The first time a man said “I love you” to me was Mr. Walton, and I remember how uncomfortable that felt. I froze and I don’t think I responded. In most worlds, but especially mine, men just don’t say such words toward other men. The sentiment is so prevalent in how I feel, but the words are so hard to muster. I’m trying to bridge the gap.
I was twenty-three years old and getting a hold on my purpose, but my personal life was experiencing a major shift. I began dating a young woman named Angelina who worked as a juvenile justice behavior counselor within the school system. We had first met when I came to the school for career day. She gave me her number, but I never called her. When I returned to the school six months later for work she came up to me all sly.
“Hey, you,” she said playfully. “Sorry, I didn’t call you back but I’ve been really busy.”
I was thrown off-balance. “Oh yeah, uh . . . sorry about that. Things have been crazy with—”
“Don’t bother lying. You’re terrible at it. Don’t ever become a lawyer.”
I smiled, because there was nothing I could say.
“I texted you,” she said, “but you never got me back.”
“What? I didn’t get a text.”
“Uh yeah—look.” She took out her phone and scrolled up to this long text she’d sent. I scanned it, saw the word “mature” maybe three or four times, and then I noticed it was to the wrong number. We laughed for a bit about some random person getting chewed out.
Her mix of boldness and lightness drew me in. Angelina had an easy smile and deep brown eyes. We began seeing each other casually. I was too young and it was too early to be any more than that. Then fate—maybe God—intervened.
About three months in, she broke it off. We were in a car outside her apartment when she said she “didn’t want to deal with me anymore.” When I pushed her on it, she broke down and cried into her hands. “I’m pregnant,” she said.
I was stunned. I wasn’t prepared for the revelation, nor was I mature enough to see anything except myself. We sat parked there for hours, me defending why she couldn’t keep the child, her arguing why she couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. We talked past each other for over an hour.
“Look, you gotta—”
“I can’t.”
“I’m just . . . Look, I’m not ready to be a father right now,” I said. “Not even close.”
“Listen to you. This isn’t about you! You’re not—”
“Exactly! The child would be—”
“You don’t care about anyone but yourself!” she yelled.
“What?! How can that be true? I—”
“Fuck you, Jim. You are not—”
“Look, I’m not financially where I need to be. I’m in no position to care for this child.”
She cried through most of the conversation, when she wasn’t screaming at me. I was overtaken by an all-encompassing fear. Fear that I would be powerless to protect this unborn child. Fear that I couldn’t prevent the hardships that plagued my own life. Fear that this child would never know the innocence afforded other children—the very definition of childhood, which I never got. Fear that no matter what I did, I wouldn’t be able to erase or shield or protect enough.
That fear made me cold and I regret it.
By the time Angelina got out of the car, I thought it was settled. She agreed she was going to terminate the pregnancy.
But she couldn’t go through with it.
Though I understood, I still brought resentment to every interaction with her. I was in my own head too much, concerned with how this affected me, how this child was going to throw me off course.
It’s strange but the two biggest and best decisions ever made in my life were made by other people. It was my attorneys who got me into Boys Town, and it was Angelina who decided to have my child.
My father wasn’t present for any of our births. He didn’t accompany my mother to the hospital, figuring that his presence there wouldn’t matter. I almost made the same mistake. Angelina thought I was naturally careless, but my thinking evolved from my upbringing. Right around her due date I traveled to Tennessee with the Children’s Defense Fund. Fortunately, the CDF’s youth director, Beth Powers, got me the earliest flight back to New York and I was able to watch my son be born. As any parent can tell you, it’s a magical, mysterious, and awe-inspiring few seconds. He wasn’t there and then—he was.
Watching Caleb enter the world washed away every doubt I had had about Angelina’s pregnancy, fears about what a child would do to my life, even thoughts about myself as an independent person. Everything was split into a before and after. Without him and with him. His life was mine to protect; I had to help push the world to be more accepting, more just. As I cradled him in my arms, this football of a person, chubby-thighed and cream-colored, I was also struck by a profound sadness. This pure boy, no bigger than my forearm, would be inheriting so many things that he didn’t know about and couldn’t understand.
I saw what he couldn’t see. The steep mountains. The thick walls. The closed doors. I knew he was going to have to deal head-on with the inequalities, oppression, and injustice that are part of being a black male in America. It echoed back long before him, before me, before my father and his father and into history. He was already chained down by nothing more than the circumstances of his birth and, by extension, my birth.
I knew that no matter how much love his mother and I gave him, we could not erase the collective history. When Edwin, my old friend who had become a cop, arrived at the hospital that day and held him, I found some solace. I began thinking about all the great human beings who would be there in his life, all of whom were an extension of me.
“Black people love their children with a kind of obsession,” Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote. “You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.”11 As I grew, I began to see my father’s behavior as a way of trying to show how much he feared for me, his version of love. Though I repudiate my father’s physicality, I carry those same fears for my son. For the world that might reject him because of his skin color, for police officers that will invariably see him as a threat, for teachers that might suspect he doesn’t want to learn. Once a child became the center of my world, I was washed in these thoughts day and night.
My father never said “I love you”; even to this day, he hasn’t said it. It’s partly cultural: I didn’t hear it from mothers or fathers growing up, and I don’t hear it much in Brooklyn. But I tell my son I love him all the time. It seems so natural that it just spills out of me. I’ll grab him and hug him and say it over and over again. And he’ll let me.
19
Thousands of Kalief Browders
You can be a fierce fighter and still be a tender person.
—REV. ALFONSO WYATT 12
The tragic story of Kalief Browder was like a missile exploding on the public consciousness. It struck the black community, the juvenile justice world, the offices of advocacy, and New York City at large. When Kalief’s death was reported in the press in 2014, news outlets called it a suicide, but all he really did was finish off what the system had done to him.
At the age of sixteen Kalief, an African American kid from the Bronx, was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack. He was never charged, and ending up spending an inexplicable three years in Rikers Island. Two-thirds of his time was spent in solitary confinement—twenty-three hours a day locked away from all human contact. He was physically beaten, psychologically tortured, and more than likely sexually abused. He was left to languish in a system that had forgotten about him or never even cared. The harrowing experience led Browder to try to commit suicide multiple times both in and out of prison. Unfortunately even after he was released, got his high school equivalency diploma, and was trying to put the experience behind him, the trauma caught up to him. He hanged himself at his parents’ home. He was twenty-two.
As it did to many, Browder’s story shook me to my core, leaving me trembling in a fit of anger and sadness. I couldn�
�t believe it, but of course, I could. Once again, I was left to question the moral compass of our country. Kalief was deprived of his basic rights as a human being, and granted less due process than a war criminal. Browder might have left Rikers, but the prison never left him; it haunted his nightmares and invaded his thoughts—and he couldn’t shut it out. His story made headlines, viewed as a cautionary tale for the way that the criminal justice system can brutalize young men. That wasn’t nearly enough. It should have done far more than that: it should’ve been a blaring alarm and wake-up call that yielded significant changes, starting with the idea that he was put in an adult prison at all.
New York State and North Carolina are the only two states that automatically try sixteen-year-olds as adults, even for nonviolent crimes. (Seven other states try seventeen-year-olds as adults.) As someone who narrowly avoided adult prison by a few months, I’m particularly struck by the cruelty and randomness of the law. When we’re dealing with people’s lives, we can’t ever be so blindly arbitrary. By the luck of the calendar, I ended up in Boys Town instead of Rikers. A stint in Rikers would have sent me deeper in, taken away my youth, my support system, and my hope—the things they took from Kalief Browder in those long three years.
Recognizing the need to change such a draconian and inhumane policy, I got involved with several organizations, such as the Children’s Defense Fund founded by Marian Wright Edelman and the Correctional Association of New York. These organizations were advocating to raise the age of criminal responsibility to over eighteen years old in New York State, a bill first proposed by Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol several years prior to my involvement in the effort to raise the age. Not only did Assemblyman Lentol propose Raise the Age, but he also advocated a progressive reform of the criminal justice system in all aspects. Under the auspices of the “Raise the Age” campaign, I spoke at press conferences, appeared on television, and met with policy makers and other interest groups to help get this passed into law. It’s an economic issue because an inability to pay for bail or proper representation is pure injustice. It’s a racial issue because of the bias inherent in arrests and sentencing. Drug offenses and other economic-related infractions make up the majority of nonviolent crimes, and blacks are incarcerated for drug crimes at a rate ten times that of whites, though research shows that whites use drugs at five times the rate of blacks.13
Society draws the line at eighteen for just about every conception of adulthood: voting, smoking, jury duty, and military service. Yet for the single most consequential thing—prison—that cutoff is sixteen in New York. It defies logic, common sense, and basic understanding.
Late on a Sunday night I received a call from Melanie Hartzog, then the executive director at the Children’s Defense Fund of New York. I had met her during the press conference with Mayor Bloomberg, and she had been appointed by Governor Cuomo to the task force for Raise the Age, a commission charged with researching its future viability and impact. After months of traveling across the country speaking to advocates, juveniles, experts, and prison officials, the commission reported its findings.
On a crisp and clear Martin Luther King holiday, I traveled to Albany with Melanie to attend the press conference with the commission and Governor Cuomo. The governor talked candidly about the various benefits of the proposed legislation: economic, social, safety, crime, and, of course, the human cost.
I sat in the front row and when the governor finally opened the floor up for questions from the press I unabashedly raised my hand. All eyes were fixated on me. I could feel the looks and hear the murmurs of reporters wondering, Who’s this guy? I have no compunctions about speaking my mind, no matter the context. The voices of our young people must be heard by those in power. The fact is I was once made silent and I can never know if that time will come again.
I rose from my seat. “Thank you, Governor, for taking on an issue so close to my heart.” The room was suddenly quiet and I felt the hot light hovering over me. I introduced myself and told an abridged version of my story, focusing on how I was saved by the sheer randomness of the calendar. I talked about working toward my master’s degree and my work with city kids who needed it the most.
Mr. Cuomo thanked me and reminded the room of why this policy was morally correct. “There you have it,” he said. “The young man just gave you a real-life example of what we have the power to do here. Literally transform lives.”
In the years that followed that initial press conference, I practically moved to Albany to put as much capital behind what I deemed to be one of New York State’s modern civil rights moments. Every time I was there, I attempted to bring the circumstances that I inherited as a child to life, using my life as evidence of the initiatives’ worth: Here’s how I grew up, where I came from, and here’s where I am now—a taxpaying citizen making a difference. What kind of society willingly gives up on its most vulnerable population?
Raise the Age was something that Governor Cuomo appeared to be behind for three years. It was built into the state budget for 2015, virtually guaranteeing its funding as an attempt to tie Raise the Age to the New York budget—a bold move that would force members of the legislatures who were on the fence to pick a side. Advocates and the Democratic Assembly vigorously championed and invested in it as a priority. The reality was something else.
One day I got a call from the governor’s office informing me that Raise the Age was taken off the budget. When I tried to inquire why, I was given no direct explanation. What I learned were the actual reasons and, of course, they were political: The Democratic Assembly, comprising mostly members representing the New York City area, is lead by Speaker Carl Heastie. Heastie supported Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol’s comprehensive piece of legislation, which was simultaneously introduced in the Senate by Valmanette Montgomery, to raise the age of criminal responsibility in New York State with the hope of providing resources to families and children seeking to lead productive lives and avoid the vicious cycle of incarceration. The political makeup of the state senate, where certain Democrats known as the IDC work in conjunction with Republicans to essentially form a majority, stymied this progressive vison for the state’s most vulnerable. As the negotiations developed, politics over shadowed what was morally right, and the inflammatory rhetoric of the opposition and a lack of political capital hindered the assembly’s ability to bargain. Other issues, such as a funding freeze for charter schools and the 421—a tax exemption program that would enable developers to build on vacant land if they included affordable housing—were now thrust into the quagmire that had become the cornerstone of Albany politics.
As the budget deadline approached, these hotly contested issues threatened and eventually derailed the legislature and Governor Cuomo’s plan for delivering an on-time budget; but none was as contentious as Raise the Age. Republicans cast this noble bill as a gang recruitment tool, utilizing the same tough-on-crime talking points politicians have used for years. Leaders from both sides proceeded over details, but negotiations stalled and Republicans in the Senate walked away. Several days past the budget deadline, Governor Cuomo, Speaker Heastie, and leaders from the opposition struck a deal that included Raise the Age. The comprehensive legislation first introduced by Mr. Lentol and Senator Montgomery wasn’t what emerged following all the compromises; however, Raise the Age remains a positive first step for us to build on as we continue this fight to treat children as children.
I know people still cling to the false narrative that prison is a deterrent for young people, that the experience of prison “scares them straight.” I’m on the front lines and the ground floor and I know this is nonsense, pure dangerous fiction. Prison doesn’t do anything but scare them into self-protection and traumatize them for life. Just like it did to Kalief Browder.
In 2014, Bobby Scott, a congressman from Virginia, and Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, both Democrats, cosponsored a bill called the Better Options for Kids Act, along with Congressman Hakeem Jeffries, who represents Crown Heights. Je
ffries had been an assemblyman I’d become friends with back when I was stocking shelves at Key Food.
The Better Options for Kids Act was a bill focused on diverting money out of the $80 billion our country spends yearly on incarceration to community-based programs, job training, and extracurricular activities for at-risk youth. I had spoken to all three men extensively on poverty, employment, juvenile and criminal justice, education, and the racial disparity that weaves through all of these issues. In June, when the bill was in Congress, they asked me to travel to Washington and testify before several congressional committees in support of it.
One of my professors at John Jay, Andrew Sidman, used to emphasize the cold reality that politics was more about harm reduction and people’s wallets than actually serving the less fortunate. Though this claim has some truth to it, I refuse to buy into this notion. Whether I don’t believe it or I don’t want to believe it, I’m not sure.
As I made my way through the gleaming hallways of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, I was overwhelmed with how efficiently it all ran: elevators dinging, a blur of freshly pressed suits, notepads passing hands, congressional aides running, the click-clack of their shoes on the marble floor, everyone’s BlackBerries dinging and ringing and making a beautiful wall of white noise.
I found the subcommittee’s assigned room, and entered: it felt like I had stepped inside an oil painting. The room displayed a rare aesthetic, both old and new at the same time. A heavy brown wooden door, thick green marble trim. Mocha leather chairs, fine-grained mahogany wood tables polished to a high shine. On the walls, brass lamps lit up like torches. Flowing green curtains covered impossibly stretched windows. The United States seal carved into the wall and centered where a clock would be; in the corner, a stoic American flag. A raised dais with thin microphones poking out. And on a table next to a wood podium, a placard: “Jim St. Germain.” I paused, trying to permanently absorb the moment: How am I even in this room?
A Stone of Hope Page 23