The majority of incarcerated women are mothers of underage children. Over 40 percent of these mothers report that, upon incarceration, they were the only parent in the household.
K.K. and I walked home from school. It was April 1981. He was complaining that he didn’t like his kindergarten teacher, something my mother never would have tolerated. Children weren’t supposed to complain about a teacher, or any adult for that matter. Teachers were always right, especially if they were white—and even if they weren’t right, you most certainly didn’t say so. But I let K.K. talk, and then told him I’d arrange to visit his classroom. He seemed happy about that, and when we returned home, he brought me a chrysanthemum. “For you, Mama.”
Then the world spun.
My son was pronounced dead at the hospital. Guilt consumed me—I had escaped the police so many times, and now it was a police officer who’d taken my baby.
Toni looked at me with an eye of accusation. She and my mother were the last to find out what had happened. Toni had been at school in the Valley and, after the hourlong ride home, she was walking from the bus stop when a paperboy told her. My mother was in Malibu that day, cleaning the houses of actress Louise Lasser and musician Neil Sedaka. She was driving up our street when she saw Toni’s school bus go by. They both, unknowingly, rode past the spot where the accident had occurred hours earlier.
A week later, I was in a white lace dress. The door of a limousine closed then opened again at the cemetery. A photographer’s camera flashed for a story the newspaper would run about the accident. Flowers were everywhere. I’d never seen so many flower arrangements. I saw Mark there, staring far into the distance.
From the hearse came the tiny casket, decorated with white roses dipped in baby blue paint. A lone rose dropped in the driveway, and everyone drove over it. Toni watched, tissues pressed to her face, as the photographer snapped a picture of the crushed rose.
Toni later told me that L.A. police chief Daryl Gates showed up, wearing a tan suit. She said she knew exactly who he was from watching local TV news, reading the newspaper, and, she added, having a criminal family. I don’t remember seeing the police chief, even though he would have stuck out with his pale, freckled face. Toni insisted we spoke, that he’d approached me at the hearse. If so, I must have told him I couldn’t afford to pay for my son’s funeral. But there were no offers from the city to pay. At the burial, my relatives passed a hat. I don’t remember that either, but, later, my mother gave the funeral home a stack of crumpled bills.
When we returned to my mother’s house, my rage propelled me into the street. I stood at the corner where K.K. had stood, the corner over which repeated requests for a stoplight had fallen on deaf ears. And then I stepped into the street. I planted myself at the spot in the crosswalk where it had happened. There I stood, wide-stanced, in my white lace dress. Horns started up—little nudges, C’mon, lady, that quickly turned into angry blares, Get the hell outta the street! Unflinching, I refused to move.
Then, my brother Melvin walked into the street and joined me. My other brothers followed, then my mother, and cousins, and neighbors. For over an hour we marched back and forth across that busy corner, chanting about getting a stoplight, chanting about justice. Someone went and Xeroxed K.K.’s obituary and passed it out, and my brother Marvin’s girlfriend, Marva, started a petition for a stoplight, collecting signatures from people in cars and on the street. We backed up traffic from the 10 freeway all the way to Hollywood.
When the police showed up, they were in riot gear. Scared, Toni hurried to her friend’s house a few doors down and watched from there. With the police’s threat to arrest us for not having a permit to demonstrate, we finally dispersed.
I went home and crawled into a bottle of booze. It was all that I could do to quell the shaking, heaving, sobbing.
Marva had collected over a thousand signatures on the petition for a stoplight, and it was delivered to the county courthouse. But, still, that stoplight didn’t happen, some guff about it not being feasible, and that five accidents would have to occur there before a stoplight would be considered. We knew of two other accidents, including a mailman who was hit but survived. So, according to the city, three down and two to go?
Our community newspaper, the Los Angeles Sentinel, ran a story on the front page, “Family Ask End of ‘Cover-Up,’” detailing the difficulty we had in obtaining a copy of the police report, and our demand for a full-scale police investigation.
At my mother’s house, the phone rang. Lawyers had read the article and wanted to represent me. They offered to send cars to bring me to their fancy offices. They tossed around words like settlement and seven figures.
Some of my brothers began scheming. Michael said, “Sue, if you got a payout, you could buy each of us a car.”
I shook my head in disgust. “You’re talking about blood money.” But my solution was no better: I was trying to drink away the pain.
The police must have been nervous that I’d file a lawsuit because squad cars slowly drove by my mother’s house, trying to intimidate. It was haunting, seeing them lingering at the corner where the accident had occurred.
Eventually, Marva convinced me to meet with a lawyer she knew, and I agreed to file a lawsuit. It then dragged on and on, and I was too mired in pain and alcohol to involve myself in the process or to question my lawyer’s intentions and missteps. He became yet another untrustworthy person in my life. Another person failing me. In the end, there was no seven-figure payout, and the finality of it all only deepened the ache for my son.
Unbeknownst to me, when the police report was finally released Toni managed to see it. Without telling anyone, she took a bus to the police station and asked for the detective listed on the report as having hit K.K.
He wasn’t in, she was told.
“I have some questions about a case,” Toni said. “My brother Marque Hamilton’s case.” The people behind the desk looked at each other, then quietly suggested Toni leave her phone number.
The detective never called, though Toni played over and over in her mind what she’d say if he did. She wanted to ask, Why? Why, according to witnesses, did two other lanes of cars stop for K.K. but the detective barreled through the crosswalk? Why had the detective not gotten out, but instead, as the report stated, stopped a full block away?
The report also described that K.K.’s fist was balled around a note folded over a dollar bill. The note said, Eskimo Pie.
A neighbor who’d witnessed the accident said the market on our side of the street had closed early that afternoon, so K.K. made a split-second decision to head to the convenience store across the street. The note for ice cream—I must have written it, though I didn’t remember. But I must have. I sent my son running to his death.
Toni spent that summer overwhelmed with frustration and sorrow, looking at me with that eye of accusation. She entered the school year in a state of disarray. I was too checked out to notice.
Then my daughter made up her mind to do something I could not: she somehow found peace, deciding she couldn’t ruin her own life too. Another decade and a half would pass before I could realize this for myself.
Alcohol had been numbing me, but it wasn’t enough. A hundred proof couldn’t seep as deep as my pain. Wandering bleary-eyed onto the street, I found cocaine, and that took me into total blankness. A place devoid of thoughts, empty of feelings, a respite from the debilitating anguish. My rage at that detective, at that corner without a stoplight, at myself, at the world—cocaine sucked all that up. It allowed me to function even though the depression and anxiety made me unable to stomach food and unable to sleep. Night after night, when it was too quiet and when I was terrified of the images that came when I closed my eyes, it was cocaine that made the world seem a little less unkind.
Cocaine was a brilliant lie. Though it allowed me to go on living when I didn’t want to, life then became about how to get more cocaine. I had no way to fund my self-medicating. That is, no legal way. K.K.’s death left me with a lack of regard for the law. So in my warped thoughts, avenging my son’s death meant defying the law any way I could. A foolhardy plan, of course, one that would only continue to hurt me and everyone I cared about. But a cyclone of emotion whirling with alcohol and cocaine didn’t exactly create a rational line of thinking.
No one does dope to get addicted. But you use it, and then it uses you. I had an addiction to feed, and it made me do hideous things. In the blindness of my depression and rage, I felt I was owed. It wasn’t difficult to find the people breaking the law, an underground world of hustlers and frauds. They had their own pain, their own addictions, their own warped logic. They supplied me with stolen credit cards, and I used them.
I closed my eyes and put my finger on a map, and that’s how I ended up in Alaska. I was thirty-two years old, and Alaska seemed just as good a place as any to spend my days. I bought my ticket under a stranger’s name. I wanted to become someone else, and I did. I became Linda Taylor, Susan Holland, Tasha Lashan James, Carla Thomas, Linda Jean Robinson. All of whom—I convinced myself—in their privileged, good-credit lives didn’t know pain like the pain I had endured. In my mind, these strangers owed me, too, and I’d fund my heavy-hearted life with what I imagined were their easy lives of American Express and pay stubs and fancy signatures on fat checks.
I landed in Fairbanks, Alaska, on a dark, snowy April day, and the first thing I did was go buy myself a white fox fur coat and matching fur hat. Three days later, I sauntered out of a bank, having just cashed a check I’d forged. The police were waiting for me.
I was far, far from home, and while I’d come to Alaska seeking escape, now all I wanted was to be back in Los Angeles. I called George, and it was good to hear his gentle, reassuring voice. By this time, George had gotten to know my entire family well, bailing out my brothers right and left. He also, in a way, had come to trust me. He remembered how I’d pay for my boyfriend James because I couldn’t stand the thought of anyone jumping bail on George. Over the years, if someone I knew was jumping bail, I’d put out some feelers, then I’d call George and report where that person was. In my neighborhood that’s called snitching, but the way I saw it, George was kind and caring, and if he bailed you out he deserved to get paid.
I told George I’d been arrested for forgery.
“You always did have that talent for picking up things easily,” he said. “I remember how you watched me sign my name and then you signed it identical.”
Only this time it was no party trick; this time I was in deep. My bail was set at $5,000, but when George tried to post it, the bail was raised. He tried to post the higher amount, and then that was raised. On it went until the bail reached $100,000: the Alaskan court did not want to let me go. Can’t blame them; I would’ve left the state and never set foot there again. Though George couldn’t bail me out, he found the best attorney in Alaska to represent me.
My attorney believed he could get my sentence reduced from five years to one, which was good considering I’d been caught in the act. At trial, the district attorney shamed me. “You’re a vulture,” he said. “What you’ve done is like reaching into someone’s grave and robbing them.” As his words sunk in, I was shocked to learn I’d been posing as a deceased woman. All the while, I’d convinced myself that what I’d been doing was resourceful. Disgust seeped through me. But I quickly separated myself, deploying my great talent for divorcing my body from my emotions. When the gavel came down, I was sentenced to sixteen months in an Alaska prison.