Allen Danielle S. - Cuz: or, the life and times of Michael A

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DANIELLE ALLEN is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and director of Harvards Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. She is a political philosopher widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America as well as a contributing columnist for the Washington Post. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and two children.

F irst and foremost, I must thank my friend and colleague, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., without whose invitation to give Harvards DuBois Lectures, this book would never have been written. The purpose of those lectures is to contribute to our better understanding of African American life, history, and culture. As, over years, I contemplated giving those lectures, I could think of no topic more important than the ravages of mass incarceration. Yet that topic, that material was too hard, too personal. Without a firm date, a room booked and an audience expected, Im not sure I would ever have been able to finish this.

Second, I thank my friend, Quiara Alegria Hudes, whose own public statement about a cousin, a chapter in my book Education and Equality, gave me the courage to start.

To my family, of course, I owe everything. My parents and brother, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. My former husband and stepsons. My husband and children. All have in one way or another helped author this book.

My daughter, Nora, came across me one evening at work with photos of Michael spread out.

Who is that, she wanted to know?

Its Michael.

Who is Michael? she said.

Well, Nora, this is Michael.

If the material was hard for me, it was excruciating for my aunt Karen and cousins Nicholas and Roslyn, who endured repeated interviews and my insistent, continuous probing. Each of us had been seeking understanding, and peace, through a solitary journey. Never had we tried to assemble our story together. While the process has been painful, I believe we have all achieved greater clarity. By and by, we have come to understand, at least in part, and this can put some of our incessant mourning to rest, I hope.

My agent, Tina Bennett, my editor, Bob Weil, and miracle-working assistant Emily Bromley are stalwart friends, advocates, and teachers. They believe in me, and we should all be so lucky to have their sort of fierce support.

Many, many more assisted, too, of course. My friends and colleagues at Harvards Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, in the Government Department and Graduate School of Education, in the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, in the Department of African and African American Studies. My students across campus, of course. And all of the extraordinary scholars and writerspeople like Bruce Western, Elizabeth Hinton, Glenn Loury, Rajiv Sethi, Tommie Shelby, Brandon Terry, Michael Fortner, Michelle Alexander, Jill Leovyand so many others who have at last opened up the story of mass incarceration so that we may all consider our circumstances with clear eyes.

Also, this story could never have been written without able and generous legal work by Joshua Milon, without the courteous and sympathetic assistance of staff in the Los Angeles courts archives and records offices, without the smiling help of staff in several branches of the Los Angeles County library system, and without the patient responsiveness of Irene Wakabayashi, in the District Attorneys Office, who fielded my multiple public records requests.

I am also grateful to all the people at Norton and Liveright who have helped make this book possible, especially Peter Miller, Cordelia Calvert, and Marie Pantojan.

Finally, I want to say thank you to the many people who came up to me after I relayed Michaels story for the first time, in those DuBois Lectures, and said, I, too, love someone who is in prison or I, too, have lost someone to the ravages of the world of drugs. So many people shared their own painful stories with me. You, too, are in my hearts locket.

ALSO BY DANIELLE ALLEN

Our Declaration: A Reading

of the Declaration of Independence

in Defense of Equality

For my Aunt Karen, and the millions gone

D anielle, phone call for you. Its your dad.

I broke away from a conversation with my husbands cousinsfrom 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, its Michael.

My fathers 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.

Hes dead.

What?

Dead. They found him shot in a car.

What?

Dead.

Im 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 husbands arms, and said Jim, we have to go.

What?

Michaels dead.

What?

Dead. We have to go.

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

And so we left.

T hree 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 Id 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 Noras 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 aunts 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 fathers 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 Michaels Big Sis by eighteen months, Roslyn, and one of Roslyns own babies, Michaels 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, Im sure the fear would now overpower the joy. Its not that, on a rational level, we didnt 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.