Black Boy Out of Time: A Memoir

by Hari Ziyad

  “You have to imagine,” I tell him, taking another drag, “how this could be a comfort. Don’t you just want me to be happy?” I ask, even though I know we’re all going to die anyway.

  I laugh again, but his expression does not change.

  “Real happiness isn’t so fleeting,” Jahvaris replies. And somehow I know he isn’t judging me at all. “Yes, we’re all going to die, but you don’t have to die that way.”

  And in this moment, Hari-Gaura, I realize that I dismissed your fear of our sister dying, just to replace it with my own fear of death. With a fear that seemed quieter and calmer, more mature. Capitalism and its cult of productivity encourage individuals to want to seem above it all, to seem unbothered, to have their shit together no matter what is going on around them. To not let the danger of the world get to them, because then they won’t do anything about the danger. Because then they’ll take the fleeting happiness and slow death over the sudden risks and lasting joys that children know. Because then I’d stay running from you.

  But there is another way. There has always been another way.

  I don’t know if Jahvaris sees you in me, but I see you more clearly around friends who hold me accountable for my health and well-being, even through the phone. I see you more clearly now. I finally throw away the rest of the cigarette—at least this time. The fear, it is still here, but I feel some real happiness, too. Not comfort—joy. And I just want to make it last this time. There are many more terrors I’ll have to face.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ABOLITION

  At her worst, Mother Bhūmi was as terrifying as anything I’d ever seen. There was no telling what could set her off, and when something did, her anger would erupt like a volcano in her throat. As she yelled, saliva would foam to fill her mouth and have to be dodged like cascading lava. The turmeric-colored jaundice of her eyes would be eclipsed by molten crimson as they no longer dared to close, not even for a blink.

  Nothing could interrupt her furor but Kṛṣṇa or the man she still loved who no longer lived, both of whom she called upon in desperation when spouting off about whatever had prompted this episode proved insufficient. Father Rupchand never showed up, but sometimes her shouts of “Kṛṣṇa” were enough to calm her. When they weren’t, I was afraid Mother Bhūmi would wind up attacking me, even though she never did. Sometimes, she would strike out at Mata, though. Sometimes, I didn’t know if she would ever stop striking out. Sometimes, it seemed as if she didn’t. There are nights I still see my grandmother’s face in my nightmares.

  For the most part, Mata held her own during these natural disasters. Daddy helped out as best any relief worker could, when even Kanye West could once see clearly how the state withholds relief from Black people. Mata’s calm in the storm of her mother fraying apart was too depressing to envy but was a quality I revered nonetheless.

  I understood that our mother didn’t want to call the police on hers, and though still quite young, I understood why.

  I had seen cops slamming Mother Bhūmi’s frail body to the ground with my own eyes, and I’d seen Mata watching it happen. I’d seen how something inside Mata broke each time she watched her mother break down, and how each time Mother Bhūmi had a breakdown, Mata tried something a little different, chanted “Hare Kṛṣṇa” a little louder, until she could hardly speak another name of her god.

  Mata’s near-tireless desire for an alternative to police in these impossible moments was fueled by a monumental love for her mother. A love that acknowledged both that Mother Bhūmi could harm and be harmed, and that she shouldn’t be limited to being understood as exclusively committing or at the mercy of abuse. A complicated love. A Black love. The same love I know now that, despite our strained history, Mata has for me. The same love I have been using this whole book to try and find my way back to knowing how to give.

  Mata understood that her mother didn’t deserve to be punished for the harm her mental illness exacerbated, and yet punishment was all that the carceral state offered. Still, Mata prayed and prayed for something else, for a world outside of this one, and never stopped believing in a god who could make that a reality.

  I am my mother’s child, for better and for worse. Maybe it was inevitable that I would wind up on what also feels like an endless spiritual quest for the means to manage the harms done by the people I love without furthering those harms. Maybe it was inevitable that I would also end up failing so often.

  I am more convinced than ever that the work to abolish prisons and police and to repair the fracture caused by carceral dissonance is that chant—the one birthday gift Mata has always asked for. The one thing that would allow my mother, like Korryn Gaines, to live on forever, by destroying the most fundamental tool with which this world has attempted to steal her children, her legacy, her lifeblood away.

  Every time I visited the zoo as a child, I thought about how cruel it seemed that anyone would confine animals to cages and call it just, say it was for their own good, when I could see so clearly these animals were yearning for freedom. I always preferred the roaming cows of Gita Nagari and could never even fathom keeping my dog in a kennel for more than a brief moment.

  And so the idea of humans in cages never sat well with me, even when I’d learned all the justifications. When Michelle Alexander outlined in The New Jim Crow how today’s prisons are an extension of segregationist policies in this country, which themselves were an extension of chattel slavery, I knew—like Korryn wanted Kodi to know—that the enforcers of the carceral state’s justice “are not for us. They want to kill us.” I knew that they never were, and always have. I knew that there was something wrong with how the state could both murder Amadou Diallo, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, and Rekia Boyd and then present itself as the arbiter of justice in their murder cases. There was something unjustifiable in how the state could use carceral violence to confine and kill Black people, whom I could feel so clearly yearning for freedom, and call it just, say it was for our own good.

  I knew all this, just like I knew why Mata didn’t call the police on Mother Bhūmi—even as a boy. But when I grew up, I also learned how to disregard my childhood understandings, conditioned by misafropedia to believe that Black children don’t really know anything. Instead of embracing what I understood early on about the fundamental wrongness of prisons, I learned to ask myself the kinds of questions about prison abolition that I heard other rational adults asking around me: “Without prisons, where do all the rapists and murderers go? What do we replace prisons with?”

  My cousin Eric has been in prison for most of my life. When I was in middle school, he got out after his first extended stint for robbery, which he’d started when he was a teenager. I was so excited to finally see him free again. But maybe he never really was.

  I don’t mean that the state threw him right back into the cage, although like many of those who are raked through the carceral system, he didn’t escape that fate either. He did return to prison when he was convicted of raping and murdering fifty-seven-year-old Susan Blockson just a few years later and sentenced to life—after the prosecutor argued that he was “the worst offender and this is the worst offense.” What I mean is that at trial Eric’s lawyers explained in explicit detail how Auntie Cheryl’s drug abuse had deprived my cousin of his childhood—how her child had often become the drug she abused the worst—and how his first prison sentence, and the frequent and accepted violence of all types he endured throughout it, only reinforced that loss. I mean that his mother was described as foaming at the mouth, her eyes turning crimson red while she struck him with whatever she could get her hands on, all for being a child.

  “I was subjected to countless forms of abuse,” Eric tells me. “No one cared if I lived or died. There was brainwashing, turning siblings against siblings. I was very much alone, (literally) locked in a pitch-black dungeon, starving. I was just a kid . . . I was just a kid.”

  Auntie Cheryl was her mother’s child, for better and for worse, and this legacy Er
ic inherited of Black childhoods stolen away meant that he had known a type of prison his entire life. Even before his first conviction. A prison created, as all prisons are, based on the false idea that carceral punishment befalls only those who are deserving. This is the same idea that led a small group of my cousins to gossip in front of me when I was just a child—a queer child—about their unconfirmed assumptions that Eric had switched over to “that life,” imagining for him experiences with sexual violence the first time he was incarcerated, without any proof other than knowing prison to be a breeding ground for sexual violence. The same idea led them to show more worry, at least it seemed to me as a repressed queer child, that “that life” could be gay than that it could have involved rape.

  I had known certain aspects of this type of prison, too, a prison that is built on allowing, even endorsing, certain abuses in the name of punishing a person for transgressing the rules of an anti-Black, anti-queer, misafropedic society. And when some abuses are endorsed, as they always are in a carceral system that uses abuse to punish people, the vulnerable are always collateral, because they, by definition, are the most likely to have their abuse justified.

  At her worst Mother Bhūmi was as terrifying as anything I’d ever seen, but this was also when she most needed healing. It’s this need for healing that is always lost when we demand punishment for all crimes. A punitive world flattens us. It makes us think of each other within the suffocating limits of either good or bad, deserving of punishment or innocent, instead of seeing each other as the complex beings we are. But Mother Bhūmi, like all of us, contained multitudes and histories and context. None of us are mindless monsters, no matter if our mouths foam up when we attack those who do not deserve it. None of us are just murderers or rapists, even if we have committed murder or rape. Even if we must be taken out of a space to ensure the safety of others.

  I do not mean to imply that Susan Blockson’s family had no right to rage or to wish violence on her murderer (although Eric insists on his innocence to this day, and he certainly did not have the resources to mount a convincing defense). And I don’t mean to ask that we have more empathy for those who enact abuse, nor to deny that there should be consequences when a person harms someone else. I would never ask Blockson’s family to forgive her killer or to put themselves in his shoes. I am jaded about “merciful” gods forever compelling Black people to forgive and empathize with our abusers while the abuse continues without accountability. It was Mata, in all her valiant work toward an alternative to punishment, who showed me the ultimate failure of this kind of mercy. It was she who sometimes chose only to keep chanting in response to Mother Bhūmi physically attacking her in front of her children, only to keep chanting in response to my grandmother spending months terrorizing Visnu and Kiss when they were just babies, calling them sinful demons who were damned to hell. To me, this type of forgiveness is little better than punishment. Both refuse the question of redress: this forgiveness does so out of a too-flattened sense of kindness, and punishment does it out of resentment. Mata may not have always fully realized what I’ve come to understand in my attempt to live my name, which is that the best parts of her chanting—the abolitionist parts—were always more than the words and the beads.

  Abolition posits that redress is possible when we are allowed to hold resentment and kindness simultaneously, without these sentiments being forced into binary opposition. It posits that people who do bad things can do better, in this life or the next, if acknowledged as being part of a community to which they are accountable, a community that cares for and supports them without letting them off the hook. And I know this to be true, because I talk with my big cuz all the time, and he shares inspiring stories and beautiful dreams and compassionate words and loving thoughts. Ours would be a better world if he could share those things with more people, and he can’t share them within the confines of prison any more than he could if he stayed committed to the carceral logics that lead people to rape and murder. The same carceral logics that make prisons petri dishes for the sexual violence and abuse and unnatural deaths that the most vulnerable communities will endure both within and outside of prisons for as long as prisons exist.

  It may not be possible to compose stories and dreams and words powerful enough to make up for the lack of beauty and compassion and love a person feels when their family member is murdered and that they might feel when crossing paths with the person who presumably committed that act. To say that prison is no place for harm-doers is not to say that living in proximity with those they’ve harmed is the place for them either.

  There is no single, simple answer to what a healing response might look like in the absence of prisons. But there are simple questions we can ask ourselves and our communities to find the answer for us in a given moment: Am I taking this action against a perpetrator of harm to perpetrate more harm against them? Or will it truly help me (and/or others) not just to feel better momentarily but to carry less harm and hurt into the world? And what can I learn from my ancestors and other Indigenous people about healing without reinforcing carceral systems?

  Sometimes, many times, our response to harms might contain conflicting motivations because they were never meant to fall neatly within a binary either. Ethicist Jill Stauffer confronts this possibility in Ethical Loneliness, analyzing Jean Améry’s writings on his desire for violent retribution in response to the horrors he experienced during the Holocaust. Stauffer argues that Améry is an example of someone who wanted payback “not (or not only) out of a will to harm others but in order to regain a moral equivalence stolen from him by abuse.”44 Healing cannot come out of punishment because punishment’s only purpose is to create more harm. But healing can sometimes entail limited harm, in order to lessen harm ultimately. And when this is the case, the desire to commit an act that entails some harm can’t be dismissed as purely punitive. But we can truly know whether our desire for harm can be measured as part of a healing practice only when we are in tune with our whole selves and with our communities. The carceral state can never answer these questions for us.

  Auntie Cheryl is Mother Bhūmi’s daughter, and Eric and I are both the sons of Mother Bhūmi’s daughters. The history and context of what we have done in our lives certainly doesn’t excuse any abuse we’ve enacted. Acknowledging the fullness of my experiences not only forces me to rethink how I respond to others’ harmful actions but also demands I acknowledge my own harmful actions, even when I have deluded myself into thinking I am one of the “good ones.”

  Fully acknowledging my reality would mean rejecting all that I have learned about punishing myself and others in my vain attempt to find comfort in this world, at the expense of their freedom and mine. At the expense of their childhood and mine.

  My friend and fellow writer Darnell L. Moore once told me that there is no story worth telling that isn’t self-reflective, and that is the beating heart of abolition. This is why abolition requires repairing the fracture caused by the carceral dissonance within ourselves.

  Yes, prisons are cruel structures, but abolition forces us to also reckon with cruelty as a feature of a world that is divided into binaries of good and evil. These binaries keep that world turning by signifying who gets punished for crimes and when.

  As I stopped trusting what I’d known about the cruelty of incarceration in childhood, I could hear inarguable statements like “there are people locked in prisons who don’t belong there” and still support the prison system. I could even acknowledge that prison doesn’t lead to rehabilitation for the murderers or rapists that I had convinced myself do belong there. I could understand that the institution of prison evolved from slavery, transforming into convict leasing and chain gangs to the monstrosity it is today. I could read all the articles and books about how prisons, by design, function as a way to continue the legacy of capture for Black people. But because I had adopted misafropedic thinking and dismissed a prison-free world as the naive idealism of a Black child, I could still defend the necessity
of prisons.

  Carceral dissonance means being okay with someone else paying the price of the undeniable horrors that come with prison culture. I claimed to be concerned about murder and rape, but murder and rape happen in prison to the most marginalized—to queer folk, to women, to disabled people, to transgender folk, and of course to Black people—at even greater degrees than they do on the outside. To truly care about murder and rape, I would also have to truly care about the conditions for murder and rape that are inherent to the way prisons have been designed.

  The self-reflective question isn’t where the murderers and rapists go in a world without prisons. It’s how we fill the lack that drives people to take what isn’t theirs in a world that responds to lack with prisons. If we continue to uphold the practices of this world, some of these people may go to prison, but they won’t stop murdering and raping while there, or once released. Many of them go easily instead into the highest offices, which is why both Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have been credibly accused of rape with little effect on their public support. Murderers and rapists also go easily into the police force and prison administrations.45 And as long as we are okay with someone else paying these prices, rapists and murderers go easily into the psyches of all of us who grow up in a world built by murder and rape. They convince us that any other world is impossible to create, just so that they will always exist.

  In 2011, Cherán, a small Central Mexican town, had finally had enough. Faced with increased aggression by exploitative loggers who conspired with cartels and state politicians to exploit and destroy forests and water sources, a women-led group of the area’s Indigenous Purépecha community began an uprising against what they began calling “the narco government.” This uprising eventually returned the town to a form of self-governance they claimed was based on the town’s practices before political parties and institutions infiltrated the community decades earlier. Along with the loggers, state politicians and state police were also banned from the town.