Essence_USA__February_2018

EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPT
I START SEEING THE TIMELINES UPDATE. THE KILLER IS
ACQUITTED OF THE FIRST CHARGE. AND THEN HE IS
ACQUITTED OF ALL OF THEM. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THEM.
I GO INTO SHOCK. I LOSE MY BREATH. MY HEART DROPS TO MY
STOMACH. I AM STUNNED AND FOR A MOMENT CANNOT MOVE.”
It is July 13, 2013, and I have stepped away from
monitoring events at the trial of the man who
killed Trayvon Martin, 17, a year and a half before.
I had learned about Trayvon one day while I was
at the Strategy Center in 2012 and going through Facebook.
I came across a small article from a local paper.
Was it Sanford’s? I read that a White man—that’s how the
killer was identified and self-identified until we raised the
issue of race—had killed a Black boy and was not going
tobecharged.Istartcursing.Iamoutraged.Inwhat
f___ing world does this make sense? I put a call out:
Have people heard about 17-year-old Trayvon Martin?
I have loved so many young men who look
just like this boy. I feel immediate grief, and
as my friends begin to respond, they, too,
are grief-stricken. We meet at my home.
We circle up. A multiracial group of roughly
15 people dedicated to ending White
supremacy and creating a world in which all
of our children can thrive. We process. We
talk about what we’ve seen and experienced
in our lives. We cry.
I grew up in a neighborhood that was
impoverished and in pain and bore all the
modern-day outcomes of communities left
without resources and yet supplied with
tools of violence. But when someone in my
neighborhood committed a crime, let alone
murder, all of us were held accountable, my
God. Metal detectors, searchlights and
constant police presence, full-scale sweeps of kids just
walking home from school—all justified by politicians
and others who said they represented our needs.
Where were these representatives when White guys
shot us down?
Were it not for the brave and determined young
people who formed the Dream Defenders joining forces
with the brave and heartbroken parents of Trayvon,
Sybrina Fulton and Tracey Martin, and had there not
been sit-ins, protests, occupations and Al Sharpton, this
boy’s name would be on no one’s tongue, save for his
family and the friends who loved him. Because of all this,
we know and we are afraid, but still, in that prison in
Susanville on July 13, 2013, in the state that would give
a desperate Black boy who physically harmed no one
ten years but a rapist six months, we hold on to hope.
Because what else?
***
Seven hours after it begins, the visit with Richie ends, and
we head back to the motel we are staying at in the small
town. Of the just under 20,000 residents, nearly half,
46 percent, live in one of the town’s two prisons.
Susanville, incorporated in 1860, was named for the
childofthemanwholaidclaimtofoundingitatatime
when founding something was a euphemism for Manifest
Destiny and homesteading, and all the blood and death
both of these wrought. “Founding,” a term like the phrase
“collateral damage,” the use of which was
ratcheted up in the 1990’s so they didn’t have
to say dead Iraqi children.
But the point is that we are an 11-hour drive
from Los Angeles because Susanville is deep
in northern California, farther up than the Bay
Area and at the border of Nevada, near Reno.
And it’s entirely unlike the vibrancy and wealth
generally associated with our state and its
outsize imagery of glittery Beverly Hills and
shiny Silicon Valley. If you saw a picture of it,
West Virginia would likely come to mind
before California would.
But Susanville is actually more reflective
of the average California town than anything
that is marketed to tourists. And it looks like
American towns across the rest of the
country: small and working-class, except
here the demographics report an extraordinary diversity—
if, that is, diversity is distorted, like a horror-house mirror
or a story from The Twilight Zone. In Susanville, there is
almost no one who is Black and free at the same time,
although a cursory reading of census reports could have
you believing it’s a racial Kumbaya.
Once a place where loggers and miners worked, today
Susanville’s singular growth industry is prisons; roughly
half of all the adults who live here work at one of the two
facilities. Of course those numbers intensify wildly if you
count the work done, the labor extracted, from the prisoners
who are shipped here predominantly from L.A.
County, from the Bay.
Being here, looking at the storefronts, the people, it
feels like we are trapped in a black-and-white photograph
KEVIN SWEENEY
98 ESSENCE.COM FEBRUARY 2018