Cuz Read online

  For my Aunt Karen, and the millions gone

  Temptations, hidden snares, often take us unawares.

  And our hearts are made to bleed for a thoughtless

  word or deed.

  And we wonder why the test when we try to do our best.

  But we’ll understand it by and by.

  —GOSPEL SONG

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: RELEASE AND RESURRECTION

  1. GARDEN PARTY, JULY 2009

  2. RELEASE DAY, JUNE 2006

  3. THE INVESTIGATION, JULY 2009

  4. GETTING STARTED, JUNE–JULY 2006

  5. JOB, JULY 2006

  6. INVESTIGATION, JULY 2009

  7. SCHOOL, AUGUST 2006

  8. FUNERAL, JULY 27, 2009

  9. APARTMENT, AUGUST 2006

  10. HITTING BOTTOM, NOVEMBER 2006

  11. THE END, AUGUST 2008–JULY 2009

  PART II: INFERNO

  12. CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

  13. WHERE WAS OUR FAMILY?

  WHERE WERE THE LAWYERS?

  14. MILESTONES

  15. NORCO

  16. INFERNO, IN MICHAEL’S WORDS

  17. VISITING 1.0

  18. VISITING 2.0

  19. DIZZY

  20. THE BIGGEST WILDFIRE

  IN CALIFORNIA HISTORY

  PART III: UNFORGIVING WORLD

  21. FIRE AND ICE

  22. THE SINGLE MOTHER AND

  THE GREAT WHITE WHALE

  23. FIRST STEPS

  24. “SIS, RUN!”

  25. GANGBANGING—A DEFINITION

  26. HOW NOT TO HELP YOUR KIDS

  27. THE LIMIT ON HELPING YOUR KIDS

  28. CITY OF ANGELS

  29. THE END

  30. MY HEART’S LOCKET

  CODA: WHAT NEXT?

  NOTES

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  CREDITS

  I

  RELEASE AND

  RESURRECTION

  Limits are

  what any of us

  are inside of.

  —CHARLES OLSON

  1.

  GARDEN PARTY, July 2009

  “Danielle, phone call for you. It’s your dad.”

  I broke away from a conversation with my husband’s cousins—from glancing, distracted talk about the kids who were playing yards away in their floral sundresses under a soft English garden-party sun. Rising from the picnic table, I took the cell phone from him and walked a few steps.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “Danielle, it’s Michael.”

  My father’s voice, the careful, clipped speech of a retired professor, came from across the Atlantic, from Maryland through the ether, but sounded as if it were miles beneath the seas, crackling, wispy as if through the first ever transatlantic cables.

  “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Dead. They found him shot in a car.”

  “What?”

  “Dead.”

  “I’m coming.”

  Michael. My cousin. My baby cuz.

  Sometimes on English spring mornings a gauzy haze clings to the air. This, though, was July and, now, afternoon, but that same sort of whiteness suddenly seemed to wrap the sky and the surrounding willows, and I near collapsed, staggered into my husband’s arms, and said “Jim, we have to go.”

  “What?”

  “Michael’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Dead. We have to go.”

  Straightaway go, we had to go, to South Central.

  And so we left.

  2.

  RELEASE DAY, June 2006

  Three years earlier, I had arisen one Thursday morning well before dawn. I was in my palm-tree-shrouded vacation condo in Hollywood, California, feeling the most glorious sense of anticipation I have ever known. It was June 29, 2006. I was still married to my first husband, not Jim the philosopher from Liverpool and second husband, but Bob, the professor of poetry who had grown up in Hollywood in the 1950s and ’60s.

  As I wended my way past the kidney-shaped pool and climbed into the old white BMW I’d bought from my mother, my spirit was filled with a light, almost sweet buoyancy easy to savor in the Southland quiet of that June day. Strange to admit, but even when my first child was born some years later, the anticipation was not so simply blissful. Waiting with Jim for Nora’s arrival was an experience shot through with fear and joy. Resurrection, it turns out, is more transcendent than birth, or so it was then, as I headed to my aunt’s small stucco cottage on a block in South Central where a few doors down, on the corner, a fortified drug house stood like a hostile sentry. Her house appeared serene. It was always reasonably neat, if also in a state of disrepair, and as the sun rose over the tidy, pale houses, it colored them pretty. Poverty never looks quite as bad in the City of Angels as it does in the winter-beaten Rust Belt.

  My aunt Karen, my father’s youngest sister, the baby of a set of twelve, now herself forty, was about to drive a crew of us to collect her own baby, her third child, Michael, from “Reception and Release” or, as it is called, “R&R.” Prison life is rife with black humor.

  I was along. So was Michael’s “Big Sis” by eighteen months, Roslyn, and one of Roslyn’s own babies, Michael’s eight-year-old nephew, Joshua. We were on our way to collect the last son of an extended clan, youngest child of the youngest daughter.

  If I had it to do over again, to meet another loved one on his day of liberation, I’m sure the fear would now overpower the joy. It’s not that, on a rational level, we didn’t know how hard reentry is, how low the probability that any given life turns a corner. But to know something intellectually is so very different from feeling it in your flesh, straining after some goal with every fiber of your being only to sink in the end to defeat.

  Everyone was looking forward to a homecoming party for Michael. In the driveway of my aunt’s house, next to the postage stamp of a lawn, uncles and friends, cousins and second-cousins, and cousins once or twice or—who knows—how many times removed, would pull folding chairs up to folding tables covered with paper tablecloths and laden with fried chicken and sweet tea. I was eight years old when Michael was born. My guess is that he was probably the first baby I ever got to hold and I had grown up with him. The baby of a sprawling family too numerous to count, he was also my baby, a child of magnetic energy and good humor.

  We had lost him when he hit fifteen, eleven long years ago. He had been gone from us almost half his life. Now he would be with us again.

  Today, though, we were just going to collect Michael and see what he wanted to do. We would drive to the parking lot by Tower 8, not the normal Tower 2 location for visitors. There we would wait until the white van drove up to deposit those prisoners being released. We were to arrive by 8 A.M. sharp, no exceptions. From L.A., in the early rush hour, it could take us as much as two hours. But once we arrived, we would have to wait. Possibly an hour. Possibly half the day. No one could say in advance.

  The drive seems like something of a haze. I remember a wait, but I don’t think it was, in the end, terribly long. We all sat—nerves taut—in the car. And I remember somehow being in a green and shady grove, which made the experience altogether different from every other trip to Michael’s last prison in Norco, a little, dusty stretch of Riverside County just south of the unfurling black ribbons where the 10 and the 15 freeways join.

  It’s a cliché to say that someone has an electric smile, but what else can you call it when someone beams and all the lights come on? Michael arrived and smiled. His broad, toothy grin, gums and all, always seemed to take up half his face, a bright flash of white against his dark skin, and he always had a little bob in his step that you could recognize as belonging to the playground athletes of your youth. He had that natural spring as a ch
ild, even at every prison visit and, to be sure, on this day of his release after over a decade of incarceration.

  His late adolescence and early manhood were, like those of so many millions, gone behind bars, and nonetheless he bounded toward us. How could we not sing hosannas, and think, “God is great”?

  His mother, deep brown and plum-cheeked, warmhearted and big-chested, wept, or so I believe. “All things work together for the good,” she might have said, as she often does when thinking about Michael’s story. Again, these are details I just cannot recall.

  Then we came to asking him what he wanted to do. Fulfilling that request would be my job, as would helping him in the months to come through reentry. Not mine alone, no, but mine consistently—day-after-day as the cousin-on-duty, the one with resources, the one whose parents had been to college, and who was expected to go to college, and who had done so, and who had turned into a professional.

  I was ready. Or at least I thought so. Like a coffee klatch of nervous first-time parents, we had all been preparing for months—my father, the retired college professor; my aunt, the nurse; Michael’s older brother and sister, each struggling to make ends meet; my husband, Bob, the poetry professor, himself near retirement; and me.

  We did have plans, but they were not the plans we had hoped to have. Michael had been working as a firefighter for the last few years. He loved the work. He should have been paroled to a fire camp or to a fire station. We even had family in Riverside County. They were ready to take him. He could have lived with them and gone to school and kept on pushing back and beating down wildfires.

  But the rule was, you had to be paroled to the county where your crime was committed. In his case this was Los Angeles County. Need I add that L.A. County is crime-ridden? We didn’t have the plans we had hoped to have because of this policy on parole, but we had developed the best alternatives we could. As the Secretary of Defense who got us into the Iraq War once more or less said, we were going to have to go to battle with the army that we had.

  Step one was this: on the way back to L.A. County, ask Michael what he wanted to do first.

  Michael wanted to buy underwear.

  3.

  THE INVESTIGATION, July 2009

  After my father’s phone call, we left the party immediately, so I don’t know if the willows ever stopped swaying. While the earth itself settled back into its more reliable wobbly orbit, we booked our plane tickets to Southern California and tried to figure out what was going on. No one knew much. The best anyone could do was direct me to a few news items gleaned from the Internet.

  Headline No. 1, from KTLA:

  BULLET-RIDDLED BODY FOUND IN CAR

  LOS ANGELES—A body riddled with bullets was found inside in a car in South Los Angeles, police said Saturday. Police responded to a call of a suspicious person sleeping in a vehicle in the 1000 block of West 60th Street at around 5:20 P.M. Friday, said Officer Rosario Herrera of the Los Angeles Police Department. On inspection, officers discovered the sleeping man propped up in the car’s passenger seat was really a bullet-riddled body wrapped in blankets. The body was identified as that of Michael Alexander Allen, 29. Allen suffered multiple shots to the torso, Herrera said. Police have no motive or suspects in Allen’s shooting. Anyone with any information on the shooting is asked to call the LAPD Criminal/ Gang/ Homicide Unit at (213) 485-1383 or (877)-LAPD-24-7.

  These were the basics. One didn’t know how he died, or how he’d ended up in the car. About his corpse, however, there was information to be found in a Los Angeles Police Department blog.

  Headline No. 2:

  Man Found Dead in Car

  LOS ANGELES—The Los Angeles Police Department needs the public’s help to identify and locate suspect or suspects who fatally shot a 29-year-old man on July 17. Yesterday, at around 5:20 p.m., a patrol unit from 77th Division was dispatched to the 1000 block of West 60th Street. The radio call was generated in response to a report of a suspicious vehicle with what appeared to be a person sleeping inside. When the officers arrived they found Michael Alexander Allen, a 29-year-old male Black, wrapped in bedding on the passenger seat. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The vehicle and victim were transported to the Coroner’s Office where he was taken out of the car.

  Did the police hoist the “vehicle and victim” onto a flatbed tow truck, or winch them on behind and pull them, a yoked pair, along the road? Did passengers riding in cars alongside witness a seemingly “sleeping” man? The gods must chortle every time death’s chariot, like Charon’s ferry, pulls up in the form of a rusty tow truck. This is too routine a feature of death in America, in our blood-spattered culture, this image of the dead being hauled off as “evidence,” the most basic human ritual of ministering to and caring for the deceased interrupted.

  Yes, of course, it makes more sense to invite the next of kin not to a street corner but to the coroner’s office to claim the victim’s belongings. Yet the rawness of the rough concrete curb at 60th and Vermont, and the grimy adjoining gutter that paralleled the road’s black asphalt, was surely a more suitable cauldron for the smelting of grief than any coroner’s antiseptic office. And when one thinks of Michael now, one never thinks first of the clickety-click wheels of a coroner’s efficient bureaucracy but of this corner, whited-out with urban despair. Here, smack on the corner of Vermont and 60th, belong the gnashing of teeth and rending of veils.

  As we waited to fly across an ocean and continent, Karen and her daughter, Roslyn, Michael’s “Big Sis,” went to claim his few, forgettable belongings. The little hatchback appeared to have bloodstains on the floor of the passenger’s seat, but my cousin, Roslyn, also struggling with poverty, so needed a car that she would soon claim it as her own all the same.

  4.

  GETTING STARTED, June–July 2006

  Michael’s homecoming party was grand. Spirits were light. The merriment went on all afternoon and seemed to attract some attention from the neighbors. More than once the same glamorous-looking woman drove past, ever so slowly, in a fancy, low-slung, two-door golden brown Mercedes sports car.

  After the party, we got down to business pretty quickly. Michael did spend a certain amount of time eating favorite foods—Doritos, fried chicken, and his sister’s homemade mac and cheese. He played Football Manager with eight-year-old Joshua and other nephews and nieces who had been born while he was in prison. But he wanted to make something of himself. He had flourished as a firefighter in prison. He was ready to find something to do again, to create a life, a span of action of which he could be proud.

  Neither of us had time to waste. Eight years older than Michael, I was telecommuting that summer from L.A. to my job as dean of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago. Having started school at the age of four, I’d never left, and one year earlier, at thirty-two, I’d been appointed one of the youngest top administrators in the university’s history. Despite a generous and supportive provost for my boss, I could manage the job from afar only so long. My age was already reason enough for people to wonder whether I could master the work. I didn’t want to let the provost, or his boss, the president, down. I couldn’t afford to appear to slacken my focus. The pressure of my job would limit my time with Michael.

  Michael and I made task lists—my usual tactic for all things personal and professional—and we moved through them efficiently. We met the parole officer, a woman Michael thought was tolerable, and we figured out the routine. Or rather, I waited outside in the driver’s seat of the ten-year-old BMW 325. During those early days, I was the willing chauffeur. In fact, I would never meet Michael’s parole officer. Now, years later, I realize he wanted to keep me separate from his life as a convicted felon. He wanted to show me only the other side, the part of him that could have gone to college.

  From the parole office we went to the bank, and Michael opened an account. Then it was the library, where I went in. These places were, after all, my turf, and under my watch Michael got a library card and started learning h
ow to use the computer. At last, as we began searching for jobs, Michael met Google, which hadn’t existed when he went to prison.

  Next up was the driver’s license. Although Michael had driven trucks as part of his work on the inmate fire crew, he’d never had a license. He’d been arrested when he was fifteen and didn’t leave the prison system for eleven years until he was twenty-six. He loved cars and now, finally, he was going to get a license, so the DMV had to come immediately after the bank and library. I drove him there and waited outside while he took the test. He passed easily, which was no surprise.

  Then we started the job hunt in earnest. Everywhere we saw a HELP WANTED sign, Michael filled out an application. This meant a lot of places. These were the boom years, still two years before the Great Recession of 2008. But we realized that, in other ways, L.A. was changing. Black neighborhoods just weren’t black anymore. About six blocks from his mother’s house, we stopped for burgers at a MacDonald’s and spotted a HELP WANTED sign. Michael didn’t want to ask for an application, but I made him. When he approached the counter and asked for the form, a certain sort of chill passed through the row of Latina women behind the registers. One went and got him the application, and he completed it before we left. But we knew we would not hear anything, and we didn’t. We didn’t hear anything from anyone else either.

  Day after day—under the scorching sun of the worst California heat wave in nearly sixty years—we returned to the cool library and scoured websites for opportunities. We thought maybe it would make sense to focus on large chains—Safeway, Burger King, Best Buy. The thought was that these would have room for advancement inside the organization, if only someone would give Michael, one of so many, a chance. If only he could prove himself. We realized that some of the large companies seemed to have regular days scheduled when they interviewed all comers: Goodwill, Home Depot, Sears. We directed our energies toward them.