Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
breathe, and when necessary, bleed. From extensive interviews with Kakamia and Mac, and through mining my own memories, I have reconstructed scenes from all of our lives. And reconstruction is just another way of saying imagining with its foundation in fact. As much as we research and retell history, we imagine it as well. I have tried to imagine with the fewest factual errors possible.
The title of this book, Angels with Dirty Faces, comes from a 1938 James Cagney film. Cagney plays Rocky Sullivan, a young man growing up in early 1900s Hell’s Kitchen. Together with his best friend Jerry Connolly, Rocky got into the kind of trouble poor kids in a city got into. They stole to eat. Then they robbed a railroad car. The police gave chase. Rocky saves Jerry’s life by pulling him out of the way of a steam train. Rocky gets caught by the police. His friend Jerry, who could run faster, does not. Rocky goes to reform school, graduates to more crime, spends more time in prison, and becomes one of the most notorious gangsters. Jerry stays in the neighborhood and becomes a priest.
Eventually, Rocky returns to the old neighborhood. He and Jerry spend time together. Rocky meets a woman. He becomes a hero to a group of young boys. But the life he was dealt pulls him back in. He kills another gangster. He is tried and sentenced to the electric chair.
Jerry comes to visit Rocky before his execution. He asks Rocky for one last favor before he dies: to pretend to die as a “rotten sniveling coward.” Jerry asks for the group of young boys who look up to Rocky, and for the young boys across the country. Jerry asks Rocky to destroy the image of heroic outlaw they have created in their head. He asks Rocky to show himself as human and broken, so that they will not follow in his footsteps.
Rocky refuses. “You’re trying to take away the only thing I have left.” All he has to hold on to is the image of himself he created out of his pain.
And yet, after Rocky is strapped into the chair, he begs. He pleads for his life. He dies crying. Begging. The reporters capture it. Write it in the paper:
At the fatal stroke of eleven p.m. Rocky was led through the little green door of death. No sooner had he entered the death chamber, than he tore himself from the guard’s grasp, flung himself on the floor, screaming for mercy. And as they dragged him to the electric chair, he clawed wildly at the floor with agonized shrieks.
In contrast to his former heroics, Rocky Sullivan died a coward.
The boys are disillusioned. Rocky was not the icon they thought. In the last scene of the film, Jerry reads the account of Rocky’s execution to the young boys. The priest tells them, “Pray with me. Pray with me for a boy who couldn’t run as fast as I could.”
Rocky Sullivan is the most human and complex portrayal of a gangster I have ever seen in popular culture. The character allows nuances to live next to contradictions. The film allows for a priest to love a gangster, and for a gangster to show nobility and sacrifice in his last moments of life. Most importantly, the film tells us no one is born a gangster. It is through circumstances that gangsters are forged. And sometimes the smallest thing, like whether or not you can run faster than your friend, determines the course of your life.
But even more important, no one is beyond a taste of redemption. While some believe Rocky just broke at the end, and was truly pleading for his life, I in my heart know this not to be the case. I know Rocky instead did the bravest thing he had probably ever done in his entire renegade life. He made a decision to tell the truth. To remove the façade. To show the pain he carried, masked as bravado. To beg, not truly for his life, but for the lives of those boys who looked up to him.
That is what this book is about.
Who among us is beyond humanity? Can we hear another’s pain and trauma, and still think of them only as evil? And if not, how will we deal with it, when we learn the monsters are themselves frightened, bruised children?
During Kakamia’s 2008 parole hearing, where he was denied for the fourth time and given a two-year hit after eighteen years in prison, he looked at the parole board and said,
I’m not the best. I’m not going to come in here with this shining record. I’ve been incarcerated over half of my life. I do the best that I can. And every day I strive not to become that individual walking that track.
Every day I strive not to become just another number.
What I Didn’t Know About My Brother
My adopted brother Kakamia Jahad Imarisha is charming, charismatic, and complicated—riddled with gaps of darkness and pain that twenty-five years in prison have carved into him. These chasms have been left by being arrested at sixteen and charged as an adult. A sentence of fifteen-to-life hanging like a broken arm. Slowly, these gaps are filled in with fear: the thought of dying in prison floods into the void left as each passing year drains away.
During one visit Kakamia, who never seems to change in my eyes, pointed to his head. “I’m getting old, Wa,” he moaned. For the first time, I saw swathes of gray glistening in the black. It scared me more than it scared him.
Survival in prison is a stroll on a razor blade. Kakamia calls it “a warehouse for people society does not want. Amistad for today,” referencing the famous slave ship where the captured Africans rebelled. You are not meant to survive—not whole, not sane, not with a loving heart. Those who do survive find whatever means they can. To make it, you have to rebuild yourself: rebuild the old you, whatever flaws and weaknesses you brought in, mortar in the gaps of the wall. It’s a never-ending job. Each day new holes are smashed in by the confinement, the inhumanity, the unnaturalness of everything that touches your skin or your tongue, that reaches your eyes or your ears, that lives under your skin and comes out when you’re sleeping late at night, the lights from the tier burning behind your eyelids.
My brother recreated himself so fully, for years I did not know where the renovations took place. In the shadow of prison, I have had to confront my assumptions, my own weaknesses. I have had to force myself to see the person Kakamia was, the person he has become, and explore the fault lines between what is fact and what is true. I’ve had to learn these are not always the same thing.
My brother…even to call him that is a lie that speaks to a deeper truth. Our status as family is not born out of blood or bound by legal documents. Instead, it was a creation we constructed, two lost children in search of a heart that would understand.
Kakamia and I adopted each other as siblings when I was fifteen years old. We’d found each other through a progressive California newspaper I subscribed to. He was advertising his artwork, trying to earn some extra money for the overpriced prison commissary, trying to connect with a world beyond the walls. I was searching for a connection to my Black heritage, living in a small Oregon town, the child of a white mother and an absentee Black father. I thought I was just buying some Afrocentric work to decorate my room. I ended up mail-ordering a brother.
The first art piece he sent me was an African warrior, spear and shield in hand, outlined by the continent of Africa. He called me “my African sista” when he closed the letter. It was one of my first real connections to a Black cultural context. And even our racial identities are complicated. At the time I wondered if I was “really” Black, while his mix of Irish-mutt whiteness and convoluted Puerto Rican Black lineages marked him firmly as “other.”
I have seen pictures of his mother. I saw my own mother staring back, the smiling folds of blonde white womanhood hardened by poverty and decisions made to carry and care for brown children of their making, our color staining and tainting their whiteness.
I have seen a picture of his father. One. Same trim frame, though Kakamia’s has been built up through countless hours of dips and pushups while in solitary, free weights and chest presses when he had access to the yard. They have the same jaunty way of throwing a leg forward and leaning back, as if daring the world to step over the line they’ve drawn.
His father’s skin glows much lighter than Kakamia’s, undarkened by the ever-present California sun. Biology being the convoluted creature it is, I cannot help but wonder at the combinations that produced him.
My own birth