Anyone who knows me knows that I talk about my mother a lot. I love my mother. I LOVE my mother. I always say that my son is a love song to my mother and her care. My grandmother died when my mother was six, but she had been ill and unable to care for her for years before that. Being the daughter of a motherless child means that you and she are operating without a playbook. Her care and self-expression are largely her own handiwork. My mother is an original. Yet, I think she is in many ways the blueprint of what it means to live an activist life despite my now 15 years of teaching at the university level and extensive post-graduate education.
Everything I needed to know about community engagement and community work, about being active I learned watching my mother by the time I was twelve. Her propensity for reading gave her one of the highest levels of literacy in our community. My mother worked for 45 years as an oncology nurse while raising 5 children on her own, but at night after children were fed or while she was making dinner she helped people do their taxes, fill out forms, read letters from the bank, decipher their retirement benefits, apply for WIC or food stamps as well as make lists of questions to ask their doctor at the next appointment. She still is one of the last persons on earth who answers their phone because it rings, it’s her house and maybe the person on the other end needs something from her.
She took her homespun obligation to be useful, helpful in her indigenous community to rural provinces in Africa where she treated burns from open fires, machete and machinery accidents, helped young mothers with sick babies release milk from engorged breast. But these people she helped were also a part of her community from the first time she found them in books. She knew them to be her people like the ones next door and up the block. She was READY.
My mother did not shelter us from any of the work she did. The words dead, death, and dying are a regular part of your vocabulary when your mother spends her days caring for cancer patients. If she had to go by someone’s home who was sick, or drop by a funeral, or screen African American men for prostate cancer at a local church on her days off from working in a urological oncology clinic, or run a community clinic for the homeless, my twin sister and I and my older sisters’ in there turn were in tow.
Not only was she ready, but she was also getting us ready for the journey. I am an eyewitness to what social scientists and activist groups are now calling micro-activism or the small day-to-day ways individuals and some groups attempt to effect change in the world around them. It is the example of what one does in the face of death and dire circumstances that has been the most instructive to my activist life. I study the death penalty in Texas. In the last 4 decades alone the state of Texas has executed 466 people and has a death row population of 337. I study the long history of racial, economic and political terrorism that has culminated in a legal system of state killing that continue to be used disproportionately to take the lives of black, brown and poor people.
I left my PhD program and the theoretical discussions of the real worlds I had once inhabited to go to law school just before the execution of a woman named Karla Faye Tucker. A white woman sentenced to death for killing two people with a pick axe, who bragged that the horrific act of murder caused her to orgasm, and then was spectacularly born-again on the Texas death row brought me home to study the law. In the midst of the debate about fairness, and forgiveness, and what would Jesus do, I returned to Texas to become a lawyer. I was drawn to the work because of its legal complexity and its engagement with the Constitution but also because I come from a family, from a people that have been targets of state violence since their labor, at least on paper, became their own.
I was drawn home because the call for mercy for this hymn singing white woman on the Texas death row made me want to take a look at this place, where my family has now lived for nine generations, where my great grandmother’s hymns did not garner a reprieve from the scorching heat of the cotton field, where my grandmother’s pain did not bring a chorus of white ministers to push the state for better or actual healthcare for black people in rural Jim Crow. There was no call for my great grandmother and my grandmother and for not one of these women, black or white, did the state show any mercy because Karla Faye Tucker was executed. I was drawn home because I wanted to do something.
THought number 2 on living an activist life: You got to do something. Right now. Everyday if possible. Do anything. Do everything. But don’t do nothing. There is no place for bystanders in the annals of history unless it is to get run over, left behind or left out. Start small. Go big, but do it.
I wanted to stand up for those men and women who bodies hung from trees and those who high themselves shot someone in a drug deal gone bad and I wanted to stand up and say that the state can only go so far in it’s control of it’s human citizens. I had seen the power and abuse of the power of the law and law enforcement all my life in my inner-city community. I wanted to do what I could to wield power for those I was charged to help but also I wanted to disrupt the networks of power that continues to put targets on the backs of young black women and men, young Latinas and Latinos and poor people of all colors.
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