Better, Not Bitter

by Yusef Salaam

  I’ve never been able to get a clear read on the impact my incarceration had on my siblings. With Aisha, she was always so present. If you look at pictures from back then, you’ll see my sister in all of those pictures. Honestly, we’ve never really talked about how my conviction has affected her in her adult life. But just like a lot of other sisters, like many Black women today, she was always out front and center making her voice heard about my innocence. She never shied away from a camera in shame or embarrassment. She was always there. My brother, less so. I think my mother was shielding Shareef a lot from what was happening. One of Shareef’s best friends clued me in to how painful my being sent away must have been for him. One day during the trial when they were in class, the teacher brought in a newspaper. I was on the front cover. She pointed at Shareef and announced, “That’s Yusef Salaam’s brother.”

  “Man, your brother just put his head down, in shame, wanting to hide and all of that.”

  It never escaped me that we were all prisoners of this system. My brother had his way of dealing with it. My sister had hers. Neither discussed with me how they were faring. And my mother, who took the brunt of everything, had her own way. She carried it all. She was out there all the time with me in the world.

  Mom’s brilliance was only matched, in my mind, by her loving kindness and passion. While she never opened an official business, my mother used her expertise as a seamstress and fashion designer to serve our village and others in our community. She made clothes for various people on the side and even designed and constructed my sister’s beautiful, intricate wedding dress. Many of the dresses she wore herself were created by her own hand. In addition to teaching fashion design at Parsons, she taught us her trade at home, and taught the community children. I learned how to design clothes from her, my first accomplishment being a dress trench coat I’d wear often.

  After the trial, she couldn’t work anymore because they fired her, and in fact, she never worked again. She was deeply embedded in the grassroots organizations she started, relying on them and Social Security. She had a real entrepreneurial streak, and she could have been or done anything she would have wanted, but things came in her path, and life went in a different direction.

  In light of all of this, it still never occurred to me as I was going through my experience pre-exoneration that my life was really indicative of the duality that W. E. B. Du Bois talks about in The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

  My life reflected two parallel experiences. One of me doing everything I could to be a good son. The other being a distorted image of myself that lived in white people’s imaginations. I grew up in New York and my mother grew up in Alabama. Yet there we were, experiencing a similar oppression: my Black body being loved dearly by my people and simultaneously reviled in light of white supremacy being the order of things. Dr. James Baldwin—though it’s not his official title, I consider him a doctor because of all he did with his words to heal the psyches of Black people—said that to be Black and relatively conscious “is to be in a state of rage all the time.” That’s what I think lay beneath all of the work, all of the protecting, and yes, all of the love my mother poured out. A soft but steady rage at the way Black people have been treated in this country. That burning was and is her motivation. It is also mine.

  The key to surviving the simmering rage, to not letting it implode your insides, is to find outlets of service and creativity. Both my mother and I learned how to control our mental and emotional capacities and faculties so that our bodies didn’t go where our minds were trying to drive them.

  Ultimately, I am in control of my life. The galvanizing love I’ve been able to experience, and learning how to navigate through the many injustices I’ve faced—including all the ways a white supremacist system tried to get me to surrender—has undergirded any social justice work I’ve done. I learned that if you don’t identify your rage and wield it wisely, you’ll feel lost at best. At worst, your joy will escape you. Peace will pass you by.

  This is what I had to remember when I was told that I was going to be doing my time at Brookwood (a relative country club, compared to other facilities) but ended up at the worst maximum-security facility there was: Harlem Valley. It’s what I had to remember when I was forced out of the car in chains from wrists to ankles. My arms were shackled to the leather belt around my waist, with a chain going down to my ankles that caused me to stumble as I walked. I looked up at the large concrete building of the facility in front of me, and the fear I felt knocked the breath right out of me. I thought the walls were moving, vibrating against a pitch-black sky. And they were, in a way. Because just like back in the Tombs, the inmates were literally shaking the bars and fences, yelling, “We’re going to get you! We’re going to get you when you get in here!”

  A constant state of rage.

  My mama wasn’t there to protect me anymore. I had to accept that. There was no flowing cloak to hide behind. There were no bananas to savor. No clean language and lamb chops. No naked spankings. No kind words to defuse the frightening sounds of fireworks. And yet she was still there. Her words of affirmation were embedded in my heart. The tenets of her faith flooded and fortified my spirit. Her resistance, her fight, was very much alive in me. I stepped into that building not knowing what awaited me but definitely knowing who and what I was bringing in.

  ELEVEN

  Ignorance as a Trillion-Dollar Industry

  If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

  AUDRE LORDE

  One of my first public speaking engagements was as a member of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty at the National Black Theatre in New York City.

  SOMETIMES IT’S OUR PERCEPTION OF prison that gets in the way. We have limitless power in Black and Brown communities. To harvest it, however, we must refuse to participate in our own degradation. When we understand history, specifically the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, we’ll smash the prison-industrial complex and construct in its place a system that lives into our highest ideals: freedom and justice for all.

  I grew up around guys from the block who went to jail. We’d see them taken away for one reason or another. Then they’d arrive home, chests large but eyes blank. It felt like they were returning prisoners of war. Some people celebrated their release with parties and small gifts. But strangely, they never talked with any depth about their experiences. The moments they did share, unfortunately, perpetuated the idea that jail was cool. They bragged about “running” the jail. About surviving it. But no one ever mentioned the other side: the loss of their right to vote, the challenge in getting a job and building a career outside of the streets, the emotional trauma and PTSD-like episodes. They had muscles and hood notoriety, but not much else.

  No one in my family or immediate circle had ever gone to jail. It was always the guy I knew from the neighborhood. Men I’d see at a distance while walking with my mom or siblings to the masjid or the store. When I became the one to go to prison, I finally understood what I was seeing in them.

  Harlem Valley, where I ended up after my brief time in Spofford, was a maximum-security facility for youth. The inmates there included killers, rapists, and those charged with other extremely violent crimes, all committed by boys under the age of twenty-one. Some of their crimes would have sent them to Rikers Island or Clinton, but because they were convicted when under the age of sixteen, they were sent to Harlem Valley. Though it housed young men who had committed vile acts—and many who hadn’t—it was Harlem Valley itself, the dehumanization seen there, that was evil at its core. The space carried a spirit that was unaligned with promoting healing and restoring youth offenders. Fortunately, it no longer exists.

  Visits felt like a lifeline. Luckily Harlem Valley was relatively close by, a t
wo-hour drive. While I was at Harlem Valley, my mom would visit me as often as possible, sometimes even one to two times a week. If there was a visitors’ day on both Saturday and Sunday, she would find a way to stay somewhere overnight, in a hotel, so that she could be there each day. Her visits to me were a part of her process of taking care of me and making sure I was okay, while also taking care of herself. This was her way of living her life and coping with the loss of her secondborn. Prison doesn’t affect just the incarcerated but changes and shapes the lives of everyone around that person.

  You could tell the men who didn’t have visits—they carried themselves with a certain kind of pain and anger. Many people had only their mother come; not very often did you see a mother and father, and even more rare was a father visiting on his own. Kevin and I would have lots of visitors. I had my mother, my brother, my sister, my cousins. People from the community would come to see Kevin, and then stop by to visit with me as well. We always had our people around us.

  There were less visits at Clinton, where visits were set on a biweekly schedule based on your last name. When I arrived, because of where my name fit on that schedule, I had to wait almost a month until I got my first visit. I was overwhelmed with how long I wasn’t able to see my family; it felt like I was going through withdrawal.

  People often refer to the prison-industrial complex as the belly of the beast. My experience with the American justice system was like the birthing process in reverse. Going from the nurturing space of my mother’s womb—the safety she tried so desperately to give me—to another womb, the birthing place of America’s evil. The impact of that journey on me physically, spiritually, and mentally was significant—an unnatural process designed to malign and deform.

  If the justice system is meant to ensure that criminals pay for their crimes, the current setup penalizes defendants two, three, and four times—beyond what is humane. True reform gives them the opportunity to return to society. True reform includes opportunities for rehabilitation—the kind that includes addressing the psychological and emotional needs and challenges of brothers and sisters coming out of jail. True reform would mean they feel safe and secure to be vulnerable when they need to. They might have had trauma before jail, and then experienced it while imprisoned, but when they leave they are able to safely and healthily release the fruit of that trauma—whether that’s anger, sorrow, or whatever—from their minds and bodies.

  Rehabilitation looks at the crime by examining the circumstances around it from different perspectives. A deep dive into the catalyst for a person’s actions—likely trauma—is what makes a productive return to society a possibility instead of a pipe dream. My fellow inmates at Harlem Valley entered prison as children. They exited as children in adult bodies. Real reform requires us to peel the layers and get to core issues. Self-love and self-determination are possible, but not if the only thing we’ve experienced is the consistent message that our lives are worthless, and we internalize that message.

  Raymond said something in the Central Park Five documentary that I’ll never forget. I’m not sure I ever understood this about myself until he articulated it.

  “It’s like you come back home with all of these things that you didn’t go into prison with.”

  To Raymond’s point, some folks came home physically bigger but mentally and emotionally smaller. I came home and realized that despite all the grace I’d experienced, I was still institutionalized. Negativity burgeoned around my edges. I responded to everything in my world with suspicion. I felt like a rocket trying to exit the earth’s atmosphere. I was trying to fly but the gravitational force that is negativity kept pulling me down. Sure, once I got the lessons my life was teaching me, I could lean back on the throttle, but that was going to take some serious unpacking.

  When I got home and I began to plow my way forward, trying to get back to myself, I realized that I had an aversion to time. Perhaps because I had done time. Inside, every minute of my day was scheduled and accounted for. I had to relearn and regain a healthy relationship to how I used the hours I had. Today that looks like forcing myself to think that I have no time in order to be on time. I often pad my alarm or ask for people to give me a start time an hour before they actually need me. There’s a powerful statement in Islam that says, “Time is like a sword. If you don’t learn how to cut it, it will cut you.” That was a guiding principle for me for a long time.

  It’s interesting how different cultures see or value time. In the Black community, we have “CP time,” or “colored people’s time,” which essentially means we’re late according to current societal values. The European construct for time is weighted differently than in many non-Western cultures. For example, the New York subway has a schedule, and people set their arrival and departure times based on the countdown timer on the platform. It is expected to arrive on time. When it doesn’t, people are frustrated. In contrast, if you go to Jamaica, for example, and ask, “What time is the bus coming?” the running joke is “It soon come.” The bus finally arrives an hour later, and on the side of the bus is the sign “Soon Come Bus.” There’s nothing inherently wrong with the “soon come bus.” Their life patterns are built more around enjoying the moment. They have a sense of presence that is lost in Western cultures. Time is a distraction. It all comes soon.

  I served time. Now my whole relationship to time had to be redrawn. That was one of the first lessons I learned with Dr. Marimba Ani. She helped me to unpack the notion of time as a construct, and those ideas fed my soul. She was such a luminary figure—in my life and the world—and she helped me. In the movie Sankofa, the main character goes through the Sankofa experience, and a woman looks at her with piercing, glorious eyes and says, “Yes, now you understand.” Dr. Ani’s influence on me was similar.

  So much of the work I had to do post-release to unravel myself from the institutionalization was about awakening into the truth and the reality of where I was, why I was, and what I was. Of course, my identity is not only that I’m a Black man. But by definition of being a Black man, I was born into the struggle of fighting on the right side. As Ibram X. Kendi wrote in his popular book How to Be an Antiracist, “We were unarmed, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns.”

  At every turn, I chose to buck the system. I chose to “not participate,” as my mother told me early on. I chose not to capitulate to a false statement of who I was. I did all this even though I couldn’t explain why. Yes, there’s value in learning how to operate within their systems, as learning how to navigate the murky waters of oppression is something that many must do to survive. But it is equally important to know the truth. We have to be able to hold both of these realities. This dichotomy of living in two separate worlds that are running parallel is real. There is my definitive, unquestionable truth, and there is theirs.

  This perspective comes at a cost, though. Once you begin to espouse and exhibit excellence and brilliance, telling people to go free, you’re a problem. You could be LeBron James, but as soon as you start telling people Black lives matter, you’re told to shut up and dribble. Too many people seek the validation of white people as a collective. They seek validation outside of themselves. Dr. Ani taught me that I don’t need to be validated by any of these white folks. I am great and I come from greatness. But when you don’t know who you are, you’ll find yourself conforming to the image of yourself that best suits them. Our ignorance is a trillion-dollar business to them. Dr. Ani once said, “If you decided tomorrow that their system should cease to exist, tomorrow their system will cease to exist.” Then she said, “Do you know what that’s called? It’s called power.”

  When you think about the worst atrocities that happened in human history, but most definitely what happened in the transatlantic slave trade, many people think about the resilience of our people. The ways in which they were able to endure and survive that many-generations-long bondage. The truth is: They were stronger than we could ever imagine. It was not about weakness. It was ab
out survival. And it was about retaining a level of humanity within themselves, a part of themselves that always believed that better was coming. We have access to all of that. It’s in our DNA.

  Part of the concept of all power to the people introduced by many of the liberation movements of old is the understanding that we really, truly do have the power. We really do have a kind of sovereignty. There is de facto sovereignty and de jure sovereignty. The former suggests something is true even if it’s not acknowledged or sanctioned, and the latter is something—a state of affairs—that aligns with the law. And yes, these terms are generally used politically in reference to the independence of nations, but in many ways they are very applicable to our own independence as Black people. There is a power that we have, which isn’t sanctioned by these systems, and that’s the power we need to wield in order to effect change.

  It isn’t easy to break out of the gravitational pull designed to keep us constrained. But we must find our way out, some way, somehow.

  I recall the introduction of an old book I have saying that “Islam stands for change.” I love that phrasing but want to switch it up a bit. Let’s say that freedom stands for change also. True freedom, true liberation, means not just change for the oppressor, which is mandatory, but also change for the oppressed. Freedom seeks to change the individual, the society, and everything around us. And that’s why there’s so much opposition to our freedom from the outside and within. The kinds of psychological and spiritual shifts required by our liberation create enormous discomfort, and that resistance to discomfort drives the status quo. John Henrik Clarke said, “Every single thing that touches your life, religious, socially and politically, must be an instrument of your liberation or you must throw it into the ashcan of history.” Those words reverberate in my soul. I’ve had to use everything in my life, the good, bad, and ugly, for the service of my freedom.