Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil Read online

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  FOREWORD by Myrlie Evers-Williams

  PREFACE: MOTHERS AND SONS by Common

  PART ONE

  INTRODUCTION: MY TRUTH

  CHAPTER ONE: FOUR AND A HALF HOURS TOO LONG

  CHAPTER TWO: THE TWELVE-YEAR-OLD DREAM AND THE LITTLE RED SUITCASE

  CHAPTER THREE: GRANDMA’S HANDS

  CHAPTER FOUR: HOOD LOVE

  CHAPTER FIVE: LADUE

  CHAPTER SIX: THE PARTY . . . ROLO GOLD

  CHAPTER SEVEN: FIRST TIMES AND BLUE LINES

  CHAPTER EIGHT: GOD BLESS THE CHILD

  CHAPTER NINE: BEAUTIFUL SURPRISE

  CHAPTER TEN: SCHOOLYARD STOMPDOWN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: IT TAKES A VILLAGE

  CHAPTER TWELVE: HE LOVES ME NOT

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: BROKEN PROMISES

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: FOOD ON THE TABLE

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GHETTO ROSE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: GROWING PAINS

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: STRONGER WITH EACH TEAR

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: BOYS TO MEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: MANCHILD WITH PROMISE

  CHAPTER TWENTY: ME AND GOD AGAINST THE ODDS

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: WON’T BRING HIM BACK

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: THREE SIDES TO EVERY STORY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: LET MY BABY GO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: THE LONGEST DAY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: MAMA GOT FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: WE DIDN’T START THE FIRE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: DECEMBER 25, 2014

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: RAINBOW OF MOTHERS

  CHAPTER THIRTY: STILL WE RISE

  EPILOGUE: MOTHER TO SON

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Equal rights, fair play, justice are all like the air; we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.

  —Maya Angelou

  To my children . . .

  If I had to choose between loving you and breathing . . .

  I would use my last breath to tell you

  I LOVE YOU . . .

  —Anonymous

  To my four children Michael, Déja, Andre, and Jazmine who didn’t ask to be brought here. God blessed me with you and I vow to honor, respect, and love them for all my days. I never thought I’d be someone’s mother, or be called “Mama.” Thank you God for showing me love, how to love another, and what being loved feels like.

  FOREWORD

  Myrlie Evers-Williams

  My general impression of today is that we are filled with sadness, but also with hope for the future, and that we will learn from what has happened to Michael Brown. Of course, my history goes back fifty years ago when my husband, Medgar Evers, was shot down in front of our home, with my children and I there watching and rushing out to him.

  Since then, there have been many positive changes, but how much does what has happened to Michael Brown say to us about the spirit, the hope, and the belief in America and where we are today, particularly when it comes to the health and welfare of young African-American men?

  It is a tragedy that we are still dealing with this racially motivated hatred. After my husband was shot, I found in my life that I had to have a purpose. I had many purposes really, but one was to see that Medgar Evers’s killer was tried and convicted. It took thirty years for that to happen, but you don’t give up on these things. You don’t give up on the American dream. You don’t give up on the rights that we as Americans have, and should have freely in this country. To see our young people taken down as they are, says something not only to the African-American community but also to the whole country. Where are our values? What do we do? What can we do to keep this from happening again?

  Michael Brown was lost to us. What about all the other young men who are out there? What can we do to preserve their lives and their future? It makes me recall an old saying: “We must keep our eyes on the prize.”

  As a mother, I say to Lezley, sometimes you pick up the pieces slowly; other times your progress seems to come fast, fueled by anger, even a degree of hatred. How do you overcome that? You find something positive. Like Lezley, I had children to take care of. I had to go back to school. I had to work. I had to develop careers. I had to be a community activist, all of which was a little difficult for me.

  One of the things I think is critically important, though, is that my family and I involved ourselves in activities that spoke to the needs of our communities. What I want to say to Lezley and to all the other loved ones of people we’ve lost to hate is, do not give up. Hatred serves as a motivator, but you can’t live and grow with hate.

  We should speak loudly, strongly about our beliefs, about these issues, about the need for change. Not doing so is not just a black problem; it’s a problem for all Americans. How dare we tell the rest of the world how to live when we don’t embody our message within ourselves. Be strong, stand up, be firm, and try to embrace all people in this area of justice and equality, but particularly our young black males.

  There are various organizations throughout this country that focus on youth and their development, helping them find jobs and instilling them with a sense of pride. But these organizations are not one-stop shops for handling these issues. They need to be addressed day to day in our places of worship, in our schools, in our homes. This is not just a black problem; all races need to be able to address our issues of justice and equality.

  It’s tragic that we have to have our young people taken away from us in the manner in which they are. It is tragic that our law enforcement officers and our communities don’t get along better. It’s tragic that the civil rights organizations and other community organizations have not come together and developed a plan of action that we can take beyond just our particular cities.

  My heart bleeds for Lezley, and the other mothers and families who have lost their children. We have to take the bull by the horns and say, “This will change, and I will be a part of the change, and I will find within my community ways in which I can be involved and bring others into that involvement too.” It is up to us to find those ways and to act on them, not only in one moment, but also in an ongoing way throughout all of our lives.

  PREFACE

  MOTHERS AND SONS

  By Common

  Everything I know in life, my experiences of life, and what I know to be love and life came from my mother. She is the most consistent form of love I can identify beyond God and the first person that I really got to know fully and deeply. I didn’t have the blessing of growing up with a father at home or a male figure to truly sit there and take the time to teach me life’s truths. The stuff I learned about being a man, both the beautiful and the ugly, I learned from my male friends and the men in my neighborhood. But my mother taught me how to live. She did her best to teach me how to be a respectable, strong black man.

  I remember there was a time when I was a teenager and I talked back to my mother. I even had the gall to raise my hand once. Man, she hit me and I hit the ground. My mother knew about the street, coming from the Southside of Chicago, the Chatham area. She also knew how to flow with the corporate world. I can recall the first time I heard her talking “proper” on the phone. She was selling products for the Gillette Company and I asked her, “Why are you talking like a white person?” She turned to me with a glare full of complete resolve and said, “Look, you gotta be able to adjust to all worlds.” That statement has always stuck with me and it was just one of the many lessons about life I learned from her.

  My mother is still a rock for me. When I’m d
ealing with some deep emotional challenges and life gets really tough or it’s time for something important to happen, I still go to her. The mother-son connection, I believe, is one of the strongest connections in existence. When it comes to most mothers with their sons, they don’t know anything but to love them. That relationship is unbreakable.

  That’s the place I drew from when I first heard about Mike Brown’s death. Of course, this was not the first time I had heard of young unarmed black men being pointlessly shot and killed. The country had only recently mourned the senseless death of Trayvon Martin. Still, there was something about the Mike Brown case that hit me hard, something that pulled at me more than the other cases had in the past. It wasn’t just that he was unarmed, or that he had just turned eighteen. That sounded ridiculous enough. But hearing that his body lay there, in the street, for over four and a half hours? It sounded unreal, out of control. How was such a thing possible in a land dedicated to treating all people equally under the law? Where was the respect for the sanctity of human life?

  Shortly thereafter, I saw his mother, Lezley McSpadden on television. I later read about a question she had posed to the media: “Do they know how hard it was to raise a young black man?” This woman had not only lost her child, but she had lost him to the searing bullets of someone who was supposed to protect him. Unless you’ve felt the devastation of seeing your baby’s soul leave this earth, I doubt anyone can begin to comprehend the magnitude of that emotional distress.

  Soon after I met Lezley for the first time, I could sense that her pain was especially profound, a deep lasting hurt I’ve rarely witnessed. You could feel her sorrow dangling in the air. When I looked into her eyes, I could feel the weight of her son’s life being ripped from her. She was occupying space, but not completely. Her mind and spirit were elsewhere, dealing with the loss of her child, trying to process how to make that empty hole she was feeling have real meaning.

  As we stood facing each other, there was a moment when she suddenly became present and gazed at me. I could see a powerful, insightful woman, eyes wide open, taking things in, thinking things through. She clearly had a warrior’s spirit and energy, but was also warm and generous. She was a woman who had worked hard and had done her best and was still doing her best. She was in a place of indescribable grief, but she understood that all she could do now was what she had always done all her life: fight, and fight hard. As we spoke, I could feel a surge of strength behind her agony. It was clear to me that this was a woman who was never going to give up, and that this incident was not the end of her story. That same strength she used to raise Mike was going help her survive. Out of the most difficult situation you could ask a parent to endure, she was determined to make the world a better place. Her words, her demeanor, and her quiet strength were undeniable and, at the same time, inspiring.

  What happened to Mike Brown was probably the darkest thing that Lezley has ever and will ever experience. Yet, in the darkest of places, light will eventually come and when that light comes, it will erupt with the force of a thousand suns. The more you recognize it, the brighter it gets. Lezley McSpadden is putting her light out there for the world to see. She’s communicating with others who’ve experienced unspeakable loss, and even those who will never experience what she has. She is showing how bright and purposeful Mike’s life was and is. She is tirelessly working to eliminate the ignorance that led to her son’s untimely death and to keep the flame alive that will forever honor his legacy.

  Mike Brown is the Emmett Till of this generation. Emmett Till’s story changed my life. I remember as a kid first reading the story and studying the pictures of him after he had been found in a river, head swollen beyond recognition. He was just fourteen, killed for the sickest of reasons, for simply whistling at a white woman. He was from Chicago, just like me. My body tingled with fear as I felt like that could easily have been me. I did not understand how anyone could hate another enough to do what those men had done to Emmett Till. Though he had died before I was born, I could feel the power of his spirit moving through me, motivating me to make a difference with my life. Mike Brown, like Emmet Till, has a strong spirit. His death awakened me again. It also ignited the world.

  We won’t ever be able to feel what Lezley McSpadden feels. However, we can at least try to bring value or some type of positive results from such an excruciating experience. We have to look at the bigger picture. What can we do right now that’s going to improve the world? How can one young man’s life better the lives of all people, particularly black and brown brothers and sisters? We may not have all the answers, but we do have the heart, motivation, and spirit to demand that Mike Brown’s life be valued. It is a cause in which Lezley finds unending hope and inspiration. A mother, after all, stays with her son, no matter what, until the day she dies. Hopefully, we can all hold hands with her in her quest to begin to bring change to the world long before then.

  PART ONE

  INTRODUCTION

  MY TRUTH

  First off, I don’t tell lies because I can’t keep up with them. My grandmother always said, “Don’t lie. Tell the truth and shame the devil.” She considered a lie a curse word and would be like, “Believe what you see and none of what you heard.” Your word is what you still got when you don’t have any money. That’s why if I give you my word, say I’m going do something, or tell you I got you, then I’m ten toes down. Anybody who knows me for real knows that. Feel me?

  So that’s why I have to say this to the world, and I want you to hear me loud and clear. Never mind what you’ve heard or think you know about Michael Brown, or about me, for that matter. You don’t know about Mike Mike. You don’t know about me. Now, you might know something, some snippet, some half a moment in time, but you don’t know my son’s life and what it meant, and an eighteen-second video doesn’t tell you anything about eighteen years.

  See, before the news media and the nation first heard the name Michael Brown, he was just Mike Mike to me. That’s what we called him. Everybody thinks he was a junior, but he wasn’t. Even though he had his daddy’s first and last name, his full name was Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown. I wanted my son to have his own identity, so he did.

  From the moment Mike Mike was born, I knew my life had changed forever. I was sixteen years old with an infant. I didn’t know what kind of mother I was going to be. But when I held him in my arms for the first time and felt his soft skin, he opened his eyes, and I could see my reflection in his little pupils. I suddenly wasn’t scared anymore. It was like we were communicating with each other without words. I was saying, “I got your back, baby,” and he was saying, “I got yours, too, Mama.”

  I can’t just say he was mine, though. When Mike Mike was born, he was adored, doted on, and loved by me and his daddy, my siblings, and his grandparents on both sides, who helped with his rearing. He was our beautiful, unplanned surprise—my first son, a first grandson, and the first nephew in my family.

  And then, one day our Mike Mike was shot and killed by a police officer on Canfield Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, and suddenly his name was being spoken everywhere: Mike Brown Jr., Michael Brown, or just Brown . . . but never Mike Mike, never our family’s name for him, the name that marked him as special to us and those who knew him for real.

  Pastor Creflo Dollar asked me what I thought about all the people out there on Canfield Drive when I got to the scene the day Mike Mike was shot. I turned, looking directly at him, and as sure as the breath I’m breathing, in a very matter-of-fact way, said, “I didn’t see those people. That day, I was looking for one person: my son. Nobody else mattered.”

  I think I kind of shocked Pastor Dollar. I was respectful, of course, but I had to tell it to him straight up. I was just keeping it real. You see, because as a mother when your child is hurt, scared, or in danger, you hurt, you want to comfort them, and you will protect them from harm, even if it means laying your own life down. That day out on Canfield Drive, I had tunnel vision. Nothing and nobody was more imp
ortant than getting to Mike Mike and helping him in any way I could.

  It wasn’t until days later, when I looked at the news and people showed me pictures from their phones that I saw the crowd of folks that had been out there. So the only way I can really describe that day is to compare it to the day I had Mike Mike. Bringing him into the world was almost the same feeling as when he left here—a lot of people making noise and milling around, and my attention just glued to my new baby boy.

  I’m not going to lie; I’ve been wanting to get mad and just go fuck the world up, because my son being killed has messed my whole life up. No way should my son have left here before me. But I have to stop myself every time my anger begins to build like that. If I look at it that way too long, I’ll find myself in trouble, doing something out of rage and revenge. That would be out of my character, and Mike Mike would never want me to do anything like that.

  It’s so hard sometimes, but I have to find some type of something to keep myself calm so I can be a good wife and a good mother for my other kids. That’s why, looking at my son’s death today, I try to see it from more of a spiritual standpoint. God let me have Mike Mike for eighteen years. He wouldn’t let me have him longer because He had other plans for us. Those plans are still being revealed to me, but I believe a big part of His plan was to wake people up to some things in the world that need changing. I’m ready, though, for whatever He has in store.

  What I do know for sure is that I was just a kid when I had Mike Mike. I made a lot of mistakes when I was young, but in raising him I got stronger, wiser. What we endured together, especially in his years as a small child, is a story that only his mother can tell. One that I have held close until now.

  The naysayers and judgers and haters wrote me off when I had my baby, saying things like, “She ain’t gonna do nothin’ with her life,” but I never gave up. I had to develop thick skin to get through those scary and confusing days, but I was determined to make it for my child, to do right by Mike Mike.