Essence_USA__February_2018

URTESRY OF SUBJECTS (2)
COU
from the deep South in the 1950’s, and the images of hard
rural living come stuttering back as if to taunt us that freedomhasneverarrivedandwon’t.Allyoucanfeelarethe
walls and the bars, the gun towers and barbed wire, which
is only offset by all the military. The random appearance
of soldiers who are based near Susanville. The sense of
impending war. The American flags in every size you can
imagine. What must it be like to live hoping for and invested
in war and crime because without them the people of
Susanville must believe that the world would collapse?
On the way back to the motel, we stop at a small store
to buy microwavables. There are no restaurants we want
to eat in; plus this is cheaper. We buy premade chicken
sandwiches or something like that. We are trying to be
healthy. The motel has a microwave. We eat and we get on
my laptop. Eating and waiting for the verdict to come in. I
go on my Facebook page because that’s where everyone
is updating what’s happening. I am nervous but Facebook
keeps me connected.
And then it happens.
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. When I begin to move, I go into denial.
No! This is impossible. Wait a minute. Hold on.
This doesn’t make sense.
But as soon as I deny it, I know that it is true,
and I am overcome with embarrassment and
Including prisoners and their wives. I officiated Taina and
Richie’s service, their exchange of vows inside of jail, and
there has not been a weekend in all the years that they’ve
been together when she has missed seeing him.
So even thoughI amnot somuch olderthanthey are,
whether Richie or Taina or Haewon or even Trayvon, I am
old enough to feel responsible. I have become my big
brother Paul. I feel the weight of being with two Black
women who are younger than me in this prison town, and
I wonder, if it came down to it, would I be able to protect
them,protectus?DoIhaveanypowertoensurethatthey
will live long—that their Black lives will be full and healthy?
I cannot stop myself from crying. As much as I want to.
I weep hard. We all do. And then I get angry. Once again
my world is defined by cognitive dissonance: To be in this
town where this little boy, literally this 18-year-old boy, who
had hurt no one, would be locked up for ten years and this
White-presenting man could kill us and go home.
And then my friend Alicia writes a Facebook post. Alicia,
whom I’d known for seven years at this point, whom I’d met
at a political gathering in Rhode Island where, at the end of
the day, our goal was to dance until we couldn’t
dance anymore. She and I danced with each other
all night long and began a friendship that holds
us together to this very day. But she writes these
words in the wake of the acquittal: “btw stop say-
that we are not surprised. that’s a damn
ing
shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how
little Black lives matter. And I will continue that.
stop giving up on black life. Black people, I will
shame. How could this have happened? Why
couldn’t we make this not happen? And then I
start crying. And I feel wrong about crying. My
tears make me want to hide. I feel like I have to be
the particular kind of strong Black people are
always asked to be. The impossible strong. The
strong where there’s no space to think about your
own vulnerability. The space to cry.
I look around the room, this small motel room,
and I look at the two women I have traveled here
with. In my role as a counselor at Cleveland, I
played such a particular role for them. Haewon,
a junior when Richie entered their high school as a
Khan-Cullors
bandele
NEVER give up on us. NEVER.”
And then I respond. I wrote back with a
hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter
Alicia and I brainstorm over the course of the
next few days. We know we want to develop
something. We know we want whatever we create
to have global reach. Alicia reaches out to her
friend Opal Tometi, a dedicated organizer who is
running Black Alliance for Just Immigration,
based in Brooklyn. Opal is a master communicator
and develops all the initial digital components
we need to even get people to feel comfortable
saying the words Black Lives Matter, for even
ninth-grader, embraced him as her little brother. I held them
both close to me, mentored them both, trained them to be
organizers for justice in our communities, organizers against
the prison industrial complex, organizers for human rights.
And Taina. Taina, who fell in love with Richie months
before he was arrested, committed to him, which made me
commit to her. When they decided to marry after learning of
his sentence, I was the one to marry them. I had become
ordained in 2004, primarily because I was determined to
marry Queer people despite what was then marriage
inequity in California and the nation. As time moved forward
and marriage equity took hold, my ordination and desire to
marry people expanded to include all those, who for differ-
ent reasons, were prevented from legally being families.
among those closest to us, there are many who feel the
words will be viewed as separatist, that they will isolate us.
Opal pulls together the architecture for our first Web site
and Twitter accounts, our Facebook and Tumblr. We are
determined to take public this basic concept: that our lives
mean something. That Black Lives Matter.
After a few days, I return to Facebook and I begin to post.
I write that we are going to begin organizing.
I write: “I hope it impacts more than we can ever imagine.”
º
Excerpted from When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives
Matter Memoir by Patrisse Khan-Cullors and asha bandele.
Copyright © 2018 by the authors and reprinted by permissionion
of St. Martin’s Press.