When They Call You a Terrorist

Home > Other > When They Call You a Terrorist > Page 11
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 11

by Patrisse Khan-Cullors


  He’s not happy to see me, Monte whispers to me sadly.

  Yeah he is, I respond. He just has to get used to things.

  We go for a walk that night through the old neighborhood for a little while, we talk or don’t, we laugh, we don’t cry, we embrace the sense of relative calm. I kiss my mother, my brother at the end of the night.

  Call me in the morning, Mom, I say, and she promises she will. Monte walks me to the door. Can you help me find a job, Trisse? I need to work, he says.

  He does not yet know that my team and I have already been planning something for him. There’s a small social justice organization I’ve been working with. They will give Monte a job as a janitor. This is part of the re-entry plan. Get him this job and between me and my tribe, we will ensure he makes it to work on time each day. Each of us takes a day. Things go smoothly for several weeks and then they don’t.

  Monte calls me and says, Trisse they’re going to let me go.

  What? I can’t believe it. These are friends. They haven’t spoken to me. I call the executive director. She tells me Monte isn’t cut out for the job. I explain how we likely have to adjust his dosage. This is what working with people who have a mental illness is like. She’s not moved and sure enough, she lets Monte go. Monte is broken. He curls up on the couch in my mother’s house for months and months and goes inside himself as my mother struggles to support him and Chase, and to a large degree Bernard, whose work is spotty.

  And it’s Jasmine and Alton, who have relocated to Las Vegas, who get her to shift. After a lifetime in Southern California, my pious mother packs up and heads to Sin City.

  They run us out of California, Cherice, Alton says. Come on to Vegas. People can live here, he says. Alton has opened a small mechanic shop, Seven Palms Automotive in Las Vegas, and Jasmine lets my mother know there are jobs and whole houses there that can be rented for cheaper than apartments in LA. I accept this, that my mother is leaving, but I cannot help think that the drug war, the war on gangs, has really been no more than a forced migration project. From my neighborhood in LA to the Bay Area to Brooklyn, Black and Brown people have been moved out as young white people build exciting new lives standing on the bones of ours. The drug war as ethnic cleansing.

  Monte and Chase relocate with my Mom but it doesn’t last long. He tells me over the phone one night how much he hates it in Vegas, how nothing is familiar to him. He says he wants to come home.

  Don’t do that, Monte, I say. Wherever Mom is, you’re home.

  I have no friends here, Trisse.

  No one’s left in Van Nuys, I say. They’re all locked up, I say. Or dead, I say.

  Monte pauses.

  Cynthia is there, he responds.

  And with that, we are right back where we started. It is 2012 now and Monte has been home less than a year and already he is in his third residence. Predictably, it’s a disaster. And predictably also, I suppose, it is my mother, again, who has to share the hard news.

  Monte’s off of his medication, she says. He is breaking up everything at Cynthia’s house. Right now as we’re speaking, she says. Trisse, please get Paul and get over there.

  Mark Anthony and I are living about 45 minutes away from Van Nuys, in an artist’s village in central LA called St. Elmo’s. We rush over to Cynthia’s apartment and as we do, we call Paul: Can you get right over? Paul can get there faster than we can. It will be the first time he will see his baby brother like this. I call him to say we are near and Paul tries to answer, but the only thing that comes through is all this noise in the background.

  Brother, brother, look at me, Paul is shouting.

  Monte is shouting, too, but I cannot make out his words. But then I hear him begin to cry—which may be a good sign. Crying may exhaust him, may stop him.

  When we arrive we step into a house that’s been destroyed. Furniture is turned over and some of it’s been broken. Plates are smashed. In the center of it all, my brother Paul is holding Monte in his arms, holding him like he held all of us when we were small. Paul is wiping the sweat from Monte’s bald head and brow.

  Monte has calmed down but Cynthia, understandably, has not. He can’t stay here, she says desperately.

  I know, I say.

  I was on one, huh, Trisse, Monte says, looking up at me from his brother’s arms. In this moment he looks like a small boy.

  I shake my head. You were, I say, without judgment or anger. I look in my brother’s eyes. Monte clearly hasn’t slept and getting him rest is a huge priority. But first we have to get him out of there. I tell Paul that Mark Anthony and I will take Monte home with us, which we do. And as we get him to at least lay down, we call the team together. Jason, Tanya, my friend Damon. Mom rushes back into town.

  And with no success, we all try to convince Monte he has to go back into the hospital. I’m writing this in sentences, but this unfolded over days. Over several really hard days. My team, my community, my tribe: they stay with us.

  There’s an afternoon where Mom presses Monte as much as she can. Please baby. You have to go back to the hospital, she begs. But he associates doctors and hospitals with prison and four- and five-point restraints. He won’t listen to us.

  I’m not going there again, he says, determined.

  We push some more but he refuses any pleas, especially from mom and me. He seems embarrassed around us. I think he thinks he is supposed to protect us, not the other way around. But men have been most present at all of his episodes. Even if it’s been men in law enforcement who hate him, he is used to male energy. Monte begins spiraling up. He’s terrified.

  Someone, I don’t recall who, gets him to take his Ativan for his anxiety, but it doesn’t work. We’re likely past the Ativan stage. Instead of calming down, Monte flashes back to his first time in County Jail, when he was beaten and starved, and before we can stop him, he is in the bathroom where he starts drinking from the toilet. A toilet, during part of his time in LA County Jail, was all he had to drink from. Monte is having a complete flashback, a PTSD-induced flashback. And perhaps because it is so horrible, perhaps because in that moment we are all with Monte in a cage in LA County Jail, it’s what does it for us, what steels our reserve. We will get Monte to the hospital and get him the help he needs. Negotiations have to ratchet up. Mom, Paul, me and Mark Anthony call in all the troops: Tremaine, our half-brother from another relationship Alton had; Jason and Damon. Mark Anthony with his training in healing and acupuncture serves as the negotiator.

  Monte, he begins, we have to get you to the hospital.

  Nope, Monte responds.

  Monte, can I explain why?

  Yup.

  Because you’re having PTSD, brother. We can’t let you drink from the toilet. It’s bad for you and you don’t deserve that. Mark Anthony speaks slowly, his voice gentle as a new mother’s embrace.

  Monte is quiet.

  We can’t help you here the way we want to. We love you. We want you well.

  Monte is thinking.

  And then, from Monte, a challenge: I’ll go to the hospital if you gimme ten pull-ups in a row. Without stopping.

  Now, Mark Anthony is tall but he is super skinny. This is going to be hard as fuck. But he takes a deep breath and says, Okay, Monte. And they head out to the pull-up bar we have in the yard. We all follow them and watch as Mark Anthony struggles, one pull-up, two, three pull-ups, four and finally, finally, without breaking, he hits it: Ten! He drops down, breathing heavily. Monte won’t go back on his word. A deal is a deal.

  And all the Black men gathered there create a gentle healing circle around my brother Monte and guide him easy into Tremaine’s car.

  My mom and I follow them and en route I call a nurse I know who works at County USC and tell her we’re coming. She doesn’t work in psychiatric admissions but she is there and waiting to help guide us when our mini-caravan arrives.

  It takes Monte 30, maybe 40 minutes to get out of the car. We wait. And slowly, slowly, I see Monte emerge from the car. He is wal
king gingerly, Paul on one side and Tremaine on the other. He has a towel over his head. They don’t let my brother stumble, they don’t let him fall. This is the image of Black men that lives in my head. This constructive care. This steady love.

  Mark Anthony walks ahead of them and speaks to the security and somehow finagles his way into the back and helps Monte through the intake and into his room, where he gets the doctor to give my brother a shot so he can really and fully sleep for the first time in three or four days.

  Mark Anthony, Tremaine and Paul get back in the car and drive back to our bungalow. My mother and I get in my car and begin to talk about how to help Cynthia put her home together. We have navigated this situation with no police involvement. And that night, before I drift off to sleep laying next to Mark Anthony, I think: this is what community control looks like.

  This is what the love of Black men looks like.

  This is what our Black yesterday once looked like.

  And I think: If we are to survive, this is what our future must look like.

  9

  NO ORDINARY LOVE

  Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.

  JAMES A. BALDWIN

  It’s Spike Lee who brings Mark Anthony and I together.

  I’m a year ahead of him, a senior in high school and I am obsessed with the Spike Lee Joint Bamboozled, a razor-sharp satire that tells the story of a Black man, Pierre Delacroix (whose real name is Peerless Dothan). He’s a Harvard grad who is continually humiliated and abused by his white boss at a television network. The white boss, who is married to a Black woman, asserts that he’s Blacker than Delacroix and repeatedly, he calls him, Delacroix, Nigga.

  The white boss refuses to allow any of Delacroix’s positive story ideas about Black people to go through, opting only for shows that depict us as vulgar caricatures. Delacroix, desperate to get out of his job, tries to get fired by creating a disgusting, racist minstrel show—blackface and all—but it backfires. The network and white boss love it and the show becomes a success. Eventually, Delacroix embraces the success of the show, spins it as just satire and gets behind it. But by the end, and as a result of the extraordinary pain that arises because of the racist horrific, many of the characters in the film are killed, and there is a strong message about how the media has taught us to hate ourselves and how that hate leads to our death.

  Those of us who repeatedly watch Bamboozled—kids in my senior class—are deeply impacted by it and its messages. We have conversation after conversation about how racism makes us hate ourselves and misdirects our anger toward one another rather than focusing it on where the sources of the problem lie. We talk about how dangerous media and pop culture can be, how complicit they are in shaping how we move in the world.

  I want other students beyond our class to join the conversation, and because during junior year at Cleveland students study the “isms”—racism, sexism, homophobia and classism—I think the film is a perfect vehicle for the junior class. Teachers make a classroom and equipment available to me, and I make flyers and the word gets out about the event. The classroom fills up. Of the roughly 200 students who are part of the arts and humanities program I am in at Cleveland, about 10 percent are Black, and, along with one or two people who are Latinx, one of whom is white, I think all of them show up. Mark Anthony is among them.

  We have a talkback when the film ends, but the room is mostly silent. We are too young, we take ourselves too seriously to appreciate the satire. We can only absorb the pain. Most slowly file out but not Mark Anthony. He’s in a chair in the corner. We haven’t really talked before this. But his head is in his arms. He is not okay. I go over to him, sit atop the desk beside him, and start speaking gently.

  Mark Anthony, I begin, resting my hand on his back. Are you okay? Do you want to talk?

  He is crying and I lean in. I hold him, this beautiful-looking young man with the wild hair, all long and lean, and with sparkling green eyes. Slowly, everyone clears the room to provide us privacy. I move closer and put my arms around Mark Anthony. He does not want to speak and so we don’t. I just stay with him, hold him, hold space for all he is feeling but cannot say. We sit like that in our first real moment together, a moment of utter and complete intimacy. It feels entirely natural. But vaguely, I’m also aware of something bizarre happening inside of me. I feel … attracted to him?

  I don’t get it. I have never been attracted to a cisgender (a person whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth), heterosexual man. Never. I had come out two years before and now, at 18, young and fierce in my sexuality, I am a purist. My attraction is and has been clearly and specifically to women who at this time are called Studs, people who will eventually be called gender non-conforming. The people I am attracted to are masculine of center, to be sure, but not born body, as well as mind and soul, male. I have no idea what to do with these feelings for Mark Anthony. I do know that in my heart, the heart dedicated to Black liberation, I love people. Period. I love complicated, imperfect, beautiful people. People, I suppose, like me.

  But in the immediate, I don’t have to navigate this strange, unexpected imposition of feelings in my heart, my body. Mark Anthony and I, after this day, develop a friendship that is not rooted in sex. It helps that I am still dating Cheyenne, although we are beginning to grow apart as we grow older and she stops attending Cleveland—mostly because she doesn’t have the support she needs to make the long trek to the school from the neighborhood she lives in. But it also helps that sexually, Mark Anthony is very reserved and, at this juncture in his life, has not yet kissed a girl. The chemistry between us is undeniable, but we choose not to translate it sexually. We are just determined to love one another, to share an abiding and deep love with one another. Without sex. We begin spending every day together.

  And, as with my other friends, we dive into reading books together. bell hooks continues to be a North Star but Cornel West’s work, as well, takes center stage. And, as with other intimate relationships I have had with both friends and lovers, we begin to share a journal, a quiet and private place where we are able to say in poems and paragraphs what we often cannot say in person. Mark Anthony shares in our journal that except for that day in the classroom, after we watched Bamboozled, he has never cried in public before, at least not since he was a very small boy. And he doesn’t have a particular memory of doing it then, either.

  After high school graduation, when Carla and I move in with Donna, for those first heady summer weeks Mark Anthony and I grow closer, speaking every day, seeing one another regularly. We have the innate sense that we can change the world, that everything that is hard and cruel doesn’t have to stay that way. Cleveland has provided us tools, and once I become engaged with the Strategy Center, my belief in what is possible expands exponentially. With Mark Anthony, I am finding ways to heal my relationships with Black men, who, for all my love for them, are people who disappear, people who are inconsistent. Because, for all the understanding I now have around prisons and race, I am still just a kid whose fathers, both of them, disappeared. Whose brother did.

  I do not, in fact, have an analysis at this time around Alton being gone, about the impact it had on him to have lost his livelihood and ability to care for his family, and I do not have a full analysis at this point even around Gabriel. There is, at this point, very much the feeling, albeit one I do not share often, that he chose drugs over me. The war on drugs has done an incredible job of demonizing the people we need and love the most, of making someone’s use of drugs solely a matter of personal responsibility and weakness.

  There is rarely discussion about the trauma that often drives chaotic drug use and addiction. And there is no discussion about the fact that fully 75 percent of the people who use drugs never develop addiction. (For some drugs, like marijuana, fully 90 percent of those who use never become addicted.) They wake up, go to work or school, pay their taxes, raise their kids, make love with their pa
rtners. They live. They live regular old boring lives. But for my father, my brother, others I know, chaos was a factor before drugs were a part of their lives. Why does no one ever address that?

  Where we could see that other laws were race-based and aimed at disrupting Black life, we had—we still have—a hard time accepting drug policy as race policy and the war on drugs as the legal response to the gains of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. At the time the drug war was launched, Black people stood, worldwide, atop a moral mountain. America—the world—knew it owed us for centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. And instead of doubling down on how to repair the harm, it made us the harm. After removing a debilitating number of jobs and the funding to ensure quality schools, after instituting laws that disrupted families’ possibility to thrive—welfare laws beginning in the 1970s meant that women often lost benefits needed to feed their children if they had a man present in the home, even if between the two of them they still subsisted on poverty wages—our mothers and fathers and daughters and sons were criminalized for choices made often out of absolute desperation and lack of any other real options.

  Consider: In the wake of Katrina, there were two Getty images that Yahoo News ran two days after the storm hit. In the first photo, two white residents waded through the water with food. Beneath their picture, the caption read: “Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.” Right after it, they ran an image of a Black boy also wading through the water with food. The caption read, “A young man walks through chest-deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005.”

 

‹ Prev