Chain Gang All Stars

Dust and cinnamon.

The meeting included fifteen of the core organizers. There was water and tea and also a tin of tamales. Marta’s aunt sold tamales to support workers who were being mistreated by local dairy farmers. They ate first. Mari took her time peeling the steaming banana leaf away and looked at the mound of love on her plate. It glistened tan and she poked a small hole with her knife to let some heat out. She resolved to enjoy the food that was there even though the reason they were there made her sick. Even though she was afraid of what she was thinking about doing.

This was the first meeting of the Coalition to End Neo-Slavery since Tracy Lasser had publicly stood up against the CAPE program. Their meeting today was about a protest that was planned for Thurwar’s upcoming fight, which would be sixty miles away at the Renshire Stadium outside of Old Taperville. And now that Tracy Lasser, an Old Taperville native, had made national news, the protest was expected to be one of the biggest actions against CAPE ever. The Coalition to End Neo-Slavery had been invited to demonstrate alongside a growing number of anti–hard action-sports groups and abolitionists. Tracy’s incredibly human display had injected new life into the fight; the world had been reminded of just how fucked it was for the state to murder its citizens in this or any other way. As such, the soldier-police were predictably increasing their presence around all Chain-Gang All-Stars events and many politicians had already appeared before holostreams to implore nonviolence. An absurd thing for the murderous state to plead for, but, as always, the massive violence of the state was “justice,” was “law and order,” and resistance to perpetual violence was an act of terror. It would have been funny if there weren’t so much blood everywhere.

But Mari was trying to focus. It felt especially important to see through what she had started. She was the one who had given Thurwar the note telling her what was to come. She had touched a woman who had not only known her father but who had killed with him. All she remembered of the man they called Sunset Harkless was that he smelled like dust and cinnamon. That and that he’d sometimes throw her high up in the air before catching her when she was too young to tie her own shoes. Her father, a man she hardly knew, had committed murder. He had committed sexual assault. She was ashamed to have come from him. And the hard truth was, despite the work she did, the work she believed in, she had not been sure she wanted to see her father free in the world. She had not wanted to have him appear in her life. She had not wanted the world to know she was his daughter.

And then he’d died and all she’d had left was dust and cinnamon and the feeling of flying, then falling.

She had seen Thurwar’s eyes and felt so clearly that she had been seen too. She had been seen by a woman who had loved and cared for her father, a man who had done incredible harm. And now she wanted to help that woman, a woman who had also done great harm, just not to her, as much as she’d ever wanted anything.

Her stomach churned and she poked another stab into her tamale just as Nile found her. He smiled weakly and took his seat on the floor near her legs; the couch had already been filled by Kendra and Pracee. They’d start soon. She watched Nile open his own tamale and put a bite in his mouth too quickly. She laughed loudly enough for him to hear as he tried to suck in cool to ease the hot he’d eaten. Nile could be funny sometimes, even if he was constantly a few moments away from annoying her. But more important, he was earnest, and she didn’t know many earnest men.

Kai leaned over Jess, who was also on the couch, and tapped Mari on the knee. “You ready?” The coalition was explicitly leaderless and was run instead by several committees and their chairpeople. There was an overall steering committee, though, and Kai, it was understood, was their unofficial leader. Other people’s fear and grief often kept them from doing the hard things, and Kai seemed always to swallow hers, to move in ways that could make change. She’d brought community library partnerships to the local schools and had worked for years to sever the relationships between schools and police departments. She was a professor on and off, but she’d been doing advocacy work for the past three decades.

Kai was also Mari’s aunt, although she’d been the one who’d raised her for almost all her life. Mari’s biological mother, Sandra, was serving the sixth year of a ten-year sentence. A mandatory sentence. The arbitrary nature of the law, the way weight had decided her mother’s life, kept Mari up at night. She grew well versed in the statistics regarding the children of the incarcerated. She’d become an expert on the criminal-justice system and the long-term effects it had on families. She remembered, with a particular resentment, a study titled “Nowhere Near as Bad.” The author’s thesis was that the children of incarcerated people were six times more likely to become “justice involved,” a euphemism she’d languished over. But now look at her. She wasn’t justice involved. She was involved with justice. Better than that, she was ready to involve a lot more people in as much justice as they could handle.

Sandra, who had been in and out of prison before her current sentence, avoided Mari as if doing her a favor. But when they had been together Mari had been short with her. Polite and distant. They’d hugged each other deeply, though, imagining what could have been for those moments of embrace before Sandra disappeared once again.

It took six hours to drive to the prison to visit her mother. She tried to get up there twice a season. Mari had graduated with a bachelor’s in political science just three years earlier. At her graduation, Kai had been there holding a bouquet of congratulations. The keynote speaker, a virtual reality startup billionaire, gave a speech about how if they just “stayed the course” they’d become leaders of something. As if leadership were the end-all, be-all of human existence. As he spoke all she could think of was her mother, locked for years in a facility, and how, as a result of people like her mother being perpetually tortured—as a result of her justice-involved life—some CEOs, some leaders, were millionaires. Many of these private facilities had government contracts that were determined by the number of inmates incarcerated—more prisoners, bigger contracts.

But her mother would eventually get out. Her father was forever gone.

They’d had a funeral that was impossibly well attended. All of those people who had come to pay their respects to Sunset Harkless. They’d had posters. They’d wept. Thousands of them.

The speaker at her graduation had ended by pumping his arm in the air. “Be the CEO of you, then of the world!” he’d said breathlessly. He’d inspired himself as much as he had the crowd, you could tell. Mari had watched. She listened to the cheers without moving. Her classmates, overcome with the possibility that they too could be leaders, leapt into the air.

“Thank you! Congratulations!” There was an explosion of green and blue confetti. Tasseled caps shot into the air, then rained down. Mari had stayed seated, taken her cap off, flicked it gently so it rose just to the level of her nose before dropping back into her lap.

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Now Mari looked back at Kai and nodded through a mouthful. She swallowed. “Yeah, go for it.”

Kai always seemed ready for whatever came next. Mari loved but sometimes almost resented her for how much she was not her mother. Kai wasn’t addicted to anything easily observable. She was in control of herself always. She trusted herself above anyone else. Her brown skin was creaseless, and although she was over twenty years older than Mari, people often asked if they were sisters. Not as a way to compliment Kai, but as a genuine inquiry. Kai was Mari’s emergency contact on everything. She was Mari’s mother as much as anyone.

“All right, everyone.” The room quieted with a quickness that made Mari feel a heat in her throat. She sipped some of her water from the glass. “Today we’re going to talk about the direct action we’re planning for the upcoming entertainment lynching.

“Before that, I’m sure we all saw how sister Tracy Lasser stepped up and used her platform to amplify our cause.” The room broke into a quick, honest applause.

Mari watched Nile slap his hands together.

“The fight against entertainment lynching has returned to the center of our national conversation and it presents a great opportunity to show solidarity with folx both inside and out of the system. We want to take the chance to show them not only that this is unacceptable, but that we will not allow it to continue.

“I want to acknowledge too what happened in Vroom Vroom. Clearly there are people who believe they deserve to watch murder and they hate us for fighting against that. I understand how frustrating it is to see that. I was there with all of you. I’m just now walking without a limp again,” she said with a laugh as she made a fist and slammed it playfully against her hip. She’d strained it somehow in the brawl.

“As we’ve said over and over again, that kind of thing is not what we are about. I know that defense is not violence, but I want to make that clear in all of our minds just in case there’s any question. We aren’t any more effective because some idiots wanted to fight us. In fact a lot of the work we meant to do that day got lost in the fighting. And it was a difficult day to be sure. Especially considering the recent loss of Shareef, who was my sister’s husband and Marissa’s father. But what is essential to remember is we are fighting to support a movement. We are in opposition to institutional slavery, torture, and murder.

“Now we have another massive action ahead of us, this time led by Tracy Lasser herself and some organizers out of Los Cielos. I have here a short holo that Tracy’s sent widely, an open invitation. Many of you will have already seen it—it’s gone viral in the past few days. Nile, could you turn it on now?”

Nile opened his laptop and pressed a button on the metal projector ring he sat next to the computer. Kai moved to turn off the lights, and then Tracy Lasser was there in the room with them.

“My name is Tracy Lasser and I’m here in front of you now because enough is enough. I come not as a sports analyst today but as a concerned citizen and as an abolitionist. We are at an impasse. America has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. We cling to the archaic and destructive practice of using death as a penalty for crime, when most countries have abolished the death penalty altogether. But rather than follow the lead of the rest of the world, we’ve gone in the exact opposite direction. Under the guise of economic stimulus and punitive prevention, we’ve allowed the state to administer public executions as entertainment. We’ve lost our way, but we lost it long before hard action-sports like Chain-Gang All-Stars.

“I’m ashamed it took me this long to stand up against this system. Hard action-sports are just one piece of what must be changed. I know sports, and murder is not sport. Murder is not justice. Confinement is not justice. Our system is evil. All hard action-sports have only exacerbated that fact. I said I’m an abolitionist. I’m going to call on the great Ruth Wilson Gilmore to remind us exactly what abolition is. ‘It is meant to undo the way of thinking and doing things that sees prison and punishment as solutions for all kinds of social, economic, political, behavioral, and interpersonal problems.’ Chain-Gang All-Stars and the CAPE program must end. But our entire system needs to be reimagined as well. That is what we’re fighting for. That is what must be undone so that we might create new systems, new ways of organizing that don’t facilitate the death of our people.

“If you are tired of sitting by while your people are killed, join me. Join us for the first of many actions Project Undoing will be taking in Old Taperville. We will show up en masse and let them know that there will be an undoing.”

Tracy’s voice was clear and precise. Clearly she was drawing from her broadcast training, but there was a human edge to her voice that Mari had generally found to be absent from news shows.

“For specific dates and times regarding the coming protests, please visit the Project Undoing website and join us in making the world a better place.”

Kai turned the light back on. Tracy was there for a moment longer, more a ghost than before, and then she disappeared entirely.

“I’d like to make a motion to open the floor to discuss the Coalition to End Neo-Slavery’s potential participation in the Old Taperville protest,” Kai said.

“Seconded,” Mari said.

“Those in favor,” Kai called. And all the hands in the room shot up.