When They Call You a Terrorist

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

  Middle school is the first time in my life when I feel unsure of myself. No one is calling me gifted anymore. No one, save for my dance teacher, encourages me or seems to have patience with me. It’s in middle school that my grades drop for the first time and that I come to believe that maybe all that love I’d gotten in elementary school had somehow dried up, my ration run dry. At the age of 12 I am on my own, no longer in the world as a child, as a small human, innocent and in need of support. I saw it happen to my brothers and now it was happening to me, this moment when we become the thing that’s no longer adorable or cherished. The year we become a thing to be discarded.

  For my brothers, and especially for Monte, learning that they did not matter, that they were expendable, began in the streets, began while they were hanging out with friends, began while they were literally breathing while Black. The extraordinary presence of police in our communities, a result of a drug war aimed at us, despite our never using or selling drugs more than unpoliced white children, ensured that we all knew this. For us, law enforcement had nothing to do with protecting and serving, but controlling and containing the movement of children who had been labeled super-predators simply by virtue of who they were born to and where they were born, not because they were actually doing anything predatory.

  I learned I didn’t matter from the very same place that lifted me up, the place I’d found my center and voice: school. And it will not be until I am an adult, determined to achieve a degree in religion, part of a long and dedicated process I undertook to become an ordained minister, that I will enjoy school again.

  A few years after I complete my degree, Dr. Monique W. Morris published her groundbreaking book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, demonstrating how Black girls are rendered disposable in schools, unwanted, unloved. Twelve percent of us receive at least one suspension during our school careers while our white (girl) counterparts are suspended at a rate of 2 percent. In Wisconsin the rate is actually 21 percent for Black girls but 2 percent for white girls.

  But having attended schools with both Black and white girls, one thing I learned quickly is that while we can behave in the same or very similar ways, we are almost never punished similarly. In fact, in white schools, I witnessed an extraordinary amount of drug use compared to what my friends in my neighborhood schools experienced. And yet my friends were the ones policed. My neighborhood friends went to schools where no mass or even singular shootings occurred, but where police in full Kevlar patrolled the hallways, often with drug-sniffing dogs, the very same kind that they turned on children in the South who demanded an end to segregation.

  By the time Black Lives Matter is born, we not only know that we have been rendered disposable because of our lived experience—which few listened to—but also from data and finally from those terrible, viral images of Black girls being thrown brutally out of their seats by people who are called School Safety Officers, for the crime of having their phones out in the classroom. Monique Morris’s reporting will tell us about the 12-year-old girl from Detroit who is threatened with both expulsion and criminal charges for writing the word “Hi” on her locker door; and the one in Orlando who is also threatened with expulsion from her private school if she doesn’t stop wearing her hair natural.

  Twelve.

  And for me, too, it started the year I turned twelve. That was the year that I learned that being Black and poor defined me more than being bright and hopeful and ready. I had been so ready to learn. So willing.

  Twelve, the moment our grades and engagement as students seem to matter less than how we can be proven to be criminals, people to be arrested.

  Twelve, and childhood already gone.

  Twelve, and being who we are can cost us our lives.

  It cost Tamir Rice his life.

  He was a child of twelve. And the cop who shot him took under two seconds, literally, to determine that Tamir should die.

  Tamir Rice. Twelve.

  Twelve, and out of time.

  3

  BLOODLINES

  She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure.

  She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.

  TONI MORRISON

  Yet for all the ways that middle school challenges me, for all the culture shock and for all of my struggles with the math and science courses, there is one incident that defines it more than any other, and it has everything to do with police and nothing to do with police and everything to do with poverty and nothing to do with poverty. It has everything to do with being Black and nothing to do with it.

  Just before I cross that sixth-grade elementary school stage, just before I head off to Millikan and Sherman Oaks, a confident graduate about to rush headlong into the next chapter of my life, my mother and I are out, shopping for groceries. At some point between the Cheerios being put in the cart and the milk, she turns to me and says, I need to talk to you when we get home. Okay, I say, though I wonder, Why not talk to me now?

  At home, after the groceries are put away, she guides me into her bedroom, onto her bed, patting it for me to sit beside her. I do. She takes a deep breath. This is not a conversation that she wants to have. And then she just blurts it out. Alton is not your father, she says. He’s Paul’s and Monte’s and Jasmine’s. But in between Monte and Jasmine, we broke up and I fell in love with Gabriel and we had you.

  Gabriel? I ask. Do you mean that man who has been calling the house for the last few months?

  Yes, she says. Gabriel is your father. It is a statement that makes no sense to me.

  Do you want to meet him? she asks.

  Her words confuse me. I don’t know what to say, what to think. I don’t want any of this. In the background my mother is saying something about running into Gabriel, exchanging numbers, her telling him about me. But I barely hear these details. I am in prayer: Can everything be the same? Please, God? Please?

  I look at my mother but none of this comes out. I try to speak but cannot. I pull and pull from a place inside me I cannot name and then I say, hard and quick, That would be okay. I want to meet my father.

  * * *

  From the time my mother tells me about Gabriel until I meet him a month later, there is no conversation about him in our home. There is no backstory. No this is how we met. This is how we fell in love. This is where you really come from. We are a family of survivors and a family of doers, but we are not a family of talkers. We do not process, my family, we do not take it all down to the bones of it. Gabriel goes undiscussed, exists almost like an imagined friend, or else someone I meet in dreams that are hazy, not quite knowable, but still present.

  But there is this one time, this one conversation. It happens with Alton, the only father I’ve ever known. Six years he’s been gone from our home. Six years of him visiting only, and us never knowing when. I am 12 and I will not connect his disappearance from us to any larger social or structural disruption but only to the idea that we, the kids, must have done something wrong to make this big, loving man go away. I will not know how he had been disappeared from himself, disappeared from the only life he’d ever known: 20 years on the line at the GM Van Nuys plant and then nothing. Alton will find jobs well below his skill set at garages, but he will never again know stability or a living wage. And all I will know then is that I love him and I miss him. Alton with all his big emotion and laughter. Which is why on this day when he comes through the door, unbidden and loud, and says, Come on girl, let’s go get something to eat, I am grateful and bound out behind him. Little shadow follows big shadow.

  We walk down the block holding hands. Down past the 7-Eleven where we get our groceries. Down past George’s Liquors, where I will one day buy cigarettes. Down to the small hole-in-the-wall, the Mexican spot with the name no one ever seems to remember. We order tacos, but before I can start eating, I look up at Alton, h
is brown face gleaming with sweat in the Van Nuys sun, and I see them, the tears, they are falling freely, incongruently with a man who looks like he does, all muscle tip-to-tip, a man who started lifting weights when he was 14 years old and never stopped.

  Alton and his Jheri curl, his 501 jeans with the super-hard crease down the center, his Stacy Adams shoes. Alton and his 18-pack abs that peek out from the silk shirt he always wears mostly unbuttoned when he isn’t working. Alton whose masculinity is ripped from the headlines. His tears push for real.

  Am I still your father? he asks.

  Of course, I say.

  We pause.

  And then, about my mother: I didn’t want her to tell you, he says. I never wanted you to feel like you were half anything, step nothing. Like you weren’t mine. You’ve always been mine. I didn’t want you to feel different.

  I cannot figure out how to respond. I have not been prepared for any of this. I only know I do not want to betray him, my Alton, my father. I want him to just feel what my 12-year-old heart, my 12-year-old brain, cannot find the words to say. I wish right then we would simply say I love you a million times but we don’t. It isn’t what we come from. We say nothing and just eat and are silent. But the tears are a sign. Everything is changing and I feel guilty. It all feels like my fault.

  But I have to meet Gabriel.

  * * *

  A month after the conversation in the bedroom with my mother, and three weeks after the tacos and tears with Alton, I meet Gabriel for the first time. We make plans, a date, and I watch out the window until I see him walk up to our broken iron gate. He rings the bell and I am the one who lets him in. I am left breathless when I see him; we look exactly alike.

  We don’t stay in the apartment long. My mother and he do not hug. She is not a hugger. But they are cordial. After five minutes we leave. We get on the bus and head to the movies, although what we saw is gone forever from my memory.

  He does not have a car yet. He rides the bus to see me. We ride the bus to our date. I am awkward with Gabriel the whole time, unsure of what to say, how to act. It makes no difference to him. He hugs and kisses me throughout the day, the way you might do with a newborn baby, which in a way, to him, I am. I accept his affection, but do not return it. I am not yet comfortable with this new father in my life.

  Gabriel tells me he lives in a home for sober adults. He tells me right away he’s in recovery from crack addiction. I know about crack. Everybody uses it, it seems like. At least in my neighborhood where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no afterschool programs, no hangout spots, no movie theaters, no jobs, no treatment centers or health care for the mentally ill, like my brother Monte, who had begun smoking crack and selling my mom’s things and is already showing signs of what we would much later come to know as schizoaffective disorder.

  But without health care beyond LA County USC hospital, we can’t know about my brother. We only know that crack filled the empty spaces for a lot of people whose lives have been emptied out. We are the post-Reagan, post–social safety net generation. The welfare reform generation. The swim or motherfucking sink generation. And, unlike our counterparts on Wall Street, where crack is used and sold more, we don’t have an employee assistance plan.

  Later, when I am home, none of my siblings will ask me how it went. Did I like him? What did we do? I have shared everything with these three people: Monte, Paul and Jasmine. Secrets, fears, rooms, triumphs, disappointments. They all eventually tumble out of us. But not this one. This story is tucked inside a world only I live in.

  And then one day after I meet Gabriel, my mom and I get into a terrible argument. I don’t recall what I say or do, only that I am angry at everything and everyone and I am talking back to her and she slaps me hard across the face. My brother Paul intervenes immediately. He takes me in his arms and he holds me. It seems like hours. He holds me and rocks me, my six-foot-two, 180-pound muscle-bound brother.

  You will always be my sister, Paul whispers to me.

  You will always be ours, he says.

  * * *

  A week after the movies comes Gabriel’s graduation. My father’s graduation. He’s been in a Salvation Army drug and alcohol treatment program. My mother is the one who takes me to it. We do not speak during the ride, but she has made sure my face is clean, my clothes are neat. Her daughter is presentable. We arrive at the Salvation Army, which is a church and also the sober living house where my father resides. My mother and I go to the graduation. I see my father for the second time. He is one of nearly 20 men who will be celebrated.

  His large, almost unwieldy family—my family now—have gathered and no sooner does he rush to greet me, to scoop awkward me up, than so do they. I am awash in their kisses, their hugs. There are uncles, two of them that day, and three aunties. My father is one of ten siblings. This is your grandmother, Gabriel tells. She is small, short like me, five feet two, and her name is spelled Vina, but it’s pronounced Vi-KNEE. I don’t know why.

  But Grandma Vina comes from Eunice, Louisiana, and her father was white and her mother was Creole. She—my new grandma—has long gray hair down to her butt, although she wears it brushed back into a bun. She is wearing sweatpants and sneakers and a t-shirt. I will learn that she is a Scorpio and that family is everything to her, her proof of life, of meaning. I will learn she cusses a lot, has a fourth-grade education, and my father was her first son and the first child of her own choice. She had two daughters before him but she didn’t raise those girls. I will learn that my aunties Lisa and Barbara were the products of rape.

  A white man got her, my father tells me once when I ask why Auntie Lisa and Auntie Barbara always seem so angry.

  A white man got Grandma Vina, and she was very young, he says. She couldn’t raise them girls. That’s all I know, he says, and we never speak of it again. No one does.

  These pieces of family history and harm that never heal, that pass on generation to generation.

  But I love my new grandma immediately, as soon as she smiles wide as the ocean and says, Well, well. Look at Ms. Brignac, after giving me the biggest hug of all hugs right before Darius, my father’s only other child, joins in. He is 20. I am his lost-and-found sister. We look at each other. We pause for a moment. We hug.

  My father’s family is a cash-poor family, unlike my mother’s. My mother’s family is middle class. The only reason that we are poor is that my mother got pregnant young, which violated Jehovah’s Witness rules, sex outside of marriage and all that. They shun her and for years she will work and work to get accepted back into the Kingdom Hall, back into love. She sort of makes it, eventually, over years, but never in enough time to climb back into middle-class safety.

  But my mother’s family, my mother’s world is nowhere to be found in this Salvation Army, in this church, in the rows and rows and rows of pews. Just this new world and I feel like an astronomer who has suddenly discovered a new planet. But a planet without Paul without Monte without Jasmine without Mom without Alton. A planet without the me who exists alongside the people I live and fight and love with.

  I don’t know how to sort my feelings, which is why, with no other choice, I set them aside. And soon enough, when I am in the presence of Grandma Vina and my father and my uncles and aunties and Darius, they stop occurring to me. I am officially two Patrisses. My mother’s daughter and my father’s daughter, which don’t quite add up to one whole child.

  But on this day, I don’t concern myself with that. I listen, instead and intently, as my father gives a speech about having his family back. He talks about healing and he talks about our right to it. As I grow older I will come to question 12-step programs, see their failures, all the ways they do not reduce the harms of addiction by making their harms accrue to the individual, alone. They do not account for all the external factors that exacerbate chaotic drug use, send people into hell. The person who only has alcohol or crack at their fingertips almost never does as well as the person who has those things but also a range of o
ther supports, including the general sense that their life matters.

  But what is consistent in this moment—and all the moments that will follow that I am in 12-step rooms—is that I will learn there is something radical and beautiful and deeply transformational in bearing witness to public accountability, accountability before a community gathered for the sake of wholeness.

  And on this day, in this hour, my father is humble.

  My father apologizes.

  Have I ever heard an adult apologize?

  Did Alton ever say sorry for leaving us, for us being hungry? Did GM ever apologize to him or the hundreds of others whose lives were entirely disrupted by its closure—with no plan for what they could do next to support themselves and their families, no plan to continue a life with dignity? But here is Gabriel apologetic and public and I have no context for it. My mother is secretive. Ours is a home where grown folks’ business is grown folks’ business. Gabriel is public. Even in the moments of shame. He always returns to truth and honesty. He talks to the audience but I know he is really talking to me, talking to his family. He praises us. He thanks us for not throwing him away, for staying by his side when he went to prison, which is how our society responded to his drug use.

  Later, when I get home no one asks me, How did it go? What was it like? Who else was there? I don’t remember any conversation at all, as though there wasn’t this whole universe growing just outside our door. I remember going into my room, going to sleep, getting up the next day and heading to school. And everything was everything.

  * * *

  From this point onward, Gabriel is immediately and continually present. After the Salvation Army graduation, he starts picking me up every single Friday and we go to Grandma Vina’s house, where there is always a huge collection of family members. My father’s family is a sports family, with football games, college and professional, held up like holy moments. But it doesn’t really matter. Football, baseball, basketball, golf for goodness’ sake, tennis, hockey. You name it, my uncles had the stats on it. But nothing was like the weekends of football and my Grandma’s poor man’s gumbo—gumbo without the seafood, only chicken, in it.