Notes From the Field

by Anna Deavere Smith

  * * *

  (To the musician.) If I may interrupt you for a moment. Luckily, I’m not fifteen, but if I were, how in the world would I find any respect for human life, or any sense of history? And history is a concept that exists in almost nobody’s mind. (To the musician.) Go on, go on. According to the West, I have no history. I’ve had to wrest my identity out of the jaws of the West. What I’m trying to say is that if I were young, I would find myself with no models. And that’s a very crucial situation. Because what we’ve done, the world we created. If I were fifteen, I would feel hopeless, too. So you see what we gotta try to, what we gotta try to face…

  I read a little book called The Way It Spozed to Be. And it was poetry and things written by little black children, Mexican, Puerto Rican children. Land of the free, home of the brave. And the teacher had made a compilation of the poems these kids wrote. And he respected them. And he dealt with them as if they were—as a fact, all children are. As a fact, all human beings are…some kind of a miracle! And so something wonderful happened.

  And so for me, that very tiny book, it’s only thirty pages long, one boy wrote a poem. Sixteen years old, he was in prison. It ended, four lines I never will forget: “Walk on water / Walk on a leaf / Hardest of all / Is walk in grief.”

  So what I’m trying to get at, I hope, is that there is a tremendous national global moral waste. And the question is: How can it be arrested?

  That’s an enormous question. Look. You and I, we’ve become whatever we become. The curtain will come down eventually. But what should we do about the children? We are responsible, in so far as we’re responsible for anything at all, we are responsible for the future of this world.

  [Slide]

  SHERRILYN IFILL

  PRESIDENT AND DIRECTOR-COUNSEL

  NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE AND EDUCATIONAL FUND

  CONTINUATION OF AN ONSTAGE CONVERSATION BETWEEN MS. IFILL AND MS. SMITH

  BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, JUNE 3, 2015

  “So This Is It”

  “So This Is It”

  (As in the prologue. Wearing a bright-colored jacket, onstage, comfortable living-room-type chair. Handheld microphone. Ms. Ifill is a public figure whose speech pattern and behavior is available to observe. Perhaps some indication that time has passed, less water in the pitcher, etc.)

  * * *

  At one point, we had investments in our public school system. The end of serious investment in our public school system happened with the work of my predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, and desegregation. With Brown v. Board of Education. When you had massive resistance in the South. When the Prince Edward County school board decided to close the schools in Virginia for five years rather than—rather than integrate. Close the schools for five years. We—we broke our contract with education and we’ve never been able to get back to where we were. And so we’ve taken the mentality around those investments and we’ve placed them elsewhere.

  So now, we’re in a moment where people recognize? Across the board? That mass incarceration has gotten completely out of whack. And so this is a moment of reinvestment. And the question is: Where are we going to reinvest? And it’s not just about dollars. But we have a mo— W-we’re gonna do something with it. It’s not gonna just go into the ether. It’s gotta get invested somewhere.

  And so while, yes, we want body-worn cameras, and we want things around policing, we also want a massive kind of investment of the kind that was the interstate highway system, you know? To focus on…how do we give people the opportunity to be people with a future. And education is a central piece of that. And so getting this understanding, what this moment means.

  (Pause.)

  There’s a lot of heaviness and a lot of pain in—even in places that haven’t had, you know, these incidents happen or had unrest happen in a very public way…There’s a lot of heaviness. In this country, in this moment. There’s a lot of pain.

  We are—when I was a kid, I used to—my father was a—was a huge history buff and he was a race man, and so we watched, you know, every documentary that was on about the civil rights movement, and I remember feeling like I had missed it. “Darn it! It looked great, it looked fantastic, and I missed it!”

  And so what I’d say to young people now is like: “So this is it!” You know, like, twenty years from now somebody will be saying, “I missed it!” Y’know?

  And it’s not just one, it’s many. And this is the one. And as difficult as it is, and as heavy as it feels, there is a privilege in it. Because in this moment, this is the space where change can happen. It only can happen in a country as entrenched, particularly around issues of race, the moments when we move are the moments when we have to confront ourselves.

  [Slide]

  BRYAN STEVENSON

  EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EQUAL JUSTICE INITIATIVE

  FOUNDER, NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE

  MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA

  “Injury”

  “Injury”

  (A world-class orator whose speaking indicates a knowledge of classical rhetoric. Seated in a room at the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. A very simple gathering room with chairs and a podium. At the back of the room is a long wall, against which are many, many jars of soil, from sites where African Americans were lynched in the US. Stevenson is muscular—toned, buff, which his tight-fitting clothing reveals. Simple shirt and pants, colorful string bracelet. Many videos of his public speaking and interviews are available. He walks along the wall where the jars are and then sits in a folding chair. Soft-spoken, composed.)

  * * *

  All of these jars represent communities where people were lynched. This is just the state of Alabama. Downstairs we have jars from all over the country. And some of these were what we call “public spectacle lynchings,” where thousands of people came downtown and watched, uh, black men, women, and children being burned alive.

  What we do is we collect all the available information about the lynching, um, and sometimes it’s very precise: It’s on the courthouse lawn, as Sherrilyn has in her book. Or it’s in the public square. It’s at this park, and—and you can, um, you can go to that park. Those places are still recognizable. Some of these lynchings are as recent as, you know, 1949, 1950. Um, other times, it’s not precise. It’s like, “They took him from the jail, and they took him down the road, and somewhere between mile marker eleven and mile marker twelve, he was hanged.” Or “He was killed.”

  This is American history. I mean, I don’t think what we’re doing is African American history. When I talk about it, I like starting with what happened to Native people. Because I think we are a post-genocide society. I think what happened to Native people on this continent was genocide. We killed them by the millions; we slaughtered them. But we didn’t call it genocide because we said, “Those Native people are different.” And that’s when this narrative of racial difference really began to take shape. And because we could say that Native people are savages, and we could create a rhetoric about their diminished humanity, we didn’t feel bad, uh, to abuse them, to—to kill them, to force them off their lands. And that experience is what I think made American slavery particularly vicious. I think the great evil of American slavery wasn’t involuntary servitude. It was not forced labor. It was this ideology of white supremacy, this idea that black people are not fully human. And that ideology was something that happened to white people just like it happened to black people. White people actually began to think that they are better than black people. And that has done something really corruptive. Those are white people in that picture standing around that—that—that, um, that platform [of a lynching]. White people were involved in each and every one of those incidents. It was white people. And there is a way in which you can see the tragedy of this history.

  Uh, I’ve been around a lot of people who are in really desperate situati
ons. I—I did have a case, um, not that long ago where we tried to get involved, we tried to stop an execution, and the man was scheduled to be executed in thirty days. And, um, I quickly learned that he suffered from intellectual disability. Our courts have banned the execution of people with intellectual disability. And so we went to the trial court and said, “You can’t execute him. He’s intellectually disabled.” And the trial court said, “No, too late. Too late. You should have raised that years ago.” And I went to the state court, and they said, “Too late.” The appeals court said, “Too late.” The federal court said, “Too late.” Every court I went to said, “Too late.” And we went to the US Supreme Court, and finally the United States Supreme Court accepted our motion, they reviewed it, and then about an hour before the scheduled execution, the clerk called me and said, “Yeah, the Supreme Court’s going to deny your motion. You’re too late.” And I got on the phone with this man—and it is the hardest thing I have to do in my work—and I said, “I’m so sorry, but I can’t stop this execution.” And the man did the thing I fear the most in this work: he started to cry. And, um, within a few minutes he started to sob. And I mean I—it’s literally fifty minutes before the execution, I’m holding the phone, and the man is just sobbing. And then he said, uh, “Please don’t hang up. There’s something important I have to say to you.” And he tried to say something to me, but in addition to being intellectually disabled, he had another challenge: When he got nervous, when he got overwhelmed, he would begin to stutter. And he began trying to say something, but he couldn’t get his words out. And I think that was the thing that I found just overwhelming, because he was trying so hard to get his words out, and he couldn’t. And he kept trying, he kept trying, he kept—you know. And that’s when tears were just running down my face. I was holding the phone.

  And then when he said to me: “Mr. Stevenson, I want to thank you for representing me. I want to thank you for fighting for me.” And then the last thing he said to me was, “Mr. Stevenson, I love you for trying to save my life.” I—there was something about that. He hung up the phone. They pulled him away. They strapped him to a gurney. They executed him. I don’t know, “I can’t do this anymore. I just can’t.” There was just—I don’t know—there was something about it that just shattered me.

  And I was thinking about how broken he was, and I just couldn’t understand: Why do we want to kill broken people? I—that’s one of the things I don’t understand. What is it about us that when we see brokenness, we get angry? We want to hurt it. We want to crush it. We want to kill it. And then I realized: All of my clients are broken people. I represent the broken. Everybody I represent has been broken by poverty or disability or addiction or dependency or racism. And then I realized that the system I work in is a broken system. People with power are unwilling to get close to people who are suffering. They’re locked into these narratives of fear and anger. They’ve lost their hope. They won’t do uncomfortable things or inconvenient things. And in that moment, I said, “I don’t want to do this anymore.” And I was sitting there awhile just thinking and something said, “You better think about why you do what you do if you’re not gonna do it anymore.” And it was in that moment that I all of the sudden realized why I do what I do. And it surprised me. And what I realized is that I don’t do what I do because I’ve been trained as a lawyer. I don’t do what I do because it’s about human rights. I don’t do what I do because if I don’t do it, no one will. What I realized is that I do what I do because I’m broken, too. And that’s the—the discovery?

  I—I—I don’t think brokenness is something that we necessarily wear? It’s—it’s much more, um—it’s about a consciousness. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I actually think it’s in brokenness that we understand our need for grace, our need for mercy. It’s actually brokenness that helps us appreciate justice. It’s in brokenness that we—we begin to crave redemption. That we understand the power of recovery. It’s the broken among us that actually can teach us what it means to be human. Because if you don’t understand the ways in which you can be broken by poverty or neglect or abuse or violence or suffering or bigotry, then you don’t recognize the urgency in overcoming poverty and abuse and neglect and—and bigotry.

  But I even feel broken by this history. (Responding to a remark.) Oh, yeah. When I was a little boy, they—you know—polio shots, you—they wanna give everybody a polio shot. My county, there were no, uh, doctors, so they made everybody go to a building which was kinda like a—it wasn’t a health center, it was like a big building. And everybody had to get their polio shot. I was like five. Black people had to get in the back—go through the back door. So we line up out back. And it was a cold day. They gave all the needle shots to the white kids before they gave any shot to the black kids. By the time they got to the black kids—they had little sugar cubes they were giving the [white] kids—they ran out of sugar cubes. The nurses were tired. And they just had lost their capacity to be kind to these little children. And so they were grabbing these black kids and giving them these needles. And my sister was in front of me, and when they—she was next, she was so terrified, she looked to my mother, and she said, “Please, Mom. Please, please don’t let them do this.” And they grabbed my sister, and they pulled her aside, and took the needle, and they jabbed it into her arm.

  And then they came for me. And I remember looking at my mom, and I was the same way. And they pulled me aside, and they were about to jab me. And then all of a sudden I heard all of this glass breaking. And my sweet, loving mother had gone over to a wall, picked up a table of beakers and glasses and was slamming them against the wall. And she was screaming: “This is not right. This is not right. Y’all should not have kept us out there all day. This is not right.” And the doctor came running in and said, “Call the police.” And the two black ministers came running over and said, “Please, doctor. Please, sir. Please don’t call the police. We’re sorry. We’re gonna get her out of here.” One of the ministers fell to his knees. Was like just begging: “Please, please. Please give the other kids their shot.” I haven’t thought about this in a while. Fell to his knees. And he persuaded them not to call the police, uh, to give the other black kids their shots.

  And so I got my polio shot. They didn’t arrest my mom, which I was happy about. But you can’t have a memory like that without it creating a kind of injury. A kind of consciousness of wrongfulness. A consciousness of hurt. That’s what I mean when I say I’m broken, right? I have that in my head. And what it means is that there has to be recovery. I can’t just absorb it. I gotta—gotta respond to it in some way.

  (Responding to a remark.)

  Yeah, it is the weight. And it shadows. And it burdens. And it—and it, um, and—and it creates a kind of, uh uh, anxiety that requires a response. And that’s the thing about it. I just think a lot of us were taught that you just have to find a way to—to—to silently live with your brokenness, with this injury, with that memory. And I don’t think that’s the way forward. I’m looking for ways to—to not be silent.

  A burst of noise, sirens, police, chaos, the actual scene after parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, South Carolina, were murdered by Dylann Roof while at a prayer meeting on June 17, 2015. Actual news of events immediately following massacre. A cacophony of various newscasters and speakers, perhaps President Obama. For example: “The shooter walked into the Emanuel AME Church and opened fire. We do know there are several victims, but it’s unclear at this time how many and if there are any fatalities.” “Dylann Roof would rant about the controversial killings of African Americans Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray.” “Critics say that the banner should be put away for good after the racist murders at Emanuel AME Church.” The video shows protests to take down the Confederate flag from the capitol building. A crowd is chanting, “Take it down! Take it down!”

  [Slide]

  BREE NEWSOME

 
ARTIST AND ACTIVIST

  CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA

  “Not a Whim Thing to Do”

  “Not a Whim Thing to Do”

  (Young African American woman, late twenties. Charismatic. Simply dressed. Perfect posture. Speaks in paragraphs rather than sentences, and quickly. Has studied how to stay on message. Lots of footage of her on talk shows, etc.)

  * * *

  Because the first rule that was established was that a full human being was a landowning white male! Here! That’s what made you a full human being, that’s what made you worthy of having a vote. And everybody else is some lesser form of human, which is why it’s okay to whip someone because they haven’t picked enough cotton for you, which is why it’s okay to pretty much do whatever you wanna do! Because other people are not…human beings. But what I saw—so—what I saw, I think beginning with Ferguson, but especially with the massacre at Mother Emanuel was…this recognition that like this level of violence can still be present when we stand up and try to fight for equality. You know what I mean? The sixties felt so much closer, I think.

  Even—even before the massacre happened at Mother Emanuel, I had actually had a conversation like several months before with one of the folks in Tribe, Yin, who lived in South Carolina, actually. He lived in Rock Hill. And he had remarked that like his dream action was to take the Confederate flag down in South Carolina. He was like, “Oh, man, that’s something that I’ve always wanted to do.” And I agreed with him on that. You know, and I had already been arrested before, and I really was not planning to be like a chronic-arrestee-type protester, but I told him even then, I was like, “Yeah, that’s something I would go back to jail for, like, if we could take the Confederate flag down. That’s something that I would, you know, risk going back to jail for.” (Silent laugh.)