A Knock at Midnight(11)
From that corner yard, Sissy’s grandmother and Aunt Cookie had the best view in town. On Fridays, when everyone got their checks, the drug corner ran nonstop. The yard had a clear view of the intersection that ran down to the busiest block in the Hole—the block where guys hung all day and night, slanging dope.
“There goes Rita’s boy,” Aunt Cookie would say a few moments after he passed, shaking her head. “Damn shame. Got a good job at Sherwood but won’t keep it long. This is the third time this week I seen his car.”
The older women would talk about every car that drove up to the dope block, and sometimes those that didn’t, too. They knew everybody and everybody’s business. But when a silver two-door Pontiac Grand Am came through from up the street, Sissy’s grandma would get up from her chair.
“Who wants some sweet tea?” she’d say. “I got some cake in there, too. Sissy, come on and help me get some more ice. Brittany, you come, too.”
The gossip would stop for a few minutes, the yard quiet, a gentle pause in the laughter and cutting up.
It was my mama in that car, and everybody knew it.
Like Sissy and her family, my friends in Commerce did the best they could to shield me from feeling the shame of Mama’s addiction, even if, living in the supply zone as they did, they were eyewitnesses to it. Mama and Jazz moved to Commerce soon after I did, the middle of my ninth-grade year, and I wasn’t pleased about it. I wanted space from that life, space from my mother’s struggles, from the pain of witnessing her decline. Mama had unraveled by this point and was no longer containing her addiction to the privacy of the home. My friends in the Hole knew when she came through in the middle of the night to buy. Many of them had seen her at her worst, but they said nothing to me. They let me go on being the good girl who lived with her grandparents on the other side of the tracks. For those of us born and raised during the height of the War on Drugs—and on our communities—having a loved one who sold crack or was addicted to crack was a shared reality, a shared experience. It didn’t mean we weren’t cruel to one another about it, that we didn’t break each other down over it. We did. But the truth is, for me, for my friends in Commerce, my friends from Bogata like Jonandrea and Demitrice, having lost a loved one to drugs was the norm. In the Hole, I was protected.
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TWO WHITE SHERIFFS in cowboy hats and big metal belt buckles looked me and my Granny up and down as we walked through the parking lot and up the steps of the old Clarksville courthouse. I felt Granny stiffen beside me. I’d already suffered the embarrassment of having to stand in the office of the principal, Ms. King, to explain that I’d be missing school that day, even though I’d accumulated the maximum absences for the semester.
“What’s the reason for your absence, Ms. Barnett?” she asked. Her stern expression softened when I answered: “My mom’s in jail. I gotta go to her court hearing.”
Clarksville is the county seat of Red River County, located about fifteen minutes from Bogata. Tourist blogs and websites describe it as a quaint town with an authentic Old South feel, and that’s about right. Of course, for Black people, the Old South is nowhere you want to visit. A statue of a lone Confederate general towers over the Clarksville town center. To hear my grandpa tell it, the general was built looking sternly over at the Black side of town as a warning regarding where the town’s heart lies. As if there were any question.
Clarksville had a majority Black population and almost entirely white law enforcement. In the courthouse, a historic building that still houses the original bills of sale for many of the region’s first Black residents, rural injustice along color lines runs rampant. “Instead of hanging Blacks from trees, nowadays they do it in the courtrooms,” says Fred Stovall, a Black pastor from the next town over. At the Clarksville courthouse in the late nineties, a dime bag of weed could get you twenty years or more—if you were Black. No one really disputes that racial inequity haunts law enforcement here—the numbers make it foolish to do so. ACLU Texas director Tom Baker bluntly stated, “Marijuana enforcement is just a tool of law enforcement to target communities of color” in the region. In a neighboring county, Blacks were charged for marijuana possession at a rate thirty-four times that of whites, despite equal usage. Red River County numbers weren’t much better.
With their own windfall from the War on Drugs, which gave financial incentives for drug arrests regardless of convictions, Clarksville renovated their jailhouse in the late eighties, even while other businesses shuttered around it. But the old courthouse was left exactly as it had always been, right down to the basement file cabinets and the records of slaves bought and sold.
I sat next to Granny on the straight-backed dark wooden benches of the old courthouse, our eyes on the door where they would bring Mama in from the jail. When the door opened, I heard Granny’s sharp intake of breath, heard her whisper “Lord have mercy” through clenched teeth. Granny was a fierce woman who didn’t stoop for anybody, but even for her, this sight was too much. There, shackled at her feet and wrists, prodded along roughly by a white sheriff in a cowboy hat, was my mama. She wore a soiled uniform with thick black-and-white horizontal stripes more reminiscent of Looney Tunes cartoons than real life. It was like she’d stepped back in time.