Better, Not Bitter Page 6

  My mother knew—as a parent, as someone who’d been in the fight for justice—to say to the detectives, “No, you don’t have the right to talk to my son.” But David Nocenti emphasized, “Do not fall back from that position. That is your position. That is your right.” That was his character. In many ways, he was our secret weapon. He knew exactly what to give us so we could fight that fight in a powerful way.

  David didn’t have to play the father role. But he chose to. He made a choice to leverage his privilege, get involved with the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization, and meet this kid named Yusef. He made a choice to stand by me. No matter how much trouble it made for him. And he still stands with me to this day.

  Left to right: my brother, Shareef; my Big Brother, David Nocenti; and I after the premiere of When They See Us at the Apollo Theater.

  FOUR

  95A1113

  The power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world’s definitions.

  JAMES BALDWIN

  Me in Central Park. This photo was taken the day before we were arrested.

  THERE ARE WAYS IN WHICH we define ourselves and/or allow others to define us. Self-definition was literally the key to my overcoming what happened to me. The American justice system had painted an image of me as a predator. Holding on to my true identity, despite what was said or done, was how I survived in prison and how I have been able to thrive outside of it. And now people have rightly made assumptions about how well I’m doing since my release and the civic case and settlement. They see that I have a thriving career as a speaker, author, and consultant, and they want to know how any of that is possible in light of having years stolen from my formative early adulthood.

  However, my understanding of myself was continually challenged internally and externally at every turn. There was the media characterizing us as wild beasts. There was my own sense of sorrow at not being able to articulate myself in all the ways I would have liked because I was a child. I faced numerous moments in which I had to refine my identity and hold fast to it in the face of grave danger.

  Sometimes it was about establishing my worth and value despite what the environment implied, in very simple ways. The day I was taken down to the local precinct in what amounted to a mass roundup of Black boys in Harlem was one of those moments when I had to grasp for what I knew deep down about myself. Raymond, Kevin, and Antron were already in the interrogation room. After Korey and I had our horrific turn, they locked us all up. Nothing really stood out about the cell I was in, other than the bars. I was still wearing the long trench coat I’d been arrested in. The Triple F.A.T. Goose coat was the height of New York hip hop fashion in the late ’80s, and I loved that coat. It was black on black and complemented my six-foot frame. But I was so exhausted. Being shuttled to and from the courthouse and inundated with the flashing lights of the press, the finger-pointing and name-calling, was all taking a toll. Being that terrified is nearly indescribable. I felt panic rising in my chest whenever there was any movement. My eyelids were heavy with fatigue. Living alongside my fear was also relief. I wasn’t in that interrogation room anymore. The walls weren’t moving. I didn’t have to suffer through listening to my friend Korey cry out in pain as they punched him.

  I was also aware that the cell was not a place they likely cleaned very often. The dirt and filth sat thick on the floor. So, I took off that treasured Triple F.A.T. Goose trench coat and gently laid it across the ground. I stared at it for a moment, wondering if all the joy that filled me when I’d first gotten it really mattered in the big scheme of things.

  I remember feeling so sorry that I had not listened to my mother. She’d say to us all the time, “I came from the Jim Crow South,” but I would brush it off. This was the 1980s. Times had changed, I thought. But I realized in that cell that I shouldn’t have ever believed that somehow it was a different time.

  They are about to do to me what they did to Emmett Till.

  I was so sorry I didn’t believe her. She was only trying to prepare me, teach me that this oppression was real. It didn’t matter that I was innocent. I know the cool thing nowadays is to claim being “woke.” Well, no one should be violently awakened in the way I’d been.

  I knelt beside the coat and laid my weary body down to rest.

  Well, at least I got my jacket.

  It was such a simple act of defiance. Though I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. But in hindsight, I see that the way I used my coat as a barrier between me and the dirt was a starting point of establishing my self-value above everything else.

  I also see now that there was a kind of innocence in how I approached the questions I was being asked during interrogation. I knew who I was. I knew I didn’t do what they were suggesting I did. So surely they’d figure that out, right? I struggle with remembering what the precinct looked like. I see the building only in flashes of memory. But I do recall the room being drab, a dark gray box. I could hear the clock ticking loudly on the wall. There was no light. No windows. It was so easy to lose track of time. Just like in casinos, where there are no windows to indicate the passing of day into night, the criminal justice system doesn’t want you to know what time it is. How long you’ve been there. Time is a slug pulling you slowly away from your cognition.

  But I do remember the interrogation:

  I am in there going crazy. They bring me in and because they won’t feed us until the next morning, I’m delirious with hunger. I’m thinking about the lamb chops I’d just put in the oven before heading out. I told Shareef and Aisha I’d be right back. The room is changing shapes. It feels like my mind is beginning to play tricks on me; their faces swarm me like angry bees. The detectives are monsters, a bunch of goons. Like angry gorillas at the zoo. And I’ve just fallen into their cage by mistake.

  Every once in a while, they come in and question me. I tell them everything I know. They leave and come back again.

  “When are you going to tell us about the lady?”

  “What lady? What are you talking about?”

  I’m racking my own brain trying to help them. Help them. This is who I was. Who I am. Someone who tries to help when there is a problem. To find a solution. I’m thinking, I’m a good guy, so of course I’m going to help them out. I don’t know anything about Miranda rights, what it means that my Miranda rights have not been read. I don’t know that they can and will use anything I say against me. I just want to help so this can be over. So the room can stop spinning and shape-shifting. So I can go home.

  The next thing I know, I hear my friend Korey getting beaten up in the next room. Korey’s not even a suspect. He’s come to the precinct to support me.

  When I’d come home from school the day after going to the park, the courtyard outside of my building at Schomburg Plaza was strangely quiet. Wow, I don’t see any kids outside. I wasn’t immediately alarmed. It just was something that I’d noted. I went upstairs and changed out of my uniform. When I came back down with my street clothes on, I ran into Korey’s girlfriend, Lisa. When she saw me, she said, “Yo, what happened in the park last night?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She ignored my question. “When you see Korey, both of y’all come up to my house.”

  “Okay, cool.”

  A little while later, I met up with Korey. “Yo, let’s go up to Lisa’s house.” When we arrived, the news was on the television.

  Breaking news.

  We were sitting there watching all the things they said had happened with wide eyes. But Lisa was watching us. Finally, she said, “So what’s up?” We just stared at her blankly. We didn’t know what she was talking about. She said, “They are saying it was y’all!”

  “What?”

  I asked, “Yo, Korey. Where’d you go last night? I didn’t see you.” I’d knocked on the window of the chicken spot he and Lisa were at to ask if he wanted to go to the park. We’d gone together but, frustrated, he’d disappeared early on.

  He s
aid, “Man, they started bugging. I was out of there.”

  I said, “Well, I didn’t see anything like that happen in the park. I saw people getting harassed, and this homeless guy get beat up, but nothing like what the news was describing.”

  Lisa had said the cops were looking for us, so I simply reasoned that I’d talk to them to clear our names. I’d just go to the cops and tell them what I saw. I knew I didn’t do anything. I didn’t see anything. I’m going to just get myself out of their hair and be home before my mom gets back.

  Korey and I left Lisa’s, walked down toward Third Avenue, talked for a bit, and then walked home. Looking back, it’s outrageous to think that I was actually looking for the cops to tell them my story. But this was 1989, New York City. This wasn’t the Jim Crow South anymore, right? My mom was teaching that night at Parsons. I’d just put some lamb chops in the oven. My sister was making salmon for herself. Surely I’d be fine.

  My brother caught wind of what was going on.

  “No, you can’t go!” Shareef had always been a little bit more muscular than me, even though he was a year and a half younger. He grabbed me and we started wrestling. “Don’t go.”

  I couldn’t get out of his grip. We were rumbling and banging into the walls. Korey was outside, but he was like, “They’re brothers. I’m just going to let them do what they do.”

  Shareef continued tussling with me. When my sister said, “I’ll go with him,” he finally let me go. He turned to her. “You’ve got to promise me. You’re going to go with him?”

  “I promise.”

  In hindsight, it seemed prophetic. Like my brother sensed something he couldn’t exactly articulate. We didn’t always hang out together like I did with our sister. He had his own circle of friends, and I hung out with my sister because she was older and could hip me to what girls wanted.

  Korey and I left with Aisha. When we exited the elevator, we saw cops getting in another elevator. I decided we should go back upstairs to talk with them.

  One of us had to get up there first. So Aisha went up in a separate elevator just in case somebody pressed a button and delayed us. When we got up to our floor, the twenty-first, the police were standing in front of apartment 21 H, already at my door.

  What I didn’t know until much later, and my brother never told me, was that they were trying to get my brother to come down to the precinct with them. Shareef was not involved in any way, form, or fashion at all. He didn’t hang out with us; he wasn’t there at the park.

  Any Black body would do.

  They saw me as I came around the corner in my Triple F.A.T. Goose. “Hey, who are you?”

  “I’m Yusef Salaam.”

  “Oh, that’s one of the guys we’ve been looking for.” They searched me, patted me down. “What’s in your pocket?”

  “I have a pocketknife.”

  It was a gemstone cut into the shape of a bird, with a little blade about two inches long, and very, very thin.

  I also had my hospital medical card from Mount Sinai on me, which had all my information, including my correct birthdate, which they’d later claim to have not taken. And then there was the infamous bus pass. Back then, the passes were made out of paper and had a hologram on one part and a space to write your name and birthday. Instead of saying I was born in 1974, which was true, I wrote 1973.

  Why?

  For older girls, of course. To prove I was sixteen instead of fifteen. And that dumb-kid move would be what the police used to justify interrogating me without my parents present. The medical card would be conveniently lost.

  They took us downstairs. As we came into the courtyard, I raised my hands.

  “Put your hands down.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Korey was still there with us. They turned to him and he gave them his name. He wasn’t on their list.

  He wasn’t on their list.

  But he agreed to go with me. To help me. In my mind, we were going to clear this all up and get home as fast as we could. Unfortunately, besides that brief time when I made bail, I wouldn’t return home for nearly seven years. Korey wouldn’t return for thirteen.

  He came with me because, like he always said, “I got you.”

  Neither of us knew that Korey couldn’t help me. That I couldn’t help him. They separated us. They worked on both of us in tandem. He caught the brunt of it because he was sixteen. In the system’s eyes, he was a man. But he wasn’t. And neither was I. We were boys being steamrolled by the wheels of injustice. And they were attacking him. I think that was the moment, hearing Korey being assaulted, I knew that no amount of me trying to help them would change their minds. They were determined to frame us as criminals.

  There were instances on this journey when I was not only determined to maintain my own self-definition but when divine grace afforded me the opportunity to do just that.

  The three of us—Antron, Raymond, and I—were moved around quite a bit. We were the first to go to trial. Korey and Kevin would go later. From the local precincts, we were sent to a place called the Tombs. The name was definitely a metaphor for what the system did to the humans held there. The system wanted us to die.

  What shocked me the most was the fact that there were grown men there. I was fifteen and there were forty- and fifty-year-old men in cells next to me. Men who’d definitely seen some things on the inside and out. Men who used violence often as a shield for pain they couldn’t articulate. We weren’t children to them. Some of those men would yell out to me: “Yo, big man!” And despite the terror filling every part of my body, I’d respond, “Hey, what’s up?” Without batting an eye, they’d say, “Yeah, man. We’re going to get you. Wait till we get our hands on you.”

  This wasn’t some cool jailhouse banter. Rape wasn’t the charge you wanted on your head when you went to jail. These were folks being sent to Rikers. These were people who understood what I’d yet to understand about the predicament I was in. That the system had already targeted us and there was nothing left to do but to accept it was happening. I refused. All I could think was, This is crazy. They’re going to figure this out. They have to. This cannot be my life. I was holding on to what I knew to be true. Despite the threats being yelled out to me from the next cell.

  Because the Tombs was simply a holding place—many people called it purgatory—we were sent to Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the dark of the following night. It was starkly quiet when we arrived. I could hear my own heart beating as the silence overwhelmed me. We’d been in holding up until that time. But we’d heard that while Spofford wasn’t Rikers, it was nothing to play with. Like an eerie calm before the storm. Fear was playing double Dutch with my mind. Leaning in and out, seemingly waiting for the right moment to enter the jump.

  There was a golden rule at Spofford that likely came in from the streets but took on an even greater meaning inside: “Don’t sleep.” Just like in the hood, you didn’t want to relax too much. You didn’t want to get too comfortable. You didn’t want to feel too safe in any space or with any person. Sleep was the cousin of death. Because of who I was, who I knew myself to be, I didn’t always follow this rule. I knew I didn’t belong there to begin with. But one day, I paid the price for that defiance.

  Due to the notoriety of the case, I was held in an isolated unit. But one day, I got a chance to spend time in the dayroom. There were plenty of other inmates there, moving about. Unfamiliar with most of them at this point, I sat in the back and played the wall, meaning I made sure that I kept my back up against it so no one could creep up behind me. I kept my eyes open and with heightened awareness as I sat watching television. I sat attentive, making sure to periodically check my surroundings. After a while, though, I went from sitting straight up to sitting back a little. Something in my mind was telling me, Everything’s cool. You’re good. So then I relaxed. That chair became my grandmama’s chair in the way I let it cradle me. I got comfortable. Then, suddenly, I felt my face swing to the side. It didn’t register that I’d be
en hit. In that exact moment it felt like I had an out-of-body experience where I was saved from the brutal force and pain of the impact. I was bleeding from a cut above my eye; my face started swelling, but I was simply… confused. What just happened? When I stood up, I saw that the officers had jumped on this massive man, named Guzman, who looked like the Kingpin in Daredevil. They were wrestling him to the ground.

  He’d hit me. Possibly with a weapon, although I could never confirm that. The cut over my eye was deep enough that it affects my peripheral vision even to this day. I still don’t have full range of motion in my neck.

  They put me and the other guy in isolation and later made us talk. I felt embarrassed. What would I possibly say to a man who’d caught me slipping like that? I didn’t want to talk to someone who’d just tried to kill me. But the system wasn’t concerned about my feelings. They needed to ensure I wouldn’t retaliate. They wanted to avoid a lawsuit. They needed this assault to go away. But in the way that anxiety would surge through my body at times, it never really did.

  That experience taught me to never “sleep,” and I carry that with me to this day. I learned that no matter how comfortable you think you are, never get comfortable. You have to have eyes in the back of your head. That anxiety still showed up beyond prison, and even now sometimes, having reshaped itself as hypervigilance. In my early romantic relationships post-release, you’d never see me be lovey-dovey, holding hands, gazing into her eyes. I couldn’t lose myself in that feeling. It didn’t happen because I always needed to be on point. It—whatever my mind believed it was—could go down at any moment in time.