Africans want to be paid a living wage. Africans want to perform work which they are capable of doing.… Africans want to be allowed to own land in places where they work, and not to be obliged to live in rented houses which they can never call their own. Africans want to be part of the general population, and not confined to living in their own ghettoes. Africans want a just share in the whole of South Africa; they want security and a stake in society.…
Above all, we want equal political rights, because without them our disabilities will be permanent.
In almost every way, Mandela speaking in 1964 at the trial at Rivonia could have been one of our leaders speaking for Los Angeles in 1992, the year of the uprising. Monies were being spent unequally for schools. Our programs were cut. Our parents had the most meager of jobs. Our families were torn asunder. I begin to realize this when I am provided a basis for comparison. Like the one I get when I am still in middle school at Millikan.
There, I am close friends with Tiffany, a white girl who goes there. She, like the other children, lives in Sherman Oaks and there comes a day when she invites me home with her for dinner. I go. And as the sun begins to set, we, the whole family plus me, gather in a fully separate dining room and the sweet, round man who is her father asks us about our day, what we learned, what we cared about and dreamed of for ourselves. Have you thought about what you want to be when you grow up, Patrisse?
It is incredible. Who asks children such things and over a well-set table where all the family has gathered to eat, converse? I’ve only seen that in movies, on the TV shows I love, 90210. But this is real life and here I am.
Have I ever known such a moment in my own home? My mother is gone before 6:00 in the morning each day and home after 10:00 at night. This is our life. This has always been our life. And while we live and we love and we laugh, there is also an unmitigated and unmitigating arc of pain that is there, has always been there, just below the surface. We suspect that things are not supposed to be this way but we aren’t sure what the other way is.
But in any case I am having dinner at my friend’s home, at her table, with her parents and I will tell you now that the sweet, round man, the father who asked his daughter—and me!—about our day and our dreams, I will tell you that over a few visits and discussions about life and where I lived we, he and I, come to realize that we know each other, the father and I. Or, at least he knows my mother.
He is, this father, this gentle inquisitor of my days and my dreams, to put it frankly, our family’s slum lord. He owns many buildings there in our Van Nuys hood, our poor hood. Our colored hood. Our building is one of the ones he owns. He is the very same man who allowed my family to subsist without a working refrigerator for the better part of a year. The coincidence is so shocking to me. I don’t know what to say, so I say nothing. I think if I say something, someone would think I was making it up, eating a big meal with a friend whose sweet father doesn’t care that my family has no way to do the same. I could understand someone thinking I was lying, embellishing, at the least, for dramatic effect.
But I wouldn’t have been. And I’m not now.
It is as true as the fact that our Van Nuys neighborhood, bordering as it did the wealthy white neighborhood of Sherman Oaks, was ground zero for the war on drugs and the war on gangs. There could be no spillover of us, the others, the dark others. We, our poverty and our music and our different foods and our reminders that they, the residents of our pretty adjacent neighborhood, were wealthy only at our expense, could not seep into the neat white world of Sherman Oaks. Of course that’s not what they said, that they didn’t want to be reminded of what it took to keep themselves rich.
It was the 1990s and what was mostly said—in carefully chosen language—was that being born Black or Mexican was enough to label you a gang member, a dangerous drug-involved criminal. And there were few leaders, save for perhaps Maxine Waters, saying that it was all bullshit. A group of kids hanging out in the street—because there were no parks and rec, no programming, nothing except sidewalks and alleyways to hang out in—became a gang. And it was mostly boys rounded up in those years. Boys, the initial wide swath of collateral damage in the war on gangs, the war on drugs, both of these names code for round up all the niggers you can.
There was no education plan for us—school budgets had been decimated and a decade before Reagan had declared ketchup was a vegetable so that’s what we were fed, we who counted on school breakfast and lunch to get through the day. With no education plan for us or thought about us becoming arbiters of our own destiny or self-determining contributors to an economy designed to reward only a few, the only plan left for us was prison or death.
If we did not die, we could go to prison, where we could work for the State of California and corporate brands we could not afford to buy. And the apprenticeship for this kind of work, the work that gets done in prisons, it started young. It started when Monte and his friends were way little. Little boys were cycled in and out of detention centers, places where they were trained and tracked, readied for longer stretches in prisons far away. They were often beaten and abused, regularly humiliated by having to strip, piss and shit publicly, left to discover their sexuality in the presence of people who hated them, and then they were sent back out to tell people they were hard, they were strong and they were a human testimony to other little boys: This is your future. Get ready. Man the fuck up.
And although I don’t agree with this approach to public safety, I suppose it could be argued forcefully that the removal of one difficult person, the local thief or bully, perhaps, makes a community more safe.
But for us, for Black people, the mass incarceration of first our fathers and later our mothers made our lives entirely unsafe. There were almost no adults who were there, present to love and nurture and defend and protect us. There was almost no one to say our dreams and our lives and our hopes mattered. And so we did it ourselves, the best way we knew how.
This, more than anything, was the evolution of gangs in Van Nuys. The groups of kids they first called gangs were really young people who were friends, they were my friends, and they took a defensive posture against what looked and felt like an actual advancing army that came in on foot and came in police cars for which the county had appropriated ever more dollars to patrol us with. And worse than the cars, most frightening of all, were the helicopters overhead. At all hours of day and night they hovered above us, shone lights into the midnight, circling and surveilling, vultures looking for the best next prey.
And there was Monte. My Monte. My brother.
He and his friends—really all of us—were out there trying to stay safe against the onslaught of adults who, Vietnam-like, saw the enemy as anyone Black or Brown who moved. He and his friends were not only busted but sent away for:
1. Tagging
2. Underage drinking
3. Carrying two-inch pocket knives
4. Cutting class
5. Being kids
6. Talking shit
7. Talking back
8. Wearing the same t-shirts. Literally.
And the gang statutes were written so broadly that even members of Congress, under their definition, could have been arrested. The ACLU would document that,
Gang injunctions make otherwise legal, everyday activities—such as riding the bus with a friend or picking a spouse up from work late at night—illegal for people they target.
They further argued, rightly, that,
One of the most troubling aspects is that they often give police overly-broad discretion to label people gang members without having to present any evidence or even charge someone with a crime. Police are left to rely on things like what someone looks like, where they live, and who they know. As a result, there is a great potential for racial profiling, with a particular impact on young people of color. Despite the documented existence of white gangs, no California gang injunction has targeted a white gang.
Kids were being sent away simply for being alive
in a place where war had been declared against us. And the propaganda, the rationalizing of how much we needed to be destroyed, we the generation called super-predators, was promoted by people who were Republican and Democrat, and, save for a few, Black as well as white. It was such convenient reasoning: the hoisting of responsibility on the narrow, non-voting shoulders (and after too many busts, never-voting shoulders) of 13 year olds, 14, 15 and 16 year olds, thereby absolving grown people of any responsibility themselves. As soon as you said drugs, as soon as you said gangs, you didn’t have to talk about what it meant to throw a bunch of adolescents together in a community with no resources, no outlets, no art classes, no mentorship, no love but from their families who were being harmed, cut daily, themselves.
And it didn’t matter how poorly conceived and executed the gang statutes were, what with their siphoning off of millions and millions and millions of dollars into police departments and away from everything that any rational parent or adult knows a young person needs in order to succeed—good schools, creative outlets, arts and sports programs and space to just be still. But so ineffective were these laws that between 1990 and 2010 in my city, Los Angeles, with the greatest number of injunctions in the state designed, they said, to stop gang activity, 10,000 young people were killed. Which is why with no one else on our side, we sided with ourselves. For better and for motherfucking worse.
A friend asked me once, well what about Paul? How come he wasn’t swept up and sent away? Paul, I explain, my brother, was never a child, I say. Once Alton was gone, it was Paul who made us breakfast and dinner and got us into bed. Paul, the man of the house before he was even a teenager in the house. Paul was never a child, doing things that children do: hanging out, being loud in the street, engaging in silly, risky behavior that is the hallmark of becoming an adult. Paul was 40 before he was 14. That’s what about Paul, I say.
Even still, when Monte is arrested and faces a charge of attempted robbery, which means real prison time, a new terror sets in. We know about juvenile hall—juvie—how to navigate it, but this is wholly different. At just 19 years old, Monte is in jail for two long months before we can even locate him. My mother calls and calls and tries and tries but the bars on the outside are as thick and real as the bars on the inside. Finally there is a breakthrough—after multiple visits someone allows my mother to see my brother. Why then, who knows? Jail and prison rules are capricious no matter what is said on paper. And alone, my mother goes to see her child in Twin Towers Detention Center, one of the many jails that makes up the Los Angeles County jail system.
It will be years, I will be grown, before she tells me what she saw, the child she bore, the one who loved animals and who once laughed easily, her big six-foot-two son, emaciated, more than 40 pounds gone from his suddenly frail frame. He is bruised and beaten. By who? My mother demands to know, but Monte won’t say. He is too scared to say. Years will pass before I learn that Monte was in a full-blown episode when he was taken to jail. He was hearing voices. His mind had been folded in on itself, and shaken brutally. The jail psychiatrist is the first to provide a diagnosis that explains why Monte has these mood swings, this erratic behavior: he has schizoaffective disorder. But they do not tell us this.
We learn it later, much later. After he is in prison. Way after. Like we will learn later that the sheriffs at the LA County Jail were the ones who beat him for his illness. They beat him and they kept water from him and they tied him down, four-point hold, and they drugged him nearly out of existence. There are drugs to take when a person is having a psychotic break. Those drugs can bring the person back into a good or total semblance of themselves. This was not what they did to my brother. They drugged Monte to incapacitate him, to incapacitate his humanity. To leave him with no dignity.
On the day my mother finds Monte and visits him in the LA County Jail through the glass that separates mother and son, he is barely able to hold himself up.
He is drooling on himself.
He is unable to speak a single full sentence coherently.
But he is able to raise his hand to the glass, where my mother, shaking, meets it on the other side.
I love you, my child, my baby, my son. I love you so much.
* * *
Monte is charged with attempted burglary after he is caught trying to sneak into someone’s home through a window. He is looking at six years in prison. He explains to our mother in one of their phone calls what happened was beyond his control.
They told me to do it, he confesses to her. They made me, he whispers through the phone lines. They being an entity only he can see or hear.
In the prison he is sent to, Monte lives out his sentence in the mental health unit. Almost immediately upon his arrival, he is stabbed by a member of a Mexican gang. My Black brother who had grown up around Mexicans and sought to identify with them behind the wall, finds that in prison the lines are different. Blacks are only allowed to stay with Blacks. Mexicans with Mexicans. Whites with whites. Even young white boys who go to prison—they are forced to join Aryan gangs no matter what they really believe. It is how you stay alive.
Or else go to the mental health unit. Which is what Monte does. I am safe here, he tells my mother, who tells me. Although a mental health unit in a prison is hardly what I would come up with when I think of keeping someone safe, he is probably right and it’s also true he is never stabbed again.
There are more people with mental health disorders in prison than in all of the psychiatric hospitals in the United States added up. In 2015, the Washington Post reported that,
American prisons and jails housed an estimated 356,268 [people] with severe mental illness.… [a] figure [that] is more than 10 times the number of mentally ill patients in state psychiatric hospitals [in 2012, the last year for reliable data]—about 35,000 people.
Monte writes me letters almost every week, none of which are coherent and all of which are dark. He talks a lot about crying, and totally unbidden and untethered he often writes JEHOVAH in all caps. And sometimes, sometimes he writes, WE WILL BE FREE!
I am 16. My brother is in prison. My new father is in prison. There are no support services for teens with family in prison. There are no school counselors to speak to who can help me understand all that I am feeling. But there are friends and I pull them close and I pull them tight.
There’s Rosa, who becomes my first friend when I enter the ninth grade at Cleveland High School, where none of my middle school or neighborhood friends attend. Cleveland is a charter school centered on social justice and the arts, but I am still nervous not knowing anyone. Rosa changes that. She’s dark-skinned and Mexican and gentle with me when I need it the most. She introduces herself to me right off and says, I like your Bob Marley t-shirt! And with that, we are bonded. In the mornings we share breakfasts she brings from home.
In the afternoons and evenings we write in a best friend journal that we pass back and forth. We rock like this through ninth grade and then through tenth and in eleventh grade we expand our friendship to include Carla, whom I meet through another person I’ve become close to, Cheyenne. Cheyenne and I will become just about as close as two people can get, but I am still drawn to Carla, who is loud in the hallways and obnoxious in a way that is exciting and she’s Queer. She’s bold in presenting all of who she is and for this she becomes my shero. Like she is to this very day.
But it is these sisters I turn to, first in the pages of the best friend journal, when I can no longer hold in what is happening to my brother. And one day I ask them—Rosa and Carla—would you write to him, too? And they agree. In some ways, Monte becomes their brother, too.
Unlike in the letters he’s written to me, when Monte writes back to Rosa and Carla he is coherent. I don’t understand then because I don’t know yet about his diagnosis and how to read when he’s properly medicated, when he is not. I am just grateful I have these young women beside me. This family we are creating.
In 2003, two years after I graduate high school,
Monte is released from prison. And it is Carla who has a car and who will be the one who drives me to pick him up from the Greyhound bus station. The prison loaded him onto a bus on one side of the state and now, finally, here he is disembarking on our side. I am excited beyond the telling and then I see him, for the first time since he was taken in 1999. But when I see him, I am left breathless.
My brother is hunched over. He is swollen from all the medication he’s on. He descends the bus steps in the clothes the prison gave him to return to us in: a thin muscle shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. They gave him underwear, but no pants, their final fuck you, you ain’t human to this man whom I have loved for all of my life. If we had not been there to scoop him right up, I’m sure Monte would have been picked up and sent back to some jail.
Monte with shower shoes on his feet, Locs sunglasses on his face like a celluloid gangsta. Monte carries with him a single manila envelope with his discharge papers inside and the medication they sent him home with. He has crushed all the pills. It is clear that the prison “doctors” chose not to stabilize Monte before he boarded the bus. Indeed, my brother is in the throes of a full-blown episode.
Not that I fully understand this yet.
I just know he is here, he is with me, he is free. I gather myself and then, Monte! I squeal. I try to hug him, but he hops in the front seat of Carla’s car and is silent.
How are you? I push.
Okay, comes the reply, hard and fast.
I missed you so much, I say.
Okay, he says.
We arrive at our home where the family is waiting, and a Welcome Home Monte party is about to be in full effect. Paul has a video camera out and our nephew, Chase, the child Monte had before he was sent away, is trying to jump on a father he has never had a chance to know. Monte heads to our table and sits there like a zombie and from the corner of my eye, I see it, the pain in the face of my so strong mother. She looks as if she will break, but she does not break.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 5