When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir

by Patrisse Cullors

My father pauses and breathes deep and then he tells me I can find him in the rundown hotel around the corner from where he lives. I rush over there, annoyed the place hadn’t already occurred to me. Dad, what the hell? I demand to know when he opens the door to his room. But he can barely answer me. All of him is sagging. From his bones on the inside to his skin on the outside, he’s a man gone limp. I don’t know whether to be angry or to be brokenhearted. I’m sorry, my father says quietly, his voice threadbare as tears begin to roll down my cheeks. I love this man so much. I do not want to lose him. This is all I can think about it. Stay with me, Dad. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave me please. As always, he is gentle with me. But there is also a stillness to him that comes as a surprise. I don’t want to call it peace. It is not peace. But there is a stillness and also a deep well of sadness. In that room my father, like me, begins to cry. He tells me he is embarrassed, ashamed. He tells me he caught another case and is awaiting trial. That’s why I hadn’t been able to reach him. He was in jail and for the moment, he’s out on bail. They want to give me seven years, he says ever so slowly, and those words hang there, a blade on a guillotine ready to sever us from ourselves. There is nothing about you I am not willing to know, I say to my father. My father who taught me to live beyond judgment. He tells me how much he hated driving that damn cement truck. He tells me how much he h...