Now and again in these moments I think of Paul, Monte and Jasmine—and Alton—whose presence is far less predictable. I wonder, though briefly, what that feels like, to watch me disappear each weekend with my found father. But with no answers, no guide, mostly I just bathe myself in these loud, Southern people who look like me and who dance like me and slowly and slowly, I begin to feel like one of them, feel like a Brignac.
I learn to look forward to things I’d never before considered, like Christmas, Thanksgiving and birthdays. Coming up in the Kingdom Hall meant we never celebrated these things; they’re not in the Bible and we took the Bible pretty damn literally. I used to go, as a fourth grader, to school with my Bible and my Watchtower. I would read aloud from them to my classmates and I never, never felt like I was missing anything by not celebrating Christmas because being in the Kingdom Hall made me feel special, anointed. But now I am with another group, Catholic people, and they love God and they celebrate and eat food and laugh and cuss, although they don’t exchange gifts because who has money for gifts? But the love fills us to overflow.
Eventually, Gabriel, who could always find some low-level job no matter what, gets a car of his own—a gold-colored Lincoln Town Car, and we’re really off and running then. He does things my mother never could, my mother with her job piled on job, shift piled on shift. But Gabriel has the time and more, the heart for me and my now early teenage friends. We pack his car with our bodies and our stories and he drives us to movies, to pizza, to wherever our 13-year-old hearts desire. He never tells us we are too loud although surely we are too loud.
But it isn’t only movies and friends and family and football. Gabriel is deeply invested in his healing and one day he says, Come on, and we jump in the car and drive into the San Fernando Valley, the real hood part, Pacoima, and we pull up to a church and get out. Come on, my father tells me, and I follow him down into a room where a small group of men are meeting.
There was never a time in my childhood that I can recall when people did not call me an old soul, and maybe that’s why my father thought I could handle being in his 12-step meeting. Or maybe because, like me, he always wanted a road dawg with him. But while I remember how overwhelmed I was by men talking about things they’d done that had hurt their families while they were struggling with addiction—their absences from family life was a repeated theme—and I remember my father talking about hiding, how he never wanted his family to see him high, what I recall most thinking about was that the honesty was life-giving. As I attended these meetings over the years and after I spent time working as an adult counselor myself, I wondered: Why are only individuals held accountable? Where were the supports these men needed? Men talking about broken dreams and no jobs and feeling hated by the world and being beat up by police.
But more than anything in those first years, the meetings make me closer to Gabriel, closer to my father. We go for an hour and I listen to men tell their stories and cry and I watch them hold and support one another and then my father finds some small spot to eat—there was a Filipino place he loved best—and we process his life, our life, what it means to build and be in a relationship together.
I’m not here to take you away from anyone, he tells me more than once. I’m just here to add to your life in a way that’s good and useful. I believe him. I lean into him, my spirit does. Children so rarely get to see adults be so honest and open and accountable in a way that is grounded, not reactionary. I could not name it then, how these conversations left me, but they start to change me, begin to commit me to being the same.
Still, it isn’t all intense meetings and talk of failures and sobriety. It is also many weekend barbeques at the park where my dad and his brothers play baseball. They’d formed an adult league, uniforms and all, and during the season, we all go and cheer them on and eat. These are the moments I love the most, the moments when the animosity between siblings falls by the wayside, and they only happen when my father is present and well, I am told. When he is absent, the games are, too.
But when he is present, we make time in the park, and the siblings, not all from the same father, come together. The first two girls who hadn’t been raised by Grandma Vina, the girls who were children of my grandma’s rape, even come. My father is the third child and the first child of her choosing. My grandma had been a mistress and my father was the only baby from that union. The next set of children were born after her marriage to a man no one speaks of anymore, a man who was abusive, physically and emotionally. My Grandma coddles these children, even now, perhaps trying to soothe the wounds their father caused, while Barbara and Lisa seethe in the background, their father the white man, their father the rapist.
When the anger boils over, as it often does, it is Gabriel everyone goes to. Gabriel is Switzerland or maybe the original idea of the UN. He processes with them, pushes them to forgive, to choose love. He uses his thin brown body and his big beautiful heart as salve, as medicine. With Gabriel any one of them, any one of us, can appear unmasked and unafraid and he pulls us close. He tells us he cherishes us. Makes us feel things will settle and be all right. Look at me, he says. He reminds us love wins. And for me, a girl from a home of little verbal expression and even less physical expression, I start to know a freedom I hadn’t realized I needed. I start to feel something like home in my own skin and sinew, bones and blood. I want this never to end. To go on and on. To forever be the normal I know. Only nothing is forever.
And as it was three years before, it is my mother who tells me. A week maybe more has passed and I cannot reach my father and this man who has called me daily, this man who has never missed a weekend, is suddenly a ghost. I make calls, my mother does too, and then one night she sits me down on her bed.
It’s your father, she says. He is going back to prison.
And in the room where my mother once told me that I had a new father, the room where she has now told me I have lost my new father, I collapse. I know prison had been part of Gabriel’s life, but it had not been part of the life we shared together. Our life together was about healing. I have no concept of my father this way, captured, in chains.
And my father, gone but still present, a space in my heart. I don’t understand, I sob to my mother. She tells me it’s true. She tells me my Grandma Vina is the one who confirmed it.
Mom had called and called in this age before the ubiquity of mobile phones and after three weeks, maybe four, she got Grandma Vina. And in these days, long before the influential determined that our criminal justice system needed reform, all we have is the shame of it, we who are families. There are no support groups, no places to discuss what is happening. I don’t even learn—although I guess—that he is reincarcerated on a drug charge. But I don’t ask. I don’t know to ask.
It will be more than a decade before I meet the advocate and scholar Deborah Small, who will say that this is a nation founded on addiction—the production of rum and other alcohols, tobacco, sugar. And now, she will say, they put people in prison for it. Prison was not always the response to drug use, she will say to a me who is grown and able to process what became of a man I loved.
But when I am a girl, a teenager heading into my junior year in high school who is crying in my mother’s bedroom, I only know one thing. If prisons are supposed to make society more safe, why do I feel so much fear and hurt?
In 1986 when I am three years old, Ronald Reagan reenergizes the drug war that was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon by further militarizing the police in our communities, which swells the number of Black and Latinx men who are incarcerated. Between 1982 and 2000, the number of people locked up in the state of California grows by 500 percent. And it will be nearly a quarter of a century before my home state is forced, under consent decree, to reduce the number of people it’s locked up, signaling, we hope, the end of what will eventually be called the civil rights crisis of our time. A generation of human beings, Black women, Black children and Black men, including my father and eventually my brother, who are
viewed as having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners.
Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.
And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding. Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.
* * *
There are no rulebooks to guide you through losing a parent to incarceration, although the year my father goes back, there are literally ten million children living in the United States who know this loss.
But there are no self-help books and there are no prayers.
Michelle Alexander has not yet written The New Jim Crow.
Barack Obama has not yet been elected and has not left office with the largest reduction in federal prisoners in history.
The racially discriminatory sentencing imbalance between crack and powder cocaine has not yet been addressed.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have not yet flowed into non-profits to fight mass incarceration.
Bill Keller has not left his high post at The New York Times to assume leadership at the Marshall Project, and Justice Strategies has not created its blog for children of the incarcerated.
Angela Davis has not yet asked us, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Ruthie Gilmore has not yet done breathtaking research on prisons in California and beyond.
But in the small world you occupy in El Barrio in Van Nuys, you do not know that there are millions of teenagers and children feeling what you are feeling, experiencing what you are experiencing, the disorientation, the loss of stability, of safety, the sure knowledge that you can wake up one morning and find anyone, maybe everyone, gone.
You only know what you can calculate:
He will miss your high school performances.
He will miss your graduation.
He will miss four birthday celebrations—your eighteenth!
There will be no more Thanksgivings at Grandma’s, no Christmases.
The kisses and hugs that once embarrassed you and then sustained you will also be gone.
You do not have words to explain any of this, the full measure of the loss. Do words even exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures that approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like?
This is why you tuck it away quietly in secret pockets.
This is why you act like you are fine.
This is why you go to school and pretend that algebraic equations that never add up to your father coming home make some kind of sense.
This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
4
MAGNITUDE AND BOND
We are each other’s harvest;
We are each other’s business;
We are each other’s magnitude and bond
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Just as I am beginning to adjust to all the changes that becoming a Brignac brought on, I have to adjust to what it means to set them aside. My father’s family loves me, but with only four years together, I am still not fully part of their everyday. Which is to say that with my father out of sight, so am I, and it will remain this way for all the years he is gone.
I do not see them.
We do not talk on the phone.
We are a part of each other’s past; and looking ahead toward an unknowable future, it begins to dawn on me the full measure of the role that my father played in the family, the literally magnetic role.
Gabriel pulled us closer. He was the reason for our family to all come in from the rain. Together. With him gone, there are no more uncles playing baseball every weekend, my cousin Naomi tells me. We go, for a time, to the same high school, and she is the one who keeps me in the loop.
There are no more football Saturdays together.
There’s no more poor man’s gumbo eaten together over laughter and shouted conversations.
There are holidays, but without Gabriel’s healing spirit to make the room easy, I can’t imagine what those holidays are possibly like. And anyway, I am not invited.
Still I have come to love Gabriel and he loves me and we seek to stay connected.
I cannot go to see my father without an adult to take me and even if I could, I don’t want to go alone. Gabriel and I stay in touch through letter writing. Our letters are brief. My father always opens his in the exact same way:
Dearest Patrisse,
I hope this letter finds you well …
In each letter he apologizes. He says he misses me. In each letter he promises us better, brighter times.
In my responses, I tell him I miss him, too. I say I cannot wait to see him again. But in the letters we do not speak of the prison itself, his experience inside, locked up and away. We do not talk about what he was convicted of, although I suspect it’s drugs because drugs are what I know most people seem to be getting locked up for. But in those letters, those weekly notes, it’s almost as though he could have been writing from a school or a country far, far away. Which is why I do not tell him about my life, either, the interior of it and in particular Monte, who, right behind my father, is also sent to prison.
There comes a day when I am at dance class and it is Monte’s job to come and pick me up. He doesn’t, but I don’t panic. He has, by that time, started acting strangely. There was the day he burst into my room excited and full of love. This is for you, Trisse, he had said, and handed me a ten-dollar bill, all crisp and fresh. Before the night was over he returned, eyes desperate and pleading. Trisse, can I get that ten dollars back, he asked softly but insistently. Of course I gave it back, along with a piece of my spirit.
But my mother, whom I call on the day Monte doesn’t come to get me, tells me to take the bus home, which I do, giving me time to think about my brother. I figured he was getting high, the cause of the wild mood swings, the hours spent locked in the bathroom when I’d hear him sobbing.
Monte, I’d say from one side of the door. Monte, let me in! I love you!
Go way Trisse, he’d sob, and then refuse to speak anymore.
Except when he did speak more. Because that was the other side of him. There were days and nights when my brother did not sleep, when he chattered on incessantly, was sure like no one has ever been sure before that he could grab this thing, this life, by the horns and go! I don’t, we don’t, know which Monte will greet us on any good morning, on any long night. And in many ways, we just go with it, I just go with it. We don’t know what else to do and, besides, doesn’t Monte have a right to his inconsistent space? He never knows how the world will greet him, after all.
I spent my childhood watching my brother get arrested. Once, when I was 12 we were just walking down the street, Monte and I, and a cop we saw regularly came up to us.
Are you Monte Cullors? he barked.
Yes, my brother responded.
And that was it. In front of me he handcuffed Monte and took him away. I had no idea what for. To this day I have no idea what for. All I know is that this was a common occurrence. And not just with Monte. It’s hard for me to think of a boy in my neighborhood who didn’t spend
time in juvenile hall, or wasn’t arrested at least once.
It is interesting to me now to think that at the time this was happening, a time when my mother worked multiple jobs that still barely amounted to a livable wage, a time when Alton had been closed out of the industry he’d given his life to and no replacement had been offered or created, and a time when Gabriel was given prison rather than treatment, Americans, Black and white, were deeply involved in the final push to end apartheid in South Africa. At his trial at Rivonia, Nelson Mandela would say the following in his famous “I Am Prepared to Die” speech:
Our fight is against real, and not imaginary, hardships … poverty and lack of human dignity.… The lack of human dignity experienced by Africans is the direct result of the policy of white supremacy. White supremacy implies black inferiority. Legislation designed to preserve white supremacy entrenches this notion.…
They do not look upon them as people with families of their own; they do not realize that they have emotions—that they fall in love like white people do; that they want to be with their wives and children like white people want to be with theirs; that they want to earn enough money to support their families properly, to feed and clothe them and send them to school.
He continued,
Poverty and the breakdown of family life have secondary effects. Children wander about the streets of the townships because they have no schools to go to, or no money to enable them to go to school, or no parents at home to see that they go to school, because both parents (if there be two) have to work to keep the family alive. This leads to … a growing violence which erupts not only politically, but everywhere. Life in the townships is dangerous.…
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 4