A Single Brown Mother on the Arrest of Her Son
Mi’jo’s canon in D major
It was two weeks before Christmas 2009. At 26 years old, my talented, college-educated, gainfully employed son with a young daughter committed a senseless robbery and was arrested. It was crazy. (Was he crazy?) He was unarmed. He could have been shot — killed. I shook at the thought. For those who always blame the mother, who blame all mothers, know that I blamed myself, too. I just never knew for what.
A long, dark night alone followed my son’s arrest — my own Noche Triste. During the great 16th-century conquest of México by Spain, there was an initial victory over the white colonizers. The Spaniards named their defeat the Sad Night. It was the end of a brutal battle in which indigenous warriors defended their nation, land, emperor, and gods. The conquistadors came back, though, and the rest is history. As a mestiza, I empathize with both sides of the horrendous tragedies of La Noche Triste, but never more than when I faced my own night of unimaginable lament, defeat, and hopelessness.
As a single brown mother raising my son under a patriarchy where wealth and the white race still ruled, I was crushed not to have done better for my brown male child.
Many parents in this country lose their children every day, some to drugs, prostitution, bad love affairs, overwhelming debts, and dead-end jobs. We lose them when they have their own children before they are prepared to be parents, to cancers and mental illness and to a myriad of other roads that can lead toward devastation. By no means was I unique within my defeat, alone in having an adult child taken into the prison system. But society’s entrenched rituals that blame a mother made me feel utterly isolated.
I watched my son brought into a Chicago courtroom. His head hung low, he was in handcuffs and wore the prisoner’s orange jumpsuit. He was unshaven and his hair was a mess — sticking out everywhere. He scarcely seemed present. My only child, la luz de mis ojos, glanced around distractedly. At the time, Illinois had no fewer than two governors in federal prison. Our country, it seemed, was increasingly familiar with incarceration. And now, we were part of it.
More among us were being removed from society for a time-out, so to speak, to punish crimes that were somehow drug-related and could boost the booming prison industry. Overnight, our loved ones became the charges of taxpayers.
We on the outside slept fitfully, knowing that prison wasn’t rehabilitation and the penalizing laws that followed an individual labeled “ex-con” made it difficult, almost impossible, to reenter society.
When individuals are punished for drug-related crimes, they do not suffer alone. Families, communities, neighborhoods, schools, and political districts all go down with them. Everyone feels alone. The incarcerated counts the hours and days from behind bars, but we are all trapped. Our hearts are broken along, our lives are turned upside down, and our dreams and expectations for our children evaporate.
The morning of Mi’jo’s first arraignment, he looked like a stranger to me. The young man I had raised, the boy filled with promise to do fine things in life, was a ward of the state. His eyes were bloodshot. He appeared disoriented — not by his surroundings but in his head. “Disconnected” was the word that came to mind the last few times I’d seen him. He appeared to be strung out on something. What? I didn’t know.
Cachito, cachito, cachito mio, pedazo de cielo que Dios me dio, I used to sing to my son as a toddler. He knew the words, too. It was a song made popular by Nat King Cole. My parents sang it to me when I was a child. I look at you and look at you and in the end I bless the luck to be your love, the lyrics go. The blessing of a child, the inimitable joy of having one, is a little bit of heaven. One of my mother’s favorite endearments for me when I was small, and which I later used for my son, was “pedazito de mi alma,” little piece of my soul.
That day in the courtroom, I watched a little piece of my soul handcuffed. A piece of my soul looked like society’s refuse. His feet were in socks and jail-issued sport slides. When our eyes met, Mi’jo’s reddened. I love you, he mouthed.
I love you, too, I mouthed back. Quietly, on the bench where I sat and wept.
I am every ounce a red-blooded American by birth and tax-paying rights, but I am also the daughter of my ancestors. When a Mexican indigenous mother loses a son, she mourns the loss of a potential warrior by shearing her hair. At the court, when my son looked up at me with his eyes bloodshot from residual drug effects, tears, or both, he, too, saw someone he didn’t at first recognize. My hair was cut to the scalp.
This is not to say that I had accepted defeat, only that I acknowledged having lost an important battle. But I did not lose hope. It was not in my nature.
Excerpted from Black Dove: Mama, Mi’jo, and Me, published by Feminist Press on May 10, 2016. Copyright © 2016 Ana Castillo.
Available for purchase at Feminist Press, Amazon, and IndieBound.
