Angels with Dirty Faces. Walidah Imarisha
his portrait of us. I had searched for the reborn him. I had never done a search using his birth name. I did not want to see what might have come up: bloody crime scene photos, my brother’s mug shot. Accounts of the destruction he helped create.
“What are you in for?” We do not ask this. But I understand now that for those of us who love people on the inside, not asking those questions protects us as much (or more) than the prisoner. It kept me from seeing my brother through the eyes of his victims. I did not know if I could see him through those eyes, and feel the same way about him. I wanted and desperately needed to see Kakamia as the prisoner who, against all odds, worked to turn his life around, who was committed to changing himself and this world, who used his art as an instrument to implement that change. And he is that.
The truth is always more complicated.
The Truth and Nothing But…
“First, I would like just to make a brief statement on behalf of my client, and I think it’s very important for the Court and for the family who’s present, to know that I’ve had an opportunity to spend time with the defendant, at times when he’s been much more quiet, much more remorseful, much more insightful.”
Kakamia watched his lawyer pleading for his life. With his big Santa-like beard and thick glasses, he didn’t look like your typical lawyer, but he had worked for years as both a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. Kakamia’s mother had hoped his years of experience would change the course of her son’s disintegrating future.
“I just want the Court to realize that this is a person who came into this system, quite frankly a boy, a child. A very immature young man that did a tremendous wrong, and he has learned a great and hopefully a life-changing lesson, here,” Kakamia’s lawyer continued.
Funny, Kakamia didn’t feel like a child. At nineteen, he felt like a grown man. How many men could say they had already done three years in jail at the age of nineteen on a conspiracy to commit murder charge?
While he swaggered hard in the jail about his time in, when he was alone in his cell, it wasn’t pride he felt. He missed his family, despite his fractured past. His mom had tried so hard to raise the bail. But it just hadn’t been enough. Seems like it was never enough. Innocent until proven guilty, he snorted mentally. Even if they had decided to let him go, he still would have lost three years of his life. But of course, he wasn’t going home. After all the things he’d done, and been through… He looked down at his forearms. He saw the kiss of razorblade to his skin, old faded lines crossing his flesh, along with new red intersections. He’d done them himself. Not deep enough to cause damage, but enough to feel. To control the pain. Be in charge of it for once. Be in charge of his own body. Scars on the outside to match the scars on the inside. Maybe then someone would notice.
Just surviving growing up in Crown Heights, Brooklyn in the 1980s had been an accomplishment, though they didn’t hand out certificates. He had heard some of the older Jewish people in the neighborhood reminiscing about when it was a good place to live—clean, safe, friendly. He knew that meant before Black people moved in. By the time he was there in the 1970s, the neighborhood was mixed, and the Jewish residents were the only whites stubbornly holding on. There were clashes between the different groups. He had been involved in more than a few himself.
The neighborhood fell from comfortable to dirt poor. It had to be that way for him, his mom, and his sister to live there. His mom worried about him so much, gave him a curfew and strict instructions. She held down two jobs his whole life, and when she wasn’t working, she was trying to find a way to block out the pain.
His eyes in the courtroom looked over to his mom, who sat in the first row, twisting the banister with her hands, as if trying to wring some compassion out of the court. She was short and solid, with a hearty laugh and gold brown hair that curled like sunrays around her head. He always teased her that she must have some Puerto Rican in her Irish heritage, to get hair like that. “I don’t know, ma, you know they’re always talking about Black Irish—there might be something to it.”
He got so tired of having to explain to people that yes, that was his mom, yes he was mixed, yes it was Puerto Rican and white, but Puerto Ricans were Black too, don’t you know? Didn’t enslaved Black people get sent from Africa to Puerto Rico? Wasn’t there voluntary mixing happening between the Indigenous folks and the Africans, and less-than-voluntary mixing between those two and the Spanish? He felt Black folks in his neighborhood looked at him with suspicion, because of his white mother and his light skin. And the Puerto Ricans looked at him with suspicion because of his lack of Spanish and his white mom. It would have been easier if his father had been around to point at for verification. Hell, it would have just been easier if his father had been around. He could have helped with the bills, which crushed his mother to the floor so hard, the only way she could lift herself up was with a drink or a snort of something.
But his dad was locked up. Again. He had been out all of five years of Kakamia’s life. Most of the time he was at one of the maximum prisons in upstate New York, and they didn’t have the money to travel up to see him. And by the age of thirteen, Kakamia was no longer interested in him. He left us, he had told himself, so he can go fuck himself for all I care.
What would his father think of him now, Kakamia wondered, looking down at the orange prison jumpsuit the state gave him. He had been in jail for almost three years, first awaiting trial and now awaiting sentencing. If he had money, he could have been bailed out. If he had had money... So many of the thoughts throughout his life had started with those words.
Three years. 1,059 days. That was three birthdays. He could now vote, he thought sarcastically. Smoke legally. Die for his country. And kill. Only for his country though. If he had done what he’d done on the battlefield, he would be a hero right now, instead of this… The shackles on his ankles clanked dully.
Kakamia tuned back to the sentencing trial swirling around him. He wasn’t really part of it. He was like this table: a thing, to be moved around. That’s what he’d felt like, moved from jail to jail, from the California Youth Authority to the adult jail when they decided they would try him as an adult.
They had tried both of them, him and Bobby, as adults, even though at the time of the crime Kakamia was sixteen and Bobby was seventeen. Sixteen years old. Joining the ranks of too many smooth faces that have never been touched by a razor, living life with shadows of bars on their soft cheeks. Mike Males recounted the story of the first youth sent to the electric chair, tried and convicted as an adult in his book, Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation. The youth asked for a cigarette as his final request. The guard admonished him, saying he was too young to smoke. Then the state electrocuted him.
Kakamia and Bobby were facing murder, attempted murder, and conspiracy. It was the conspiracy that really scared Kakamia. It woke him up with cold sweats at night, hoping with his eyes squeezed tight that he would open them and be back home. Conspiracy carried a sentence of life without parole. No chance of going home again. That’s it. First strike and you’re out.
After all, this was his first charge. Of course it was a big one. It hadn’t seemed real at the time, not while he stood in the entryway of what Bobby’s parents called “their dream home.” Kakamia had never been in a house so nice before. He thought of the bedroom he, his mother, and his sister shared back home, and worse, the car they had shared for a few weeks when the bills got the best of them.
It hadn’t been real to him until he heard the first shot rip the air. And another. And another. It had not been real until he saw Bobby’s face emerging from the bedroom. It was real when Bobby dropped the gun into Kakamia’s hand. It was real when Kakamia felt the heat from the recently fired barrel. The gun curled up in his hand, warm like hot blood was rushing through its casing. The air smelled like burnt metal and closed doors. That’s when it began to feel real. And that’s when it was too late.
Kakamia remembered his friend Eric approaching him in school with this deadly proposal. He knew both Bobby and Eric, who the prosecution had described as the little devil on the shoulder, telling everyone to do it. Kakamia was much closer with Bobby: as close as he was to anyone. People liked Kakamia well enough; they thought he