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

by Patrisse Cullors

We, Cheyenne and I, feel the world can go to hell. We love each other.

But we stay together, even when Cheyenne drops out of school, as she eventually does.

And our schools are not set up to be surrogates for the poorest of children, which is to say Cheyenne, which is to say most of us.

don’t want to keep living with five people in the living room of the apartment of a woman I barely know, feeling the judgment and silence that comes with being Queer in a Jehovah’s Witness home where even masturbation is considered deviant and where I have no space to say, Excuse me. I really miss my father and my brother.

Donna never yells at us, but she writes super-long letters about what our transgressions have been, what it means to live in community and be considerate.

And although Cheyenne and I eventually separated and could not remain in touch, the rest of us remain close to this day, growing in numbers and love as the years roll on.

am 20 years old and four years an organizer. My toe in the water around community organizing began while I was in high school but after I graduate I wade all the way in.

But it’s not just Gabriel who becomes involved with me at the Strategy Center. His involvement slowly brings my mother around.

We grow closer than ever and it’s not only how Gabriel shows up at events, at meetings and art showcases.

And the quality of the conversations with my father goes deeper than it has before. Although I had been to 12-step meetings with him, now that he’s older, he talks about what living the life felt like. He says his real addiction is to the fast-paced energy of it all. How else was a man like him ever going to have some money in his pocket, decent clothes, be viewed as someone who mattered? He was invisible before immersing himself in the life, he said. But drugs not only made him feel seen and relevant, the lifestyle itself gave him that sense. My father, a poor Southern boy, was made fun of all his life until he had money in his pocket and a product people wanted.

Who has ever been accountable to Black people or to my father, a man the world always presented

with limited choices?

For my father that service showed up as enlisting in the military. As a young man he would do his time in the army. He tells me he once dreamed of going to college, but that option wasn’t real the older he grew.

But my father, with no defenders or language that could dissect the harm done to him, is out there in the mix, a sustenance drug seller and a regular drug user.

was easy to understand that when race was a blatant factor, a friend says to me in a political discussion one afternoon. Jim Crow left no questions or confusion. But now that race isn’t written into the law, she says, look

for the codes.

They rewrote the laws, but they didn’t rewrite white supremacy. They kept tha...

A decade of 12-stepping has ensured that he only really knows how to hold himself accountable.

Sometimes I still go to 12-step meetings with Gabriel.

binary that makes a person either good or bad is a dangerously false one for the widest majority of people.

I can see how my father could have loved my mother but have been in such pain, such self-doubt, that he would not show up that day when she wanted to tell him she was pregnant with me.

This total absence of judgment.

And then Gabriel disappears. Again.

But this time I am not a child. This time I am an adult. I am an organizer. I have survived his incarceration and I have survived Monte’s. I have survived homelessness and homophobia. I have chosen dignity and power. I have chosen not to break. I go in search of my dad.

In this small tattered place, my precious father is high as fuck and drunk.

I tell him that relapse is a part of recovery. I ask, What if we wrote off every person who fell off a diet? We laugh at that, but just briefly.

He is able to avoid the seven-year bid because he volunteers to go to the prison fire camp, a program where convicts are made to serve as frontline first responders when the California wildfires

break out. They are the ones who go in before trained firefighters do. My father risks death for a faster shot at freedom.

It is 2009 and I am 26 years old when Gabriel comes home from prison. He will never go back again.

For a week my father lives with me, sleeping on my couch, but he wants his independence, he wants to not be a burden. He moves into a shelter, which allows him to feel more independent. He begins 12-stepping again and applies for Section 8 so he can get permanent, secure housing. Years after I first suggested it, my father finally determines to get his CASAC—Credentialed Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor—certificate. He wants to spend the rest of his life helping people heal.

He enrolls in the program at Pierce College in LA while I enroll at UCLA. I am the first person on my mother’s side of the family to attend college. We are a father and daughter determined to write our own history and it’s March now and all we can see is the sun rising higher and brighter. We live in gratitude and hope and then June arrives and word comes that his father has died.

I look like the Brignacs going back generations. Me with my wide mouth and big forehead. They come from a place. I come from a place.

By now I am fully in love with Mark Anthony, who is patient and kind and deeply consistent.

I go into his room and look around this tiny space that once was and now no longer is his, this place where he was reinventing himself. I begin packing up the few material items that proved he was here. My father was here. He existed. Gabriel Brignac. This single lockbox of important papers. These few pairs of shoes and items of clothing. They are not the sum of a man. But they are part of him. I pack them up.

My father’s sponsor rises and assumes the position before the microphone and begins to speak. He tells the room about a man desperate to be a better version of himself.

My father, at 50 years old, officially died of a heart attack.

My father was part of a generation of Black men who spent a lifetime watching hope and dreams shoved just out of their reach until it seemed normal, the way it just was. I lost my father at a time when 2.2 million people had gone missing on our watch, buried in prisons that were buried in small towns, but

somehow and unbelievably this man kept coming back.

My father kept fucking trying. This man. My father. Gabriel Brignac who loved me deeply and fiercely.

This was Gabriel Brignac and I hold that flag that had covered his casket, this man who died of a broken heart in this nation of broken promises, and I think that if my father could not be possible in this America, then how is it that such a thing as America can ever be possible?

there was no infrastructure that existed to help secure either his re-entry or his mental health.

The brutal memory of Monte’s first break, during which we learned that there were no social services or safety nets for my brother, hung over all of our heads like a sword.

When Monte came home, after we were able to get him stable after weeks in the hospital, he wanted nothing more than to be a self-sufficient man in the world. But the cycling in and out of juvie during his childhood—for drinking or tagging or just standing on the street with his boys—and then of course the time in prison, meant he had never had a single job in his life, save for any forced labor when he was locked up.

In California there are more than 4,800 barriers to re-entry, from jobs, housing and food bans, to school financial aid bans and the list goes on. You can have a two-year sentence but it doesn’t mean you’re not doing life.

My mother, in fact, stepped in to be Chase’s caretaker because of his mother’s overwhelm and my brother’s own struggles. But disabled and poor and never having had treatment for the PTSD borne of having her life nearly taken at only 18 years old, Cynthia was in no position to manage Monte and ensure he took his medication or get him to County USC hospital to see a doctor who could check to see that his levels were maintained.

He’s mentally ill, I respond, and wonder why cops never seem to think that Black people can have mental illness.

Two days later Monte is transferred to Twin Towers as a high-power alert prisoner, which means he is classified as a threat to officers.

They get to charge him with terrorism.

I don’t feel well, Trisse. Can I please have my meds? They giving me Advil but I need my meds. Please Trisse. Please.

The second time I go to see Monte I am turned away. He’s not fit to be seen, an officer tells me.