This is what it is like every day. Harm to white people, especially resourced white people, and the behaviors they engage in as a result, is framed sympathetically. Harm to us, more widespread, more embedded, more permanent, is framed as our own doing.
This is to say that for a long time and for all the structural analysis I was learning about race and the world, at the end of the day, I was still just a teenager with a heart left broken.
But then one day that summer, I don’t hear from Mark Anthony. We had been in the habit of talking not once but throughout the day, the days. I call him and call him but there’s no answer. This is before the age of texting and many of us do not have cell phones. So I call a landline that rings until it rings out. Mark Anthony is totally a ghost. This goes on for probably two weeks, this painful silence. It feels like longer.
Finally, I write a long letter, a letter Mark Anthony will later call my hate letter. I write it in red pen. I give it to John Ralph, Mark Anthony’s brother, who is a friend and whom I still see when we all hang out at our friend Tanya’s house—without Mark Anthony.
Two days later the landline at Donna’s rings. And although at first I don’t recognize the voice, I realize suddenly: it’s Mark Anthony! I am both joyous and enraged. But we have protocols among our little tribe. We are committed to courageous conversations. Our school had taught us to address conflict in ways young people are not typically provided; as often as possible, we, as a group, use them. I want to do that here. Not long before, Cheyenne and I had a torturous breakup—she’d left me for one of my friends. I don’t want to end anything in such a harsh way again. We agree to meet at Tanya’s house. It’s more than neutral territory. It’s sort of our safe house, what with her liberal mother and artistic family.
When I arrive I look different than the last time Mark Anthony saw me. I have shaved my head and gotten a piercing beneath my bottom lip. I’ve gotten a tattoo on my lower back of a woman flexing her biceps, inspired by Rosie the Riveter. I’m leaning all the way into my feminism and physically demonstrating it in every way I can and tattoos and piercings represent a public commitment to me.
Mark Anthony is as gorgeous as ever. He’s grown his hair out into a huge Afro, making him appear even taller than his six feet. When he sees me, he looks me over approvingly, and immediately we are playful, giggling for no reason, touching each other in ways as silly as they are loving. And in the middle of the silliness, the words about nothing, the laughter, Mark Anthony turns serious.
I’m sorry, he says. I will never do that again, he says.
His words break open the container of feelings we’ve held for the last few weeks.
I talk about my fears, rooted in real-world experience, with cisgender men.
Y’all are not emotionally available, I accuse.
We were getting so intimate, he confesses. I felt too vulnerable, he continues. I felt you could see parts of me others could not. Parts I wasn’t ready for the world to see. I didn’t feel in control, he says. I don’t want people to know how things hurt me, where they hurt me, he explains.
We talk about Black men and the performance of cool, about how brothers are supposed to take whatever the world throws at them and never be fazed. Never be shaken or afraid. I demanded, our relationship demanded, honesty, which is to say vulnerability. Before me, Mark Anthony had never cried in the presence of a peer. Maybe as a child, with his family, but not all naked and out in the world like this.
Mark Anthony apologizes to me again. He tells me, he promises me, he will never, ever disappear on me again. And after this, we begin to date, although we are still non-sexual, and frankly, we are not monogamous. What we are is inexorably bound to one another, to a love and a relationship that we understand and that makes complete sense to us, although it’s also true that it engenders discomfort in the others we date. But our position to those people is simple: we are connected. Unbreakable.
The people we date have to accept who we are to each other. One of the writers we studied together and loved was the feminist anarchist Emma Goldman. She offered these words in 1897, at the turn of a new century: “I demand the independence of woman, her right to support herself; to live for herself; to love whomever she pleases, or as many as she pleases. I demand freedom for both sexes, freedom of action, freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.”
Goldman, a Russian-born woman who emigrated to America, would be identified by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld as “the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public.” Indeed, she writes to Hirschfeld not only about homosexuality, but also about gender identity existing along a spectrum.
From Goldman we take the lesson that relationships do not come before community liberation, that possessiveness and jealousy can undo the best of us. We strive to be different, to love and honor the singular us along with the collective us. We want to build a world in which undeveloped and unrefined emotional instincts—like possessiveness and jealousy—are minimized as much as humanly possible so that all eyes, hearts and spirits are not distracted from the goal. And the goal is freedom. The goal is to live beyond fear. The goal is to end the occupation of our bodies and souls by the agents of a larger American culture that demonstrates daily how we don’t matter.
They show us this in the schools most Black people attend where there are history books—history books—sometimes more than a generation old.
They show us every time we drive through one of our neighborhoods that has no safe places for kids or grocery stores.
They show us when they find money for another war but not for a decent hospital we can go to.
They show us on TV and in the movies.
They show us when we are arrested for standing together in the street.
They show us relentlessly.
Which is why we are determined to show ourselves something else. We are determined to love ourselves the best and most whole way we know. For Mark Anthony and I this mostly means being platonic, it means being radically honest about what we feel, even when what we feel seems scary or uncomfortable but also totally natural. Another way of saying that is that in 2003, four years after we first met, Mark Anthony and I kiss for the first time.
We’d spent an evening at a Talib Kweli concert:
WE WORK ’TIL WE BREAK OUR BACK AND YOU HEAR THE CRACK OF THE BONE
TO GET BY … JUST TO GET BY …
WE COMMUTE TO COMPUTERS
SPIRITS STAY MUTE WHILE YOU EAGLES SPREAD RUMORS
WE SURVIVALISTS, TURNED TO CONSUMERS
TO GET BY … JUST TO GET BY
The night was magical and we cannot stop thinking about each other all through the next day and, by the evening we are on the phone until finally Mark Anthony says, I’m coming to scoop you. And he does. We go back to his apartment, where we listen to the soundtrack from the film Amandla. We imagine freedom. Our community’s freedom. Our own personal freedom.
We do not make love but we are love. We kiss all night. Another man might have tried to push harder. But Mark Anthony just flows with me and I flow with him. It is perfect, a dream. And we can no longer deny it. We are in love. For six months we flow like this, connected, individual but as one. And then one day he disconnects. He is vacant. He is distant. I push. I ask what’s wrong. He just shakes his head. He is gone. I flash back to the summer after high school and my heart wrenches. This time I do not ask why, what happened. I just accept it. He broke a promise and that breaks us. We stay in touch but as a couple, we are over.
And honestly, while it’s painful, it’s not as hard as it was the first time. This time I am more sure of myself, and before long I am headlong in another relationship with Starr, the rapper and singer. Starr is a Stud and I feel like I am back home. I lose myself in them, in their artistry, our passion, for five years. But those years are punctured by as much intense sensuality as they are by anger. It is the first and only relationship I’ve ever had where w
e yell more than we laugh. Even still we try, we push, we want us to work. We consider marrying. But the volatility serves neither of us. All my skills around how to have courageous confrontation go to shit. I’m sad and shaken. I miss the healing light that surrounded Mark Anthony and I; Mark Anthony who I never yelled with.
We, Mark Anthony and I, begin to see more of each other. Again. Apart, we have also grown ever more together. Both of us live in the tradition of Ifa, the African spiritual practice that originated with the Yoruba people of Nigeria at least 8,000 years ago. The tradition is earth-centered and is balanced by these three: Olodumare, Orisha and Ancestors. Our Supreme Being is known as Olodumare and is without gender. Olodumare is benevolent, not the vengeful, angry God I grew up with. Olodumare does not interfere with the affairs of humans. Rather, Olodumare has provided us with a Universe, with all that is needed to create joy and peace—if we so choose it.
In Ifa we believe that all living beings, all elements of Nature, are interdependent and possessing of soul. Rocks. Flowers. Rivers. Clouds. Thunder. The Wind. These energies are called Orisha and it is these Orisha with whom we are in direct contact, whether we know it or not.
In Ifa, we also recognize and believe that our Ancestors are always with us and must be honored and acknowledged. They are part of what both grounds and guides us, and to understand them, we undertake a process of Divination, readings that help us understand that our purpose and destiny are based on the wisdom of the Orishas and the Ancestors.
Separately Mark Anthony and I both get the same reading: we are meant to be together. I get a reading that says it outright: Mark Anthony is meant to be your husband.
I ignore the Divination at first. I feel like a fraud and I tell Mark Anthony this. How is it that I, a Queer woman, can be destined to be with Mark Anthony? It makes no sense. Plus, it is hard to ignore or miss the heteronormativity and patriarchy that is threaded through Ifa, compliments of some of its practitioners. But again and again we are told we are each other’s soulmates.
He comes over and we process.
The last eight years, he says. We always knew it would come to this.
He’s right.
I tell Starr that neither of us is getting what we deserve in our relationship, that I can no longer be here.
I’ll change, Starr says. I promise, they say.
It would have happened already, I say.
How dare you leave me for some fucking dude, they say.
I’m not leaving you for some dude, I say. I am leaving because we’re not healthy, I say. And Mark Anthony is not some dude, I do not say. Plus I’m already struggling with so much internally. I never thought, never could have imagined I’d want to marry a cis man. But there can be a universe of difference between what you think and what you feel. And I feel Mark Anthony, all the way to the core of me, in the very seat of my heart.
It’s a particularly unpleasant breakup with Starr, marked by months of angry texts and notes left on my car. And because we are in a primarily Queer community, we have few resources for how to handle what really becomes abusive. There are community, non-police-involved interventions for challenges in heteronormative and white intimate partner mistreatment, but not really any for us. I think about the numbers of Black women who suffer abuse at the hands of their husbands and lovers because calling the cops is a worse option than getting your ass kicked. In the Black/people of color Queer community, it’s even worse.
It takes months of abusive behavior before I am able to block Starr all the way from my life, which also teaches me something about how much I tolerate in the name of transformation. The price is unfair. I want to be at peace, in peace. I pull Mark Anthony closer and he pulls me closer. He agrees to grow with me, to be vulnerable and emotionally available. Mark Anthony moves in with me almost immediately and then we are offered the cabin in Topanga Canyon and we move there, our first home together. The home where I hear the news that my father has died.
It is Mark Anthony who carries me through that loss. Mark Anthony who facilitates a full yearlong healing group with my friends where we come together and make art projects, collages, tiles, paintings to commemorate Gabriel. They come for me but they also come for Gabriel and to process their own grief. When he was with us, when he was alive, Gabriel had been a community dad, and my friends came to Brignac family barbecues, Brignac family baseball. Sometimes two of us make it, sometimes ten. Sometimes we are in our home and sometimes we are at the ocean. But for a solid year, they hold me up, every single week. All facilitated by Mark Anthony. The man Ifa said was to be my husband.
* * *
On a brilliant sunny day, September 11, 2010, in a house we rent near the port in San Pedro, a house that had been fashioned as a traditional Louisiana home, a house that brought my father into the space, and before more than 200 people, Cullors and Brignacs, all of Mark Anthony’s family, all of the family we created together, we commit ourselves to each other and we commit ourselves to our community. We do not marry in the eyes of the law since, at the time, not everyone could marry in the eyes of the law, but our commitment is just as deep.
Alton and my father’s little brother, Ellis, walk me down the aisle and Mark’s mama walks him down the aisle. He looks exquisite in his modified white zoot suit—our wedding is 40s style. And I feel as beautiful as ever in my two-piece, white, crop-topped, form-fitted dress my auntie made me, the pearls my grandma loaned me to wear. My homegirl sings Sade—“No Ordinary Love.” And we exchange rings made of wood. And when we jump the broom, all of our 15 friends who stand up with us jump the broom, too. And then we dance until we can’t dance anymore.
Uncle Ellis grabs me by the arm and says, I don’t know what just happened and I’ve never been to nothing like this but it was the dopest shit I ever been a part of!
And my mother just says she is proud. She says she is happy.
Mark Anthony and I and our friends all go to our favorite diner together, Swingers in Santa Monica, and we laugh more and all fall in love more and then he and I head over to the W Hotel in Westwood where we’ve booked a suite for the night and we hold one another and we wrap ourselves in one another. We have this 24 hours before I have to be back at UCLA and Mark Anthony back in studies of Chinese medicine. And we whisper to each other how much we love each other, we say I love you 1,000 times. And we say we have hope and we say we have faith. And then slowly we give in to our magnificent, beautifully earned love informed by two souls that are exhausted but sated and certain in the knowledge that yes, while there is so much hell on this earth, so much pain, there is also this. A love we could not have predicted but always imagined. A love that rocks us and a love that holds us. A love not ordinary.
10
DIGNITY AND POWER. NOW.
Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve.
MALCOLM X
Monte has always been the sibling who is closest to me. He is the one I play with the most, joke with the most. Our relationship has nearly its own language. Not in the way we think of when we think of twins. But me and Monte, we never need full sentences, wholly spoken thoughts, to communicate fully with one another. In every way, he is my first best friend. Losing him at such a young age is an early childhood wound it will take me more than a decade to really unpack, understand and begin to try to heal. I am 11 when the police start picking up Monte, who is then 14, and putting him in juvie, for hanging out in the street, for underage drinking, for tagging—which gets him put on the National Gang Database. And I am still a teenager when he is tortured by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
There’s a difference between abuse and torture. Both are horrible, often unbearable, and both leave scars. Neither can be minimized. But I make the distinction here in order to explain that while abuse may or may not be intentional, and is often spontaneous, torture is always intentional. It is always premeditated. It is planned out and its purpose is to deliberately and systematically d
ismantle a person’s identity and humanity. It is designed to destroy a sense of community and eliminate leaders and create a climate of fear. This is the definition used by the Center of Victims of Torture.
In a sentence, torture is terrorism.
And this is what my brother endures.
He is not alone.
Because while I know the basics of what he experienced the first time he was sent to LA County Jail in 1999, a jail run by the sheriff’s department, it will not be until 2011 when I read a report issued by the ACLU of Southern California that I fully understand what was done to my brother there. This is to say that Abu Ghraib was first practiced on this soil, in this America. And before the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Before the second Gulf War. The skills to torture people were honed in this nation on people who were not terrorists. They were the victims of terrorism.
In the fall of 2011, weeks after Monte’s come home from Corcoran State Prison, and days after he’s back in my mother’s house from the hospital stay, I’m in our cottage in the Village with Mark Anthony and our friend Ray. And on this night I’m going through my email when I notice one from the ACLU of Southern California. They have filed an 86-page complaint against the LA County Sheriff’s department for torture. Seventy of the 86 pages are testimonies from survivors and those who were witnesses to torture. The report, which includes prisoners’ testimony and that of jailhouse chaplains who could not be silent, reveals that under the watch of Sheriff Lee Baca, torture in the LA County Jail was, for at least two decades, pervasive, gruesome, systemic and routine.
The scope of the report is staggering.
The sheer number of individuals who were kicked in the testicles, set upon and beaten by several deputies at once, individuals who were tased for no apparent reason other than the entertainment of guards, who had bones broken by guards wielding flashlights and other everyday tools that became instruments of extreme violence in America’s largest jail, is breathtaking enough. But other elements of the torture almost break me as I read the words of a civilian who testified about a wheelchair-bound prisoner whom deputies pulled off his bed, kicked and kneed in his ribs, back and neck and then shot with pepper spray in his face. I begin to hyperventilate and remember my brother on his knees drinking out of the toilet. My God.
When They Call You a Terrorist Page 12