Via: Rehab International

He never wants to talk about it…

So I don’t bring it up.

We usually talk about sports when I see him.

We don’t like the same teams.

Yesterday afternoon, I asked him if he would join a conversation that I am co-organizing about youth confinement next week.

“No thanks,” was his response.

I didn’t follow up.

“Don’t you want to know why?” he asks.

“If you want to share,” I say.

“I don’t.”

That part of the conversation is over. We talk about some other things. Then he leaves.

I get home late. I check my e-mail. There is one from him. I open it. It reads:

“Maybe I’ll talk about it one day.”

That’s it. Nothing else.

Locking children up in cages is inhumane and immoral. The fact that our country does so to so many children, most of whom are black and brown, without a national outcry says something terrible about us. It suggests that the Roman Colosseum mentality continues to animate us. We have a generation of traumatized people who are unable to speak about these experiences and so perversely they remain hidden in plain sight. It makes me want to throw up. Sometimes I do.

Next Wednesday evening (September 26), some young people who have found a way to survive the ordeal of spending time behind bars have generously agreed to share their stories. You are welcome to join us to listen and to hear. You are welcome to stand in solidarity with these young people. Information about the event can be found here.

In the meantime, I will continue to pray that the young man who I care so much about finds a way to talk about “it” one day…

Poem about Police Violence
by June Jordan

Tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently?
sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
comes back to my mouth and I am quiet
like Olympian pools from the running
mountainous snows under the sun

sometimes thinking about the 12th House of the Cosmos
or the way your ear ensnares the tip
of my tongue or signs that I have never seen
like DANGER WOMEN WORKING

I lose consciousness of ugly bestial rapid
and repetitive affront as when they tell me
18 cops in order to subdue one man
18 strangled him to death in the ensuing scuffle
(don’t you idolize the diction of the powerful: subdue
and scuffle my oh my) and that the murder
that the killing of Arthur Miller on a Brooklyn
street was just a “justifiable accident” again
(Again)

People been having accidents all over the globe
so long like that I reckon that the only
suitable insurance is a gun
I’m saying war is not to understand or rerun
war is to be fought and won

sometimes the feeling like amaze me baby
blots it out/the bestial but
not too often tell me something
what you think would happen if
everytime they kill a black boy
then we kill a cop
everytime they kill a black man
then we kill a cop

you think the accident rate would lower subsequently

Next Saturday, I will be attending the wedding of a former student. I taught him in a college class in 1997. He was, I think, about 28 years old at the time. He was older than me and had already lived several lifetimes. He had spent 6 years locked up between the ages of 17 to 23. I was teaching an urban sociology class and our interactions were challenging to say that least. He thought that I was hopelessly naive and I thought that he was needlessly confrontational.

For several years, I heard nothing from him. This is not unusual; I don’t stay in touch with the vast majority of my former students. In 2005, eight years after we had met, I received a letter from him. He was incarcerated again. We began a correspondence that lasted beyond his release from prison in 2008. Through our letters, I learned that he had taken an instant dislike to me because he believed that I saw through him; that I considered him a fraud or perhaps even a con man. The truth, he wrote, was that he was in fact a con. He was still actively part of the gang that had led him to become a prisoner at age 17. The gang was in fact helping to cover his tuition costs when he was attending college.

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A few years ago, I came across a copy of the “City Magazine” which was owned by famed director Francis Ford Coppola in the 1970s. He apparently lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on this venture. Anyway, the issue that I found in a thrift store was from October 1975 and the cover had the following headline: “The Prison Love Letters of Angela Davis to George Jackson.” The magazine came into possession of these letters and printed them in their entirety. I bought the publication for $5 and put it in storage. Today, I thought that I would write about this historical moment on the blog.

On July 8th, 1971, Angela Davis and George Jackson met in a holding cell beside a courtroom in the Marin Civic Center in the company of two attorneys and an outside observer. It was the first time that they would be in the same room together for an extended period of time. About a year earlier, Davis had seen Jackson when she attended his pre-trial hearing. She had been organizing to free the Soledad Brothers.

After their July 1971 meeting, Angela Davis began to write a series of letters to Jackson. Paul Avery (1975) explains:

“She typed out her innermost thoughts single space onto, in all, 18 pages of legal size paper. Page by page, over a period of a month, the diary-like document was smuggled out of the Marin jail and into nearby San Quentin Prison’s Adjustment Center where Jackson, Clutchette and Drumgo were being held awaiting their own trial (p.16).”

After Jackson was killed in August 1971, Angela Davis’s letters to him were discovered in his cell. During her trial, the prosecution (which had a very weak case) seized upon the discovered letters to suggest that Davis’s motive for helping Jonathan Jackson (George’s younger brother) with his lethal hostage taking incident was her love for George Jackson.

Again Avery (1975) provides some background:

“When the prosecution announced its intent to introduce the “love letters” as evidence to be read to the jury, the defense cried foul. They argued that Ms. Davis’ intimate feelings were protected by the right of privacy and immaterial to the case at hand. The State responded that her own words proved the People’s case (p.16).”

A few days after hearing excerpts from her writings to Jackson, a jury acquitted Davis on all counts. Avery writes: “In the end, all the State could prove was that Angela Davis loved George Jackson.”

The letters are incredibly moving and poignant. It’s a shame that they are not readily available for everyone to read. Below is an example of something that Davis wrote dated 7/22 (the words are offered as they appear in the magazine):

This has been a week I didn’t think I would be able to survive. Not for many month have I been so depressed. Since I received word that you had, if only tentavely, placed me in the adversary camp, so many other things around me have crumbled, but I don’t think this is an appropriate time to bother you with all the details of my troubles. You’re the only one who can bring me out of states like this, but there’s this huge thing between us. Even on this level of communication, I feel extremely uncomfortable. I don’t love you less — that’s something beyond my control. But I just can’t go on like this. Please be kind to me and let me know immediately what this whole thing is all about.

I guess I really was angry when I wrote this letter of the 16th. The anger has more or less subsided, although I essentially feel the same things I expressed in that anger; the anger has given way to this unabated depression. If someone sees you tomorrow, please send back some word. I love you, but do you feel the same as before?

Apologies in advance for these inchoate thoughts… I am working on a workshop and also on a paper about reconceptualizing relationship violence in the lives of young women of color. I am playing around with ideas and using the blog as a way to work through what I want to say. These ideas are just coming into focus for me. If you have anything to contribute, I would as always welcome your thoughts..

In November 2003, I ran a seven week girls’ group at a Chicago alternative middle school that I will call Dewey. There were nine young women in my group. They were between 12 to 16 years old, all of them were girls of color and each was at Dewey (not the actual name of the school) because she had been kicked out of her neighborhood school. In a school of over 100 students, only about ten were young women. The overwhelming majority of these girls had been kicked out of their home school for fighting. In an age of zero tolerance school discipline policies, administrators are quick to expel young people of color who “use violence” on school premises.

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I am still working toward writing something about Johnny Cash. In the meantime, here’s Johnny’s cover of Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat.” The song is a commentary on the death penalty.

This week has me thinking about Kim Jones (aka Lil Kim) again. A young woman I am working with e-mailed a photograph of her and I was left speechless. Kim is unrecognizable to me. I have always been fascinated by her and have written about her a couple of times on this blog here and here.

The legend of Lil’ Kim begins with her “discovery” by Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G) on the streets of Bed-Sty in Brooklyn. She released her debut album titled “Hardcore” in 1996. In interviews, she has said: “Lil’ Kim is what I use to get money, a character I use to sell my records.” Yet one wonders if this is truly the case. What is the distance between the character of Lil’ Kim and Kimberly Jones? One thing is certain: she is a complex person, full of contradictions. It is perhaps this, above all, that makes her so interesting & relevant to me.

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