Who Really Died on August 9, 2014? Sasha Panaram on 'Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil'

Who Really Died on August 9, 2014? by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
You already know the story. Neither its contents nor its implications strike you as surprising. During the two-year anniversary of his death – you likely encountered the details again as they circulated by way of images, testimonies, and memorials. Despite its familiarity or perhaps because of it, you need to revisit Michael Brown’s death. We all do.
Such a return is not only integral to recapturing the sense of nostalgia and grief that accompanied his life and his untimely death. Nor is this return wholly indicative of a search for closure or better yet, peace. We need to hear Michael Brown’s story because if we are really honest – and I mean really honest – we full well know that we did not hear his passing the first time. Amid the chatter and the chaos that accompanied his murder, we barely let Michael or Mike Mike, as his mother affectionately referred to him, die honorably. We failed him. And in the process, we failed ourselves, too.
I finished reading Lezley McSpadden’s Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil: The Life, Legacy, and Love of My Son Michael Brown (2016) for the second time on August 9. While it is hardly uncommon for me to reread a book two, three, or even four times, McSpadden’s text possessed a strange hold on me. Upon completing it, I both desired to know more and yet could not bring myself to pick up the book again. I was caught somewhere between not knowing enough and knowing too much.
On Monday, as if returning to the book again hoping this read would generate new pages for consumption, I was startled by what I understood as its central paradox. Every single day, especially these past few days, we are told that we know the true circumstances surrounding Michael Brown’s death. We know the name of his killer. We know the number of bullets that ripped through his body. We know how many hours his dead body lay in the Ferguson street. We know the verdict.
And yet, despite all of this, his very own mother could barely gather the information necessary to account for her lost son – to make his loss count – at the hour of his death. So starved for information was McSpadden and her family that they could not set a date for Michael’s funeral, because they did not know when his body would be returned from the medical examiners conducting his autopsy.
We know too much.
We know nothing at all.
Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil is bildungsroman-like in its composition telling at once how a mother and her son grew into themselves and each other in a world that could seldom imagine their success let alone allow for it. But to be clear this is not a novel. Nothing about this text is fictional. At times it is too real as it carries us through the process of living and grieving and living again more forcefully after loss.  
In three parts, McSpadden recounts raising Michael Orlandus Darrion Brown as a single black mother in Missouri. Named Michael after his father and nicknamed Mike Mike by his mother, Michael was McSpadden’s first-born child. Naming him was as momentous as giving birth because “[h]e had his own name and his own identity” (75).
In Part One of Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil, we meet the family and friends who raise McSpadden and her son including Granny, the bedrock of the family, the Browns with whom McSpadden and Michael lived, and Brittanie, McSpadden’s tried and trusted sister, among others.
Before we can understand the world into which Michael was born, we first must understand his mother’s world. Part One sketches that world in broad and beautiful strokes reminding us that contrary to what the news suggests, McSpadden always belonged to a community that cared for her deeply.
Part One also teaches us what it means to work. Holding well over seven jobs, McSpadden labored to provide for her family. She worked to remain faithful to her homebred values. She sought employment to survive.  
Whether behind a deli stand or sporting scrubs in a hospital, with a broom in hand or two pieces of bread, McSpadden refused to fail to provide for her children. Humbling herself to any and all opportunities that came her way, she always put her family first. Even when she could not complete her high school degree, she made sure her children, especially Michael, became credentialed.
If Part One is a history of the family, then Part Two is a history of the boy she brought into this world. Up until Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil most of what we know about Michael Brown surfaced from journalistic reporting, video surveillance, and personal testimonies.
Part Two troubles those perceptions and the people who make them by showcasing his unfailing kindness and his unparalleled love. We encounter Michael as an older brother and his capacity to care for his siblings especially his sister, Déjà. We laugh with him as he playfully performs for his mother just to see her smile. We even cry with him as he struggles to defend himself throwing a punch when it is not of his nature.
In roughly sixty pages, we watch a child become a man and a man become a corpse. In its sheer simplicity and brutal honesty, McSpadden both mourns and memorializes her son inviting us to do the same. For the very first time, we meet Michael.  
Then he is taken from us.
Whereas Parts One and Two are full of life, Part Three stands in contrast illustrating what happens when life is so abruptly taken away. Written as journal entries, Part Three marks times slow passing by in minutes, days, months, and years. Reliving his murder, McSpadden charts where and when death moves. Michael, too, speaks as we encounter his final social media posts in the days preceding his death.
From both the message is clear: No one nowhere is safe. Not now. Not ever.
Reading this book two years after Michael’s death is equal parts sad and encouraging, equal parts memory and prophecy. On the one hand Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil is a declaration of grief – the grief endured by a vilomah. But it is also an instruction manual for hope; a guidepost for faith.
Its hauntological implications – the way it speaks to and bespeaks the future – is most poignantly captured in the chapter titles where McSpadden names her truth and points us towards our own. For instance, “God Bless the Child” recalls Toni Morrison’s latest novel, God Help the Child. A “Rainbow of Mothers” is the “Mothers of the Movement” at the Democratic National Convention. “It Takes a Village” anticipates Karla Holloway’s question, “Whose Village Is This?”
Each chapter beckons the future. Each word moves us forward.
By the end of the epilogue the question still remains: who really died on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri? While the record reports one, the memoir suggests otherwise. Michael was not the only one taken that hot summer day but so, too, was everyone who ever knew him; everyone who ever wanted to know him.
In his own words: “Yall seeking for the truth help me bring it out” (175).
And that he did and continues to do again and again and again.
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Sasha Panaram is Ph.D. student in English at Duke University. A Georgetown University alumna, her scholarly interests are in black diasporic literature, black feminisms, and visual cultures.
Other essays from Sasha Panaram:
Beyond Real(ism)--Review of Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form & Social Critique in African American Culture
The Watcher, The Watched, and The Witness – On (T)ERROR