August 17th, Sacramento County Sheriff's Office, 711 G Street, from 4:30 - 5:30 pm.
Photographs by Chris Tuite
Almost two months have passed since I’ve kneeled at the Sheriff’s office. The memory of it has faded like a slow river passing. As portrayed by the photos, rather predictable behavior arose from the employees inside. They were in a rush to get home, and didn’t blink an eye while glancing at my dark cloak, not that I blamed them, and most police looked askance at me with indifference. However, some women were deeply moved by my cape, and a young man had been absorbed by my letter for quite some time as he circled around me. The police officer at the door had been bothered by my presence, initially, and he reminded me several times that no one would be here at 5:00. Eventually, though, even he, read my letter.
August 17th marks my mother’s birthday, so it was strange, if not poignant that I was kneeling on concrete with a story on my back that involved our family’s past. She came across my mind intermittently. My mother did not celebrate her birthday most of her life. She had been born in 1940, in northern France and celebrations of any sort were an absurd notion with a world war in motion. My grand-parent’s family had been forced to evacuate in 1939, and find cover in underground shelters; they hunted squirrels for sources of food, and rationed one quart of milk per day for a family of seven. One time they were forced to eat a rat. To say they survived on very little would be an understatement. By the time my mother was 9 years old, she had weighed 36 lbs.
Later, in 1944, my grandparents needed to separate from their children and move them to a small, remote village. Stories had arisen from nearby areas that the SS had marched into towns, built bonfires in the center of it, and threw children into the flames. As the soldiers did this, they would drink liquor and sing with glee. Her parents told her these stories when she was a young woman and when I was older, my mother told me these same stories. I remember feeling incredulous of my mother at the time, but as an older adult, I came to believe her.
Stories like these, stories that are unspeakable, and are learned through an oral tradition often remain inside families as secret burdens. Though my mother would have been too young to remember events exactly, no doubt the impact of them had affected her deeply. Her trajectory in life would be profoundly influenced by these events in terms of her survival. Her means of survival would inevitably affect my own terms of living. Though I wasn’t told these stories until I was an older teenager, as a child, I had a re-occurring nightmare whereby thousands of miniaturized SS came from behind my bedroom door, bound me in bed, and submerged me into a swirling time-machine. I also dreaded the sound of airplanes overhead as they passed over the Baltimore beltway, but I didn’t understand why.
I imagine that the lineage of holding secrets of horrifying stories has occurred within Black American families and continues even still. In our schooling, the notions of slavery were taught with broad generalizations, and Abe Lincoln was seen as the hero. When I was a child, our family visited Gettysburg or Harper’s Ferry, and we learned about the battles, and the suffering of white men who died for the cause of liberating slaves. Even as many Americans sacrificed their lives for a unified America, the Civil war was primarily waged for a predominantly white population to keep hold of land in the south. Many businessmen and politicians saw it as precious real estate. Though the Abolitionists were appalled by the savagery of slave owners, (Abolitionist numbered 255,000 of a total population of 31,443,000 in 1860), Black lives were secondary to the loss of capital in the south. Within our public education, no details had been revealed to us about the Black men and women who fought their own battles against slavery. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman were an exception. I’d never heard of Robert Smalls, or Susie King Taylor, or about the 65 slave revolts that have occurred throughout our American history. Neither had I learned about post-emancipation white vigilantism or the massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. For myself, I had been ignorant for a long, long time. As is written in my cape, my father also banned me from having Black friends beginning in 2nd grade.
In 1998, I had visited the National Blacks in Wax Museum in northern Baltimore. As I’d entered the doorway, to my left was a wooden ship that racked with creaking sounds, and moaning voices. Initially, it felt rather kitschy, and yet it described the capture of Africans, and the cruelty inflicted upon them as they were forced to row the ship from the belly of the vessel. The kitsch aspect contrasted so awkwardly with the facts I read on the plaque that I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. I felt myself cringe with dark shame. Further along, I saw wax figures from Africa such as Imhotep, and Queen of Sheba, and other proud leaders from the African nation. In the middle galleries, dioramas from the era of slavery displayed scenes of small figurines cutting off their own hand or foot, rather than labor, day after day on a plantation. Whippings, men being hunted and hanged, and/or burnt, and the separation of family members were revealed as well. In the last rooms were life-size wax figures of celebrated African Americans; the first Black astronaut, nurse and senator, among many others, all stood in dramatic lighting.
By the time I got to the basement section, I’d felt overwhelmed by a history I’d been ignorant of, but I was not prepared for what I would see in the casing downstairs. In the long, shelved glass frames along the wall were mason jars full of formaldehyde containing the genitals of Black men. Newspaper articles from the 50’s and 60’s bragged about lynching’s and how “white folks” got their “trophies.” I could barely stand up and look at it.
Seeing this display left me speechless, shamed, and aghast. I thought about my mother’s stories of her survival, and I thought about those images from the news reels taken at concentration camps. Though I do not wish to compare a history of atrocities, the burden of knowing these barbarisms as secrets wreaks havoc on families, and sends stunning reverberations through generations; these waves resound in our world.
I can’t know the experience of being African American in the U.S.; racist attitudes and hate crimes continue in our country without a doubt and we are in a reckoning. But for centuries, many Americans did not want to accept the Emmett Tills, the Isaac Woodards, the Rodney Kings, and list of others. As well, how many brutal beatings or killings have never been reported-witnessed-videotaped? Even James Baldwin mentions his own anguishing feelings when discussing Algerians in France being disappeared or mysteriously injured by police. He had heard “rumors” on his return to Paris that Algerians were being placed in camps, tortured there and/or murdered. No one wished to believe these rumors, and it made him and his friends uncomfortable, mostly because they felt helpless to do anything. After a while though, they began to realize the rumors were in fact true, and that “even those suspected of being Algerian were being murdered in the streets, corralled or dropped into the Seine, like flies.”
History itself is made of stories like this, and yet, I sense them being buried in the tomb of secret memories, in everyday lives, and mundane tasks. When my mother had arrived in Baltimore twenty-four years after the war, she’d heard an air raid alarm not far from our house ring out as an emergency practice drill. The blaring sound of the horn made her dive under our kitchen table. It took her a while to realize she didn’t need to hide from an incoming bomb. Her body knew the score, and her body gave our bodies the same alarms. I imagine that people of color know in their bones the trauma of their ancestors, and still, the continuing brutalities that occur every day.