Love and Fury (16 page)

The weeks and months passed and nothing seemed to be working. I decided to write an op-ed. I had been published in the opinion pages of the
Boston Globe
twice before, and I was serving on the board of a nonprofit with one of its former editors, so I felt I might have some access. It all seemed to me to be about access. Because Damion was politically inconsequential, he was disposable, like hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class people, especially young black men.

Rereading the piece I sent to the paper, I see that it was more than an appeal; I was attempting to shame the DA into changing his mind. I didn't allow myself to see this at the time. I was convinced I had the moral high ground and that the tone of the piece was right.

I wrote that a grave injustice was about to be done in the name of justice, that an old and victimless crime was about to claim its first victim, a six-month-old baby boy who would be separated from his father. “He is, after all, a black boy. Maybe he needs to get used to it, prison, as a feature of his life. Statistics suggest this is so. But neither he nor his father are statistics, they are the latest victims of institutionalized racism. If this trial occurs, this costly and senseless prosecution, then our judicial bureaucracy is even more out of control than anyone thought.”

Instead, and wisely, the
Globe
gave the story to one of its columnists, Adrian Walker, who met with Damion and me. I'd shown Damion the piece I wrote. He didn't like it, didn't like seeing himself as a victim.

Another friend of mine put me in touch with the best defense attorney in Massachusetts, who agreed, as a favor to our mutual friend, to work for half his usual retainer. Even this reduced fee was a hardship for us, and Kathi was angry that she was not consulted. Things felt to me that they were moving and moving fast, and the fact that I did not slow them down long enough to confer with her was a mistake, not only because that was our agreement about spending any large sums of money, but because something had begun to creep back into my behavior that I should have seen and understood. It is true that I wanted Veronica and Damion to have a decent chance to make a family, but it was also true that I was getting caught up in the battle, sending e-mails, making phone calls, meeting with the defense attorney, talking to anyone who might have any leverage. I had decided it was a matter of principle: Damion would have all the advocacy a middle-class, well-connected white kid would have. But it was also, although I mostly hid this from myself, my exercising whatever social and political muscles I had built up by virtue of crossing the class line, of “moving up.” It was my need to prove I was just as good as them. As I said, other things had kicked in, including the old male mythology about battling injustice on behalf of the underdog.

Walker's column ran the following Tuesday. It was strong but more politic than mine. A couple of days later, the district attorney responded with a letter to the editorial page. He took issue with the way Walker had framed the case and restated the charges in such a way that they suggested Damion was incorrigible.

District attorneys never, ever write letters to newspapers. They prefer to do their arguing in court, not in the media. I thought this was evidence of progress. It meant we were getting to him. I failed to see, even then, that I had changed the game from a considered appeal to his sense of fair play to a public assault on his integrity. I was too full of myself, wedded to the myth, to understand that by hiring the DA's arch nemesis, bringing pressure to bear from the statehouse, the governor's office, and the media (I had spoken to reporters at three TV stations, as well), I had not only changed the tone, I had challenged him, I had called him out. I believed I had outgrown this kind of aggressive taunting, and that I had only the welfare of my family at heart. Who could blame me? I was the good guy.

I was the fool. I was so certain I was right that, whether or not I was right, I was wrong. I had been giving myself a free pass, a vacation from self-examination, beginning even before I hired the defense attorney without consulting Kathi. When Veronica and Damion and D were living together in their own house, a family, without the threat of incarceration or, worse, the separation of a prison sentence, everyone would agree it had all been worth it. People might even remark how I had risen to the occasion, found, gathered, and deployed resources like a field general, and won one for the little guy. I would demur: “What else could I do?” As I said, a fool. I want to insist that I was a well-intentioned fool, but what other kind is there? An ill-intentioned fool is no fool at all but a villain.

Soon after that, the defense attorney informed me that the trial had been moved forward to May. He insisted that he hadn't done this so that I would have more time to agitate on Damion's behalf. He repeated this twice on the phone, and I took it as a wink and a nudge. The crusade continued.

Then one night, at the kitchen table, the baby asleep upstairs, Veronica told us something she had withheld from us for months, that Damion kept a handgun in the glove box of his car. She'd kept this information from us probably because the potential cascade from this revelation could destroy what was left of her dream of making a family. Love blinds us to good sense, but that night she was angry enough not to care.

“So he's driving around with the baby in the car seat and a loaded gun in the glove box? That's outrageous!” Kathi said. She was the one who, later, came up with the sensible and respectful idea that Damion could visit D here, or we would bring D to his mother's house, but under no circumstances could he be allowed to take the child anywhere on his own.

The next evening Damion came by to pick up D. As I heard his key in the front door, Veronica shouted down the stairs, “Don't you let him in here! Tell him to go away! I don't want him here!” She'd been upstairs crying, Kathi comforting her.

As the door opened, I blocked his entry. He looked up, surprised. “What's up?”

“She doesn't want to see you.”

“Yeah. I know.” He held up his cell phone. “She's mad. I just come by to get D.”

Robert had turned off the TV and taken up a position behind me with his arms crossed.

“That's not going to happen,” I said.

“I don't understand. What's going on here?”

“What's going on is you driving around with my grandson in the back of your car and a gun in the front, that's what's going on. And that is not happening again, ever.”

Veronica and Kathi came halfway down and sat on the stairs, Veronica nursing the baby. Damion could see all of us now, aligned against him. He raised his hands in front of him, palms out, fingers spread, as if to say, “Whoa. Hold on a minute.” I would rather not have seen the look in his tearing eyes then, and I hope to never have to see it again. “Can we talk about this? Sit down and talk about it?”

“No. There's nothing to talk about.”

“I don't understand.”

“Go,” I said. “You're no longer welcome here.”

That afternoon I had e-mailed the defense attorney and told him we would no longer pay for him to represent Damion. I had written that I no longer believed that he had been truthful with us, and that I believed he had lied to us about a number of things, including having a gun in our house. I told him about the gun in the glove box.

Damion looked past me, and Robert behind me, to Veronica on the stairs. “How do I fix this? Veronica? I'm sorry. How do I fix this?”

“You can't. You can't fix it. You broke it.”

“Wait. You get mad at me and now you want to throw me under the bus? I see. I see how it is.” He turned to me, nodded to Kathi. “I got nothing but respect for you and Kathi. And Rob. You're the closest thing I've had to a real family. I don't know what to do right now.”

“Right now? Right now you can go.” I felt no satisfaction saying it, and I hoped that Damion heard both meanings of
right now:
that he should go immediately, and that this was what he should do right now but, perhaps, not later. Maybe we all needed time to think.

Damion's mother agreed that Damion should visit D only at our house or hers. That plan was in place until a few weeks later on a Friday morning, the day before Veronica's baccalaureate assembly, when Damion went to the lawyer's office to meet about his trial, set for Monday. The attorney told him, “We're all done here. I suggest you go home, pack your bags, and make your good-byes. You're going away.” He had worked out a plea with the prosecutor. Damion was to spend a year in the Middlesex House of Correction.

That same afternoon, Veronica called me at my office. “Daddy, he's scaring me. He says he's coming to get his son. He says I can't keep his son away from him.”

I told her to go to a friend's house, and I went home to wait for Damion, hoping I'd be able to calm him down. He never showed up.

That night he was arrested with three friends and charged, again, with possession of drugs and firearms.

Now, on this visit, pulling myself together in the parking lot as the last of the guards are starting their cars and heading home, what I really want from Damion is the story of that evening. I have heard a number of accounts, all secondhand. I want to hear his recollections of that evening.

As I enter the building I notice for the first time that there are marked parking spaces just outside the door. One says Warden. One says State Police Commander. One says District Attorney. The ascending chain of command. I have never seen it more clearly: I had tried to help, but I made things worse.

Sometimes, if I'm talking with friends about our families or grandkids, I'll take out my phone with the photos of my grandson. If the friends are white, they stare a moment, say how beautiful he is, and then remark, “Ah, he's biracial.” If they are friends of color, they say, “Oh, your grandson's black.” I once asked about this and a friend I would have called biracial set me straight from his perspective: my grandson's black because history has defined him as such, because the white world will call him black, because he can only understand who he is in the eyes of the world by being black and because, alas, the police will call him black. I wonder if my friends who call him beautiful will still think so in a dozen years or if they will see him as dangerous until he can prove otherwise.

At any rate, often, after questions of proximity (“You're so lucky! My grandchildren are on the other coast!”) and grade in school, white friends will ask, “Is the father still in the picture?” It is a strange, strained, locution. “The father”—not
his
father, or
the child's
or
the boy's
father, but
the
father, an abstraction, and I already sniff a bit of moralizing in the air. I don't try to dodge what's next; I say it: “Yes. But things are hard right now because the boy's father, Damion, is in prison.”

The questions stop. No one asks why or what for. And I believe I know what they think because it is not really their thought, or mine—although I can almost reach out and touch it in the air between us—as much as it is a page from the American book of class and caste. It is as if a column of integers has been added, tallied, totaled, summed up: white trash. I don't want to own the thought, and I don't require anyone else to own it. I only wish that in these situations we could acknowledge the psycho/social/political chord that has just been played, that I hear as it fades, diminuendo, into a generalized discomfort as I put my phone back in my pocket. Would that this chord would fade into history as well.

It doesn't seem likely. Recently Veronica told me that when she was six or seven months pregnant, she visited the welfare office to see if she qualified for food stamps or any other assistance. The woman who took down her information asked her how much education she had. “Junior year in college.” The woman gave her a condescending look and asked again.

“I've finished my junior year in college.”

“No, dear. That's high school. You mean you finished your junior year in high school.”

Veronica stood and left without signing up. White trash is not so much a group of people as the name of the category she, my beautiful and shamed daughter, felt she'd been consigned to as the hot tears welled in her eyes, her cheeks burned, and she gathered her things and left that office.

It's a slur. I don't allow my writing students to use the term. When I come upon it in a manuscript we're discussing, I call out the author: what do you mean? “You know,” they say. But it turns out that they mean poor people, as we already knew. I try to ask my follow-up questions gently, without betraying my anger: do you mean my mother working in the sweater factory? My father laid off again? Are you talking about my aunt waitressing at the Uptown Diner? My next-door neighbor's mother working the Woolworth's lunch counter? Are you referring to my mother's stinky shoes she cut holes in to ease her corns while she worked on her feet eight hours a day? Or my father's brogans with the eye-sized hole in the bottom he patched by cutting a piece of linoleum for an insole?