The alleyway is where my brothers hang out with their friends and talk shit, probably about girls and all the things they probably never have done with them. Monte and Paul are 11 and 13 years old and there are no green spaces, no community centers to shoot hoops in, no playgrounds with handball courts, no parks for children to build castles in, so they make the alleyway their secret place and go there to discuss things they do not let me in on. I am the girl. Nine years old, I am the little sister banished behind the broken black wrought-iron gate that tries, but fails, to protect us from the outside world.
It’s from behind that gate that I watch the police roll up on my brothers and their friends, not one of whom is over the age of 14 and all of whom are doing absolutely nothing but talking. They throw them up on the wall. They make them pull their shirts up. They make them turn out their pockets. They roughly touch my brothers’ bodies, even their privates, while from behind the gate, I watch, frozen. I cannot cry or scream. I cannot breathe and I cannot hear anything. Not the siren that would have been accompanying the swirl of red lights, not the screeching at the boys: Get on the fucking wall! Later, I will be angry with myself: Why didn’t I help them?
And later, neither Paul nor Monte will say a word about what happened to them. They will not cry or cuss. They will not make loud although empty threats. They will not discuss it with me, who was a witness, or my mother, who was not. They will not be outraged. They will not say they do not deserve such treatment. Because by the time they hit puberty, neither will my brothers have expected that things could be another way.
They will be silent in the way we often hear of the silence of rape victims. They will be worried, maybe, that no one will believe them. Worried that there’s nothing that can be done to fix things, make things better. Whatever goes through their minds after being half stripped in public and having their childhoods flung to the ground and ground into the concrete, we will never speak of this incident or the ones that will follow as Van Nuys becomes ground zero in the war on drugs and the war on gangs, designations that add even more license to police already empowered to do whatever they want to us. Now there are even more ways to make us the enemy, even more ways to make us disappear.
And I will not think of this particular incident until years and years later, when the reports about Mike Brown start flowing out of Ferguson, Missouri, and he is morphed by police and the press from a beloved 18-year-old boy, a boy who was heading to college and a boy who was unarmed, into something like King Kong, an entity swollen, monster-like, that could only be killed with bullets that were shot into the top of his head. Because this is what that cop did to him. He shot bullets into the top of his head as he knelt on the ground with his hands up.
I will think of it again when I watch bike-riding Freddie Gray, just 25, snatched up and thrown into the back of a police van like he was a bag of trash being tossed aside. Freddie Gray, taken for a Baltimore “rough ride” vicious enough for the cops in the case to be charged with depraved heart murder. Those actual words. Cops who would be, like most law enforcement accused of shooting Black people, acquitted. Even with the presence of video.
Soon after the day that my brothers were set upon in the alley by cops, a new cycle begins: they start getting arrested on a regular basis, and it happens so often that my mother is eventually forced to move us to another part of Van Nuys. But there is nowhere that they can be or feel safe. No place where there are jobs. No city, no block, where what they know, all they know, is that their lives matter, that they are loved. We try to make a world and tell them they are important and tell ourselves we are too. But real life can be an insistent and merciless intruder.
Later, when I am sent out of my neighborhood, to Millikan, an all-white middle school in wealthy and beautiful Sherman Oaks, I will make friends with a white girl who, as it turns out, has a brother who is the local drug seller. He literally has garbage bags filled with weed. Garbage bags.
But that surprises me less than the fact that not only has he never been arrested, he’s never even feared arrest. When he tells me that, I try to let it sink in, living without fear of the police. But it never does sink in.
2
TWELVE
One of the worst things about racism is what it does to young people.
ALVIN AILEY
The first time I am arrested, I am 12 years old.
One sentence and I am back there, all that little girl fear and humiliation forever settled in me at the cellular level.
It’s the break between seventh and eighth grades, and for the first time I have to attend summer school because of my math and science grades and I am angry about it. No other Millikan kids come here, to this school in Van Nuys, for remediation, only me. The summer school I attend is for the kids who live in my neighborhood. It doesn’t have a campus, but it has metal detectors and police. There are no police or metal detectors at Millikan.
Somehow, mentally, I don’t make the adjustment. I still think of myself as a student there, which I am but not for these summer months, and one day I do what I’d learned from my Millikan peers to do to cope: I smoke some weed. At Millikan it is a daily occurrence for kids to show up to class high, to light up in the bathroom, to smoke on the campus lawn. No one gets in trouble. Nowhere is there police. Millikan is the middle school where the gifted kids go.
But in my neighborhood school things are totally different and someone must have said something about me and my weed—two girls had come into the bathroom when I’d been in there—because two days later a police officer comes to my class. I remember my stomach dropping the way it does on one of those monster roller-coaster rides at Six Flags. I can just feel that they are coming for me and I am right. The cop tells me to come to the front of the room, where he handcuffs me in front of everyone and takes me to the dean’s office, where my bag is searched, where I am searched, pockets turned out, shoes checked, just like my brothers in the alleyway when I was nine years old. I have no weed on me but I am made to call my mother at work and tell her what happened, which I do through tears. I didn’t do it, Mommy, I lie through genuine tears of fear. My mother believes me. I am the good girl and she takes my side.
Later, when we are home together, she will not ask me how I am feeling or get righteously angry. She will not rub my wrists where the handcuffs pinched them or hold me or tell me she loves me. This is not a judgment of her. My mother is a manager, figuring out how to get herself and her four children through the day alive. That this has happened, but that she and her kids are all at home and, relatively speaking, safe, is a victory for my mother. It is enough. And for all of my childhood, this is just the way it is.
What made middle school such a culture shock, beyond the race and class differences, was that all throughout elementary school I was considered bright, gifted even, a star student whom my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Goldberg, indulged when I asked if I could teach the class about the Civil Rights Movement. A week before she had given me a book, The Gold Cadillac by Mildred Taylor, about a girl making the frightening drive with her father from Ohio through the Jim Crow South, down to Mississippi, where her extended family lives.
The terror in it was palpable for me, the growing sense on every page that they might be killed; by the time I was nine, police had already raided our small apartment in search of one of my favorite uncles, my father Alton’s brother. My uncle who used and sold drugs, and who had a big laugh and who used to hug me up and tell me I was brilliant, but who did not with live us, whose whereabouts we did not know the day