Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  • • •

  Dashonte Malcolm, known to his family and friends as Cool, was sixteen when we met, a good-looking, well-spoken African-American with manners that reflect both training and instinct, and a sense of humor about himself. He seems like a fellow you’d trust with your checkbook or your sister, so it was easy to believe that he was locked up because of someone else’s bad behavior. “This is my first offense,” he said, hanging his head, “and my last.” While many of the kids at the Home School evinced embarrassment about the humiliation of being stripped of basic freedoms, Dashonte seemed genuinely remorseful about his crime.

  Dashonte’s father, a bus driver, had died of an alcohol-triggered stroke when Dashonte was five, and his mother, Audrey, had brought up her only son in the tough neighborhoods of south Minneapolis under the general patronage of her imposing father, the bishop of Minnesota of the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, with forty-four churches under his aegis—a man by whose air of grand authority I was always slightly awed. Audrey Malcolm is large and beautiful, with soft eyes and an aura of quiet dignity. She enfolds you in good cheer, although closer observation reveals that she is somewhat reserved beneath her outgoing manner. Audrey and Dashonte live six blocks from her parents, and her brothers and sisters all live within a mile; they see one another almost every day. Dashonte describes his mom as his best friend; he told me he was thinking about having her face tattooed on his arm “so I’d always have her with me.”

  Audrey had moved a neighborhood away from the worst part of the ghetto to distance Dashonte from crime. “But there was always that thing picking at me, to go back to where the trouble was,” Dashonte said. He described himself as “a badass” in school. According to Audrey, he got into scuffles, “always protecting somebody else.” She added, “You want him to be compassionate, so some things you have to live with.”

  In third grade, a new kid arrived at Dashonte’s school: Darius Stewart from Tallahassee. They got into a horrendous fight because Darius was allegedly harassing a smaller child. “They tore the classroom up,” Audrey recalled. “Chairs flew, desks flew.” The next day Dashonte and his opponent were best friends. Audrey didn’t like Darius’s influence, and she switched Dashonte to another school in sixth grade, to separate them. Two years later, Darius enrolled at the new school. When Dashonte was sixteen, Audrey bought him a car because public transportation was a prime setting for gang recruitment. Darius didn’t have a car, and Dashonte took to giving him rides. After Dashonte crashed his car, Audrey told him to ride the public bus, but he complained that he was being drawn into gang life, so she bought him his second car.

  Audrey was to buy Dashonte five cars before he turned eighteen. He wrecked three of them and maintained that each of those crashes was the other driver’s fault. With the image of those wrecked cars in mind, I listened to the rest of his story. “Darius started getting more dependent, so I moved Cool out of his school, again,” Audrey explained. Darius showed up at the new school’s orientation. Soon thereafter, Dashonte came home from time on the town with Darius, and Audrey smelled alcohol on his breath. “I told him, ‘Had your dad not been an alcoholic, he’d be living right here with you. Cool, you’re going down. And I’m not going to let this happen, even if I have to lock your butt in the house for the rest of your life.’” To Dashonte, however, separation from Darius was almost inconceivable. “We were like brothers,” he said.

  The offense that landed Dashonte behind bars was aggravated assault. He and Darius had picked up a girl at a bus stop and wanted to go to a pool hall tournament that had a $7 admission fee. Darius proposed robbing someone. Dashonte had a gun and they found a boy alone, threatened him, and took $80 along with his jacket and sneakers. The news traveled around school after Darius wore the stolen clothing. Darius and Dashonte were arrested. “The detectives called and said, ‘Aggravated robbery and assault.’ I couldn’t fathom it,” Audrey said. She insisted that her son had never had guns—she searched his room from time to time and she knew. She walked into the Juvenile Detention Center, and Dashonte started crying. “I said, ‘Cool, I might beat you half to death tomorrow—but I want to know tonight what happened,’” she recalled. “So he saw that I was more with him than against him.”

  At the trial, Darius blamed Dashonte; Dashonte blamed Darius. “Me and him both said that it was ‘death before dishonor,’ but when it came down to it, he got selfish,” Dashonte said. I met them both and found Dashonte a great deal more likable than Darius, but Dashonte undeniably was the one with the gun. Following his arrest, Dashonte spent a week in detention and two months on house arrest, with an ankle bracelet that sent out an alarm signal if he went beyond the garage. He and Audrey sat up late talking, night after night. She kept asking for his motive, but he couldn’t say.

  Both boys were sentenced to eight months at the County Home School. “I felt like, you’ve already humiliated yourself,” Audrey explained. “My mom used to tell us, ‘I don’t care if you killed somebody. I want you to come home and tell me.’ That’s what I wanted Cool to hear: whatever you do, you’re my son. If it was murder, would I turn my back? No way. And I told him that.” Audrey was known at the Home School for being the first visitor to arrive every visiting day, and the last to go. She wrote Dashonte a letter every day and closed each one, “Love you more than life itself, Mom.” She was planning a celebration for Dashonte’s release and had rented a penthouse in Las Vegas for their first weekend together. It was a mutual attachment. I had known Dashonte a month when he was granted his first off-premises time—four hours with his social worker. I asked what he was going to do, and he was definite: “I’m going to Bath & Body Works to buy my mom a birthday present.”

  There’s a fine line between heroic love and willful blindness, and Audrey Malcolm has visited both sides of that line. “He said he didn’t even think the boy they held up really took offense, because he was laughing at them through the whole thing,” she told me. “Cool actually tried to give the money back, and Darius snatched it out of his hand.” I wanted to believe what his mother believed, but both staff and other inmates told me that Dashonte was actually in the Bloods. It was easier to learn the hereditary titles of dynastic China than it was to get a handle on all the gangs in Minneapolis and how they overlapped. “I have older cousins that had their own little gang,” Dashonte explained. That gang was the Fergusons—which sounded to me more like an indie band than like a sinister operation devoted to programmatic violence. “The Fergusons, their family is all Bloods,” Dashonte added, “and we used to have little wars, in the school hallway after lunch, fun, fighting for real, but it was just all smiles.” When I mentioned the gang to Audrey, she said that Dashonte had always had a need to be popular and pretended to be a gang member to get respect.

  Dashonte admitted that acting out had been gratifying for him. “I had a lot of anger after I realized I didn’t have a father,” he said. I came to understand gangs as an answer to his hunger for male connection—a counterweight to his church heritage and the intense intimacy of his relationship with his mother. He explained his gang affiliation like this: “A lot of ’em are your blood family, or people married to my girl cousins, and people you’re not related to at all, but you just feel like you’re related. Having parties, just hanging out at the park, or just joking with each other—I liked that. Fighting for territory and just rivalries, that was secondary.”

  Shortly before Dashonte was released, I went with his mother to the Emmanuel Tabernacle Church of God in Christ. We arrived as people were streaming in, the women in bell-shaped hats that matched their dresses and handbags, their stiletto-heeled shoes adorned with diamanté butterflies and silk blossoms; the men in dandyish confections of suits, with pleats and gathered neckties. The atmosphere was warm and friendly. I greeted Dashonte’s grandmother, the first lady of the church. A man was already in the pulpit, and soon a woman got up and started singing, and before long, everyone was singing, accompanied by a Hammond organ and a drum
set. Periodically someone would say, “Praise the Lord!” or “I need you, Jesus.” First-time visitors to the church were asked to stand and introduce ourselves. The first woman who spoke up said, “I am on business in the Twin Cities and it is Sunday, and I was not going to let this blessed day go by because without Jesus I am nothing!” A second made a similar speech that ended, “I am here today to be brought out of sin! Hallelujah!” Then the microphone was passed to me. Meekly I said, “I am here as a guest of Audrey Malcolm and Mother Forbes, and I am so moved by this congregation’s faith.” Everyone clapped.

  The bishop was performing a consecration that day, so the head of the Sunday school preached. He began by talking about how parents didn’t want to see what their kids were doing wrong, and referred to 2 Samuel and to 1 Corinthians as models for vigilance. “You’ve got to watch the company your kids is keeping,” he said, “and when they start in with that wrong crowd, that wrong crowd is going to bring them down and they will do wrong.” I was struck by this blaming of the “wrong crowd” that somehow compromised the natural purity of the kids of this church. Then began the enumeration of evil. The people of the church must rise against the “principality of homosexuality,” and the modern moneylenders must be expelled from the holy places. The notion that the problems of black people in Minneapolis were the fault of gays and Jews or bankers reminded me of the excuses for Dashonte’s three car crashes, or the notion that Darius had tricked Dashonte into malfeasance. The congregation’s generosity braided with militancy and a hatred of otherness was oddly reminiscent of the gang ethos. The community saw this mix of harshness and kindness as an extension of a Christ who embodied both infinite love and the terrible verdicts of Judgment Day.

  I called on the Malcolms six months later. Dashonte was out of the Home School; his grandmother came over, and the four of us had lemonade and carrot cake. “You know, as bad as I hate to say it,” Audrey told me, “this was probably one of the better things that could have happened to Cool. It was overkill. But he needed a deterrent.” I had heard that he still belonged to the Bloods, but with his mother in the room, he described the fine life he had imagined for himself, with a wife and an office job. It felt more like tact than deception. “Gang life is always going to be on my mind,” Dashonte conceded when I later spoke with him alone. “When I’m at that desk job, it’s going to be, ‘What could I be doing right now if I was on the streets?’ But if you’re selling drugs, you’ve got to keep your guard up. Sometimes you can’t even trust your cousin, your mom. And I’m through with that.” You don’t quit a gang in some grand ceremony; you let the affiliation peter out, often with ambivalence. I wanted to believe in Dashonte’s resolve, but at that stage, his innocence felt like a flexible, daily decision.

  Loyalty turned out to be Audrey’s strong suit. Unlike most interview subjects, she always expected our conversation to be a two-way street. When I finally told her I was gay, she wrote me a letter that said in part, “Thank you so much for being open and honest with us. Nothing has changed as a result of you telling us that you are gay and have a partner. You never judged us because we were black, or because Cool was locked up, or because I’m a single parent raising a son alone and living in the inner city. Some don’t get a chance at love and happiness, and now I know you to have that chance, and I’m happy. I choose friends because of their hearts. I’m sure God brought us together as friends for a greater purpose.”

  I came to love my visits with the Malcolms. Dashonte didn’t quite get the white-collar job he’d talked about, but he managed to avoid serious trouble and did not return to prison. When he met a girl he really liked, he talked about her with joy; soon enough, they were engaged. In the end, his mother had believed him into becoming who he had sometimes pretended to be. Her gift for faith proved strong enough to achieve redemption not only in the next world, but also right here in this one.

  • • •

  I resolved to write about parents of criminals after seeing a television interview with Paul Van Houten, in 2002. His daughter Leslie was one of the Manson girls, members of a quasi-commune in the 1960s who committed vicious crimes under their charismatic leader’s instruction. In August 1969, Leslie stabbed grocer Rosemary LaBianca fourteen times in the back. Thirty-three years later, Paul Van Houten appeared on Larry King Live to plead for parole for his daughter. “If Leslie had never smoked her first marijuana cigarette, this would never have happened,” Paul Van Houten said. “You’re blaming it on marijuana?” asked an incredulous King. “With marijuana and LSD, Manson was able to maneuver these people,” Paul said. King rebutted, “Millions have smoked marijuana and didn’t go kill people.” An expert on the program added that Leslie hadn’t been on drugs when she committed the crime. I was riveted by Paul’s blindness to his daughter’s free choice to murder. It reminded me of the parents of deaf children who couldn’t understand that those children would never use spoken language happily or fluently, or the parents of people with schizophrenia who still fantasized that their intact children were only waiting to be revealed again.

  Soon afterward, I read an interview with the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, in which she described how she became alienated from her son as he moved toward fundamentalist Islam, criticized her for not wearing a veil, and was inspired by a cousin to refuse womanly jobs such as making his bed. Still, his mother was unprepared for seeing her son’s face on TV in connection with the attacks. “How could he be involved in such a thing?” she said. “I cannot eat. I cannot sleep. I keep saying to myself, ‘Could this be?’ All my children, they each had their own rooms. They had pocket money. They went on vacations. I could understand if he had grown up unhappy or poor. But they had everything.” The quotations bespeak a relationship between a mother who had no idea who her son had become and a son who had no wish to tell her.

  A young man from a middle-class family whom I met when he was serving in a juvenile prison told me he stole and crashed cars “because I can.” Dan Patterson never cared about the things once he had them—he had proudly traded a $300 car stereo for a pack of cigarettes. When I asked about the cars’ owners, he said, “What the fuck did they ever do for me?” At seventeen, he was on his tenth car-theft arrest. He talked about despair in his interactions with his parents. “When we tried to talk, it was always like there was a glass window in front of us. One time the cops picked me up and then let me go home. My dad was just like, ‘Well, go to bed. I’ll talk to you later.’ So I went to bed, and about a half hour later I went out the window, and I took off again. And later, when he asked me why I did it, I told him, ‘Because you didn’t try talking to me.’” When Dan appeared in court, his mother said on the stand, “This is not my son. He’s not that kind of person. Why can’t I just take him home?” I asked Dan when he started lying to his parents. “When they stopped noticing who I am,” he said.

  Lionel Dahmer’s book, A Father’s Story, describes his relationship with his son Jeffrey, who killed seventeen young men in Milwaukee between 1978 and 1991. The memoir is both a celebrity biography and a cry for expiation. Jeffrey was clearly a disturbed child from a troubled family, but most boys from troubled families do not develop a sexual obsession with murdering, dissecting, and eating their victims. Lionel wrote, “My life became an exercise in avoidance and denial. Now, when I think of those final days, I see myself in some kind of mental crouch, half expecting some sudden blow, but hoping against hope that it would never hit. It was as if I had locked my son in a soundproof booth, then drawn the curtains so that I could neither hear nor see what he had become.”

  Such denial to the point of dissociation is not infrequent. In Capital Consequences: Families of the Condemned Tell Their Stories, Rachel King follows nine families as they struggle with death sentences. She includes the story of Esther Herman, whose son Dave committed a vicious murder, then came home for Christmas and refrained from mentioning his crime. “I had two very active businesses, and health issues, and was
overseeing the care of people, and I was pretty much overburdened,” Esther said. “Mother and my brother were in very bad health. It was an extremely difficult time. [Dave] was always a very kind person. He didn’t want to overload me.” In describing Dave’s trial, Esther said, “We had not provided Dave with a healthy, loving environment growing up. We fought a lot and there was a lot of tension in our home. Even so, Dave had been a good person.” The psychological conundrum for the child in Dave’s position is that it is extremely alienating—even traumatic—to have parents who are in denial about who you are. A mother who would think you are “a very kind person” and “a good person” even after you’ve committed murder makes you feel you have to do yet wilder, more dramatic things to be credited with agency. Parental denial, ironically, may contribute to the unspeakable crimes that it later renders invisible.

  • • •

  As a child, Noel Marsh often saw his father, Tyrone, beating his mother, Felicity; Tyrone pushed Felicity down the stairs while she was pregnant with triplets, causing one fetus to die. Felicity’s first job was to protect Noel, and her identification with him as a beleaguered victim would handicap all their future relations. She left Tyrone and married Steve Tompkins when Noel was six; of the five children she brought with her, Noel was her favorite. Steve found his new situation extremely difficult. “Anything Noel wanted, if she couldn’t come up with it, then she felt like she was doing wrong,” he said. Noel exploited these concerns relentlessly, trying to drive a wedge between Felicity and Steve when he thought he could profit by it.

  Noel’s transgressions began to accumulate. “The late hours; the lying; the stealing,” Steve recalled. Felicity insisted that Noel couldn’t be the one taking money from her purse. Steve would say, “Felicity, ain’t nobody else here, baby. Why won’t you wake up your eyes and see that Noel is not Noel anymore?” The situation inevitably created marital friction. Then Steve was diagnosed with pulmonary disease and was hospitalized for almost two months. After Steve returned home, Noel’s erratic behavior escalated. Felicity recalled, “I used to ask him, ‘Noel, do you hate me that much? I never would’ve dreamed that you would put the pressure and feelings you have on me.’” He asked her to tell the police he was home when he wasn’t. “I stopped being me when I started to lie for him,” she said.