather compassion. They don’t need coddling but discipline and direction. They don’t need to be lectured to but listened to and skillfully challenged. They don’t need to be condemned but encouraged. They don’t need to be written off but reimagined. First and foremost, they need to be seen. My hope is that in this book they will be seen and heard and their humanity recognized.
Much of the behavior we abhor in incarcerated youth is a mere reflection of a racist, violent, materialistic, celebrity driven, low-bar mediocracy celebrated, instant gratification society. They are showing us what they learned. Our collective social pathologies, bequeathed to them, have legs and teeth and hungry bellies staring us in the face. They’ve been watching us. So it is up to us to show them something different. It is up to us to give them the language needed to understand and navigate multiple systems pimping their poverty, hustling their pain, and profiting from their loss of freedom.
We must find the courage to tell incarcerated youth the ugly historical truth about white supremacy and the racially biased, profit-driven prison system that was designed to entrap them before they were even born. Fear of making members of the dominant culture feel uncomfortable holds back the truth. It is time to stop protecting the privileged from discomfort, tiptoeing and playing nice-nice to sanitize Black and Brown suffering and mitigate white guilt. Our children are in crisis. Author and scholar Dr. Neely Fuller said, “If you do not understand white supremacy, what it is and how it works, everything else that you understand will only confuse you.”
One antidote for racism and white supremacy is Black love. When we love ourselves, our culture, our heritage (which didn’t start with slavery), our hair, our features, our complexion, our style, our uniqueness, our flaws, and our potty-mouthed, sassy, beautiful children, we are better inoculated from the disease of both external and internalized racism. The Black community has a lot of healing to do. We survived a lot of trauma. We have to practice being gentler with ourselves and each other. We’ve been grossly wounded and beat up pretty bad. Laughter and love is the medicinal balm.
Let’s begin to tell children in jail the whole story of history. When Black and Latino kids think their ancestors contributed nothing to the world, how can they consider themselves a positive and necessary part of society? How are they supposed to act when their sense of self is warped or nonexistent? How can a child aspire to be anything great when they have not been educated to their culture’s great gifts to civilization? Knowledge of history sparks the imagination and inspires self-knowledge, self-love, and a sense of purpose. It helps kids recognize they have a place in society and are not thugs, monsters, savages, natural-born criminals, and other degenerate identities that society has labeled our children. Teaching them true history, exposing them to the depth of their stunning ancestors, will connect them to something great and vastly impact how they see themselves in the larger world and influence how they act and feel.
Children in jail (and other high-risk kids) reflect spiritual and psychological problems caused by the environment in which they live, the low-frequency music they listen to seemingly hypnotized by lyrics of death, the videos they watch, the toxic foods they consume, the complex traumas they’ve experienced, the poverty they navigate, and a cobweb of failing systems they are embroiled in (economic, educational, judicial, and mental health). But we have the power to change the narrative.
Over the years I had the privilege of working with many uniformed staff at Rikers—COs, captains, deps, and wardens who were committed to helping the youth. Those extremely rare, select officers possessed the gift of knowing how to relate to and engage the adolescents and young adults in custody. I witnessed them wield their magic, dropping jewels of knowledge, building a rapport, connecting, listening, and lifting a kid’s spirit. These spiritual soldiers, this small group of agents of change who wore shields, were in the system, but like me, they were not of the system. Their ability to connect with incarcerated youth may have been because the officers came from the same communities as the detainees and reflected the population.
Preventing our kids from going to jail is paramount, but getting them out and helping them stay out requires reaching them while they are in custody, feeding them empowering information and then providing a network of support upon their release.
Along with receiving education and strong cultural curriculums, youth behind the wall could greatly benefit from learning trades such as barbering and cosmetology, automotive, carpentry, printing, culinary arts, and more to arm them with employable skills to earn a decent coin instead of committing crimes against poverty, hurting others, and risking their freedom. Changing their daily diet (and commissary selections) from heavy starch, high sodium, and sugar will have a huge impact on their behavior. Having real in-depth conversations with formerly incarcerated men and women—the OGs and former gang members who have successfully turned their lives around—can help demystify the allure of gang culture and de-normalize prison. Tell the children the truth. Have real-talk discussions on manhood, womanhood, and how to handle adversity. Deconstruct, dissect, and psychoanalyze racism, current events, hood politics, national and global politics, and relationship dynamics so they develop critical thinking skills and stronger life skills. And, of course, expose them to the arts, one of the most viscerally liberating and empowering ways to help a young person develop and grow at warp speed.
I don’t have all the answers. There is no single solution to a problem entrenched in a centuries-old system of slavery and capitalism that has morphed into mass incarceration, gobbling up Black and Brown people at a dizzying rate, especially our kids. But we can turn this thing around. I believe in our children, our jewels.
This book is my testimony, my offering, my contribution toward the liberation of a marginalized community… my community. It’s my imperfect, brassy push toward racial awareness and authentic justice, where Black and Brown lives will matter with equal value as white lives. When the humanity of Black and Brown youth will be seen as just as important as white youth. When courts, judges, and DAs offer the same consideration to children of color as is afforded wealthy white youth. When a poor Black kid and first-time offender will hear the judge say jail will have a negative impact on him like Judge Aaron Persky did for Brock Turner, the rich, white Stanford University student accused of rape who was sentenced to only six months in jail and three years of probation, because the judge thought, “a longer sentence would have a severe i
mpact on him.” I want to see a judicial system where collective Black and Brown humanity is equally valuable and fragile enough to protect. I want psychologists to come up with newfound conditions for poor Black and Latino kids that will preclude them from prison time, like they did for rich, white sixteen-year-old Ethan Couch, who killed four people while driving drunk and was sentenced to ten years of probation because he suffered from “affluenza,” a made-up condition that psychologists successfully argued in court, saying it was the result of Ethan’s parents’ having spoiled him to the nauseating point that he didn’t know right from wrong or have the capacity to comprehend responsibility. I want that same judge, Jean Boyd, to accept “poorfluenza” as a credible defense for the thousands of poor kids of color so steeped in poverty that their ability to know right from wrong is warped. Our children deserve freedom from inequity.
I want to see equality.
I want to see freedom.
I want the elephant in the room to be courageously addressed.
I want to see compassion.
I want to see the last become first, and the masses at the bottom rock the few at the top and the walls of injustice come tumbling down.
I want to see love manifest in our children as they dance to music affirming their life and their goodness and their necessity.
I want to see them laugh and grow up knowing joy.
I want to see them alive and free.
I want to see them prosper and multiply.
I want to see them win.
May their voices be amplified, because they matter.
Acknowledgments
Thank you Mother Father God Infinite Great Spirit NTR, ancestors, guardian angels of Light for the gift of life and storytelling, this divine assignment and all the doors that open and close in my life.
My Philly fam, “Squad deep!” I love y’all. See me following in big sis’ steps. In the genes, I guess.
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