Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
experiment is more complex than any class tests I conducted in college courses.
The expanse of Kakamia’s skin has become crowded with the remains of things burnt. It is full body armor: arms to back, legs to tops of feet. Ivy curls around fingers, the eyes of a portrait of a political martyr stare out of the top of Kakamia’s skull. The martyr chose death over jail. When I die, I wear nothing but the tats on my back. From Kakamia’s poem “Last Stand.” The tat on his back screams, “Fuck the World” across his shoulder blades in Old English (malt) lettering.
Almost a decade ago, doctors cut out cancer that had settled near his heart, two inches under his right nipple. It had been growing in him for some time, they said—it was just now big enough to notice. They do not know how he got cancer. “The environment you grew up in probably contained toxins in large quantities,” the doctor said, telling him something he knew his entire life. His whole life has been carcinogenic.
His scar is camouflaged by the West African Adinkra symbol for eternal energy. Kakamia no longer hides his scars, but paints them brightly.
In the middle of his chest is a bullseye, and an edict: “No warning shots.”
Kakamia has the symbol for the revolutionary Puerto Rican indepentistas, Los Macheteros, swaddling his Adam’s apple. Their blood-red star has a machete through it, surrounded by an outline of the island of Puerto Rico.
“Cuz you know how your hermano get down!” he shouted joyfully the first time I saw it.
Kakamia and I share a tattoo—the Adinkra symbol for change and adaptability—his at the base of his neck, mine on my left shoulder. It was the first tattoo I ever got, a reminder to me not to fear what the future brings—that change is constant, and rigidity is the enemy. The tattoo is a reminder to Kakamia that such a thing as change exists beyond the same three walls and set of barred teeth greeting his eyes every day. As sci-fi writer Octavia Butler wrote, “God is change.”
I do not believe in god. I struggle to believe in change. When I got my tattoo I was terrified. I wasn’t scared of leaving permanent marks on my body—the multiple cigarette burns and shallow razor slashes on my forearms, breasts, and abdomen were evidence of that. When I pushed the smoldering mouth of the cigarette to my skin, it was power I smelled burning. That was pain I could control as a teenager: scars I chose to carry rather than those that had been forced upon me. I was scared of uncontrollable pain.
In the tattoo parlor, I shook in the chair. The woman, covered almost completely in dayglo tattoos and endless piercings, readied her instruments. My friend was there, holding my hand, breathing for me. I had planned the design small, slightly larger than a dime, stacking the odds in my favor of making it through.
“You ready?” the artist asked, needle already purring.
The first kiss was like the sensual gnawing of my first lover’s teeth on my skin.
“Is that it?” I asked her, incredulous.
“Yep, that’s as bad as it’s going to get,” she said over the hum of my identity being etched onto me. I started laughing.
Kakamia loves to tell the story of me laughing through my first tattoo. It proves how tough and baaaad his little sister is. Like Bruce Lee.
“Now we’re connected by ink.”
Kakamia has a portrait of me tattooed over his heart, two afro puffs perched like dark planets on the side of my head. I have seen a photograph of this tattoo. I am not allowed to see the tattoo itself, of course, because we only meet in visiting rooms, under the watchful eyes of guards.
I hate the picture of me he chose. Taken in my friend’s car when I was eighteen, I was preparing to step out into the rain, back into my apartment, into the relationship I wanted so desperately to escape—the one I finally did escape—with a bruised wrist and a fear of eyes watching me through windows. I turned to say goodbye and got a face full of flash. The picture is a torn girl trying to paste herself into a woman, all unfinished edges and messy wet glue.
I love living on my brother’s skin; I just wish it was a wholer me that resided there.
Kakamia’s name is a bracelet encompassing the span of my wrist. My third tattoo and my last. So far. A birthday surprise for Kakamia. After he immortalized me on his skin, every time we would talk, he would joke, “So when you getting my face tattooed on you? Only fair you know.”
I did not want his face frozen. It would be only one of the countless hims I have seen over the years. It would be a fact, and it would be a lie.
So I chose words, as I always have: the letters I gave him, strung together with poetry.
I ventured deep into North Philly to an art studio, up rickety, dusty stairs to a room plastered with pin-up girls on cars and death metal bands thrusting their manhood out. The artist was a dreadlocked Black man with heavy eyes, I hoped, from lack of sleep and not weed.
He tried to talk to me while I gritted my teeth, the needle digging into the delicate bone of my wrist until it felt like sawing tendons. My boyfriend Dovid was with me. We had broken apart but we were still pretending to be whole, not so much for outsiders—they could all clearly see our cracks—but for ourselves. He put his hands on my shoulder and I jumped, causing a tiny line coming down from the second “a.” Permanent. Like so many little mistakes.
On the next visit, I proudly rolled my sleeve back and held my illustrated wrist in front of Kakamia’s face. These were ties more than blood: ties of choice.
He dragged me by my arm, showing everyone in the visiting room—prisoner, visitor, and guard alike: “Look at that, that’s my name, fool! I told y’all my baby sister loves her big brother, didn’t I? Look at that, what did I tell you? That’s my name!”
My brother was a graffiti artist, which is to say an outlaw. If you could read the wild styles of his youth, you could speak the words of the kamikaze graffiti tattoos on his flesh. Growing up in New York, where graf artists hung out of windows to put their names in gravity-defying places, Kakamia has become his own blank wall, readied for bombing (the graffiti term for covering a wall that isn’t yours).
I can see him, tagging his name on walls, scaling fences into train yards to spend hours sucking in paint fumes, the only sounds the shhhh of the aerosol can, the rattle of the Krylon and your own hot breath in your ears. It is a way to leave your mark on the world: proof you were there. An undersized, skinny ghetto mule-atto mixed-up kid who never had enough money to get by. They can’t erase you. Even if they sand blast you off, you’ll come back. Immortality.
As he dragged me around and showed off my flesh, I was proud to realize I was his latest tag, his latest cry of resistance to a world intent on scrubbing him clean out of existence.
* * *
I know my brother sent me a clip from a paper several years ago of a high school senior—a promising star basketball player—who was killed in a car accident. My seventeen-year-old son, the words wept: Thearon. I had never heard of a son before. Kakamia’s brother had raised Thearon as his own son. I had never heard of a brother before.
Thearon had not seen Kakamia; he had only heard of him as an uncle gone bad, an example not to be followed. My complexly beautiful, wonderfully frustrating, and infinitely loving brother was reduced to a convict stereotype. His son was reduced to a grainy picture in a paper, a list of accolades, and overwhelming regret. Thearon had Kakamia’s wide jaw, his big forehead, and his clear eyes.
I know so many family members who have stood by their incarcerated loved one for decades. Unwaveringly sending much-needed packages, traveling hours for visits, accepting exorbitant collect phone calls. They redefine words like commitment, sacrifice, and love.
But sometimes blood family step back when the police knock at the door, or they wander during the trial, or they run after the sentence is handed down. They collapse under the biggest loss, already on the ropes from continual body blows. They drift through years that move so slowly behind bars, and so quickly out here. They run from the shame society force-feeds them, as if prison is a