JESMYN WARD
The Supreme Court struck down Chicago’s antigang loitering law, which disproportionately targeted African American and Latino youth who were not engaged in criminal activity. The law had resulted in the arrest of 45,000 innocent people.
When I was a child, Easter was a major holiday in my community. Most of us were black, semidevout Catholics, so we rose early on the holiday, attended Mass in pastel and cream outfits specifically sewn or purchased for the day, wore full-skirted dresses and crisp ties. After Mass, we changed into less formal outfits, again specifically sewn or purchased for the day. My grandmother was a seamstress in her youth, so sometimes she made my brother’s and sisters’ outfits, tailored them to our short torsos, long legs, slim arms.
After the midday Easter meal, we all went down to the local baseball park where our team was part of the regional Negro league; our team was the DeLisle Yellow Jackets, named after an especially pernicious wasp-like insect plentiful near woods where there are deer trails. They are at their worst during the late spring, when they swarmed us whenever we walked outside and bit us so badly we were left with raised red welts. The swelling and pain took days to subside. Our baseball players wore black and yellow and white uniforms, and they were good enough that every year, they were given pride of being the home team on Easter Sunday. One man was DJ and sportscaster all at once, narrating the game and then playing blues records during breaks between innings.
At the edge of the field was a tiny, low-ceilinged building that contained pool tables, a small dance floor, and a bar. This was our local hole-in-the-wall blues club.
Most years, it was already warm by Easter, so while we children played games behind the bleachers and took our tooth money to the concession stand for pickles and candy and, when we were hungrier and had a generous adult’s cash in hand, fried fish, the adults took breaks from the humid spectacle of the outside and sought the dim, cool interior of the club. Challenged neighbors to rounds of pool. Sipped a cold beer or wine cooler. Stomped the dance floor.
When I was a child, my small town felt isolated. There was a hub of four long roads where all the people I knew, more than half of whom I was related to, lived. The one convenience store was owned by a local family. There was one Head Start, and one elementary school, one Catholic church, one fire station, one ballpark/hole-in-the-wall blues club, and wilderness around, stretching farther than my small legs could walk. Our year spun a procession of community gatherings, where we came together to celebrate our living, our survival. Mardi Gras. Easter Sunday. Mother’s Day BBQ at the park. June church bazaars. Halloween/fall festivals at the elementary school.
An older gentleman I met from Texas once told me this: everything changes. He had watched the desert pare away the houses and storefronts of his hometown, the old die, the young flee, until his town disappeared. I was nineteen when I met him, attending college in California, and when he said this to me, I felt the pain of recognition. My town too was changing. The old DeLisle disappearing, plot by plot, as new people moved in and settled the wilderness, razed the pines, cleared acres to cultivate scraggly, threadbare grass lawns. The old DeLisle reduced gathering by gathering as our institutions faltered, our community-affirming holidays out of favor due to organizers getting old, fatigue, poverty. When I moved home briefly in my late twenties, the only community gathering still in existence was the Easter ball game.
That year was an anomaly. It was cold, and perhaps this is why the young adults who attended the game did not want to actually sit in the park and watch. We milled and gossiped and laughed and ate and drank on the sidelines, but before the afternoon waned, many of us left. We migrated to the local park, around a mile away, where we could at least sit in our cars in the small lot rimming the playground, crank our heaters, and play music that wasn’t blues. Sometime during the afternoon, one fresh-dressed, hoodied young man let loose his 6 by 9 speakers to sing, and he pulled out into the road, which sported no traffic at all, and rode down the block very slowly, windows rolled down, perhaps swerving a bit, to regale us with music. To show off his car, freshly washed and waxed, tires burnished with Black Magic tire gel.
Soon he was joined by another young man, another car. And another, and another, all serenading us, all smiling, usually with a compatriot in the passenger seat, whose hair was braided tightly to his scalp, whose line was less than twelve hours sharp, mugging for the growing crowd on the sidelines in the parking lot, making us grin with the pleasure of being alive under the weak spring sun, blood rushing to the music, the growl of the tires, breathing and singing and beating in the dying day. Soon there was a procession of cars driving up and down the block, an impromptu musical parade.
The police hired for security at the ballpark down the street noticed. The next year, on our way to the ball game, we rode past the park and saw the parking lot blocked off. Four county sheriff cars posted around the park to prevent anyone from parking, and another two at a fire station nearby. More parked on the shoulder of the road around the ballpark to prevent would-be attendees from parking and socializing anywhere that wasn’t the ballpark. I glared at all of them, anger and sourness roiling in my gut, unable to articulate what it felt like to be policed.
Before that moment, I’d had some experience with what it meant to live in a police state. I’d grown up in Mississippi, after all, a place where Parchman Prison Farm, a plantation prison that stole many from black communities all over the state, reenslaved them over decades, could and did exist. In DeLisle, county cops had stopped me more than once, asked me to exit my car, interrogated me over who I was and where I was going and who was with me, and then never gave me a ticket or reason for pulling me over. I’d heard of others in my community who suffered the same—black women who were more vocal about their resentment at being racially profiled, who were then handcuffed by police for pushing back. What I could not articulate at the time was this: What happens when a community is policed to the point that public gatherings are criminalized, when community members are prevented from coming together to affirm we are alive we are alive we are alive? What then happens to that community?
In 1992, the city of Chicago passed the Gang Congregation Ordinance that prohibited individuals from loitering in public places. A city commission argued that violent crime was escalating due to street gangs and that loitering gang members intimidated “ordinary” residents. The ordinance meant that police officers had the power to ascertain that one or more people in a certain place were gang members, loitering with no purpose, and could then order them to disperse, and then arrest them if they disobeyed that order. Morales, among forty-five thousand innocent others, was charged with violating said ordinance. In the end, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Morales, holding that under the Constitution, police officers do not have unlimited discretion to define the nature of the loitering, and such laws must be subject to sufficiently specific limits.
This desire to police the other, to rob the alien other of the very human pleasure of gathering in public and sharing community, is not new. Black boys as young as twelve were charged with loitering in Mississippi in the 1930s and 1940s and 1950s and sent to Parchman Prison to be reenslaved. The Gang Congregation Ordinance resulted in forty-five thousand innocent people, mostly black and brown, being arrested. New York City’s infamous stop-question-and-frisk program, which is still currently active, has been the conduit for rampant racial profiling and illegal stops. According to the NYPD’s own reports, nearly nine out of ten stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers have been innocent.
Sometimes I marvel at what it might feel like to be a white American. Especially a white American male. To walk out of my front door and enter public space and to be free of preconceived notions of who you are, of your morality or lack thereof, your work ethic or lack thereof, your intelligence or lack thereof, your ethical standards or lack thereof. To walk through the world unjudged. And then I often wonder what it is like for white men to not have to worry about the types of judgments that are particular to my sex: What must it be like to not have to worry that your work is worth the same as everyone else’s, to not have to worry that if you are sexually assaulted or harassed, you will be blamed for it because of how you dressed or spoke or drank or stood or sat? What must it feel like to exist in the outside world unencumbered by the threat of not only racial but also sexual violence?
Sometimes I think I have experienced something of what it must be like to move through the world a bit more freely. When I left Mississippi for college in California when I was eighteen, the farther I got from the South, the lighter I felt. I looked up more often instead of watching my feet as I walked. My shoulders, perpetually curved as a cowed animal’s, began to straighten. I had conversations with classmates wherein I would relate stories of racism from my past, and in the telling, I would realize how I’d accepted the bullying, internalized it, accepted it as my due because I was black, and this was Mississippi. In leaving Mississippi, this place where every other street is named for a Confederate, where politicians pose with Confederate flags, where they make flippant remarks about public lynchings at campaign events, I felt a little safer, a little lighter in public. This is the kind of place where Cruisin’ the Coast, a gathering of mostly white, older people who tool around the different small towns of the Gulf Coast in restored antique cars, produces just as much, if not more, traffic and congestion business as Black Spring Break in Biloxi, and while Cruisin’ the Coast is celebrated, BSB is heavily policed, restricted, and the outcry to cease the event increases every year. This denial of community gathering does this too, teaches us that we are less than human, that we don’t deserve to feel that sense of joy of being serenaded, or the sense of kinship when an arm is flung over your shoulder, or that sense of ease when someone you have known for years tells a good joke, and you turn your face to the sky and laugh.
I am ever grateful for the work the ACLU does to root out this racist behavior legitimized in law, wherever it occurs, in Mississippi, where they’ve brought suit against the Madison County Sheriff’s Department to challenge racially motivated policing or Chicago or elsewhere, but it is disheartening to know that this happens all over the country, even when not codified in law. This belief that black people, brown people, queer people, trans people, disabled people, women are perpetually less is the great American Gorgon, and these endless terrible laws and behaviors are its myriad heads, regenerating one after another. Rooting us in place with one glance, miring us in inequality. This is how we are frozen in stone. Sometimes I believe this is an endless battle. And in a rare moment, I believe maybe we are our greatest heroes, ACLU and all. On these moments, I think: onward, to freedom.