The Fear of Believing Survivors

Many times, my mama describes to me the moment she knew my dad was plotting to kill her. The details are always consistent: the way his lips turned white, dried up, and quivered; the quiet and the chill of Riverside Park. Even though my dad used to beat my ass, the possibility of me losing my mother was too frightening to believe. It couldn’t be real. Not me. Not her. Not him. Not us. But she keeps repeating the story, the knife she felt in his pocket, the cold, his lips. How she said she needed to use the bathroom and quickly walked away. Each time she tells it, I feel her desperation to rid herself of the story, to offer me this thing I don’t want. When she tells the story each time, she tells it with her chest jumping and falling, her voice running through details with enough rage and volume to fill up my head and an auditorium full of listeners, but not without expressing how scared she was. Is. Something in her necessitates that someone else also be enraged at how she is forced to feel. Telling it is how she attempts to expel it. It’s too overwhelming to let it to consume me: her anger, her fear, the thought of my dead mother, and the possibility that I could one day be her angry, scared, or dead body too.

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander describes the way we “know and don’t know” that the system of mass incarceration imprisons more African Americans today than there were people enslaved right before the civil war; how we “know and don’t know” that we’re moving about our lives, business as usual, without responding to this atrocious social…