Twilght

by Anna Deavere Smith

  and to tear up the Joshua trees

  instead of to, you know, to find

  the freedom that you used to be able to find

  in, in, you know,

  the desert.

  Lightning But No Rain

  Theresa Allison Founder of Mothers Reclaiming Our Children (Mothers ROC) Mother of gang truce architect Dewayne Holmes

  (Amazing black hat and bracelets on both arms. Beautiful rings.)

  Mothers ROC came about right after my nephew was killed,

  November the 29th of ’91.

  After the death of my nephew, my son

  Dewayne

  thought about a peace among,

  you know, the, the guys in the project—

  I don’t want to say gangs—

  the young men.

  The truce, they started meeting every Sunday,

  so I thought about

  a group of mothers gettin’ together,

  so I thought about

  the words

  Reclaiming Our Children.

  I knew that there was

  a lot of kids going to prison,

  a lot of kids going to the cemetery

  by the hands of our enemy,

  the unjust system.

  Then my son Dewayne was sentenced for a crime he did not do.

  When they killed Tiny—

  when I say “they,” I mean the police.

  They shot forty-three times.

  Five bullets went into Tiny.

  No bullets went in nobody else’s body.

  I think what they do, they want to make it look like a drive-by

  shooting.

  See, when the gangs

  shoot at each other,

  it’s a lot of ’em

  fire

  (She shows the shooting with her hand)

  bullets.

  When they killed Tiny, they were in unmarked cars.

  When they shot my nephew, they were dressed like gang members,

  duck-walkin’,

  with hard beanies, jackets, no badges or anything,

  all over the project,

  like

  birds!

  This was going to be listed as a drive-by shooting,

  and then they were gonna put

  it on another project.

  This is what they do all the time.

  And for some reason the lights was out in the project,

  ’cause Tiny was goin’ around

  gatherin’ up the children,

  ’cause when the lights go out in the projects,

  there’s a lot of shooting.

  So when I left the Fox Hill Mall

  I felt something was wrong,

  but I didn’t think it was my family,

  ’cause that day look like the crucifixion of Jesus.

  I told people, “Doesn’t this look like

  the crucifixion of Jesus?” and they say,

  “You right.”

  It was the weirdest time of my life,

  it was the weirdest feeling.

  It was lightning,

  no rain!

  And when I got back home my daughter was runnin’ down La Brea

  wid her two little girls and she was cryin’.

  My daughter told me then

  that Tiny,

  that Tiny had been killed.

  The day we had Tiny’s funeral

  it was so many people,

  and me

  being a strong Catholic,

  it reminded me of the time

  that Jesus took that one loaf of bread and made a whole,

  it was just like that.

  All of Tiny’s death told me

  that

  a change must come,

  really

  a change got to come.

  My son changed.

  (She’s crying)

  Other guys in Watts changed.

  Our life totally changed

  from happy people

  to hurting people.

  I mean hurting people,

  I mean hurting,

  pain.

  When we came back from the funeral,

  we had a demonstration,

  so I had a

  great coalition.

  I mean, I,

  I mean it was …

  I’m tellin’ ya,

  I’m tellin’ you eight hundred fifty people,

  nothin’ but Spanish people,

  that caravan,

  I had white folks!

  That in itself …

  They don’t want,

  they don’t want the peace,

  they don’t want us comin’ together.

  So after that they wanted my son more.

  They wanted Dewayne more.

  So when they attack my son,

  again the lights was out in the project for some reason.

  He was walkin’ slow.

  They told him

  to give him his driver’s license,

  but they kept insisting he was another person,

  Damian Holmes,

  or some other Holmes they use,

  other than Dewayne Holmes.

  So they had him in a car.

  So some people ran and got me.

  We surrounded the police car,

  we gonna turn it over,

  we gonna turn it over.

  Some laid on the ground.

  I laid at the front part of the bumper, and one little girl—she was

  about eighteen but she looked like twelve—

  she was underneath the back wheel, so they couldn’t roll.

  If they rolled, they would have hit somebody,

  people were all over the ground.

  I told him, I said, “My son don’t have a

  warrant.”

  He said, “Oh yes he does.”

  I said, “Okay, run his name through this computer.”

  “Oh, we can’t do that.”

  I said, “You a lie.

  You do it anytime you want to arrest them.”

  So they kept saying they couldn’t use it, they had to take him to the

  station,

  to run his name.

  “But maybe he doesn’t have anything.”

  “We just have to take him to the station.”

  Now, you

  know and I know too,

  before the police stop you for a traffic ticket

  they done ran your license plate.

  I mean, they know who you are,

  you know.

  They knew he was,

  they knew he was Dewayne Holmes,

  they knew he was Sniper!

  I said, “Look, I’m not gonna move.

  You not gonna kill my son like you killed my nephew.”

  So the police happened to pull the car up a little bit and hit my leg.

  Dewayne said, “Don’t you hit my mother!”

  But we, I already told him, “We gonna turn the car over, Dewayne,

  we gonna turn it over.”

  They were not gonna kill my son.

  And that was their intention, to kill my son,

  they still wanna kill my son,

  they do! (She cries)

  So then

  the sergeant came

  and he told the man,

  he said, “It’s not your son.

  I made a mistake.”

  Somebody yell outta the car,

  “Make ’em tell him they’re sorry.”

  So the cop had to say,

  “I’m sorry,”

  that they didn’t want to have …

  After that Dewayne couldn’t walk,

  go from one side of the project to another.

  They was trying to get my son,

  to stop us, to stop

  the demonstration,

  to stop

  us from protestin’ against them,

  to stop the world from knowing

  that they corrupt.

  LA supposed to be
the best police officers in the world,

  and if everybody all over the world knows

  they the corrupt one,

  then

  that’s the problem,

  they been doin’ it.

  They used to take our kids

  from one project

  and drop ’em into another gang

  zone and leave ’em in there

  and let those guys kill ’em

  and then say it’s a gang-related thing,

  hear me?

  They picked my son up several times

  and dropped him in another project

  when he was just a little boy.

  They’ve done it to my kid,

  they’ll do it to your kid.

  It’s the color, because we’re Black.

  The woman that killed Tiny,

  she had a big

  plaque—woman of the year!

  Yeah, she shot him in the face,

  her and her partner, we call ’em Cagney and Lacey,

  and she is …

  a little—

  I can’t give you the name—

  how she use to go in an’ pull these kids,

  I mean from twelve years old,

  and kick ’em and hit their heads against trees

  and stomp on the ground.

  Why you got to do Black kids like that?

  Why couldn’t you handcuff ’em and take ’em to jail?

  Why couldn’t they handcuff my nephew Tiny

  and just take him to jail?

  After they done shot him down,

  he couldn’t move! (she cries)

  Why they have to shoot him in the face?

  Doesn’t seem like they killin’ him

  to keep from him sayin’ what they said to him.

  (Crying and an abrupt change)

  They coverin’ up!

  ’Cause they know they killed him wrong!

  I’m not sayin’ they were just gunnin’ for Tiny,

  but they not men enough,

  they not men or women enough to say, “Hey, I killed the wrong person.”

  These police officers are just like you and I.

  Take that damn uniform off of ’em,

  they the same as you and I.

  Why do they have so much power?

  Why does the system work for them?

  Where can we go

  to get the justice that they have?

  Ts tuh!

  Where? (crying)

  Then they took my child!

  I was tired,

  I have heart problems.

  I went away

  and they took him while I was gone.

  A Bloodstained Banner

  Cornel West Scholar

  (He is in a three-piece navy-blue suit with a pocket watch and he has on cuff links. Eyeglasses. Books everywhere, papers on the desk. It is as if the desk, which is two-sided, is a fortress. The answering machine clicks and there are two beeps.)

  You sell

  at the

  most profitable price

  and it’s inescapable, it’s ubiquitous,

  you’re selling things,

  you’re selling things at the most profitable price

  and you’re trying to gain

  access

  to power and property

  and pleasure

  by any means you cayan,

  you see,

  and thal [sic] are two different things.

  On the one hand

  there’s

  like duh frontier myth in America,

  right? (barely audible on the word “right”)

  That we (hard to hear that “we”) gain some moral and plitical [sic]

  regeneration

  and expansion by means of conquest and dispossession of duh

  people’s land.

  So I mean a, uh,

  Richard Slotkin talks about dis in terms

  of being a gunfighterr (grabbing the “r”) nation.

  If in fact our major myth is that of the fronteer,

  the way in which you expand the fronteer

  (He is leaning forward, with his head down close to the desk,

  his

  glasses seeming to sit on top of his ears, and screwing up his

  face, as

  he literally puts his body into the idea)

  is by being a gunfighter.

  So many heroes,

  these cowboys

  wit dere gu-uns

  Now, you can imagine

  on one level

  dat’s done

  because you wanna

  expand

  possibilities for the market,

  extract resources from the land,

  even as you subordinate the peoples who are on that land.

  Well, on another level

  it’s a deep machismo

  ethic,

  which is

  gangsterous,

  eh? (almost as if he’s saying “okay?” or “right?”)

  That to be a

  Mayan

  who engages in this

  means ta put othuhs down,

  ta be tough, ta be cold

  and meanspirited, and so forth.

  To be like Rambo,

  as this brother Stallone made big money in the last decade,

  right?

  Uh, and

  this kinda gangsterous orientation,

  which as we know,

  ya know,

  has a long history in black and white,

  uh, and

  in rap music these days—

  you know, gangster rap,

  which is deeply resistant of, uh, against racism and so forth

  but so centered on machismo identity because

  you tough

  like a soldier,

  you like a, uh, military mayan,

  you, you can best,

  you’re better thayan, uh, these other

  military men that you’re fightin’, against,

  you can outpolice the police,

  you can outbrutalize the police brutality,

  the police who are being brutal and so forth

  and so on.

  So you’re playing exactly the same game, as it were,

  and racial reasoning, I think, oftentimes has been construed as an

  attempt of black people

  all coming together

  in order to

  both protect

  each other

  but usually the men

  who will serve as the policing agents,

  therefore the interests of black women

  are subordinated

  and the black men

  become the

  machismo heroes,

  because they’re the ones who defy

  and women can’t do that.

  Why,

  because,

  you know, these folks who you’re defying

  themselves are machismo,

  so you need a machismo person to respond to the machismo.

  So you get dis

  encounter

  between two machismo heroes,

  you see,

  and it takes courage.

  I don’t wanna downplay these machismo heroes

  but it’s still within a patriarchal mode,

  it’s still very much within a patriarchal mode,

  and it reproduces and recycles the same kinda conception of what it

  is to engage

  in

  struggle

  and what it is to

  attempt to gain

  some progress,

  as it were,

  and hence what I think we end up with is a certain kind

  of turf policing.

  The best we can do

  is hold up

  a bloodstained banner

  of a black struggle that is rooted in moral vision

  and yet

  acknowledging the fact

  that a power str
uggle

  will be fundamental for any change, so you don’t wanna be naive

  and on the other hand you don’t also wanna just become

  amoral at the same time

  or give up

  on

  the broader possibilities of humann

  beings engaging in interaction that accents our humanness,

  more than simply our, uh,

  our delusory foundations,

  race or gender or whatever.

  Uh,

  but!

  ass,

  you know,

  ass the bess we can do,

  ass the bess anybody can do at any moment of human history

  is simply hold up the bess of what you see in the pass,

  no guarantee whatsoever

  that, one, it will ever triumph or, two,

  that it will ever gain a mass following.

  I mean for me

  it, it, it,

  the real marking was the, uh,

  the demise of

  the innernat …

  the demise of

  the Black Panther Party, which was the

  last representation

  of

  internationalism

  and multiracialism

  grounded in the black community,

  you see,

  ’cause

  what the Black Panther Party was trying to do

  was ta take duh best of the boldness and defiance of Malcolm X,

  which is often machismo-driven

  but also quite authentic

  in terms of its critiques of white supremacy, but also

  link it to

  a certain internationalism

  that acknowledged the roles of people of color,

  that acknowledged the role of progressive white persons,

  that acknowledged the role of all

  whosoever will

  identify

  with poor

  people and working people,

  and, uh,

  Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, given all their faults,

  did have that kind of broad,

  all-embracing vision that people forget.

  I mean that broad international perspective, you see,

  and it was not closing ranks,

  it was not just a kind of narrow black nationalism that they were

  putting forward,

  at all,

  at all.

  Uh,

  but once that went under

  it became very clear

  that we were in a moment of dissarray,

  and, of course,

  the conservative forces,

  business classes, especially corporate elites, unified, consolidated, and

  then

  were able to bring to bear their own policies

  in reshaping society,

  primarily in their own interest,

  and that’s what we been up against for the past nineteen, twenty

  years.

  Yeah.

  No, well, good luck,

  good luck

  indeed in deed.

  I’m always pullin’ an’ prayin’ for ya.

  (BLACKOUT)

  Here’s a Nobody