Once a month I see a psychiatrist who refills the six medications I take every day. Three are antidepressants, one is to treat my narcolepsy, one is for anxiety and to help me sleep unbothered by my frequent nightmares, and one is to help me fall asleep in the first place. Before each appointment, I’m asked to fill out an intake form:
Over the last 2 weeks, how often have you been bothered by any of the following problems:
How often have you been bothered by little interest or pleasure in doing things? (Several days)
How often have you been bothered by trouble falling, staying asleep, or sleeping too much? (More than half the days)
How often have you been bothered by a poor appetite or overeating? (Not at all)
Most of my answers stay the same from week to week, and answering them has become an almost unconscious act. But there are two questions that always make me pause.
The first: How often have you been bothered by thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way? The answer to this question varies from Several days to Nearly every day, dependent on whether or not I’ve been sleeping, if I’ve had to deal with my family, if money is tight, if the weather is nice, if I had breakfast that morning, if I had dinner the night before, and on and on and on because my depression is not predictable.
The second: How often have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless? I always debate my answer to this one but, more often than not, I answer Nearly every day. It’s not that I feel down nearly every day. And while I can sense my depression lurking in the background of each morning as I wake up and each night as I lie down to sleep, it often doesn’t bother me like the form asks. It’s become part of the background, like the ringing in my ears that I notice on rare occasions. But when I think about how often I’ve felt hopeless in the past two weeks, I struggle. Not because I feel hopeless about my own life, but because the black experience in America is rife with loss, with despair, with an absence of the freedom that permits hope to exist.
July is almost over and I’m sitting on my couch, which is where I was sitting when Darren Wilson was not indicted for his murder of Michael Brown and when Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for his murder of Eric Garner. It was where I was sitting when Michael Dunn was sentenced to life without parole for his murder of Jordan Davis, a rare moment of our justice system working for black people, not against them. It’s also where I mourned the murder of Freddie Gray Jr. and his brutalized and broken black body. I watched the videos of John Crawford III and Tamir Rice’s murders, and I read about the murders of Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride, Darrien Hunt on this couch. This is a privilege, I know, that I am able to witness the theft of black lives in safety, and I hope you don’t hold it against me, because on this night, I am watching another black woman’s life end. I am watching a black woman die over the course of fifty-two minutes and twelve seconds, and her name is Sandra Bland.
About fifteen minutes into the video, we hear her last words during the arrest: You don’t have to. Another officer, a black woman, is arguing with her before telling Bland that she’s not talking to her. You don’t have to. We don’t hear from her for the remaining thirty-seven minutes. We hear Brian Encinia, the arresting officer, we hear the crackle-hiss of his police radio and his superiors, we hear him say that she kicked him and that’s why he slammed her into the ground. But we don’t hear Sandra Bland. We don’t hear the pain or the anger or the shame she’s been made to feel. We don’t hear any of these things—there is only silence.
Several days after she is found hanging in her jail cell by a plastic trash bag, a voice mail surfaces to break the silence put upon her, to give us the last words of a woman wronged. Her voice sounds distant, weary, but it is not the voice of a woman on the cusp of death. I’m still just at a loss for words honestly at this whole process. How did switching lanes with no signal turn into all this, I don’t even know. But I’m still here . . .
And then she wasn’t.
Maybe you’ve seen the video of her arrest. I hope you have. I hope you’ve seen her face, that you’ve heard her voice, that you’ve watched her body be abused, that you’ve been witness to the beginning of her end. But witnessing is only a small part of understanding her experience. Let me give you another. Let me describe to you the experience of existing in a black body when a police car appears behind you. It is not Sandra’s experience exactly because I cannot and will not claim to know her truth, but I can tell you some of what she felt because I’ve felt it and my mom’s felt it and my sister’s felt it and my grandfather’s felt it and maybe every black person alive has felt it, and I bet you most of the dead ones have felt it, too, right before they ended up dead. It’s like this:
The car appears in your rearview mirror. It has materialized from nothing, it seems, because you never stop scanning the road for the police. Your eyes lock on every idle vehicle on the side of the road, hoping there is no officer in the driver’s seat. Your heart pounds every time you approach the speed traps that your brother taught you to identify for your own protection. Overpasses, blind curves, clearings between trees, you’ve learned where danger lurks. But despite your wariness, despite your careful inspection of the road ahead, an officer has come into existence behind you.
You look from the rearview mirror to the road to the side mirror, one after another, again and again. Your chest is tight, your heart pounds, your throat constricts, your stomach turns, your bowels quiver. You tell yourself that you’ve done nothing wrong, that it will be OK, that he’s not after you, but you don’t believe this. You don’t know if a light has gone out since the last time you checked. You can’t remember if you were a mile or two over the speed limit when this phantom officer first emerged into existence behind you. You don’t know the rules of this state you’re in. You don’t know if you fit the description, but of course you do because there are so many black descriptions to fit that you know one of them can stick. You start to doubt yourself and your memories. You remember renewing your tags and registration for this month, but maybe you didn’t. Maybe you forgot or maybe you did it wrong. Maybe you’ve done everything wrong.
And then the lights come on.
You think about your bank account, about your mom’s bank account, because bailing you out of jail for fitting the description or for driving while black or for living while black costs a lot of money. And then you wonder if you are going to get to go home tonight at all or if you’ll spend the evening behind bars or if you’ll go into the ground instead because all of these outcomes feel equally possible.
As you begin to slow down, drifting right toward the shoulder, crossing over the rumble strips, you think about what’s in your car. There are empty fast-food bags, a few old soda cans and bottles, random mail and papers, and you feel nervous about all of the trash because you know that when the officer sees the garbage in your car, it will only strengthen his association between your body and trash, something to be discarded. You look at the root beer you drank earlier, at the empty bottle in the cup holder, and you start to tremble because the bottle looks a little like a beer bottle and that could be all it takes since black people have been killed for less.
Now you’ve come to a stop. You have to. Every part of you wants to run, to follow the instinctual urge to flee from this predator. You imagine driving off, pressing the pedal to the ground and kicking up a storm of dust and gravel into the face of the hunter behind you, a squid fleeing from a shark. But the shark is faster, works in packs, has support, and even in your imagination you reach a roadblock minutes later where officers with shotguns and pistols are waiting to finish what the other officer started. A hail of bullets pierces the windshield, the car’s tires, your brown skin, your chest, and then your pounding heart falls silent as you die, your only comfort coming from knowing you died on your terms, not theirs. But you don’t run. You are not a squid escaping a shark. You are a deer, frozen, and a white hunter hiding in the bushes that’s been stalking you is taking aim.
The officer steps out of the car. In the side mirror, you can see his hands hovering near his gun as he approaches. A lifetime passes—your lifetime passes—between the moment he exits the car and the moment he reaches your door. You think about what you’ve accomplished and what you’ve yet to do. You think about your hopes and dreams, about the people you love who will miss you, and you try to make peace with the fact that you might have less than an hour to live.
Then comes the knock. Lower your window.
For a moment you think about refusing to lower your window and lose the last line of defense you have between your black body and this agent of death. You even think, for a second, that if you don’t lower the window then nothing will happen and you’ll be safe and you’ll make it home tonight.
Another knock, louder. Lower your window, now.
His hand is on his gun, so you do. The window falls and you lose your last layer of protection and, with it, you lose whatever remains of your control in this moment. You know that lowering your window may be the last choice you ever make and that what comes next is not up to you. All you can do is hope for the best. You feel foolish hoping for kindness, so instead you hope for ineptitude, laziness, indifference. Maybe you’ll get lucky.
Sandra Bland did not.
It’s been a little over eight months since Sandra Bland was found hanging in her cell in Waller County, Texas (which isn’t far from where my sister lives, and I think, sometimes, that it could have been her in that cell). We still don’t know what happened. Some believe that she was murdered, that there was foul play. I’m not sure what I believe.
I had this thought, this thought I’m ashamed of on some level, about her death. Sandra Bland was no fool. Interviews with her family and statements from her mother show that Sandra Bland wasn’t raised a fool and she didn’t die a fool. She was herself an activist who’d watched what happened to Tanisha Anderson, to Michael Brown, to Trayvon Martin, to so many black boys and girls. She wasn’t blind to our present, to the fact that America, in this moment, seems to grant more power to the black body in death than in life. And maybe, I thought, she decided that she wasn’t going to let people like Brian Encinia take her apart, piece by piece. She decided she was not going to let what happened to her pass without weight or importance. She decided she was going to die with purpose. I want to believe that this is what happened, that she felt pride in her final moments as she took her life, confident that her death would stand for something and send a message.
But this is only what I would like to believe.
Here’s what I know: Sandra Bland was murdered. Maybe those officers hanged her. But whether they did or not, she was murdered all the same because Brian Encinia murdered her the moment he pulled her over and began to treat her like something less than human. From July 10 to July 13, regardless of what happened in Waller County Jail, Sandra Bland was murdered because she never should have been there.
And yet, five months later, Brian Encinia was not indicted for this murder. He was fined four thousand dollars—less than the amount set for Sandra Bland’s bail—this year for perjury and was fired from his job as a state trooper. Sandra Bland’s family filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against Encinia and Waller County, among others, which is set to begin early next year. But George Zimmerman walked under more suspect circumstances, so I don’t expect much.
A short time after her death, Sandra Bland’s family asked for an end to speculation about the circumstances of her death. I struggled with whether or not to write this essay in light of their request, and I have not decided, still, if writing this will dishonor that. If it does, then I owe them my sincerest apologies. I don’t speculate to spread rumors, to use Sandra Bland, to make a target of Encinia and Waller County. I speculate because if she wasn’t killed at the (literal) hands of the people in the Waller County Jail that means that she was dealing with something we don’t talk about much in the black community—mental illness.
I tried to hang myself, once, seventeen years ago, from the rafters in the unfinished half of our basement. I didn’t use a rope or a trash bag, but an extension cord. I tossed it over one of the rafter beams, knotted the cord tight against the wood, made another loop, cinched a knot against my throat. Floaters danced across my vision, looking so much like paramecium under a microscope, like the ones I’d seen in my middle school science class on Friday, the day before. I swallowed, felt my esophageal muscles work against the rubber cord to send the saliva down my throat, and stepped off the back of our old, gray corduroy couch.
But because I was never a Boy Scout and because I’d never been on a sailboat and because I’d never been too good with my shoelaces either, the knots didn’t hold, and instead of dangling, choking, dying, I fell to the ground and hurt my knee. The concrete floor was cold, I remember, and the house was quiet except for the intermittent beep of the smoke detector above me, crying out, its battery dead.
I didn’t tell my mother that I’d stepped off the back of the couch, ready to disappear, hungry for nonexistence. Instead, after I fell and after I cried, I wrapped the extension cord up, put it back where I’d found it, washed my face, and played Final Fantasy VII until she called me up for dinner hours later. I didn’t tell her when, weeks later, I started burning myself. The sharp pain of a lit match pressed against my skin was a welcome distraction from my misery. And I didn’t tell her when I began to see images throughout my day of me dead from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, of me dead from a successful hanging, of me dead from swallowing bottles of pills.
I didn’t know how to tell her. I wanted to explain that I was terrified of my father’s rage—once, he beat me with a 2×4—and of my brother’s similar, unpredictable anger—once, he poured boiling water on me—but I couldn’t find the words. Or, maybe, I couldn’t find the right words, the words that would explain to her that this wasn’t a problem that I could pray away, that going to church wasn’t going to fix things, that I did not share her belief. These were her answers when I tried, when I could only find the wrong words to tell her that I didn’t want to live.
I don’t understand why we have this taboo against talking about mental illness and suicide in our community. I wonder if it’s because of the church, if mental illness is seen as evidence of sin and suicidality the work of Satan. But maybe it’s just because so many of us have been killed, are being killed, will be killed. By which I mean, maybe it’s because we work so hard to stay alive, to endure, that the impulse to kill ourselves when we’re being killed by so many so often seems incomprehensible.
I don’t know the answer. Here’s what I do know: Four of the six medications I take every day combat my depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. I have not burned myself in two years. I do not want to kill myself, most of the time. And when my mother calls now and asks how I’m doing, she doesn’t mention her God, her faith, or church. She’s starting to understand that this thing I’m dealing with, for me, can’t be fixed with belief or prayer. It’s not something that can be cured, that can be removed from me as if by an exorcism. She’s starting to understand that it’s not temporary—it’s forever.
In March of 2015, Sandra Bland posted a video, one of the many “Sandy Speaks” videos that she posted on YouTube, that are meant to be uplifting, positive, inspirational. In her March video, she talked about her experience with mental illness. In her jail intake form, she mentioned a previous suicide attempt—an attempted overdose—in 2014 after losing her child due to a miscarriage. Maybe her loss formed the core of her depression and PTSD. Maybe not. Maybe it was one of the innumerable traumas that a black person—and a black woman in particular—in this country suffers on a regular basis. She doesn’t mention any of this. Instead, she says:
. . . I am suffering from something that some of you all may be dealing with right now. It’s a little bit of depression as well as PTSD. . . . But that does not excuse me not keeping my promise to you all by letting you know that someone cares about you, someone loves you . . . but I want you guys to know I’m a human so if there’s any of you dealing with these same things, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, it is OK. It is OK to talk about it. I think that those illnesses are something the African American culture likes to turn a blind eye to and act like they don’t affect us but they do, they really do. So I’m coming out here now, Sandy Speaks, and letting you know that, yeah, I deal with it and some of you watching this probably deal with it too and you have to know that it is OK…because you have someone who loves you. His name is God.
She smiles throughout the video, even when she talks about a wave of depression that hit her, that caused her to start crying. And for her, “. . . God blocked it. You have got work to do.”
I wonder if this is what her mental illness was like, if her depression would strike and leave her raw, overwhelmed. And then, in most cases, a feeling of inner strength would surge within her, a feeling born of her faith, to help her push through her feelings.
But that last sentence troubles me. You have got work to do. Because what happens when faith isn’t enough and that pressure’s still coming? What happens when faith isn’t enough and that thought rings out in your mind—You have got work to do—and you don’t have anything to give?
When she ended up in the Waller County Jail with a bail set at five thousand dollars and her phone call to a friend went to voice mail, did the depression well up within her like a tidal wave, washing over her, drowning her? And then, did she hear that thought in her head—You have got work to do—and think to herself, But I’m tired. I just can’t, not anymore, before making that final decision? I don’t know. This is speculation, perhaps the same kind of speculation that her family wanted to stop.
At the end of April in 2016, Bland’s mother spoke to the Library of Congress at the first symposium of the Congressional Caucus of Black Women and Girls, established in March of this year, about her daughter’s murder:
By a show of hands, can any of you tell me the other six women who died in jail in July 2015 along with Sandra Bland? That is a problem. You all are among the walking dead, and I am so glad that I have come out from among you. . . .
Let’s get something straight. I as a mother do not believe she committed suicide. I will say that until it’s proven. But if you want me to believe that my daughter—that I sent down there sitting up, driving her own vehicle—would be sent home in a capsule in the bottom of a plane with luggage on top of her, that I’m going to shut up? I will not. I will not. I will continue to speak for every mother paralyzed because of the loss of their child. Six, and Google them. I’m looking at your phones. Take two minutes and Google the other six that died in jail. We’re not talking about that year; we’re talking about the month of July. 18-50 [years old]. Kindra Chapman allegedly stole a cell phone; 20 hours later she hung herself. Alexis McGovern downstairs in the infirmary dead, her family upstairs paying the bond. Nobody has spoken these names. And as I go around the country speaking, the fact that no pen is raised in a room, where six other women, aside from my daughter, have died. And nobody knows their names. That’s a problem.
The thing is, I’m not speculating for Sandra Bland alone. I’m speculating for her and me and Kindra and the thousands upon thousands of black boys and girls that are tired, worn down by men like Encinia, by institutions like the Texas Department of Public Safety, by the too-frequent news of dead black boys and girls like Natasha McKenna and Tamir Rice and Shereese Francis. I’m speculating because, like Sandra Bland, I want those of us who suffer from this illness that’s more than fatigue and sadness to feel that it is OK, even when every part of us believes that it’s not, that it won’t be, that it can’t be. Not because some god will see us through to the end but because all of us brown folks, through our own strength, our own power, our own endurance, will remember Sandra Bland, Kindra Chapman, Alexis McGovern, Renisha and Rekia and Korryn, Michael and Aiyana and Trayvon, and we will never let their deaths be in vain. There is no heaven, no hell, only this world we live in, filled with those that would destroy us, whether we believe in God or not, if we let them.
So when the form from my psychiatrist’s office asks: How often have you been bothered by feeling down, depressed, or hopeless? I answer: Nearly every day. How could I not? How can we not? But if Always were an option, I wouldn’t check that box. We’ll never check that box.
