When They Call You a Terrorist

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors

  But of course Black Los Angeles in 1984, the year of his discharge, is experiencing rates of unemployment that rival those for Black people in apartheid South Africa. When the economy begins to bounce back, African Americans are extraneous material, discarded, unconsidered in the emerging tech revolution. When Silicon Valley first emerges, it might as well be a Nordic country for all its homogeneity. Even today, its diversity has not yet found a way to reach into the communities of those who were legally and willfully excluded from the paid labor market.

  But what is at the ready for us, and on every corner, is access to underground drug markets and all the violence that comes when brothers on the street, or presidents of nations, are defending their territory. My father, Gabriel Brignac, had no territory to defend, only trauma and depression to manage, along with a habit I will believe until the day I die he picked up as a serviceman. Surges in Americans’ preferred drugs of choice seem to always align with what is available in the region our nation is invading.

  But my father, with no defenders or language that could dissect the harm done to him, is out there in the mix, a sustenance drug seller and a regular drug user. He is left to fend for himself. I try continually to talk to my father about structural realities, policies and decisions as being even more decisive in the outcomes of his life than any choice he personally made. I talk about the politics of personal responsibility, how it’s mostly a lie meant to keep us from challenging real-world legislative decisions that chart people’s paths, that undo people’s lives.

  It was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look for the codes. Look for the coded language everywhere, she says. They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept that shit intact, she says.

  I don’t know if I ever convince my father of this line of thinking. A decade of 12-stepping has ensured that he only really knows how to hold himself accountable. Even with all my speeches and his engagement with me at the Strategy Center, I sense when we talk that everyone and everything else kind of gets a pass.

  For this reason we spend most of our time focusing on the here and the now. My father wants to re-center himself with me, in his life, in the world at large. He gets a job driving a cement truck and comes to meet me each day for our brown-bag lunch. And, often with my friends in tow, we go back to our every weekend spent together. Yes it is the barbeque and baseball, but it’s also Grandma and gumbo, football and family.

  We are stitched back together, our Brignac clan and company, a patchwork community brimming with possibility in a small LA apartment ruled by a tiny Creole woman with a fourth-grade education who survived Jim Crow hatred and vicious rapes and unconscionable poverty and brutal domestic violence so she could sit on the other side of it all and still know more than most who have had so much more than she ever did, that at the end of the day, from love we come. To love we must return.

  * * *

  Sometimes I still go to 12-step meetings with Gabriel. Older now, I know I am not only beginning to understand the complexity of human beings and society, but I am sure that the binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people. I am beginning to see how more than a single truth can live at the same time and in the same person. I can see how my father could have loved my mother but have been in such pain, such self-doubt, that he would not show up that day when she wanted to tell him she was pregnant with me. We talk about compassion, forgiveness, about wanting to heal.

  And we talk about me, the breadth of my life, what I dream about and care about—building a new world. I talk about my developing spirituality, my journey to understand God. I never come out and say to my father that I am Queer but neither do I feel as though I have to hide it or myself. We just don’t discuss romance much because, well, it’s weird. He’s my dad regardless. But my friends and my lifestyle make my Queerness pretty obvious and he couldn’t care less. He just wants to roll with me. And this, I realize, is what his family cherishes in him. This total absence of judgment. He’s easygoing as hell, the original live-and-let-live man. His warmth runs over you like the waters in the hot springs of Central California, enveloping and clean and what you want more and more and more of. In a world that has deliberately made Black humanity invisible, I feel seen in a way that is almost shocking. Is it safe to be all out there like this? And before that thought can settle in my bones, I realize what my father gives me, how he sees me, is necessary as air.

  For three years this is who we are. This is our life.

  And then Gabriel disappears. Again.

  He stops answering my phone calls and he does not call me.

  But this time I am not a child. This time I am an adult. I am an organizer. I have survived his incarceration and I have survived Monte’s. I have survived homelessness and homophobia. I have chosen dignity and power. I have chosen not to break. I go in search of my dad.

  I start hanging around the boarding house he lives in. I call him repeatedly. I call his friends. Fifteen calls, 20 calls, 30 calls, 35 and finally, finally, my father answers the phone. His voice sounds funny but I push and I push: Dad, where are you? I’ve started calling him Dad.

  My father pauses and breathes deep and then he tells me I can find him in the rundown hotel around the corner from where he lives. I rush over there, annoyed the place hadn’t already occurred to me.

  Dad, what the hell? I demand to know when he opens the door to his room.

  But he can barely answer me. All of him is sagging. From his bones on the inside to his skin on the outside, he’s a man gone limp. I don’t know whether to be angry or to be brokenhearted.

  I’m sorry, my father says quietly, his voice threadbare as tears begin to roll down my cheeks.

  I love this man so much. I do not want to lose him. This is all I can think about it. Stay with me, Dad. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me please.

  As always, he is gentle with me. But there is also a stillness to him that comes as a surprise. I don’t want to call it peace. It is not peace. But there is a stillness and also a deep well of sadness. In that room my father, like me, begins to cry.

  He tells me is embarrassed, ashamed.

  He tells me he caught another case and is awaiting trial. That’s why I hadn’t been able to reach him. He was in jail and for the moment, he’s out on bail.

  They want to give me seven years, he says ever so slowly, and those words hang there, a blade on a guillotine ready to sever us from ourselves.

  There is nothing about you I am not willing to know, I say to my father. My father who taught me to live beyond judgment.

  He tells me how much he hated driving that damn cement truck.

  He tells me how much he hates himself.

  He tells me what it was to come to LA from Louisiana when he was nine years old, a boy with the thick pull of Cajun Country in his voice and manner, marking him as other among children seeking tribe. He tells me about being bullied, about how he felt ugly for the whole of his life. He tells me how he cannot remember ever feeling good about himself. He says he never did find a way to learn how to love himself.

  We sit with that for a time. What it means to not have the ability to love yourself. How do you honor something you do not love?

  That night we speak of prisons and the drug war and how it feels to not seem to matter as a person in the world. He has never been worth saving, never worth treatment.

  No intervention beyond prison for this Black man from Louisiana.

  We talk about how Black people’s relationships are too often defined by harm. We wonder what it means to have so much of our own relationships formed by absence. What goes unsaid, what goes unknown, even as we try to be entirely open before each other? We acknowledge that he has spent more time behind bars and away from me than he has spent time with me.

 
In this small tattered place, my precious father is high as fuck and drunk.

  I have never seen him high before but I refuse to turn away. If he matters to me at all then he has to matter to me at every moment. He has to matter to me at this moment. Seeing him like this feels like my soul is being pulled over shards of glass but I do not turn away. His life is not expendable. Our love is not disposable. I will not be to him what the world has been to him. I will not throw him away. I will not say he has nothing to offer.

  I tell him that relapse is a part of recovery.

  I ask, What if we wrote off every person who fell off a diet? We laugh at that, but just briefly.

  My father’s addiction and the stigma that attaches to it have made him so deeply lonely, forced him into a world that cannot ever be fully shared by anyone who loves him. I love him. I tell him I want to share his whole life with him. He sighs and expels air. He deflates. I move closer to him. He lets me. I tell him I won’t leave him and I don’t. We talk or we don’t, for the rest of the night. We hold each other on and off. We cry.

  Two months later my father is sentenced to three years in prison. He is able to avoid the seven-year bid because he volunteers to go to the prison fire camp, a program where convicts are made to serve as frontline first responders when the California wildfires break out. They are the ones who go in before trained firefighters do.

  My father risks death for a faster shot at freedom.

  * * *

  It is 2009 and I am 26 years old when Gabriel comes home from prison.

  He will never go back again.

  We—me, Mark Anthony and Carla—pool our little bit of money and fly him home from Northern California, where he had been held in the fire prison camp. Mark Anthony and I have become a couple in the intervening years and Carla and I, we are best friends still. We meet him at the airport. It is the first time I am seeing my father since he was taken away and in this time I have grown this small family around me, around us.

  As they did with Monte, almost a decade before and in all the years since my brother came home, my friends have invested themselves in my father’s and my life, and their love has helped stop the bleeding when our spirits were caught in all that concertina wire, the wounds that went past the sinew and bone, laid claim to the marrow. My community of friends, this chosen family of mine, loves in a way that sets an example for love. Their love as a triumph, as a breathing and alive testimony to what we mean when we say another world is possible.

  My father emerges from the gate area and I squeal like I am a child of five and run to him. The joy I feel in my body is so alive and pulsing. I swear it is something everyone can see. And I cannot stop holding my father and he cannot stop holding me and this is how we are and this is how we stay in the middle of LAX until finally my dad says softly, Anyone hungry? I’m starving. And we pile into Carla’s car.

  For a week my father lives with me, sleeping on my couch, but he wants his independence, he wants to not be a burden. He moves into a shelter, which allows him to feel more independent. He begins 12-stepping again and applies for Section 8 so he can get permanent, secure housing. Years after I first suggested it, my father finally determines to get his CASAC—Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor—certificate. He wants to spend the rest of his life helping people heal.

  He enrolls in the program at Pierce College in LA while I enroll at UCLA. I am the first person on my mother’s side of the family to attend college. We are a father and daughter determined to write our own history and it’s March now and all we can see is the sun rising higher and brighter. We live in gratitude and hope and then June arrives and word comes that his father has died.

  Dad gets permission from his parole officer to travel, and we take a trip to our ancestral home in Eunice, Louisiana, a city of fewer than 11,000, known for Cajun music. The last time I was there, the only time I was there, was four years before in the wake of Katrina. After delivering food and supplies along the devastated Gulf Coast, I went to meet my grandfather, who welcomed me into his home, made me a meal, told me I look like the Brignacs going back generations. Me with my wide mouth and big forehead. They come from a place. I come from a place.

  This trip to Eunice with my father is more healing than sad, despite the occasion. And for the first time in my life I see my father at complete ease. I have never seen this side of him before. There’s something in his walk, in his smile. Nothing is heavy. Nothing is forced. We walk all through the town that he lived in until he was nine. I see places where he played as a boy. We sit with family on porches. We watch sunsets. We talk shit, we play the dozens. We eat and we eat. We tell family stories and stand up while we do it. We clap. We are loud. We love each other openly and hard.

  The funeral for my grandfather is held in the single church in the neighborhood, a Baptist one, and in that house of worship we mourn but we know we will survive because Eunice teaches us this, that all our bones matter, that all the broken pieces of us somehow make a whole.

  Dad, I think you should move here, I say. You seem so happy in this place, so at peace, I say.

  Too slow for me here, he argues back and praises LA, the city for him that made freedom an ever-moving target.

  After a week we say goodbye to Eunice, to my Grandfather Carl, to porches and slow walks and ongoing spaces of Black people who just love you and openly. Together, we head back to LA, and I spend much of the summer watching my father play baseball with his brothers, the game he loves, surrounded by the people he loves.

  By now I am fully in love with Mark Anthony, who is patient and kind and deeply consistent. He is not insecure about my previous relationships, in particular ones I’ve had with women. He does not judge my sexuality. He loves me as is, which is a gift I wish for all of us to receive, the gift of being loved simply because of who you are, not in spite of it, not with condition, not loved in parts.

  Mark Anthony is a man who has literally dedicated himself to healing; while I am in religious studies at UCLA, he is doing his master’s in Chinese medicine. A friend’s mother has a tiny cottage in Topanga Canyon that’s surrounded by trees. We decide to move in together. The area is more breathtakingly beautiful than any I’ve ever lived in up to that point and I accept, finally, that this is my life, this is my blessed life as the winter holidays roll in. I tell my father we will celebrate them fully. All those moments we missed together, we will make up for them this year. On Thanksgiving my Grandma Vina will make gumbo with such love that I am filled until Christmas.

  On December 25, 2009, my Grandma’s house is in full party mode. This is my father’s first Christmas back home in half a decade. All the family shows up and before the night comes to a close, between all of us who are gathered, I am certain we say I love you one thousand times. We kiss each other until we spill over in giggles and laugh until we ache. We leave my Grandma’s home having wrapped ourselves in ourselves and snuggled down in it. We thank all the universe for the grace shown our family. We say Good Night to one another and we say it very deliberately because on this Christmas in 2009, we give those words such deliberate meaning.

  On December 26, I don’t speak to my father, which is why I call him early on December 27. I don’t reach him but I leave a message, and he calls me back, a call that I miss. He leaves me a voicemail in which he says he doesn’t feel well, a message I do not get immediately. I am at my mother’s house, visiting. She’s had a fight with my sister Jasmine and Mark Anthony and I have come to help patch things up.

  We talk, we help settle things and after not so long, we head back up to the Canyon, driving that long stretch of road in which cell service drops out. When we pull up to our small home I hear our landline ringing and now voicemail alerts are coming through on my cell.

  I answer the landline.

  Are you sitting down? It’s my mother and her voice is in a panic.

  I tell her I’m not and I ask her what’s wrong, but she cannot stop asking me if I am sitting down. She asks me four
times, five times and now I’ve spun into a panic. My mind goes immediately for some reason to my nephew Chase, Monte’s now near-teenaged son.

  Where’s Chase? What’s wrong? What is going on? I yell. Mom! What is it?!

  Which is when she says it.

  They think your father is dead, she says. That’s what they’re saying.

  * * *

  When you are told that your father is dead you really can’t believe it’s true, you can’t just accept it and I didn’t. What proof was there? My mother has heard the news from a cousin who heard it from another man who lived in the shelter that my father lived in. But no one in my family has heard from the shelter itself. I take this as a hopeful sign. I am questioning my mother as I am corralling Mark Anthony to head back down the mountain, out to find my father. I have always been able to find my father. We get into the car and Mark Anthony will recall for me later that I went into shock. I am unable to speak.

  He will tell me later of guiding me to the car and into the passenger’s seat so we could begin the 30-minute ride back down the Canyon. I remember clutching my phone. I don’t remember why. We cannot get service for the entirety of the ride. When we finally do, I call my father’s cell. I call it and call it, trying to will him to answer. Mark Anthony tells me later I was still doing this as we pulled up to the shelter, even as the street was filled with police cars and a van from the coroner’s office.

  I get out of the car and approach the first officer I see. I’m Gabriel Brignac’s daughter. I say this matter-of-factly and equally as matter-of-factly, the officer says to me, Your father is dead. I’m sorry.

  The officer tells me I cannot go upstairs to see my father’s body until the medical examiner has determined whether or not there was foul play.

  I sit outside the shelter unable to move, and then one by one my friends who Mark Anthony has called begin to arrive and surround me. The medical examiner emerges, declares my father’s death was not foul play. I am allowed upstairs, this final moment with the man who helped give me life.