What I Said at my Brother’s Funeral\What I Left Out
Lucie Brooks
I want to share one of my favorite memories of my brother from prison, and then I want to tell you the story of how white supremacy killed him. I know it’s an unusual choice to lead with a story about when Steven was incarcerated, and an even more unusual choice to say the words white supremacy in his eulogy. It’s most unusual of all to tell you white supremacy killed a white man from rural Kentucky. But I don’t think he would mind.
Steven read constantly while he was away. I didn’t realize it at the time, but books (and letters we exchanged discussing them) brought us back together, as close as we had been since we were children jumping creeks and picking burrs off one another’s backs. We’d been trying most of our adult lives to find our way back to each other, but he was addicted to opioids and I was addicted to my righteous anger and that left us at an impasse.
Early into his last sentence he wrote me a letter and mentioned the pitiful library cart with only a few battered thrillers he’d read several times over. The next day I sent him a book. A week later I received a long letter all about it. I sent another book. I chose fantastical books set in faraway worlds in hopes that when he cracked their covers, he could travel somewhere else, even if only in his head.
He burned through every book I sent him. Wherever they transferred him, he read every book in their small collection. He read the fifteen or more books I sent, and every book from our dad. He even started a book club where they would trade books and then discuss them over cheap black coffee in small white Styrofoam cups. A book club! At the last place he stayed, he told me in a letter, almost apologetically, that he planned to leave his collection behind so the guys still there would have something to read.
These small acts say a lot about my brother. He was whip smart and curious, kind and generous. He could find humor in dark times. His letters, which are now stacked neatly in a box on my bookshelf along with the handwritten draft of his eulogy, are full of quips and self-deprecation even as he shares heartbreak after heartbreak. The parole denials. Missing his daughter’s birthday. Getting put on two weeks lockdown for hanging a shower curtain around the toilet for privacy. In one letter, he wrote,
Check this out, they came through this morning and took every book that wasn’t a bible out of the whole jail and threw it away! I’m talking trash bags and trash bags full of books. I tried to hide the ones you sent me, but they found them. I’m sorry if you feel like you wasted money but the stories I’ve read will stay with me for a long time to come. They said they were taking them because they were tired of books getting tore up. I can’t fathom the thought process. This place is fucked up for real.
I cried harder than I did any other day he was
locked up the day I received that letter.
And then I sent him another book.
While we were playing on the farm, Black families were targeted by police, by prosecutors, and by laws written to discriminate. Black infants were labeled crack babies and future super predators. Black people suffering from addiction were demonized as a way to justify all manner of racist policies. We grew up absorbing these racist myths about who is a criminal and who is a person and we never questioned them. We let a monster grow right in front of our face and we had no idea that eventually it would come for us, too.
He had hope. He had tenacity. He had a grateful heart. He was imperfect, and he knew it. He cared about being a better brother, a better father, and a better son. But this world does not make it easy for people like my brother to be better. We have not made it easy for people like my brother to be better. Today our country incarcerates one in four of all incarcerated people on the planet. It wasn’t always that way. My brother was born at the end of 1986, when Ronald Reagan was riding a popularity high with white Americans due, in part, to his “tough on crime” approach that included doubling down on the drug war, which in the beginning was a war on only Black people.
I can still remember the first time I held my baby brother – a tiny, swaddled thing – the moment I became Sis, which is what he still called me in his letters. The drug war was ravaging the country, but not places like rural Kentucky. Not yet. While we were playing on the farm, Black families were targeted by police, by prosecutors, and by laws written to discriminate. Black infants were labeled crack babies and future super predators. Black people suffering from addiction were demonized as a way to justify all manner of racist policies. We grew up absorbing these racist myths about who is a criminal and who is a person and we never questioned them. We let a monster grow right in front of our face and we had no idea that eventually it would come for us, too.
While we were busy ignoring the new prisons popping up in rural America like Starbucks on city corners, the hospitals and mental health clinics closing, and addiction rates skyrocketing, the monster continued to grow bigger, stronger, and hungrier. Now we put addicted people in jails instead of hospitals (unless they’re rich). And when they get out, we limit where they can work, where they can go to school, and we don’t even let them vote. Today there are 2.3 million people incarcerated in our country, one in five for a drug offense. There are more people incarcerated for drug offenses today than there were incarcerated for all crimes before the drug war.
I said white supremacy killed my brother. That’s not to say he didn’t make extraordinarily bad choices (he once extended his prison sentence by trying to sneak something in for his friends on the day of his release). He made plenty of bad choices, right up to the last one to buy heroin from a stranger only to realize too late it was 100 percent fentanyl. Bad choices made him a flawed human being. White supremacy created a culture of criminalization where bad choices meant he deserved to suffer and even die.
The horrible truth about the monster is that we’ve had the ability to destroy it the whole time and we have simply chosen not to. This is no great revelation, that white people can destroy white supremacy, and that white supremacy must be destroyed to end the drug war, and so many other ills. Black people have told us this for too many lifetimes to count. From climate change to mass shootings at synagogues, white supremacy is a many-headed monster. Some of us chose not to destroy it because we relish anti-Blackness and we will shovel our own young right into all those snapping jaws, if that’s the cost of maintaining a hierarchy where we sit at the top. Others don’t because we’re too scared. Destroying the monster means facing ourselves and our history, which is facing an amount of pain most of us remain unwilling to feel.
If you learn something from the example of my brother’s life, please learn not just from his generosity and compassion but also from what our collective lack of generosity and compassion for others wrought for him. For so many others before him. For us.
I wake up every day and stand in the crater my brother’s death has left in my life, looking up towards the sky and trying to understand how to climb out. There are millions of us standing in our own craters, shaped like the empty spaces left by the people we have lost.
From the opioid epidemic to the deliberate failed U.S. response to the COVID19 pandemic, we see what white supremacy does when it spreads rapidly and out of control. We see how much it costs. We see the endless craters.
It is so easy to never think about people who are addicted and people who are incarcerated. To pretend that everyone who is incarcerated deserves whatever cruel treatment they receive. It’s easy to believe the lie that more prisons and more police keep us safe, and more insisting we are nothing like them gives us value. Everyone here cared about my brother. Too many people in this room have lost people to addiction. The solution to this crisis will not come easy but it will come in part by caring about not just people like my brother, but also people beyond these walls and beyond our own communities. It will come from naming white supremacy in places we are not supposed to. Places like funerals, where we convince ourselves it is too improper, too painful, too scary to bring it up, even though afterwards we feel as if we could choke on the things we did not say. It will come from rejecting white supremacy. It will come from being honest and brave enough to tell the truth, and when we know we didn’t say enough the first time to try again. And again and again and again, as long as we are alive to keep on trying. I think that is what Steven would have wanted.
Lucie Brooks is a writer and educator based in Louisville, Kentucky. When she's not writing or teaching you can find her browsing the aisles of her local bookstore, tucked in the corner of a coffee shop, or exploring Kentucky's forests. She spends too much time on Twitter, where you can follow her at @luciemariebooks.