And, like my brother, many have never harmed another being.
And even those who have harmed others—what if there had been appropriate interventions, medical interventions, compassionate interventions, early on? What if we, if all of us, had access to health care that centered the patient, not the money? Systems like this actually exist on this planet, in this time. Why is America so tethered to punishment and judgment, to one life mattering and another not? I am thinking of all the people, like my brother, like my father—who have been the targets of harm, not the harm itself. And yet they are the ones whom society views as disposable. Our nation, one big damn Survivor reality nightmare. I am filled with a sense of rage and a call to action at the idea that my brother, my Monte, is considered someone disposable to these people. But to me and my mother and to my sister and my brother, to Chase and to Cynthia, Monte was never disposable. Not him nor the measure of his great heart or beautiful broken brain, which perhaps wrestles so mightily because my God, how the fuck does any of this make sense?
Why is he here? I demand to know. Why isn’t he getting treatment? Jesus, what is wrong with you people?
The bailiff doesn’t answer me and I return to my seat in this court where you cannot speak or use a cell phone or do anything but pray and pray.
Obatalá obá layé ela iwo alara, Ache.
There is suddenly a disturbance, and I look up, we all do, which is when we see what has been done to my brother. Monte is in a full psychotic break. He is yelling and talking to himself. Monte’s presence in the courtroom is roughly the equivalent of dragging someone before a judge who has just been shot in the face and expecting that that person will somehow be able to be an active participant in the proceedings. It’s a stunning betrayal of human dignity, of the words And Justice for All.
Again.
We should be used to this, I should be used to this. But I can never get used to this. I refuse to.
My mother begins to cry and Jason holds her close as Mark Anthony takes my hand in his own and squeezes it. To one side of me and just in front, three white men who are also in the court, I suppose for their family member or friend, begin to laugh. No one silences them. They look at my brother as though he is the freak show. They look at him as though he is not a human being.
I am gripped with an encompassing sense of shame and humiliation. I don’t want to feel this way but here is all of our family’s pain on full blast before people who hate us. I try to stay centered, to say with my eyes, which are laser-focused on Monte, what the court will not allow me to say with my mouth. I love you Monte. I am coming for you. I won’t let them take you, baby. Just stay with me, Monte. Stay with me.
I have to fight back the urge to run to my brother. It’s a particular kind of evil, a specific sort of sadism, when someone forces you to be still and silent while a person you love is hurting just beyond your reach and in ways that can never fully be measured. I am desperate to go to him, to hold my brother, this brother who held me as a child, this brother who rescued and fed small animals, this brother I so love.
And then the judge walks in. She assesses the situation: a man in a face mask and five-point restraints tethered to a gurney who is yelling gibberish and fighting to get free. Perplexed, she speaks to the bailiff who is acting as though there is something normal, something fine about the situation.
The judge then asks publicly, Why is this man in the courtroom? No one has an answer. Not the bailiff, not the DA, not Monte’s public defender, who hasn’t said word one in my brother’s defense. He almost looks distracted, the way he keeps glancing at his watch and the papers before him.
In a voice all of us can hear, the judge admonishes the cops who brought Monte in, the DA and the public defender. And then she postpones my brother’s date. The cops almost shrug and move to roll Monte and his gurney back out of the courtroom. And as they do, Monte yells one last thing, dragging a simple, one-syllable word out for what felt like a full minute. For what felt like a final, desperate prayer:
MOM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
* * *
We leave the courtroom, silent in our procession. We are in shock. We are aliens traversing a strange and hostile planet. We are survivors crawling from the wreckage of a crash scene and we are bruised, broken in parts, bleeding. But we are still breathing. I am still breathing and after a short time, the stunned sensation that took hold of my body, my soul, begins to erode, transform. I am angry, so angry, and I find I have to summon all the strength within me to try not to explode. I turn to Monte’s ineffective public defender.
How dare you allow that to happen? How could you not even try to stop them from putting Monte and our family through that?
He shrugs. If he said anything, I can no longer remember. Who is this guy and why does he present himself as part of Monte’s team? He has nothing to offer in this moment, no word let alone a plan. In another space and time I might have some sympathy for his overwhelm. He’s clearly in a place he’s never been. But so are we. I turn away from him and toward my mother, my mother who has spent a lifetime sharpening her reserve into a weapon against the attacks of the world. That weapon has come apart in this courthouse and now she is crying without restraint. She is sobbing. She chokes out these words: I feel so guilty.
I’m confused. Why would my mother, our mother, feel guilty? What did she ever do except love us and work for us, two, three jobs at a time, and worship and follow rules, while her own family turned its back on her? And then slowly I begin to consider: Is this what it is to be a mother who has to carry the weight of having to protect her children in a world that is conspiring to kill them? Are you forced to exist within a terrible trinary of emotion: rage, grief or guilt? What of the joy and the peace that loving a child brings? What of pride and of hope? Could it really be true that my mother has been given no door number four or five or six or even seven to walk through in order to know the wholeness of motherhood? Is she one in a long line of Black mothers limited to survival mode or grief?
Has my mother ever been allowed to lose herself in the laughter of her children, the silly baby games, the simple adolescent struggles—do your homework, do your chores? I do not remember ever going to a movie with my mother, window shopping. I do not remember us together as relaxed, as humans being. We have always had to be humans doing.
Is this my mother who is gripped, albeit wrongly, with guilt? Is she in this moment wondering what she did or did not do to ensure her baby, her Monte, be kept safe from the nightmare he’s been cast into? Is my mother the fallout, the collateral damage in the battle to elevate personal responsibility over everything, over all those decisions that were made about state budget priorities, about wages, about the presence of police, and even about damn grocery stores and access to quality food?
Here, in this hour and in this place, in this system of law that is supposed to be adversarial but is instead where the players all side up against her son, my mother accesses the only feeling she’d ever been allowed to access freely. Guilt.
Guilt for having a baby young.
Guilt for not blindly following patriarchal religious protocols.
Guilt for being poor.
Guilt for not keeping mental illness out of her son’s brain.
Guilt that she could not stop a group of people from divorcing themselves from a useful definition of humanity.
Guilt that she could not keep these moral monsters from harming her baby.
I put my arms around my precious mother.
It’s not your fault, Mom, I say. None of this is. Not his illness and not what it looks like when it goes untreated. It’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, I keep saying, I keep affirming this with her. But I don’t know whether or not she actually believes me. I didn’t know then and I don’t know now.
* * *
Another court date is set and in advance of that, in the courthouse, Mom and I meet with the public defender. We never do get to meet with him in an office, a place we can think and str
ategize together. We are allowed these few minutes on a bench in a hallway.
Right off the PD tells us that this case represents my brother’s third strike and Monte will be sentenced to life in prison. Full stop.
Monte’s first arrest for an attempted breaking and entering while he was in the middle of an episode was his first strike. While he was incarcerated, guards claimed to find a weapon in his cell. Monte denied it was his and we never knew about this, but regardless, he was convicted and therefore: strike two. This third incident in which the charge is terrorism, also in the midst of an episode where he yelled and carried on but threatened no one and hurt no one, represents strike three and that’s it. He qualifies for a living death sentence and that’s fucking that. The public defender is nonplussed as he says this, and he is not embarrassed that he has no plan to fight back. He says this is what Monte wants. He literally said that.
Go tell my brother we’re hiring a lawyer, I order, and he disappears through a door, back where I suppose the holding cells are kept, where my brother is being kept. He comes back quickly. Your brother says don’t worry about it.
Now I hiss: Go. Tell. My. Brother. We. ARE. Hiring. A. Lawyer.
Full damn stop.
This time when he disappears and returns, he is compliant. Is that humility I read on his face, I wonder?
Your brother says fine, he informs my family. He says it’s okay to find a lawyer and that he might know someone, he mutters.
We’re done here, I tell my mother. Being an organizer, volunteering with the Strategy Center, has made me bold. Fuck this loser. There is another way. Now we have only to find the money, which is a mountain that shoots up, its apex beyond where I can see if I use only these two human eyes. This moment requires a sight born of faith, of walk-on-water faith.
It’s the faith that drove us to run without maps or compasses, money or friends, with dogs trained by demons following behind. It’s the faith that sent four Black students, on February 1, 1960, Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, to sit down at a “whites-only” lunch counter at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refuse to move, risking bodily harm and their very lives. It’s the faith that allowed Robert Parris Moses to keep pushing for voting rights in the deep South in 1965 despite only being able to register one Black man that first summer in Amite County, Mississippi.
The stories I learned as a small girl who read about civil rights and Black power and Black culture flowed everywhere in me and through me. The lessons I’d learned from the Strategy Center about how to organize in the face of unrelenting odds had taken full root.
The court hearing is perfunctory: a new date is set. We have two weeks to hire and finance a private attorney. Facebook exists only at Harvard at this point. There’s MySpace but no architecture for digital crowd-funding campaigns. There’s no Twitter. I go to visit Monte, who tells me another prisoner has recommended a really good attorney whose name is Peter Corn. Even still, Monte’s not hopeful.
Trisse, he says, I’m going to be here until Armageddon comes, he says.
I tell him he won’t be. I tell him we will fix this. And then I go to meet this Peter Corn guy, who immediately makes me feel uncomfortable. But there’s not much choice. We need $10,000. I have maybe $150 in my bank account. My mother is still paid poverty wages. And it’s going to be up to my mother and I. Alton isn’t reliable; he has money, just doesn’t dish it out. Paul and Jasmine are feeling overwhelmed by both Monte’s illness and the attacks by the court. Who can blame them? What supports are there, what therapy, what road map is offered, when one of your own is being lynched in your presence and you have no army to fight back with, no gun, no Underground Railroad? This is the way it is set up: to intimidate families and shut them down and away from the people they love the most when those very people most need support.
But I refuse to be intimidated.
I have been an organizer since I was 16 years old.
From my teacher and friends at Cleveland I learned that just because I was young, it did not mean I couldn’t be a leader. Cleveland taught us, taught me, that leadership was our responsibility.
From the Strategy Center I learned how to map a campaign with young Black and Brown people, and that we could actually win that campaign. Monte’s arrest came the year we won a fight against the school district for fining parents $250 each time their child was late to school—even if they were late because the lines to get through the metal detectors were unconscionably long.
Donna taught me to know faith, to understand spirit as a verb.
And from my intentional family—Mark Anthony and Carla, Naomi and Tanya and Jason and Sarah and Katidia and Vitaly and more people than I can name here, I learned that nothing could break a community united, a community guided by love. From them, I learned to reimagine a world. A world where my own family can be safe. A world where Monte can be safe. I learned that I am not alone no matter how lonely I’d felt at times.
No problem, I say to Peter Corn. We’ll have your retainer in two weeks. And then I go to work. We go to work.
My friends, my people, my tribe, take to making calls and writing letters, which we email and snail mail out. And then we pray. And then we wait. But not for long. Within ten days checks from across the country begin to pour in and days before I have to pay Peter Corn, we have $6,000 raised.
I ask my mother to go to her father, to her middle-class family. Ask them for the balance, Mom.
They’ll say no, she’s sure.
Ask anyway, I insist. And she does. And after fits and starts and an interminable two days of silence, my grandparents send over the final $4,000. I go to meet Peter Corn.
At his office that day, his partner is there and he listens in. When he hears my brother’s name, he asks if we are related to a man named Rodney Cullors.
Yes, I say. He’s our uncle, I say.
Small world, he declares. I prosecuted him once.
There’s an awkward pause. I try not to be derailed by the fact that for these folks, this is all a chess game. They can play the pieces on any side of the board. I try to be comforted by the idea that at least they will know how to come at the prosecutors, and they do. Peter says immediately: We gotta strike one of the strikes. Probably won’t avoid any prison at all (I seethe) but we can get around life. This whole process unnerves me. Is it ever really about defending people or is it always only about getting the better deal? This is what we’re forced into.
Peter Corn is true to his word—and has remained so for Monte over the course of the years we’ve known him. He gets the second strike struck, the one Monte was given while he was in prison, but Monte has to plead out and agree to serve 85 percent of an eight-year sentence. No one mentions medical treatment or what the proper response to a person who is unwell should be. Somehow we feel something like grateful. Not really grateful. But something like it. I begin visiting my brother every month, a process I continue for the six years he ends up serving at Corcoran State Prison, where they find the right balance of meds to keep Monte mostly together.
Six months before Monte comes home, I tell Mark Anthony, whom I have dated on and off for years, but am now fully committed to, that we cannot allow what happened before. Monte needs a re-entry team, I whisper one night, laying in Mark Anthony’s loving arms. The next day we put out a call to people from the Strategy Center, my friends Tanya, Jason and Carla. I reach out to mentors. I try to convince my mother to let me find a home for Monte that will support his transition but she will hear none of it.
My son will live with me, she says, and that’s it.
In October of 2011, Alton, Paul and I rise at 4:00 in the morning and load into my dad’s monster truck, an F-350, to begin the three-hour drive up 99 North. Monte will not be sent home alone on a bus again, in his underwear. As we pull up into the dawn of the day at the prison, I see workers, as if for the first time. They are gardening, mowing the lawn, doing all sorts of tasks. And they are all in prison
jumpsuits. Prisoners are literally an enslaved workforce, not only to external companies like Starbucks and Whole Foods, but to the state of California itself. The prison provides jobs in the town for guards and nurses, a couple of counselors. But not for janitors, cooks, people who make the furniture. These are all parts of America’s sprawling slave labor system. Just then, a single white van pulls up and a group of men step out. Monte is among them.
He is wearing the 501 jeans we sent him, black Stacy Adams shoes and a trademark Ese black shirt. Alton begins to weep and Monte says with a laugh, Smile now, cry later old man, and they embrace.
Monte turns to me and exclaims: Trisse! What’s up?? He grabs me and Paul into hugs. Standing near Monte is an elder who has no one meeting him and who has nowhere to go. Monte looks at Dad, Hey can he come with us? It’s a gentle demand framed as a question. Alton’s not thrilled, but this is Monte. We all pile into the van and the elder and Monte stare out of the window. So long since I last saw any of this scenery, Monte says. These colors, he says. The elder doesn’t say a word but he doesn’t stop staring, either. Monte shifts and begins playing with the cell phone we’ve bought him. The world has turned over several times since 2006.
We stop for a bite along the way and are thrilled to watch Monte scarf down chicken, steak, pinto beans and rice. When we get into the Valley, Alton asks the elder, Hey, where should I take you? But the old man has no plan. That much is clear. He is reflective of so many prisoners who are coming home after lengthy sentences. They come home to a world they don’t know, to a people who don’t know them.
I’m just gonna head down to Hollywood, he says. We take him there and I give him some of the little money I have and get back in the truck, and we head back home to my mother’s new Section 8 apartment complete with a small balcony where a barbecue is happening. Chase and Monte reunite awkwardly; Chase won’t give his father a full embrace. He’s in full-blown adolescence and perhaps that explains part of it, but most of it is about how you can never get back the time.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 10