Better, Not Bitter

by Yusef Salaam

  When we finally returned to our different units, I ran into David, the guy I’d kicked in the chest. I was anxious and uncomfortable. What would he say? Would there be continuous beef between us? Tension hovered over us until one day he looked over at me and said, “Hey, what’s going on, man?” He gave me a pound handshake. “Yo, man, that was crazy, right?” he continued. “Man, you kicked me so hard in my chest. All of the air went out of me. All I could do was sit there.” He laughed and, stunned, so did I.

  “Yeah, man, you can’t be hitting one of my guys like that. You were punching him in the face. He couldn’t even fight you back. It’d be different if he could fight you back.”

  Just like that, the tension was gone. There wasn’t going to be a problem.

  But the face that kept coming to my mind then and even now was Mack’s. Him coming over to the couch, ready to kill. There was something markedly different about him than I’d seen in some others. A hopelessness. A despair. He was, by definition, a poster child for recidivism. He was in the trap and not because he wanted to be. It was the sole option presented to him by a community that internalized the systems of oppression that ultimately sought to demolish it. Prison as a way of life was given to him so young that he didn’t know anything else. Mack and his own mother were a hit-man team. This transgenerational legacy of crime as the only way to deal with pain and trauma was all he knew. One of the Muslim officers who was mentoring me, who ironically was named Muhammad Ali, told me he spoke to Mack and was so happy he was Muslim. “You could see death in his eyes,” he said. To some extent, the prison-industrial complex, the way this thing is set up, makes it hard to change. You can have all the spiritual transformations you want, but it’s going to go only so far in a cage. At some point in time you may be faced with a situation, like Mack Moton, even like my friend Abdur Rashid, where something switches back to the modes of survival you were used to on the streets.

  When we talked in 2019, Mack began sharing with me how he’d just come to realize that the system didn’t want him to live free.

  “Yo, man, I saw your movie. I see what’s going on. They gave me all this time. They don’t want me to come out of here. And you know what? I just realized they never even evaluated my mental makeup.”

  Here was a person, older and wiser, saying to himself, Something isn’t right. There were other options for me, as horrible as the things I’ve done were, besides a cage.

  I want to believe that, at some point, everybody is redeemable in this system. Even if you committed murder, you went to prison for, say, ten or fifteen years. It wasn’t like you were never coming home. But when the system realized that they could counter the elevation and wealth-generation of Black and Brown folks, first by the infiltration of drugs and second by exploiting the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment—while abolishing slavery in 1865, it allows for “involuntary servitude” as “punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted”—and incarcerating us for profit, the decision made “in the air” was no longer ours to make. The system figured out that ripping our arms out of their sockets would keep us off the court, ensuring that we would never play the game of life well in this country again. The country found its new cotton fields, and the Mack Motons and Yusef Salaams of the world were ripe for labor.

  That kind of power is definitely a kind of sorcery. It turns bright-eyed boys like Mack into criminals instead of providing the resources necessary for them to do the healing work needed to have a fighting chance at life. When I speak to high schools, no one raises their hand when I ask students, “How many of you PLAN to be dead or in jail by the time you’re twenty-one?” Nobody plans for that kind of trauma. Nobody asks for death and destruction to be their path. And yet, deep in their guts, some of them believe that this narrative is inevitable. The brightness of their eyes turns dark and their pencils become guns.

  You can’t talk about someone like Mack Moton without talking about the systems that positioned him and his family for the lives they lived. You can’t talk about crime without talking about poverty, health disparities, and redlining. You can’t talk about the urine and excrement in the elevators of the projects (translation: concrete experiments) without talking about the lack of mental health and other social services. Just like everyone the system targets, Mack took the lemons of his life and tried to make lemonade. No doubt the levels of trauma he experienced affected his mental health. And instead of addressing those mental health challenges, the system decided that his life had no value. So someone like Mack doesn’t get the help he needs and keeps self-medicating with violence and criminal activity.

  There is a source to it all. It’s Newton’s third law of motion in real time. Crime is a set of reactions that people should be held accountable for. But if the only response to these reactions is a cage, then the actions that follow will never be ones that promote healing or rehabilitation. And that, sadly, is by design.

  John Henrik Clarke explains why the American system of injustice makes such a concerted effort to criminalize Black people: “It is not uncommon for ignorant and corrupt men to falsely charge others with doing what they imagine that they themselves, in their narrow minds and experience, would have done under the circumstances of a given case.”

  This is why my social justice advocacy work post-release has been so important to me. The system has decided that it can predict the number of prisons to build by the time a population of students reaches the fourth or fifth grade. They are actually using educational statistics to build cages for mostly Black and Brown people. And so it’s up to those who want to see a different America to step in and tell the truth. For me, I was fortunate to have prominent Black male leaders come to Harlem Valley and speak to us. I was still untainted enough by this system to take in what they were saying and build on it. When I first got to prison, I had many conversations with mentors who taught me that “words make people.” I never forgot that. Language creates us. It shapes us. Our ability to communicate well with each other is the key to our liberation. It’s the same reason why the captains of European slave ships combined the various ethnic groups they captured. If we can talk to each other, we can overthrow the ones who claim power. Somehow, I knew early on that if I could, I would use my words to help us heal. I was chosen to go through this awful, terroristic accusation in order for America to be put on trial. And maybe so I can stand in a prison like those elders and mentors did for me and encourage others.

  I feel called, by virtue of my experiences as part of the Exonerated Five, to expose this mass deception, the witchcraft in our systems. We’ve approached our view of this country’s systems in the same way we shop online. We see the thumbnail image of a product and believe it to be a representation of the content and quality. Then we’re upset when we open the package and realize it’s not what it was presented as being. America has purported itself as a beacon of diversity and progress, and yet we are nowhere near where we need to be in that regard. And though the civil rights leaders worked so hard and the movement accomplished so much, we have to be careful that we don’t allow ourselves to be deceived into thinking there has been more change than there actually has been. As Malcolm X said in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech, “How can you thank a man for giving you what’s already yours? How then can you thank him for giving you only part of what’s already yours? You haven’t even made progress, if what’s being given to you, you should have had already. That’s not progress.” Our humanity belongs to us. And it’s not progress to get what was already ours in the first place.

  I do not pat myself on the back because I was able to escape recidivism while many succumbed. I am where I am now because of who we are as a people. I firmly believe we have this ancestral strength available to all of us. As soon as we tap into it, unlock the truth of who we are, we’ll all be able to break the generational curses and operate at another level. We’ll all elevate. We’ll all fly.

  SIX

  Love and War

 
; The ends you serve that are selfish will take you no further than yourself but the ends you serve that are for all, in common, will take you into eternity.

  MARCUS GARVEY

  GROWING UP, WHENEVER I HEARD my mother talk about the police, she would say things like, “Don’t talk to the cops. They’re not your friends.” She would say, “If they come, let them break the door down.” In my young mind, I would think, Really, Ma? I can just open the door. We don’t have to let them break the door down. We can help them.

  But my mother knew something I didn’t. At least, I didn’t know it until it happened to me. My mother was my modern-day Harriet Tubman, trying to show me the way to freedom by changing my naive outlook on the world. I didn’t believe her until it was too late.

  When we were being interrogated, my mother arrived at the station with fire in her eyes. There was no time for sweet talk and comfort. There was no opportunity for “Hey, baby, how are you doing? Are they treating you well?” Her first words were “Stop talking to them.” She had to give me proper instructions to save my life.

  Her underlying sentiment was clear: “I love you, but we are at war.”

  She had to teach me how to stand my ground before I knew what standing your ground meant. My mother was the woman who played French-language albums on Saturday mornings and took us to the Museum of Modern Art. She was the one who emphasized the importance of education and made sure that she exposed us to a world outside of our uptown apartment building. It was intentional but never obvious. She never said, “Yusef, read this!” But instead she created an environment that allowed me to learn and discover things that some wouldn’t have expected. I could have found anything from stories about African kingdoms to books on Grecian art on our shelves.

  Me, my mom, and my cousin Mieasia. Mieasia and I share the same birthday.

  But my mother would often say, “I was raised in the Jim Crow South.” I think my siblings and I were supposed to know what that meant, but I’m not sure we did fully then. Her family was part of what is now known as the Great Migration, a movement of millions of Black people in the United States from the rural areas of the South to the Northeast, Midwest, and West between 1917 and 1970. She’d experienced two worlds that, below the surface, were really one.

  While we might not have understood her meaning, we did know her stories. Of having to turn off the lights in the car on the last few miles home so that she and her family would not be confronted by the Ku Klux Klan. “That’s Alabama,” she’d say.

  “But, Ma, we’re in New York,” I’d answer.

  New York is different.

  My mother was sent to the city as a teenager to make something of herself. Our family held the same hope as many Black families in the South: that the North would offer more opportunities for advancement, that there would be less terror and fewer lynchings. She ended up going to the world-renowned Fashion Institute of Technology. She became a designer and later taught at Parsons School of Design at the New School, one of the top universities for fashion.

  But having that impressive career and education didn’t shield her from what it meant to be a Black woman in America. She was trying to teach us this duality. She wanted us to learn whatever they were teaching us in school. But at home, we’d read Assata Shakur and Malcolm X. She helped us navigate the days when we were questioned about not saying the Pledge of Allegiance. She was very matter-of-fact in her responses to things. “We do not pledge allegiance to the flag. We respect the flag and we’ll stand up, but don’t put your hand over your heart or say anything because this flag does not pledge allegiance to you.”

  She never went into any great detail about her own experience. She’d simply share a story here and there and create an environment where information about who we were as Black people was readily available. She helped us move through the world the way she did: always moving forward while acutely aware of the dangers lurking around her. I suppose she hoped that at some point the why of all she was teaching us would click. That moment came when I was fifteen.

  No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the… victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver—no, not I! I’m speaking as a victim of this American system… I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare!

  Malcolm X

  When I was fifteen years old, my family and I woke up to the “American nightmare.” All of us—even including my mother with all her Jim Crow experiences—were wanting the American dream. We wanted the ability to live, and we longed for the pursuit of happiness. The ideals of our Constitution were the ideals we held: that all men and women are created equal. But we learned in the most catastrophic way that this was never written with us in mind, and in many respects it still doesn’t apply to us now.

  It’s still a war.

  We are certainly trying to make it apply to us. The good folks who may just be the children of former slaves and the children of former slave owners are trying to make those words true for all and are doing so in the face of continued systemic racism and oppression, white supremacy, and white patriarchy. But freedom is far from a certainty. If anything, that was what my mother was trying to get at when I was young: Work toward liberation but be clear about the reality in which you’re living. During the trial and while I was in prison, my mother never lost hope. She never stopped pushing. My mother always made it clear that this wasn’t an experience I was having in isolation. She was also there, experiencing this with me. Her Alabama sensitivities were still present. She understood that what happened to the five of us was something that had happened to many over the course of American history. But, importantly, she was unwilling to conform to any notion that justified that experience.

  I can’t write about the war if I’m not willing to write about the love. I’ve often stated that the Central Park jogger case was a love story between God and His people, and I recognize that for some that’s a hard pill to swallow. The assumption is that I’m saying God caused these awful things to happen to me and my brothers.

  But that’s not what I’m saying at all.

  God used these heinous injustices to reveal to us our own power and purpose. If I believe in both God’s omniscience and the presence of free will, then I can reconcile that God knew I would be placed in the crosshairs of the system and, because of man’s free will, He didn’t stop it. But He did soften the blow. Not only that, God ordained that I would not only survive this experience, but I would also live fully in spite of it.

  Part of the way I’ve been able to thrive in light of my story is through detachment. There are times when I speak about myself in the third person. “Yusef went through this,” or “His story changed overnight.” This allows me to disassociate from the emotions of the experience so that I’m not constantly triggering the trauma. To keep bringing up the pain would not be helpful—to myself or to those who are listening to me speak. At some point, I have to allow the deep wounds to scar over and eventually heal.

  If I’m speaking from a healed place as opposed to a triggered one, then I can be part of the solution. To continuously sit in that trauma could mean being overwhelmed by the weight of what happened and unable to move forward. Instead of saying, “Damn, I really went through that,” now I get to ask, “How can we make sure it never happens again?” Because I think, more than anything, we need to get to the place of finding solutions.

  This doesn’t mean that I haven’t had to live in that trauma and release the pain that exists there. Release is necessary before you can detach or seek solutions. This release happened during the screening of the Netflix series that told our story, When They See Us. Korey, Raymond, Kevin, and I (Antron could not attend the private screening due to the death of his dear mother) knew that we needed to experience the film privately, together, but we didn’t realize just how much we needed to purge emoti
onally in the process.

  I remember walking into the Netflix studios in Los Angeles and marveling at the space. The walls were large screens with images flicking between them. There were stations where you could get healthy food, water, juice, or snacks. People smiled and waved at us. They all knew who we were. Up until that point, we’d never actually been celebrated. We were just some regular boys turned men attached to this huge story. This was the first time we’d experienced that red-carpet treatment. People in that room not only knew who we were, but they were also happy to see us. That was a first. I think some of us wished this had been the reception we’d received when we were first exonerated. Now we’d finally gotten ahold of the American dream again, even though we knew the nightmare was still very real.

  We felt so special. And the moment was beyond anything we could have ever imagined. We soaked it all in until it was finally time to meet some of the executives. We were brought into another room. Ava DuVernay, the director, was there. A round table was covered with an amazing bounty of food platters. “We’re likely going to watch parts one and two,” they said. There was no conversation about watching all four episodes. Just parts one and two.

  We considered one another as brothers. As brothers, the four of us walked into a small theater with three long rows of seating. Ava was behind us. We placed ourselves in the room, none of us sitting right next to the others. Perhaps intuitively, we knew we needed the space.

  When part one started playing, I didn’t know what to expect. I remembered having previously sat down with the writers of the series for eight hours, and the liberating and energizing feeling of telling them my story. But I didn’t know how it would all come together, how it would look.