Rest in Power

by Sybrina Fulton

  “Oh, my God, I cannot believe you are doing this,” my mother said, because I’d always been strong. But in that moment I realized how much family really meant to me—not just the idea, but the physical presence of family, the closeness, the way the people you love can create a kind of soft, gentle barrier around you that makes everything seem easier. When my family left me, alone in that strange place, that lonely place, I felt a chill wind, a sense of isolation I’d never known before. After a while I calmed down and slowly went back into the dorm. A year and a half later I was still homesick, and when I came home for Christmas break, I never went back. I enrolled in the University of Miami for one expensive semester, before transferring to what was then called Florida Memorial College, where I majored in English with a minor in communications.

  My ambition was a career in television, either as a reporter or someone who worked behind the scenes, but when I interned at a Miami television and radio station, Channel 10 and 99 Jamz, everyone told me, “You’re going to have to leave Miami to go to one of the smaller markets to get more experience.”

  I thought about it, but worried, Maybe this is going to be just like Grambling, homesick all over again.

  I decided I wanted to remain close to home. In 1989, I left college to do what I had always done: go to work. My first full-time job was working for Miami-Dade County as a console security specialist.

  I sat at a desk that faced a wall of small TV monitors, fifty in all, each connected to a closed-circuit camera around the county. I was also given seven different two-way radios that connected me to various nearby security companies. My job was to monitor the cameras and alert the security companies by radio whenever I saw something suspicious or whenever an alarm went off. So I kept an eye out for anything I thought might be suspicious—never targeting a demographic category. I learned how to size people up rather quickly, without having to resort to simplistic profiling.

  It was a job in security, I suppose, except it wasn’t dangerous; occasionally there would be a minor break-in or other petty crime to report, but mostly my shift included homeless people sleeping where they shouldn’t, vandalism, and cats and dogs triggering false alarms. It was a good, solid job. I was in my twenties. I was dating and had been proposed to twice. I felt like I was at the beginning of something; the start, maybe, to a life that worked, surrounded, still, by the family I loved in my hometown.

  It wasn’t love at first sight. But Tracy Martin grew on me. I met him at the Miami-Dade County Solid Waste Management Christmas party in 1993. I was still working for the county, but had been promoted to code-enforcement officer, writing tickets for violations, mostly to people dumping trash in front of their homes. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it offered stability. I was still good at quickly sizing people up. But when Tracy’s brother Mike, who worked as a truck driver for the county, brought Tracy over to meet me, he wasn’t easy to size up or understand.

  Tracy was very tall, thin, and really lean. When he said, “How you doin’, Sybrina?” his baritone voice was inflected with a thick accent from a faraway place—well, not that far away: he told me he was born in Miami but raised in East St. Louis. But it wasn’t his voice that drew me in: we seemed to click from the start. He was friendly and funny, and I just felt, somehow, although I still can’t figure out why, I just felt we had met before.

  He asked me out a few weeks later. Everything about Tracy Martin was different. He was hilarious and gentle, but also bold and self-confident. His already impressive height was topped by a high-top fade. I liked him, and came to love him, enough to say yes when he proposed. We were both twenty-seven.

  On June 11, 1994, we were married in a big Miami wedding, filled with friends and family, at a banquet hall. We moved into a small, two-bedroom apartment. In the beginning, it was Tracy, my son Jahvaris, then an active and intelligent four-year-old bundle of joy, and me, beginning a new life of hard work, faith, and family.

  Our baby, Trayvon, was born the following year, on February 5, 1995. My mom and Tracy’s mom were with Tracy and me in the delivery room. I wasn’t asleep, just relaxed from the anesthesia, and in that state I remembered the prediction of a psychic I had visited some years before. I had gone with a friend, thinking I’d only wait for her while the psychic performed her reading. When we got there, the psychic looked at me, and even though I was at the back of a line of people outside, she took me by the hand and said, “I’ll read you first.”

  She was a middle-aged Puerto Rican woman wearing a bright-colored dress covered in gold beads, and she led me into her reading room. She began shuffling tarot cards and then placed them down on the table. She then took my hand in hers and started peering down at my palm.

  She told me she could see my future clearly. “You’re a strong person, ambitious, very spiritual, and you will live a long time. You care about people, like to help people. As for children, you’ll only have boys, never girls.”

  I wasn’t sure if I believed in fortune-tellers, but I sensed that what she was saying was true and felt a quick surge of mixed emotions. I had always been close to little boys; everybody in our community seemed to do so much for little girls—teaching them, keeping them safe—and I felt that boys needed someone on their side, too. But, of course, I also knew that black and brown boys had a harder struggle ahead of them—not only with the temptations of drugs and crime, but just to get the basic things that should have been theirs by right: education and employment. So I was always there for my two brothers and my male cousins and nephews. And now I promised myself that I’d always be there for my son, Jahvaris, and also the baby that was now pushing to escape my womb and come out into the world.

  Trayvon came out screaming. After they cleaned him off and wrapped him in a blanket, the nurse laid him on my chest and I thanked God for this miracle, this ultimate blessing. I could feel his heart beating so fast, right alongside mine, so close that it made me cry. Then and there, I made a promise: to do my best for this child, as a mother, an example, a counselor, and a friend.

  From the beginning, Trayvon was a playful child. We called him “Crazy Legs” at one point, because his legs were so long, just like his dad’s. As soon as he could crawl, those legs were moving, and little Trayvon was trying to escape that two-bedroom Miami apartment. He was always on the go. He would bother everything, and sometimes I’d make him sit down and watch TV, just to keep him still. He loved cartoons, was glued to them: Ninja Turtles, Batman, Superman, Barney, and most of all, Winnie the Pooh, which he watched so much that we exchanged Crazy Legs for “Pooh” as his nickname, and even dressed him as Winnie the Pooh for Halloween two years in a row.

  By 1997, I had returned to Florida Memorial University to complete my degree. Trayvon was two and Jahvaris was six, two little boys I’d dress in identical clothing, always sitting side by side under my chair or on my lap while I was studying in the university library or at home. I took them everywhere with me because Tracy was always working. From early on, I impressed on them the importance of excelling. “I graduated from high school and college, and you have to not only do what I did, you have to exceed what I did,” I would tell them. “Because each generation has to do a little bit better than the last generation.”

  When Trayvon was five, Tracy and I split up, but agreed to share custody. Trayvon and Jahvaris would spend the weekdays with me, and then Tracy had them on the weekends, picking them up at the house on Friday afternoon and bringing them back either Sunday night or Monday morning. It wasn’t always easy, but we stayed close.

  By the time Trayvon was nine, he had begun calling me “Cupcake” because, he said, “you’re so sweet.” He wanted to do everything for me. If I was sick, he wanted to be my doctor. When I was tired, he wanted to be the cook. He could already make breakfast and, soon, dinner. He carried grocery bags, moved furniture, cleaned the house, babysat his young cousins, washed my car, everything.

  Sometimes I would even pretend that I couldn’t do things just to give him a chance to do
the work he loved. He would tell me, with his big smile, “I’ve got it, Cupcake.”

  He was a mama’s boy, always with me, always affectionate, kissing and hugging me, sitting beside me, walking alongside me and holding my hand. But as he grew, his world expanded. He would introduce himself to everyone who crossed his path and then dub them a “friend.”

  I always taught my sons the importance of good manners. Once, when I took Trayvon and Jahvaris to visit my mom and dad, Trayvon rushed in and just started talking like he had been there the entire time. No Good evening. How are you? Just talking a blue streak. I marched him right back outside that door.

  “You will not come into my mother’s house without speaking!” I told him.

  And I made him make his entrance all over again, this time saying, “Good evening. How are you this evening?”

  Whatever he did, he did with all of his heart and soul. He didn’t just ride his bike; he had to build a ramp, on which he would ride on his bicycle—fast—so the bike would take him high into the air. He played football for two youth teams, basketball, wrestling, and played drums in the school band. When he turned fourteen and his junior league football days were over, he kept going to the park. He worked at the concession stand with his father, who ran it, but he also worked with the younger kids at the park, making sure they had their uniforms, helping them get on the field on time, and doing whatever else he could, until I had to say, “Trayvon, we have to go home now!”

  Two summers before his death, Trayvon found his future in Opa-Locka, at the airport near our home. That summer, he joined Experience Aviation, a summer camp founded by the legendary pilot Barrington Irving. Irving was raised in inner-city Miami and, in 2007 at age twenty-three, became the first black pilot to fly solo around the world. Miami to Miami. The flight took ninety-seven days and twenty-six stops to complete. He designed his summer camp to help kids become more knowledgeable about aviation and, through aviation, build their skills in other areas, including reading, math, and science. One day at the camp, Trayvon sat in the cockpit of Barrington Irving’s globe-trotting airplane. When he came home, he still had stars in his eyes. “Mom, I know what I’m going to do,” he told me. He had decided on a career in aviation: either as a mechanic (because he could fix anything) or as a professional pilot. He couldn’t decide which, except that he was determined to be around planes.

  He was a child of Miami, Florida, the great melting pot of nationalities: whites, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Haitians, Bahamians, South Americans, Chinese, Vietnamese….People from all over the world call Miami home. We taught Trayvon to respect the differences of others, but also to always remember who he was. He was an African American. But that was never all he was. We sent Trayvon Martin into the world not as a young black man, but as a young man.

  By the time he was seventeen, Trayvon was 140 pounds and almost six feet tall. He was a typical Miami teenager, eager to do everything all at once. He’d already seen a world outside Miami: I’d taken Trayvon and Jahvaris on skiing and snowboarding trips to Colorado so they could have a white Christmas, and we’d recently been to New York, where Trayvon fell in love with the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and the Empire State Building and saw his first Broadway play. He was very particular about his clothes and his appearance, his haircut, his cologne, and, most of all, his shoes. He collected Air Jordans, though I couldn’t afford to buy a new pair of $100 to $200 shoes every time a new style was released. “If you can earn the money, I’ll take you to get the shoes,” I would tell him. He went to work, doing odd jobs for family members and friends—washing cars, cutting grass, trimming hedges, pulling weeds, babysitting—until he had enough for the shoes. Sometimes, if he fell short, I would pay the difference, and Trayvon would stand in line from six A.M. until the store opened at ten—because he always had to be the first to get whatever was new.

  When he said he wanted the new $80-a-bottle Issey Miyake cologne, I drew the line, for a simple reason: it was too expensive! Instead, I gave him a bottle as a birthday gift when he turned seventeen, on February 5, 2012. Two weeks after that, we celebrated my birthday by going horseback riding. We were all beginners. But Trayvon, who had only ridden ponies before, led our group as if he’d been riding all of his life.

  I can still hear him calling his friends to tell them about the horseback ride on his ever-present cellphone. He kept earbuds in his ears at all times, because he could use them to listen to music or talk on the phone. And he rarely removed his gray or black hoodie, which he wore spring, summer, winter, and fall, even though Miami really only has one season: hot.

  At first, I didn’t like the hoodie, and would tell him to take it off. It was something the teenagers were wearing that I wasn’t used to. Hoodies weren’t in style when I was growing up. But Trayvon, who felt he was making a fashion statement, would rarely remove it. So once I realized that all the teenagers were wearing them, I was okay with it.

  —

  As he got deeper into his teens, his teachers generally found him pleasant and smart. But there were some dark clouds, too. Problems began just before the start of his eleventh-grade school year, when I transferred him from Miami Carol City Senior High, a school he loved, to a good school closer to our house, Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High.

  Away from the teachers and friends who’d been his community for years, he didn’t always apply himself. At Carol City, in advanced classes, he had been a B and C student; at Krop, he was making Cs and Ds. By the fall of 2011, school seemed to take a backseat to everything else that was happening in Trayvon’s life: his haircut, his clothes, his social activities, going to parties, and, of course, girls. He lost focus. I kept telling myself that these were the typical ups and downs that a lot of teenagers go through, that Trayvon was still the same person I’d known for his whole life. And he was a good kid. Still, Tracy and I started to worry.

  He started missing classes, and then entire school days. When he would show up to school, he would frequently be late. The school receptionist would call the house to report his absences.

  At first, they would reach my older brother, Ronnie, who, after being left a quadriplegic in an automobile accident many years ago, had come to live with us. Like all of us, Ronnie adored Trayvon, who helped take care of him, frequently cooking meals and feeding him. So when the school called to report tardiness and absences, Ronnie would cover for Trayvon, and word never got back to me.

  When I finally caught wind of the calls, I started taking Trayvon to school myself, which, strangely, he liked. It gave us a chance to talk—about small things, but the sort of talks that teenagers need in order to feel a connection to their moms, to be reminded of the gentle, familiar intimacy of family during a time of tough transitions—but our time was always short. “Hurry, Trayvon! Let’s go!” I was forever saying, because I needed to get to work on time. Like so many mothers I’ve met, the shortage was never love or concern or desire. But time was short.

  Trayvon was still finding his share of trouble. In February 2012, he was disciplined for being in an unauthorized area of the school and writing “WTF” on a locker in the school hallway. When the security guards searched his backpack, they found a screwdriver, which they called a “burglary tool,” and some women’s jewelry: rings and earrings. Trayvon admitted the jewelry wasn’t his, but because he wouldn’t tell the administrator who it belonged to, he received a ten-day suspension from school.

  This had gone too far. When he came home, I sat him down. We were in my living room, him on the sofa, me on the love seat, me dressed for work, him in his everyday jeans and polo shirt, me demanding answers, him quiet and very careful with his words, because he knew I was upset and, even worse, disappointed in him.

  “Why did you have it?” I asked him about the jewelry. “Where did it come from?” I tried to stay calm, but I’m sure my voice was laced with tension.

  He said it belonged to a friend, whose name he wouldn’t reveal—and would never reveal—to me or to the s
chool administrators. I had always impressed on Trayvon and his brother the importance of making commonsense decisions—and this didn’t make sense. This was much bigger than skipping school; I needed to know why.

  “Where. Did. You. Get this?” I asked again, my voice rising.

  “From my friend,” he said.

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  He looked away and said nothing. The silence between us lingered for a few moments.

  “You’re going to have to be more responsible,” I said, finally.

  “I know,” he said.

  “If you keep getting suspended you’re not going to graduate on time,” I said. “And if you don’t graduate, you’re going to have to stay in school for an extra year.”

  “Oh, no, Mom, I want to graduate,” he said.

  “Well, then you need to work hard and stay out of trouble,” I said. “You need to stop doing whatever all of those other kids you are associating with are doing.”

  “Well, I’ll just be by myself,” he said.

  And I said, “That sounds like a good plan.”

  For the first few days of his suspension, he was at home, and my mother, brother, and aunt Leona kept him busy doing odd jobs. For the second week of the ten-day suspension, he was set to go on a trip with his father to Sanford, Florida, a city of around fifty thousand people just outside Orlando. Tracy was going to Sanford to attend a convention.

  The week before he was to leave for Sanford, Trayvon grew tired of all the odd jobs we were lining up for him. He was ready to get out of Miami. So Tracy, who had to work and couldn’t drive up to Sanford until Friday, suggested that Trayvon go a few days earlier than him and spend time with Tracy’s girlfriend, Brandy, and her son, Chad.

  Tracy thought it might do Trayvon some good to go with him to Sanford, and said he would use the opportunity to talk with Trayvon, father to son, to get him back on the right track before he went back to school the following week.