White campuses remain open air and green. But then Cleveland is still fairly open and by the time I graduate a Gay Straight Alliance has been formed.
One afternoon when I am in tenth grade, I go over to Naomi’s house so we can hang out for the afternoon. And I look my cousin in the face and I say to my cousin, You know Naomi, I am Bi. Bi is the terminology we use then.
She looks shocked and then scared. Is this the face she wore the morning her mother, unhinged and hateful, had come charging at her?
Then Naomi demands a re-hearing: What? What?
A pause, and then, We can’t both be, she declares, she almost screams. And yet we are. And I see it in her eyes, the fear a person has for someone they love. The police hate us. Schools don’t really give a fuck about us. Don’t be about this life where even family can tell you to go to hell.
Moments pass. They are awkward. I have no idea what to say so I return to what I do know: love.
I tell her about the five-foot-nine beauty out of the Le Merk park area whose name is Cheyenne. She plays basketball and always carries a basketball, I say. We talk about crystals and spirituality and we go to Barnes and Noble, I say. I tell her how we are reading books on race and gender and class. I tell her how we, Cheyenne and I, share poetry and that Cheyenne is a gifted writer. I tell her about Cheyenne’s two little Afro-puffs. I tell her I love Cheyenne, that I am her world, that she is my world.
We talk for a long time, I don’t remember everything we say. What I remember is that when I leave, Naomi understands. I remember that Naomi wants nothing more for me than my joy—and safety—and part of knowing safety in a world bristling with hate is to create these protected centers of love. I feel powerful. I feel strong.
Without hesitation, I start bringing Cheyenne home to hang out with me and we act oblivious to the awkwardness that permeates the small space we now occupy. I no longer have my own room because we no longer have our own apartment. Months before we had been evicted from the condo my mother had rented. She’d moved us into a new neighborhood in order to give us a better life and out of nowhere the owners wanted it back so they could sell it, which meant we had to just get the fuck out. We had 30 days’ notice. A mother and three children tossed out like the trash. We were not trash. We were human beings.
It’s Bernard, to whom my mother is engaged at the time, who comes to our rescue. He says, Don’t worry, Cherice, I got you and your kids. Bernard moves us into his mother’s one-bedroom apartment. His mother, a diabetic and wheelchair-bound elder, sleeps in the bedroom.
We take up residence in the living room, me and Jasmine, Mom and Bernard. Paul has moved out by now and Monte is in prison. We sleep in sleeping bags on the floor. Not an ideal situation in which to grow teens, one of whom is Queer and whose father is in jail, but there we are. And whenever possible, I invite Cheyenne over. I want some kind of normalcy. Isn’t this what teens are supposed to do? Hang out in their houses with their girlfriends?
We, Cheyenne and I, feel the world can go to hell. We love each other.
But it isn’t easy. Beyond our few protected spaces—at Cleveland there is a classroom, E-10, where the Queer kids have taken up residence and made it our own and safe—the streets are spilling with vitriol. Even with all of the hatred that still exists today, it’s amazing to think of the movement that has been made in the last 15 years.
But at the turn of the century it is all Fuck you, faggot! and eyes filled with violence and disgust that follow us, that train themselves on us. But we stay together, even when Cheyenne drops out of school, as she eventually does. She lives far from Cleveland High School and has little support from her family when it comes to making it through high school. She has no advocates, no one to ensure she gets meals, let alone does her homework, or to navigate situations with teachers. And our schools are not set up to be surrogates for the poorest of children, which is to say Cheyenne, which is to say most of us.
All of us need more than we are given or could possibly access. Hell, our parents need more than they are given or could access. Naomi eventually moves in with her father, which alleviates much of the harm she lived with. Cousin James is gentle and accepting and his love helps quell the depression that has settled deeply inside her. Depression rates run high among those of us who are out, and for those of us rejected by our families, the national statistics report we are 8.4 times as likely to attempt suicide. It is not a time when Love is Love is Love is Love is a movement coming in to rescue us.
For this reason, and much like the boys in my hood who are the targets of police hatred and violence, we seek to create our own rescue plans, an effort that takes on a particular significance when Carla is kicked out of her home in our eleventh-grade year.
By the time this happens, and although I am still with Cheyenne and Carla is still her homegirl, Carla and I have developed a deep friendship of our own. We are thick as thieves, besties for real, just as we are to this day. We decide that the only thing left to do is thug it out together. I don’t want to keep living with five people in the living room of the apartment of a woman I barely know, feeling the judgment and silence that comes with being Queer in a Jehovah’s Witness home where even masturbation is considered deviant and where I have no space to say, Excuse me. I really miss my father and my brother.
Carla and I begin to stay at the homes of different friends as often as possible, and when it’s not, we take to sleeping in her car. By senior year, both of us are completely on our own, couch surfing, going from friend’s home to friend’s home to car to friend’s home. I carry a duffel bag of clothes and other personal-care items with me wherever I go. But when we graduate we get a reprieve in the form of our art history teacher, Donna Hill, with whom we are both close.
She tells us we can live with her while we get ourselves stabilized. I’m sure she thought it would take months, but I live there almost two years, and Carla almost three. We both work: me at Rite Aid, later as a dance teacher. But Donna neither charges us rent nor demands money for the food we eat that she buys. We act thoughtlessly, having friends over for small parties. We are kids and behave as such. Donna never yells at us, but she writes super-long letters about what our transgressions have been, what it means to live in community and be considerate.
She teaches us Transcendental Meditation—and an abiding patience with young people who are still evolving. Donna Hill, a simple, single Black woman with a heart that could carry a universe, becomes my first spirit guide, the first and most clear example I have as a young adult of what it means to receive a gift you can only properly show gratitude for by sharing it with others.
She is the first adult who doesn’t think who we are, how we live and love, needs anything but support, some architecture. She understands our, Carla’s and mine, emerging idea of building intentional family, a concept that I suppose will later become the basis of our theory of change.
To outsiders—in many cases outsiders being our families—our relationships may have seemed complex or odd or even dangerous. But to us they made sense. To us they were oxygen and still are. And although Cheyenne and I eventually separated and could not remain in touch, the rest of us remain close to this day, growing in numbers and love as the years roll on. And central to that growth, and complicating what I thought I knew about relationships and love, was a man named Mark Anthony, a brother who would become my first husband.
I didn’t understand either when it first began.
I had never in my life been attracted to a heterosexual, cisgender man. There was, of course, Mikie in middle school, who was really Gay, but here I was almost grown with a man who was not Gay or Trans or Queer. I mean, what the hell?
Mark Anthony is a year younger than me, than my crew, and I meet him when I am a senior at Cleveland. I am a TA in his eleventh-grade cohort, and when I walk into the classroom, I cannot help but notice him. He is super attractive: tall and fair-skinned and with the greenest eyes I’ve ever seen.
I am totally confused by wh
atever happens immediately inside of me. I try to push it away, but Mark Anthony takes the bus with me one afternoon after we first meet and we talk about poetry and literature and music; he is the son of one of the original members of Earth, Wind & Fire. He watches me as I write in my journal on the bus that day and he tells me that he journals, too, and now I’m really getting invested but also really confused.
Am I really sitting here feeling attracted to some heterosexual dude?
But the energy between us is a tangible force. We, and not just us but anyone in our presence, can hold it in our hands. Even still and for the next few years we will channel it into a profoundly deep friendship. But we know it will be more. For a photography project Mark Anthony does with Donna about his journey, evolution and masculinity, he asks me for help. I take image after image of him but Carla shoots the last one of us. Our fists are in the air and we are holding hands looking out an open door, looking out toward a destiny that is not fully in view.
7
ALL THE BONES WE COULD FIND
We collected all the bones we could find, and yesterday, Natividad wrapped them in a shawl that she had knitted years ago. It was the most beautiful thing she owned.
“A thing like that should serve the living,” Bankole said when she offered it.
“You are living,” Natividad said.
OCTAVIA BUTLER, PARABLE OF THE SOWER
Gabriel comes home.
I am 20 years old and four years an organizer. My toe in the water around community organizing began while I was in high school but after I graduate I wade all the way in.
After graduation, Donna Hill not only provides a home for me, but also an outlet for all that I had learned in high school. She tells me about the Brotherhood Sisterhood social justice camp and for seven days I go off to the Pine Ridge campsite. There, we use icebreakers and experiential interactives to learn about not only systems of oppression, but more, how to be in courageous and compassionate relationships with people—all people. Campers are like me: poor, Queer and Black.
But they are also heterosexual. They are working and middle class and some are quite wealthy. They are Latinx. They are white. The goal is to train a generation to be in conversation with one another and we confront all manner of difference and all manner of discrimination. We talk about our families of origin and families of creation. We talk about racism, classism, sexism and heterosexism. We have highly facilitated, cross-racial dialogues that allow us to be wholly honest about the stereotypes we hold about one another.
One afternoon I listen to a young man speak in the group of 30 young people who identify as Queer. We are speaking about homophobia and the specific pain it causes, the deep depression it’s wrought. We talk about what it’s meant for so many of us to have been forced out of our homes by our parents. We talk about the rampant homelessness among us, the hunger, the isolation. And then this young brother says he doesn’t expect he has long to live. He tells us he is 18 and has been diagnosed HIV positive and with that there is a grief in the room that cannot be contained. We grieve for him and we grieve because if we weren’t aware of it before, now we cannot turn away: we live in a world where hatred is so deep that adults are fine ensuring death sentences for us young people who have done nothing but be in the world who we were born to be.
We resolve to fight back.
One of the organizations that comes to present to us while we are there is called the Strategy Center and I am immediately drawn to them and especially to their lead organizer, Kikanza Ramsey, whom I watch in a video. A sister with natural hair who is as fluid in Spanish as she is in English, I think: I want to be like her. I want to challenge structural inequities. I want to build power. In this space, we grow. I grow. I transform. After camp ends, I join the Strategy Center and for a year they train me to be an organizer.
I read, I study, adding Mao, Marx and Lenin to my knowledge of hooks, Lorde and Walker. I focus on young people and produce spoken-word events. I canvass as part of their Bus Riders’ Union, a campaign that pushes back not only on climate change by highlighting the need to reduce reliance on cars, but also provides a workable and fair public transit system for people, like my mother, who rely on buses to get to work.
I meet and build with Eric Mann, who started the Strategy Center and who takes me under his wing. Eric is older and white and fearlessly anti-racist. He is also a man who worked the line at the GM plant just like Alton did. I find a home at the Strategy Center, a place that will raise me and hold me for more than a decade. I not only bring my friends to the Strategy Center, but also my father, who begins coming to meetings with me now that he is home from prison.
But it’s not just Gabriel who becomes involved with me at the Strategy Center. His involvement slowly brings my mother around. My mother, who never had the luxury of time to attend meetings or participate in activities that could have made her life better. The Strategy Center will provide a place where, for the first time in the whole of my life, I will be in a public space with both of my parents—the way I had always seen my white friends in public spaces with both of their parents.
At their annual gala, The Political Party, after the videos and speeches—including my own—and after the drums and chants, we turn the joint into a huge dance party. And as my father and I dance the night away, my mother sits at our table at a fancy seat in the front. She watches us and smiles. My mother is a smiler. But she is not a dancer and never has been. Later she will say to me, This night took me back to when we were young, your father and I, and I used to go to the club with him. I didn’t dance then either. He was always the dancer. But watching him move always made me so happy. Just like tonight.
After the struggles my mom and I had during high school, when Monte comes home I move back in with her to support my brother’s caretaking. She’s found a new home in Canoga Park in the Valley, a three-bedroom apartment where she and Bernard, Jasmine and I, and Monte’s son Chase all live together. But caring for Monte is a Herculean task. He hates his meds and does everything he can to avoid taking them. In truth, they are overmedicating him but none of us know to question this back then, none of us understands this, not even Monte. It will be years and multiple hospital visits later before he will tell me that the medication steals him from himself. All it does is make him sleep and be dull. He cannot think on it or create or, in any real way, be in the world.
But it is this Patrisse who greets my father when he gets out from that long stretch locked up. I am still young, but I am a woman now with an analysis and profound real-world responsibilities. I am determined to make up for all the time we lost, as though that were really possible. We go back to seeing each other each weekend, sometimes more. We grow closer than ever and it’s not only how Gabriel shows up at events, at meetings and art showcases.
It’s also that we are back with the family, my aunties and uncles and cousins and Grandma Vina. I see so much of myself in this side of my family. And it’s not just that we look the same. It’s that we have the same loud laugh. We dance. I am elated to be back in their bosom. And I bring my friends along—Mark Anthony and Carla and so many others. They’re all there in the park with my family, watching the baseball games and eating barbeque and making noise and demonstrating proudly just what love and community look like in action.
And the quality of the conversations with my father goes deeper than it has before. Although I had been to 12-step meetings with him, now that he’s older, he talks about what living the life felt like. He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense. My father, a poor Southern boy, was made fun of all his life until he had money in his pocket and a product people wanted.
This is what he is really trying to 12-step around, he says to me o
ne afternoon. An addiction to a lifestyle. He is working hard, once again, to hold himself accountable, which stirs the question in me: Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented with limited choices? My father attended schools that did little more than train him to serve another man’s dreams, ensure another man’s wealth, produce another man’s vision. The schooling available to my parents’ generation did not encourage creativity, the fostering of dreams, the watering of the seeds of hope. Only service.
For my father that service showed up as enlisting in the military. As a young man he would do his time in the army. He tells me he once dreamed of going to college, but that option wasn’t real the older he grew. The army was a sure bet, he tells me, providing income for his family. I wanted to relieve the burden Grandma Vina felt, he says one afternoon when we are sitting outside having a brown-bag lunch together. With all the children, it was hard, he says. But it was also hard, he confesses, to leave his siblings behind.
I felt like they were mine, the ones who came after me. The army seemed the best bet, so off I went, my father says, and I think I hear his voice crack. He shrugs for sure. What choice did he have?
What Gabriel does not say but what I am keenly aware of is that when he returned from his tours in Panama and Korea, he returned to a city under siege, economic and otherwise. The GI Bill was notoriously unhelpful to Black veterans, indeed having been forged in such a way as to uphold Jim Crow. And while some gains were made in a post–legal segregation society, it was never a tool men like my father could usefully wield. Anyway, school, which is what it would have covered, was not on his radar. He went, like so many others, just looking for work.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 7