my father and eventually my brother, who are viewed as having no other meaningful role in our nation except as prisoners.
Prisoners are valuable. They not only work for pennies for the corporate brands our people love so much, but they also provide jobs for mostly poor white people, replacing the jobs lost in rural communities. Poor white people who are chosen to be guards. They run the motels in prison towns where families have to stay when they make 11-hour drives into rural corners of the state. They deliver the microwave food we have to buy from the prison vending machines.
And companies pay for the benefit of having prisoners, legally designated by the Constitution as slaves, forced to do their bidding. Forget American factory workers. Prisoners are cheaper than even offshoring jobs to eight-year-old children in distant lands. License plates are being made in prisons along with 50 percent of all American flags, but the real money in this period of prison expansion in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s is made by Victoria’s Secret, Whole Foods, AT&T and Starbucks. And these are just a few. Stock in private prisons and companies attached to prisons represents the largest growth industry in the American market as the millennium lurches toward its barbed-wire close.
There are no rulebooks to guide you through losing a parent to incarceration, although the year my father goes back, there are literally ten million children living in the United States who know this loss.
But there are no self-help books and there are no prayers.
Michelle Alexander has not yet written The New Jim Crow.
Barack Obama has not yet been elected and has not left office with the largest reduction in federal prisoners in history.
The racially discriminatory sentencing imbalance between crack and powder cocaine has not yet been addressed.
Hundreds of millions of dollars have not yet flowed into non-profits to fight mass incarceration.
Bill Keller has not left his high post at The New York Times to assume leadership at the Marshall Project, and Justice Strategies has not created its blog for children of the incarcerated.
Angela Davis has not yet asked us, Are Prisons Obsolete? and Ruthie Gilmore has not yet done breathtaking research on prisons in California and beyond.
But in the small world you occupy in El Barrio in Van Nuys, you do not know that there are millions of teenagers and children feeling what you are feeling, experiencing what you are experiencing, the disorientation, the loss of stability, of safety, the sure knowledge that you can wake up one morning and find anyone, maybe everyone, gone.
You only know what you can calculate:
He will miss your high school performances.
He will miss your graduation.
He will miss four birthday celebrations—your eighteenth!
There will be no more Thanksgivings at Grandma’s, no Christmases.
The kisses and hugs that once embarrassed you and then sustained you will also be gone.
You do not have words to explain any of this, the full measure of the loss. Do words even exist to explain some forms of devastation, are there pictures that approximate in real-world terms what the shattered heart of a Black girl looks like?
This is why you tuck it away quietly in secret pockets.
This is why you act like you are fine.
This is why you go to school and pretend that algebraic equations that never add up to your father coming home make some kind of sense.
This is why sometimes you think, I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
4
MAGNITUDE AND BOND
We are each other’s harvest;
We are each other’s business;
We are each other’s magnitude and bond
GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Just as I am beginning to adjust to all the changes that becoming a Brignac brought on, I have to adjust to what it means to set them aside. My father’s family loves me, but with only four years together, I am still not fully part of their everyday. Which is to say that with my father out of sight, so am I, and it will remain this way for all the years he is gone.
I do not see them.
We do not talk on the phone.
We are a part of each other’s past; and looking ahead toward an unknowable future, it begins to dawn on me the full measure of the role that my father played in the family, the literally magnetic role.
Gabriel pulled us closer. He was the reason for our family to all come in from the rain. Together. With him gone, there are no more uncles playing baseball every weekend, my cousin Naomi tells me. We go, for a time, to the same high school, and she is the one who keeps me in the loop.
There are no more football Saturdays together.
There’s no more poor man’s gumbo eaten together over laughter and shouted conversations.
There are holidays, but without Gabriel’s healing spirit to make the room easy, I can’t imagine what those holidays are possibly like. And anyway, I am not invited.
Still I have come to love Gabriel and he loves me and we seek to stay connected.
I cannot go to see my father without an adult to take me and even if I could, I don’t want to go alone. Gabriel and I stay in touch through letter writing. Our letters are brief. My father always opens his in the exact same way:
Dearest Patrisse,
I hope this letter finds you well . . .
In each letter he apologizes. He says he misses me. In each letter he promises us better, brighter times.
In my responses, I tell him I miss him, too. I say I cannot wait to see him again. But in the letters we do not speak of the prison itself, his experience inside, locked up and away. We do not talk about what he was convicted of, although I suspect it’s drugs because drugs are what I know most people seem to be getting locked up for. But in those letters, those weekly notes, it’s almost as though he could have been writing from a school or a country far, far away. Which is why I do not tell him about my life, either, the interior of it and in particular Monte, who, right behind my father, is also sent to prison.
There comes a day when I am at dance class and it is Monte’s job to come and pick me up. He doesn’t, but I don’t panic. He has, by that time, started acting strangely. There was the day he burst into my room excited and full of love. This is for you, Trisse, he had said, and handed me a ten-dollar bill, all crisp and fresh. Before the night was over he returned, eyes desperate and pleading. Trisse, can I get that ten dollars back, he asked softly but insistently. Of course I gave it back, along with a piece of my spirit.
But my mother, whom I call on the day Monte doesn’t come to get me, tells me to take the bus home, which I do, giving me time to think about my brother. I figured he was getting high, the cause of the wild mood swings, the hours spent locked in the bathroom when I’d hear him sobbing.
Monte, I’d say from one side of the door. Monte, let me in! I love you!
Go way Trisse, he’d sob, and then refuse to speak anymore.
Except when he did speak more. Because that was the other side of him. There were days and nights when my brother did not sleep, when he chattered on incessantly, was sure like no one has ever been sure before that he could grab this thing, this life, by the horns and go! I don’t, we don’t, know which Monte will greet us on any good morning,