He’s here, Mom. It’s okay. He’s here, I say.
And we hold on to that, to this small offering, over the next few days as Monte doesn’t sleep, doesn’t eat but rubs toothpaste on walls and mixes drinks with pieces of tissue or else runs outside and screams, I’m walking the line! I’m walking the line! He takes to wearing two pairs of shoes. He slips on one first, and then over the first pair, he slips on another.
By day four, Monte brings a shopping cart filled with God knows what into the living room, and for some reason, this is what does it, what breaks my mother. Her tears rush forward hard, the destroyed levees of Lake Pontchartrain. We are holed up in the bedroom, locking ourselves away. We are confused and afraid and my mother is crying. I have never seen her cry before.
Monte is growing ever more erratic. When he speaks he babbles and nothing we say is able to get through to him. We have no idea what to do as my brother spirals and spirals. Jasmine has left, gone to stay with a friend. She’s the youngest and completely overwhelmed.
I call a friend, a former teacher, Vitaly, who is a therapist and describe what is happening. This is what an episode looks like, he tells me. I try to coax Monte but he won’t talk to me. And then success! Eventually he does talk to Bernard, the man my mother will fall in love with after Alton and marry. We—well, Bernard—are trying to convince Monte it’s time to go to the hospital. Monte seems to be listening to this man who is a stranger to him and we guess he has grown accustomed to only speaking with men. I call an ambulance and do a mini-intake over the phone but they will not come to help when they hear his background.
He is a felon, they say. You have to call the police.
I beg. Please help us. This isn’t a criminal matter.
They refuse. They disconnect the line. My mother and I go back and forth and decide we have no other choice. I call the local law enforcement office and explain everything. I beg them to go slow. I tell them Monte’s history with police because by now I know how he was beaten and tortured by LA County sheriffs.
Two rookies arrive and they are young as fuck. I meet them downstairs. I ask them, What will you do if my brother gets violent?
Monte’s never been violent but I am trying to prepare for anything. I’m—we’re—in a place we’ve never been.
We’ll just taser him, one responds.
No! My God! Absolutely not!
I refuse to let them past me until they promise me they won’t hurt him, and when they finally do, I lead them into the apartment, explaining to Monte as I walk through the door, It’s okay. It’s okay. They’re just here to help.
And my brother. My big, loving, unwell, good-hearted brother, my brother who has rescued small animals and my brother who has never, never hurt another human being, drops to his knees and begins to cry. His hands are in the air. He is sobbing.
Please don’t take me back. Please don’t take me back.
I stop cold. I tell the police they have to leave and they do and I get down on the floor. I curl up next to Monte. I hold him as much as he’ll allow.
I am so sorry, Monte, I say, my voice broken, my face wet with tears. I am so, so, sorry.
Eventually, Bernard nudges him gently and gets him to agree to a walk. They go to the supermarket, where apparently Monte knocks everything down. They go to the movies and Monte tries to tear up the seats. And finally, finally, Bernard gets Monte to agree to come with him to the hospital, which is where he stays for almost three weeks. It takes two weeks alone just to get him stabilized on the right medication before we, his family, are allowed to go visit him.
When people ask me how we got through that moment, that time, how we managed it all, I tell them about my mother, Cherice. I tell them about a woman who worked from can’t see in the morning until can’t see at night. I tell them about a woman whose own family had disavowed her but who refused to be a person who disavowed anyone in return. My mother wove us together, my brothers, sister and I, into a tight and strong complex quilt and she called it us and it was, and it is, us.
Magnitude and Bond.
5
WITNESS
The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.
JAMES A. BALDWIN
Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that there are years that ask questions and years that answer them. In my own life, my high school years did both and all at once and consistently. My new magnet program, Cleveland High, is located in Reseda, another San Fernando Valley neighborhood not so different from my own Van Nuys hood, though a half-step more developed. Reseda is all strip malls and fast-food joints and is mostly Latinx and working class. None of my friends from middle school are sent there so in every way it is an ending as much as it is a beginning.
Cleveland’s humanities program is rooted in social justice and we study apartheid and communism in China. We study Emma Goldman and read bell hooks, Audre Lorde. We unpack the world’s three major religions—and are allowed to go deeper into lesser-known and practiced religions if that’s where our inquiries take us. We are encouraged to challenge racism, sexism, classism and heteronormativity. We are encouraged to ask, How do you know what you think you know?
It is inevitable, then, that I begin to question the Jehovah’s Witness world I had come up in. It begins with small questions posed to the Elders, the group of men only who guide Kingdom Hall, our understanding of the Bible, our way of worship.
There are things I need to know and so I begin to ask:
How can we preach that the Earth is only 2,000 years old?
How come only 144,000 people are chosen to go to heaven? What happens to the rest and how is the selection made? Wouldn’t heaven be lonely with only 144,000 people?
Why is there no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible? (I am obsessed with dinosaurs at the time.) Do Jehovah’s Witnesses believe in dinosaurs? (The answer—yes—is one of the few clear ones I receive.)
And then my inquiries push further: Why are all the Elders in our religion men?
What about the women?
And why would a religion encourage family members not to speak to one another?
This is when I begin to hear that Satan has gotten me, but those words, those admonishments, don’t change the reality within which I have lived for the whole of my life, the life of an exiled family, a family cast off of the precious island that is Kingdom Hall.
When my mother was a teenager and pregnant, she was immediately disassociated from the religion—and from her family. The religion took precedence over the love and support she must have needed from her mother, her father. Thrown out of her home, she was not even allowed to speak to her parents or siblings. The religion was more important than a scared 16 year old or us, her children, who were often hungry and often without but were not allowed to ask our own family for help. My mother’s family was not rich, but neither were they wanting. We were allowed the privilege to come and to pray but not to participate in fellowship or even say hello to other members of Kingdom Hall, except the Elders, no matter the relationship.
And for years, for the whole of my early childhood years and into my early teens, my mother worked and worked and tried and tried and kept showing up to prove to the Elders that she was reformed, a good and pious woman. When I am in the ninth grade she writes them a letter asking to be reinstated. She speaks in the letter about why she is worthy. And after some deliberation by the men, and after two decades of being disassociated, they tell my mother her arguments are meritorious, which is to say she will be reinstated. It will be a public affair.
And I suppose that I should be happy for this development. But now, after all of these years of being a Disassociated Witness, of being allowed to go to the Kingdom Hall but not allowed to speak to anyone, including my mother’s family—You can come and pray but you are too dirty, and by extension your children are too dirty, to speak with, even if you share the same blood—now, after all these years, I fe
el something like disgust, certainly something like anger.
For four years I have watched my father in faith-based processes where he could own his choices and still be embraced, still be loved. And that practice, that coming together, that speaking the truth of your life from a place beyond shame and having it heard from a place beyond judgment, it didn’t just change my father. It changed we who were witnesses. It changed me who was a witness.
And a thought occurs to me after my mother is reinstated. When was she ever given such grace? Was she ever given such grace? Had she ever lived and been free in even the smallest corner of the world where she was not judged and shamed? Was this the place that could offer her or any one of us this?
I am only 14, and while there is a lot I know I don’t know, there are some things I do.
I want a place of worship that feels honest. Kingdom Hall, with its men over everyone and literal interpretation of the Bible, does not feel honest. I cannot look in the face of those judging men and believe that they truly are the ones who could hold my mother to account. I do not believe that in all of time, only 144,000 people would survive and not be cast into a Lake of Fire.
I want mentorship and guidance, not this judgment and punishment I had known all my life. It feels particularly aimed at women and our bodies, our sexuality. My mother was spiritually exiled for choosing to love someone when she was a teenager and, as evidence of that love, birthing beautiful children—and with a man, Alton, who would choose me, too. Twenty years she carried the heavy water for that love. Twenty years!
I know I am supposed to be on a spiritual path, but the path that Jehovah’s Witness has me on does not feel liberating or purposeful—beyond the purpose of shaming and scaring us. It doesn’t provide me the feeling of connection and spirit I feel reading Audre Lorde, whose books I carry with me everywhere. Where I can find no center for myself in the Bible, what with its anti-woman origin story, I can when I read the essays in Audre’s Sister Outsider. I am changing, my whole life is changing, and for all the parts that feel terrifying and hard, there are other parts, many of them, that feel incredibly exciting and bursting with possibility. The possibility of becoming my truest self.
On the day of the reinstatement, my mother is nonchalant. We are readying ourselves to go to Kingdom Hall in the same way we always do. Eat a light breakfast. Talk little. Dress conservatively. On that morning, in fact, we do not even know what is about to happen. Now I realize my mother’s way of coping is to minimize things, both the good and the bad, but especially the bad. It’s how she manages trauma. But on that day we enter Kingdom Hall, as always, silently, because here is a place where you do not speak, not even whisper.
My mother takes out a piece of paper and a pen and scribbles a note that she passes to us, her children: I’m getting reinstated today, she writes. And as they begin the public portion of the service, I start to feel sick. Not physically but emotionally. It is insulting! How dare they! After all we’d gone through, after the years of hunger and uncertainty and their lack of support—and after all that my mother had done to provide for us, who the hell are they to judge this woman, my mother?
I get up from my seat and sit the service out in a bathroom stall. I will not bear witness to this vulgar hypocrisy. This body of men judging the body and very soul of my hardworking and underpaid mother. In that hour and in that place, being a Jehovah’s Witness becomes something that exists as part of my past. And beyond the doors of the Kingdom Hall, I set out to find God, to find my spirit, to find myself.
6
OUT IN THE WORLD
I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.
AUDRE LORDE
I always knew I wasn’t heterosexual. Which is not to say I focused on that as a child. It wasn’t much of an issue then and, like my friends, I also acted boy-crazy. But I never felt it in my soul. The one boyfriend I had in middle school would end up coming out as Gay when he got older.
I was a girl who had come of age in a repressive sexual environment. In Kingdom Hall we would spend hours and hours being instructed on sinful sexual behavior, which included lectures on masturbation. Not masturbating was elevated to a moral position, which is to say normal, healthy sexual expression was considered immoral. In many ways, it was my high school, Cleveland, that saved my life.
And while Cleveland was nowhere near perfect, it offered a pathway for we who were Queer to claim ourselves. Nevertheless, while Ellen DeGeneres had come out on live TV, in our own lives, there were no Gay Straight Alliances, no LGBTQ groups, no counselors trained to guide us through our particular struggles, which often included being kicked out of our homes.
There was one student group called Impact that had really been organized for kids struggling with depression, but many LGBTQ kids ended up in there because depression is the predictable outcome when people are forced to deny their humanity. Along my own path, I had a particular and magnificent guide, a North Star. Her name was Naomi. She was my cousin and touchstone.
Naomi was why, in some ways, while I came into Cleveland alone and without my middle school friends, in other ways, it was like coming home. Both a public and a humanities magnet institution, it served as the local school for many of my cousins on my father’s side of the family. Most of them were boys and on the sports teams and I didn’t interact with them very much. But Naomi was the daughter of my father’s cousin James who, like Gabriel, had come to LA from Eunice, Louisiana, at the age of nine. Gabriel and James grew up as best friends: two country mice trying to make their way among some big old city mice. Naomi and I were shaping up to mirror the love of our fathers. She held me close, even at one of the hardest moments in her own life.
We, Naomi and I, started the ninth grade together. Everyone seemed to know and love her. They’d all gone to middle school together but that wasn’t the only thing. Naomi was—is—outgoing and beautiful. She was a star on the track team and could kick it with anyone, the roughest wanna-be gangstas and the Emo white girls. And of course, us, we, the Black girls, loved her, though none more than me. On top of it all, Naomi did something several of us wished we had the courage to do: she came right out, bold as love, and had a gorgeous girlfriend who was older.
And even though in our family, on my father’s side that is, there was pretty broad acceptance of Queer people—we had aunties who openly identified as Gay—Naomi, who was masculine of center, what we called then a Stud, did not have a mother who was one of those people. Cousin James had married a woman who was deeply homophobic, and when Naomi comes out, it sends her over the edge into full-on abuse.
Marsha, Naomi’s mother, explodes when she learns that her daughter has come out. And early one spring morning during our ninth-grade year when Naomi is at track practice with her coach and the other runners, Marsha bursts upon the scene. I am not there but quickly hear what happens; it rushes through the rest of the school like a California brush fire. Marsha grabs her daughter right there on the track and attacks her, fists and feet, beating her daughter down in front of all of her friends and coach until they are able to pull her off. Then she screams at Naomi’s coach that it is all her fault, that she must have molested her daughter. And she makes a threat: Naomi is going to be snatched out of Cleveland, friendships, community, all be damned.
When friends find me and tell me I run through the school to find my cousin, who is in a stairway crying. Crying because that’s what Naomi does when she is angry. She says the people at Cleveland are her family, her tribe. She cannot lose us, she says.
I tell her we won’t let go.
I tell her she is the heart of Cleveland.
We vow, through tears, to stay together.
And we do. Through the end of the semester and through summer school. But when the fall rolls in, Naomi’s mother is true to her word. Naomi is enrolled in another school, in another town. She is separated from her friends, lo
ses her coach, and is exiled from the community that had loved and supported her since she was ten years old. And we who love Naomi, we who love her and are Queer, whether we are out or not, will learn in the harshest of ways that this is what it means to be young and Queer: You can do nothing wrong whatsoever, you can just be alive and yourself, and that is enough to have the whole of your life smashed to the ground and swept away. And all you can do is watch.
* * *
There are 20 girls of color who come out during my time at Cleveland. I am one of them. In some ways I suppose many of us are attracted to Cleveland because it is a social justice school. It is artsy. And Columbine hasn’t happened yet so we don’t yet have the bars and the metal detectors. Because that’s what happened in the wake of the horrific school shooting in a town that was mostly white in a school that was mostly white. Black and Brown kids across the country got police in their schools, complete with drug-sniffing dogs, bars on the windows and metal detectors. Years on, as a member of the Los Angeles–based organization the Strategy Center, I will work on a campaign to end what is now known as the school-to-prison pipeline. This real-world horror for young Black and Brown people is summed up by the organization States of Incarceration, which reports that,
In the quest to create “safe schools,” students have become demoralized and criminalized. The presence of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, drug-sniffing dogs, harsh ticketing policies, and prison-inspired architecture has created a generation of students, usually poor and of color, who are always under surveillance and always under suspicion. These modes of controlling spaces and the youth within them normalize expectations of criminality, often fulfilled when everyday violations of school rules lead to ticketing, suspension, or worse, court summons and eventual incarceration—a direct path into the criminal justice system.… [Indeed], some school buildings become indistinguishable from prisons, police presence in them has continued to increase, with an unequal impact on lower income schools with predominantly black and Latino student populations. The Los Angeles Unified School District is one of the districts nationwide to have its own police department, which has an annual budget of over $52 million specifically dedicated to its schools.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 6