My father is on a stretcher in front of the room he shared with three other men.
He is wearing white boxers and a white t-shirt.
He still has on his glasses and his watch.
I remove them. I keep them.
I go into his room and look around this tiny space that once was and now no longer is his, this place where he was reinventing himself. I begin packing up the few material items that proved he was here. My father was here. He existed. Gabriel Brignac. This single lockbox of important papers. These few pairs of shoes and items of clothing. They are not the sum of a man. But they are part of him. I pack them up.
This is the business of death.
I lean over my father’s body.
I kiss him one final time.
I tell him I love him.
There is nothing more I can do here. I turn away slowly and just as slowly, I leave.
* * *
I want my father to have the dignity in death he was never afforded in life.
I search for a funeral home and a florist. I call everyone in his address book and tell them we are planning the service. The work helps blunt the pain for a time. I select a casket because it is powder blue and my father loved blue. My grandmother selects a suit for him to wear in death that is nicer than any item of clothing my father owned in life.
At the turn of a new year, on January 3, 2010, 300 of us gather to honor the life of Gabriel Brignac. My friend sings Amazing Grace.
TWAS GRACE THAT TAUGHT MY HEART TO FEAR
AND GRACE MY FEARS RELIEVED
HOW PRECIOUS DID THAT GRACE APPEAR
THE HOUR I FIRST BELIEVED.
I believed in my father.
I believed in Gabriel Brignac.
I believed in us.
I still believe in us.
My father’s sponsor rises and assumes the position before the microphone and begins to speak. He tells the room about a man desperate to be a better version of himself. He tells the room of a man who was gentle. He tells the room of a man who worked as hard as any man he knew. He tells the room that my father was just coming up on Steps 8 and 9 in the program. He was making a list of the people he had harmed and then finding ways to make amends to each one.
In that room, on that day, we give my father the Steps 8 and 9.
We choose forgiveness and love as a collective act.
When it is my turn to stand and face this group of people I have gathered, the first time I have ever called community together to acknowledge a life, I am overwhelmed by the responsibility to offer a eulogy that is as authentic as Gabriel Brignac was. I stand and speak of a man who was more brilliant than he knew or was ever given credit for. I tell them about a man who was a full burst of love. I speak about a man who was flawed and flawless, as each one of us is. I speak about a man I am proud to call my father.
* * *
A week after the service we drive out to the cemetery in Riverside, California. We are going to bury my father with complete military honors. There are six of us gathered at this final resting place, including my grandmother and my Aunt Jackie, who works at the Pentagon. Aunt Jackie is dressed in full uniform and represents her brother with a deep swell of pride. And her brother—a forgotten veteran of wars he never knew had been declared on his one thin brown body that in the end would succumb to a heart that was broken. My father, at 50 years old, officially died of a heart attack.
We sit before his casket as “Taps” begins to play and a soldier presents me with the folded American flag that had covered his coffin. I take it and I hold it, this flag for a nation in which my father, my Black father, my good and imperfect and loving Black father, could not be possible.
My father who got cages instead of compassion.
My father whose whole story no one of us will ever know.
What did it do to him, all those years locked away, all that time in chains, all those days upon days without human touch except touch meant to harm—hands behind your back, Nigger. Get on the fucking wall, Nigger! Lift your sac, Nigger. Don’t look at me like that or I will fucking kill your Black ass.
It would be easy to speculate about the impact of years of cocaine use on my father’s heart, but I suspect that it will tell us less than if we could measure the cumulative effects of hatred, racism and indignity. What is the impact of years of strip searches, of being bent over, the years before that when you were a child and knew that no dream you had for yourself was taken seriously by anyone, that you were not someone who would be fully invested in by a nation that treated you as expendable?
What is the impact of not being valued?
How do you measure the loss of what a human being does not receive?
My father was part of a generation of Black men who spent a lifetime watching hope and dreams shoved just out of their reach until it seemed normal, the way it just was. I lost my father at a time when 2.2 million people had gone missing on our watch, buried in prisons that were buried in small towns, but somehow and unbelievably this man kept coming back.
He kept coming back.
He kept coming back.
And he kept trying. My father kept fucking trying. This man. My father. Gabriel Brignac who loved me deeply and fiercely. Who spent every moment with me telling me how my Black life mattered. This was my father, the bones and the blood and the soul of him. This was Gabriel Brignac and I hold that flag that had covered his casket, this man who died of a broken heart in this nation of broken promises, and I think that if my father could not be possible in this America, then how is it that such a thing as America can ever be possible?
PART TWO
BLACK LIVES MATTER
8
ZERO DARK THIRTY
THE REMIX
Come celebrate with me that every day something has tried to kill me and has failed.
LUCILLE CLIFTON
My phone jolts me out of a deeply needed sleep just past midnight. It is my mother’s voice I hear on the other end of the line: Trisse, it’s your brother, she says. It’s Monte. He’s been arrested.
I sit up immediately and try to shake the sleep from my body, my brain. My exhaustion is encompassing and thick. It is 2006 and I am in college full time now, studying philosophy with a concentration in the Abrahamic traditions. But I am also working full time with Mark Anthony and our friend Jason, executing a special program at my old high school, Cleveland, on trauma and resilience. It takes me a minute. Only just a month before they had taken my father, Gabriel, to the fire camp prison. How do I make sense of what my mother is saying? How do I make sense of a world that seems hell-bent on subverting it?
Monte had come home from his first prison bid in 2003, and as we learned quickly, frighteningly, there was no infrastructure that existed to help secure either his re-entry or his mental health. Whatever was going to happen would happen because of us, the family, and our capacity to manage severe mental illness. We learned quickly that intervention was either us alone and without medical professional support, or it was the police. The brutal memory of Monte’s first break, during which we learned that there were no social services or safety nets for my brother, hung over all of our heads like a sword. We lived alongside the steady buzz of anxiety. I turned ever more toward spirit, toward that which I could not see but could feel at all times, in order to manage my emotions. This is to say I prayed often and surrounded myself ever more closely with the family I’d created. Mark Anthony and Tanya, a close friend from high school. Jason from work. New friends from the Strategy Center. They sustained me.
When Monte came home, after we were able to get him stable after weeks in the hospital, he wanted nothing more than to be a self-sufficient man in the world. But the cycling in and out of juvie during his childhood—for drinking or tagging or just standing on the street with his boys—and then of course the time in prison, meant he had never had a single job in his life, save for any forced labor when he was locked up.
We helped him to get a low-wage, low-level job
at a local Rite Aid—Carla and I had both done our time at Rite Aids in LA—and I still remember his excitement at the end of the first day: Trisse, I got this! He was so deeply proud. But a week into his very first paid position, he was promptly fired. His background check had come back: No ex-felons, dude, get the hell out.
We tried pulling him closer to us, and my mother begged him to live with her, risking her Section 8 status. If you have government housing benefits you cannot have anyone living with you if they’ve been convicted of a crime. Even if they are a juvenile. And even if they are incapable of caring for themselves because of an illness. And even if they cannot get a job because even the most low-level jobs won’t hire someone with a conviction. In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.
In any case, Monte didn’t want to put my mother at risk and decided instead, and against our wishes, to move back in with Cynthia, the mother of his son Chase. But Cynthia had her own set of challenges in managing life since she had been shot all those years ago and left paralyzed. Some were physical and some were emotional and all were present. My mother, in fact, stepped in to be Chase’s caretaker because of his mother’s overwhelm and my brother’s own struggles. But disabled and poor and never having had treatment for the PTSD borne of having her life nearly taken at only 18 years old, Cynthia was in no position to manage Monte and ensure he took his medication or get him to County USC hospital to see a doctor who could check to see that his levels were maintained.
And like many people who struggle with schizoaffective disorder—a diagnosis that includes bipolar disorder—Monte eventually began to feel he was fine, he was better, in fact, without the medications. We didn’t know this at first but when we began to see signs of erratic behavior—his mood was exaggerated, too excited, he was speaking too fast—my mother, Paul and I pushed him to come with us to a doctor.
Monte, you need medical support, I tried to convince my brother. All of us do. But my brother’s primary engagement with doctors had been in prison, a sure way to destabilize if not completely destroy their relationship to healing. Even later, after he was home and we got him into County USC, medical staff treated him, a poor Black man from a poor Black family, a man with a conviction, not as a person whose critical condition could put him at the top of their list. They were perfunctory, in part because of their overwhelm, I’m sure. They did not remember his name or ours. There was no time for bedside pleasantries and reassurances. Get him in, get him stabilized and get him the fuck out. Somebody else needs this bed. For my brother, hospitals signaled harm if not outright hatred: Monte knew they didn’t care for him and were not even particularly invested in seeing him well, only contained, controlled.
But in these predawn hours in the spring of 2006, my mother tells me she doesn’t know the details, that she got a call from Monte but he was neither clear nor calm. We cannot do anything to help Monte until later in the morning. I tell my mother that we’ll head to Twin Towers, the LA County Jail that I assume is holding my brother, first thing in the morning.
Monte is not in Twin Towers, my mother informs me.
Whatever happened, she says, Monte’s in the hospital. We have to go see him there.
There’s a fear that grips you, a vise, a garrote, when you are entering a place that is unknown, unknowable. And yes, in these times there can be bursts of relief: perhaps the ending will be one that is an alternative to the terrible ones you cannot help but imagine. But I know no such feeling now, in our own zero dark thirty, in our family’s own treacherous theater of war, which in this moment has anchored itself against my brother, a man trying to live in a world that refuses a relationship with him that is not rooted in pain.
When Paul, my mother and I head to the hospital, our sister, Jasmine, does not join us. Seeing Monte in the condition we fear he will be in is too much for her to bear. I approach the hospital in the full expanse of prayer, a calling to every God and Goddess I have ever heard of or known.
Ogún oko dara obaniché aguanile ichegún iré.
(Warrior for justice, protect my brother.)
In Monte’s County USC hospital room, which is located in the prison wing, he is being guarded by two members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Before we enter the room they nonchalantly tell me pieces of my brother’s story:
We thought he was on PCP or something, one says.
He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.
He’s huge! one exclaims. Massive! They had to use rubber bullets on him, one says, casually, like he’s not talking about my family, a man I share DNA with. Like it’s a motherfucking video game to them.
We had to tase him too, the other cop offers, like tasing doesn’t kill people, like it couldn’t have killed my brother.
I will learn later that my brother had been driving and had gotten into a fender bender with another driver, a white woman, who promptly called the police. My brother was in an episode and although he never touched the woman or did anything more than yell, although his mental illness was as clear as the fact that he was Black, he was shot with rubber bullets and tased.
And then he was charged with terrorism.
Literally.
If someone alleges that you have said something threatening to them and causing them to fear for their life, you can be charged, as my brother, who was in a full manic episode, was charged, with terrorism.
When we at last talk to Monte, his words are unclear and slurry. We cannot understand him and then eventually he begins crying uncontrollably. This is the other side of a manic episode, this brutal drop down the darkest hole, something deeper than sadness, an aching and hopelessness that finds home at a cellular level. We cannot make out almost anything he is saying except this one simple plea: Can I have medication please? I don’t feel well, please?
The horror of this disease is that at one stage your brain will trick you into believing that you are well, more than well—that you are better than anyone ever has been. In this phase you believe that you don’t need your medication. And then without warning and often without a perceptible trigger, you’re in your own personal hell that no one can snatch you out of.
Two days later Monte is transferred to Twin Towers as a high-power alert prisoner, which means he is classified as a threat to officers. To hear this is complete cognitive fucking dissonance: my brother has never hurt another living being, let alone a cop. But he has been stripped, beaten and starved, kicked and humiliated by cops. So they get to call him the threat. They get to call him the harm. They get to charge him with terrorism.
Incarcerated as a high-power alert prisoner, Monte is kept in his cell 23 hours a day in solitary confinement, a condition that has long been proven to instigate mental illness in those who previously had been mentally stable. In my brother’s case, he deteriorates quickly, predictably, horribly and without a single doctor on that staff to assert the Oath: first do no harm. When I go to Twin Towers for the first time to visit my brother, he makes the plea again.
I don’t feel well, Trisse. Can I please have my meds? They giving me Advil but I need my meds. Please Trisse. Please.
His voice, the look in eyes, breaks my heart. I wonder if heart meds are withheld from people, cancer meds, an asthma pump? We know Hep C treatments are. And naloxone, which can reverse an OD, has been. We certainly know meds that would slow the onset of AIDS have been kept out of reach of certain groups of people. What kind of society uses medicine as a weapon, keeps it from people needing to heal, all the while continuing to develop the drugs America’s prisons use to execute people?
Even still I cannot figure out why it works in the jailers’ interest to withhold treatment for my brother. They’re the ones who diagnosed him in the first place! They have all of his records! I tell him I will get him whatever
he needs, and I talk to the sheriff, who for some moment I assume will be reasonable. I mean, isn’t a properly medicated Monte better for everyone? The sheriff blows me off after I argue and argue. Can’t authorize nothing without the doctor and the doc didn’t give the word, he repeats. And then I get it. The cheaper alternative to medicating Monte is strapping him down in five-point restraints in a room by himself. Reduces the cost of not only the medication itself, but guards and likely food.
The second time I go to see Monte I am turned away. He’s not fit to be seen, an officer tells me. I go back and go back each of his scheduled visitation days and each time I am turned away, as is our mother. We will not have an opportunity to lay eyes on Monte again until his court date arrives, some 21 days after his arrest. We turn out in full force, not just Mom and me and the family, but Mark Anthony; my colleague from Cleveland, Jason; and other friends of ours in a show of support.
At the court I approach the bailiff to ensure Monte’s on the docket.
Monte Cullors? she asks.
Yes, I say.
She looks over some materials and disappears for a moment and then returns and looks me in my face.
I want to warn you: your brother is in really bad condition. It’s very alarming.
Her affect is flat. I don’t know what to think.
What do you mean, I ask?
He’s on a gurney, she says. She pauses.
He is strapped down, she continues. Restrained, she says.
And also, she continues, using the same flat tone, his face is covered with a spit net, she concludes.
This woman, who perhaps has a brother or perhaps has a son or perhaps has loved somebody’s brother or son, is almost as nonchalant as the officer who told me my brother had been shot with rubber bullets and tased.
My mouth is agape. I’m in shock. I’m trying to process what I cannot imagine. They are going to have my brother hemmed up like he’s Hannibal fucking Lecter? How is it possible that the only response we have for poor people who are mentally ill is criminalization? How does this align with the notion of a democratic or free society—to not take care of the least of these? More mentally ill people in our nation’s prisons than in all of our psychiatric hospitals—combined?! Human beings charged with all manner of terrible-sounding crimes—terrorism!—like my brother has been. What kind of society do we live in?
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 9