Better, Not Bitter Page 4

  I never got a chance to ask her why she did that. She lost her ability to speak after having a stroke, and she passed away in 2014. But I know it was her clandestine way of sending me a message of confidence. Like the stories of people sending coded secret messages in letters during the World Wars, in the way she addressed her letters to me, my Mommie was telling me to straighten my back. She was telling me that I was a master of my faith. She was telling me that this should not define me and that I was bigger than the box they wanted to put me in. And I took those “secret” messages to heart. I became the Master of my fate, even behind bars.

  Even toward the end of her life, after suffering multiple strokes, my grandmother still exuded moments of regalness. One day we were in a cab together going toward my mom’s apartment, and at this point she had lost her speech. As we pulled up, she said, clear as day, “Pay the man.” But even when she couldn’t speak, she would express her excitement and joy. There was a loving fullness to her gaze. She would look at me in a way that clearly said, “That’s my grandson, the one I call Master Yusef Salaam.”

  There’s power in a name. Even more than the name itself, there’s power in the name you answer to. Those two things intersect in many ways, I’ve learned. Writer Mia Sogoba writes in her essay, “The Power of a Name”:

  In West African culture, many factors are at work in the naming process and a seemingly simple name can hold someone’s entire biography. A West African name is much more than a simple, functional tag to identify someone. It is a symbol, an emblem.

  A name can shape a person’s character, mold their social identity, and even influence their destiny. The meaning attached to a name will determine much about the present and the future of a child.

  I would learn this to be true about my own name. But first, I needed to know the names of One greater than me.

  I remember a day early on in the trial when I was going back and forth between court and the youth facility. A man came up to me, said he was Muslim, and greeted me. That wasn’t so strange. I’d encountered many different people as we traveled back and forth from Spofford to the courthouse. Some people would offer words of encouragement and support. Others would spew hatred, like when a white guy pointed his fingers at me as if he were squeezing the trigger of a gun. It could go either way.

  Nevertheless, this man was different. I was startled by what he said: “Your father gave me this book for you.” Mind you, I was fifteen years old, and I hadn’t seen or talked to my father since I was four. This man pressed the book into my hands. It was The 99 Beautiful Names of Allah, and I still have it to this day. What was interesting about the text was that it was framed as a book of prescriptions—yes, like medical prescriptions. The implication was that within the 99 names of the Creator, you could find a remedy for whatever ailed you. For instance, if you were sick, you would call on one of His names from the Faith, Shafi. Shafi is the Healer, and you could say, “Ya, Shafi, oh Healer, heal me. I need Your help.”

  As confused as I was that my absent father sent me the book through a stranger, I do consider it a cherished offering for the journey I was on. It was my first encounter with the power of naming, and it would not be my last. I would soon confront my own name and its meaning.

  Salaam is one of the names of God/Allah. Muslims, because they’re not allowed to call themselves by the names of Allah, will often put Abdul, Abdur, or Abdus before the name of God to distinguish themselves from the mighty Creator. While it’s not what’s on my birth certificate, in my faith tradition, my name is Yusef Abdus Salaam.

  So when Jerome Jones, the corrections officer, asked me that question, “Who are you?” I didn’t know where to begin the journey of finding out. Yet the question opened my mind and, in a way, gave me permission to start the process of self-discovery. And what better place to start than the beginning? With my name.

  My father brought Islam to our family, and my mother converted immediately afterward. I was born into a Muslim household, and so we didn’t have baby showers celebrating a child prior to their birth. In Islamic tradition, parents were to observe the baby for seven days and then name the child based on what they saw. On the seventh day, my parents called family and friends to the baby-naming ceremony and pronounced me to be Yusef Idris Faadel Abdus Salaam.

  But growing up, I never knew what my name meant. My mother and father likely knew, but I never asked. Understanding the origins of my name and ultimately what they might have “observed” in those seven days became a starting point to answering Jerome’s pivotal question. I began diving into book after book, finding out, in one instance, that the Arabic equivalent in English of the name Yusef is Joseph. Joseph/Yusuf/Yusef means “God will increase.” The literal meaning that I found in one book said, “He enlarges.” Meaning God enlarges, increases, makes bigger.

  This of course led me to the biblical Joseph, who is also Yusuf () in the Qur’an. This is where the prophetic nature of our naming traditions began to reveal itself.

  Joseph/Yusuf () was the dream interpreter who was placed in charge of the pharaoh’s palace. But he did not start out that way. Before that, he was in prison. And prior to prison, his brothers, in their jealousy, had wanted to kill him. But then they said, “Let’s not kill him. Let’s put him in the well. Hopefully, somebody will pick him up and he’ll be done with.” And sure enough, Joseph/Yusuf () was put in the well. But he was also rescued, though it didn’t look pretty. He was taken as a slave. And despite that, he did not die. It was not his time to die. Later, after being falsely accused of sexual assault, he was placed in prison.

  Pharaoh sent for Joseph, and he was quickly brought from the dungeon. When he had shaved and changed his clothes, he came before Pharaoh.

  Pharaoh said to Joseph, “I had a dream, and no one can interpret it. But I have heard it said of you that when you hear a dream you can interpret it.”

  “I cannot do it,” Joseph replied to Pharaoh, “but God will give Pharaoh the answer he desires…

  “It is just as I said to Pharaoh: God has shown Pharaoh what he is about to do. Seven years of great abundance are coming throughout the land of Egypt, but seven years of famine will follow them. Then all the abundance in Egypt will be forgotten, and the famine will ravage the land. The abundance in the land will not be remembered, because the famine that follows it will be so severe. The reason the dream was given to Pharaoh in two forms is that the matter has been firmly decided by God, and God will do it soon.

  “And now let Pharaoh look for a discerning and wise man and put him in charge of the land of Egypt. Let Pharaoh appoint commissioners over the land to take a fifth of the harvest of Egypt during the seven years of abundance. They should collect all the food of these good years that are coming and store up the grain under the authority of Pharaoh, to be kept in the cities for food. This food should be held in reserve for the country, to be used during the seven years of famine that will come upon Egypt, so that the country may not be ruined by the famine.”

  The plan seemed good to Pharaoh and to all his officials. So Pharaoh asked them, “Can we find anyone like this man, one in whom is the spirit of God?”

  Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, “Since God has made all this known to you, there is no one so discerning and wise as you. You shall be in charge of my palace, and all my people are to submit to your orders. Only with respect to the throne will I be greater than you.”

  Genesis 41:14–16, 28–40 (NIV)

  As the story reveals, Joseph/Yusuf () was divinely released from captivity there as well. He would later become governor of all Egypt and a great prophet.

  My sixteen-year-old mind was completely blown! I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I felt like I was unraveling my whole story; my destiny was unfolding right in front of me in these sacred texts.

  In Yusuf’s () story in the Qur’an, it states that Joseph’s brothers didn’t know who they had. The prison guards didn’t know who they had. I would argue that maybe even Joseph didn’t know who they had.
His identity was revealed to him through these miraculous rescues.

  More than forty years ago, my parents observed me for seven days and gave me a name that divinely aligned with my journey.

  As I read the story of Yusuf () in the Qur’an and Joseph in the Bible, I received spiritual nourishment. Over and over I said, Wow, Allah is talking to me. I appreciated that divine nod. I don’t believe myself to be a modern-day Yusuf (), but reading those stories and connecting them to my own helped me realize that Allah’s miracles have not stopped. Sitting in my jail cell at sixteen years old, I learned that I was a miracle waiting to happen. The uncovering of who I was required me to use my choices to participate in that miracle in a meaningful way. Every day I had a chance to push that miracle forward to fruition. I also somehow understood that even when names are forgotten, the justice and reality of God/Allah remains. The time I spent unpacking my first name was also the first time I said to myself, This is Allah’s doing. Allah is allowing this to become a beautiful story, as opposed to the tragedy some people intended.

  It wasn’t too long after reading these sacred texts that I wrote the following poem:

  In between Venus and Mars

  Is the center of our attraction

  Of those connected to the stars

  Hardly a fraction

  It behooves man to work for the day

  when this will all end

  Life is mortal, so follow the way of those heaven sent

  Awaken and receive that which will give you life

  Or remain horizontal and never begin the flight

  For the solution, I’ll descend from amongst the stars

  And I’ll meet you between Venus and Mars.

  There I was, in the Dannemora prison, walking to the mess hall, and these words came pouring into and out of me. I remember saying, “Somebody give me a napkin!” and I wrote and wrote until I couldn’t anymore. I knew it wasn’t my words. I knew that the Creator was speaking to me. I was just a vessel. It was like the revelation of my name had awakened something in me. In my writing of that poem, more of my identity was being revealed.

  More digging led me to the meaning of Idris, my middle name. Idris is the Arabic equivalent to the prophet Enoch in the Bible, and the name means “teacher.” Faadel means “with justice.” And Salaam is a name for God/Allah and means “the Owner and Source of all Peace.” So at sixteen years old, six months into a prison bid for a crime I didn’t commit, and after the prompting of a guard who saw “something” in me I couldn’t yet see, I learned for the first time that my name meant: “God will increase the teacher with justice and peace.”

  Whew!

  The truth is, I was always Yusef Idris Faadel Salaam. Even before the accusation, the trial, and prison. I was this person before I even had a tangible hold on what it meant to be that person. But it was almost as if the moment I learned my name’s meaning was the right time, that I was ready to know it without any doubt. At that moment, with a future that looked bleak, I was ready to understand everything that would happen going forward. I was ready to see the miracle of my life unfold.

  In hindsight, I’m certain I wasn’t the only one who was beginning to see who I was, who I’d always been. I remember being in the youth facility and coming into my cell after being in some other part of the building only to find Tropicana orange juice and Entenmann’s cookies on my bed. When it first happened, it felt like a mirage. I thought maybe I was just longing for the luxuries of home. I kept thinking, Am I tripping? But then I realized that the cookies and juice were real, and I heard my mother’s voice in my head saying, I was raised in the Jim Crow South. In other words: Be suspicious.

  I said, “Man, they’re trying to kill me with the food. I’m not eating that.”

  But once again, bless the kind heart of Ms. Eleanore Faulkner. One day she came up to me and said, “Have you been getting the goodies I’ve been leaving in your cell?”

  “Oh wow! Wow. Yes. Why did you leave those for me?”

  She said, “Yusef, I know you’re not supposed to be here, but I can’t take this key and let you go. Every time I come here, I want to make your time as easy and as sweet as possible. That’s why I bring these things and leave them for you.”

  Whoa.

  She saw me. Really saw me. I don’t think she knew the meaning of my name, but God/Allah used her to protect and shield me. To rescue this Yusef from the destruction others intended.

  This discussion of names reminds me of Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley’s Roots. We read of a man who was told his name was Toby, and he refused to accept it. “No, my name is Kunta,” he said, holding tightly to his name, to his heritage, to the last vestiges of freedom. And there were consequences for his resistance. The slave masters whipped him mercilessly until he submitted to this new name and a new “story” of himself. But he didn’t really submit. We have Haley’s Roots because Kunta only pretended to accept this false narrative. In the miniseries adaptation, we hear Kunta’s resolve: “They can put the chains on your body. Never let them put the chains on your mind.” In order to live, to survive for his children and his children’s children, he chose to hold on to the knowledge of who he was and where he’d come from and bury it deep inside himself.

  I suppose that’s what many of us have to do. In order to survive, to live another day, we have to bury the truth while taking the narratives given to us. The systems and institutions around us make this necessary at times. However, the biggest challenge we face is in not forgetting what we buried. We cannot forget. We must keep the constant reminders of our inherent value in our lives—even when we can’t announce it to the world. If we don’t, we will end up buying into the lies about who we are. Those letters my grandma sent were my reminders. That book my father gave me was a reminder. Unfortunately, many of the young boys and men I was imprisoned alongside had forgotten.

  If we are to have any success, however that’s defined, we must hold on to the truth of who we are. We must fully embrace the power of our names, and the power of the name we answer to.

  We should ask all the questions, we must—and believe me, I have. Why are there so many Black and Brown bodies incarcerated? Why is there a clear and concerted effort to ensure we occupy jails more than we occupy college campuses? Why would our government pay upward of $200,000 to house juveniles as opposed to using half of that money to offer us alternatives to improve our lives and the lives of our families? The answers have been expertly unpacked in documentaries, such as 13th by Ava DuVernay, and in books like The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. Alexander even gave us a crystal clear characterization of it all: “Many of the forms of discrimination that relegated African Americans to an inferior caste during Jim Crow continue to apply to huge segments of the black population today—provided they are first labeled felons.”

  But if we were to dig even deeper than the systems and structures, I think we’d find what we always find at the heart of white supremacy: the mission to get Black people to believe the definitions they have of us, to narrate our lives in such a way that it actually affirms the false notions of inferiority, in order to trap us in a system where we simply become mindless cogs in the wheels of Western capitalism.

  Newton’s third law of motion states that for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, and that certainly applies when discussing the issue of crime and poverty within Black and Brown communities. Many people are examining and dissecting the myth of Black-on-Black crime. And it’s important to note the word myth because statistically most crimes occur within one’s own ethnic group. But if crime in some of our communities is prevalent, it’s mostly due to systems that have perpetuated poverty in these communities and ensured the pervasiveness of racism. It’s imperative to view these things as a reaction to something that was set into motion long ago, to look at the actions that produced these reactions. The behaviors and intentions at the foundation of white supremacy created a criminal justice system that would do everything in its ample power to
wrongly imprison five teenage boys, to essentially change our names and the trajectories of our lives. Our options were limited and clear to us even back then: If we buy into their narratives of who we are, then we can never survive outside the construct they built. If we don’t, then they’ll attempt to destroy our lives.

  But I refused.

  They could accuse me of rape. They could convict me of rape. They could whip me mercilessly in the press. But thanks to my courageous mother, my praying grandmother, and a village full of support, they could never get me to truly believe I was that person. I would never accept the construct they were trying to build for me.

  Never.

  THREE

  Before

  He was only seventeen, in a madman’s dream The cops shot the kid, I still hear him scream.

  SLICK RICK

  In first grade at P.S. 83.

  THERE’S A LONG LIST OF all the ways in which injustice has stolen things from my life. I prefer, however, to remember all I’ve been able to hold. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had mad love for hip hop, and at one point I’d wanted a career as a rap artist. My mother never really liked the genre, mostly because she couldn’t understand what they were saying. She never discouraged me from following my dreams, though. Her only advice to me in regard to my career ambitions was this: “Talk slow enough for people to understand what you’re saying. Don’t mumble.” I took her advice to heart. I believed I had important things to say, and that it was important I say them in a way that would increase the impact on the listener.

  I was a decent student, but the arts were my first love. In New York, riding the trains and buses to get to school was normal. My mom trusted me to get to school safe and on time, even though I had to travel to Lincoln Center, farther away from my neighborhood than most. It’s funny to think about how even though I was only twelve years old, I was a student at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. I was in high school a year and a half earlier than I was supposed to be because my mother had started me in kindergarten early. Like many mothers, she had to work outside the home, and so, because nobody really checked those things back then, she enrolled me in school when I was three and a half. It also helped that I was always tall for my age.