Remembering Sandra Bland in a Time of Reckless Detention

An anniversary I always remember without a calendar

This is Emily Writes Back, for brilliant people, by Emily Sanders Hopkins.

Good morning, you.

I always seem to remember Sandra Bland’s death in my bones and like a whisper behind my ribs that says, “It’s that time of summer again, when the days are hot and lazy and a young woman is driving down a Texas road while filled with happy expectation for the rest of her life—her new job, new apartment …”

I felt that feeling today and googled “When was Sandra Bland arrested.” The answer: July 10, which was yesterday.

I don’t think enough people realize or acknowledge how serious, drastic, outrageous it is to DETAIN anyone. To be detained even for one minute is a violence against one’s liberty.

Think of it. Where are you right now as you read this? Okay, imagine a stranger rushing toward you right now and forcing you to the floor. Imagine him dragging you into a car or van and taking you somewhere. What an affront, what a violation of your freedom and the life you were busy living. Who cares what he thinks his justification is, you know? If he let you go five minutes later, how long do you think you would still be shaking with outrage and fear? For an hour? For the rest of the day? For the entire week? For a year?

In remembrance of her death, here is the essay I wrote ten years ago almost to the day, a few days after she died:

Feeling Sandra

To me, this week, Sandra is a little sister, proud of her maxi dress (I like the way she points out to Brian that she probably doesn’t have a weapon hiding anywhere, since after all she’s wearing a maxi dress), exalting in the open road, a new town, a fresh cigarette, and certain knowledge of constitutional law. All is right with the world, little sis. The world is your oyster.

To Brian, Sandra is a smoker. She’s black. She’s a suspect, disrespectful, a loose cannon, infuriating. Frankly, she is a threat to the fabric of society if she so little understands how she’s supposed to act with him. He would never date her, never vote for her. Who would? No one he can imagine. She would have to speak in a British accent or like a Texan and be draped in many-faceted emeralds, or be introduced to him as a foreign millionaire entrepreneur who holds several patents for medical devices she has invented to be afforded personhood of the level requiring manners and kindness, attraction, amusement, chivalry, the fucking benefit of the doubt in the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. (Or maybe this is my recipe for unassailable personhood: wealth, exoticism, and achievement in a technical field.) For Brian, she could have had merely the local feel — soft-spoken and humble and afraid, quick to apologize. That would have worked, too.

To Sandra, he is a White Cop, a chance to practice being unbowed by unjust and rude authority. I think she thought it would go well. I think she thought he’d be like “Damn, she has a point!” She doesn’t feel compassion for him, that he has always relied on the approval of manly men and the flutter of grateful women. She doesn’t know how many lives he’s saved in his old job as a firefighter (that was his job, not hers), how mean his dad was to him, how much his dogs love him, how attuned he is to God’s green earth, especially wide and shallow rivers. (I’m just guessing here. I don’t know the particulars of what is lovable and pitiable and relatable about Brian.. There must be something.)

To have flicked on a turn signal, on an empty road, with nothing but a cop car moseying behind you? That would be almost ridiculous, showy subservience, the tick tock tick tock in an otherwise quiet afternoon.

Why couldn’t he see you?

Why couldn’t he see that you were the star of this grainy video, the idealistic heroine, sassy like your mother called you, practically a lawyer. Maybe he never in his life saw a movie starring a black woman (in fact, in his entire lifetime of American media exposure, which has included several million magazine covers, hundreds of thousands of television episodes, a few thousand movies, and hundreds of books, he has hardly had to think of black people as beautiful, smart, or equally human and entitled above half a dozen times), and so he’s never dreamed of a world where you are human and smart and brave (if a little rash) and he is the villain, or of a world where you are reasonable and he is the crazy one. Why couldn’t he just see your point, that you’d only changed lanes for him? Did it ever occur to him that you had recently decided to dedicate your life to fighting police violence against black people? That you felt called by God, even, to give your life’s work to this cause? Then the knee in your back and the twisting of your fine-boned wrist. His rage, rage, rage at being questioned, taunted. He looks exactly like a big bellied rapist, an overgrown frat brother losing his temper out there in the open, a spoiled child. You can picture him as a toddler, his baby penis jiggling as he stomps around mad. You call him a pussy, but naked little baby boy crying and stomping would have been more apt. Either insult would fit, because in short he wasn’t being much of a man.

A pretty neat trick, turning a nothing stop into a roadside tussle, assault, and arrest in broad daylight. Good day, sir!

Then suddenly, the jail cell and a whole system waiting there, engraved in cinder block a billion years — guards who can’t give you the time of day. What time is it? Panic. Towering rage burns like death. You can taste someone’s blood. Everyone acts like they’ve taken the full measure of you and it ain’t much. You have never been so thoroughly humiliated.

I had a cousin who killed herself in the wilderness where she lived. I’ve heard that she went months, sometimes, without seeing another human. I didn’t even know her, but when I learned of her death, I caught a whiff of the flavor of it, the way you sometimes do, the way I did with Sandra’s death in the jail in Texas. And this is what it felt like, in my imagination: When the whole wide world thrums around you, wild and immense and implacable, eternal and gorgeous and without pity, you can bump up against your own death. It might not come today, but all the endless trees, the voiceless sky stretching up who knows how far and wide, everywhere you look you see things and systems that will outlive you by a lot. And you see how there are a billion ways you could die — falls, infections, water you could drown in … well, really anything could happen. You can feel your death, especially if you don’t have enough joy. You can feel death walking alongside you patiently, and it feels powerful, because death is powerful. It is ultimate, it defines your whole life, and there is not a single thing more mysterious or unassailable. And so there is a dark glamour, a power that can be claimed, in that one moment of death, and when we meditate on this truth about death, it can hook onto the back of our minds, like a spell or a worm, like an awesome (in the original meaning) possibility or inevitability. I guessed that my cousin’s suicide was a rash succumbing to this ever-present pulse, in a moment with not enough joy or hope to protect her from it.

When you are yanked from your car, your day, manhandled and shouted at, pressed into a car and sped to your incarceration, you stay sun blind for a while, then your eyes adjust. Your heart races faster than on your first job interview. This is your first jail, your first suicide. You cannot catch your breath. You cannot stop crying. You hadn’t planned on sleeping on a jail bed in the dark. The pillow is disposable and has no pillowcase. There are no sheets or blankets. You can hear the girls across the hall, in the other cell, talking and laughing. There’s a whole civilization in here. It feels as certain, maybe, and as intractable as the Alaskan wilderness. It stretches forever in every direction, as far as a young American eye can see. Where is your purse, your cigarettes? What day is it?

The second day is long and strange.

They take you to another room to eat food so bad that you are reminded of the insult. Your wrists hurt and your gut. You haven’t used the bathroom yet. Maybe your shoulder is broken. It might as well be, you’ll never use it again. You think of slavery, Mandela, King, Supreme Court decisions, Black Lives Matter, the last episode of America’s Got Talent you saw, an eon ago, and all of those things seem so much more dignified and real than this sham. You remember the long highway that got you here, with all the Sheetz and McDonalds and Wendy’s and you picture the apartment you were supposed to move into yesterday. You think of how bad you must look. They took your dress. The actually stripped you of your clothing and made you put on prison scrubs. You see yourself through the cop’s eyes, or imagine you do: a dumb, loud black girl mouthing off, so dumb she ends up in an orange jumpsuit that very same day. He’s back at home now, watching TV, maybe drinking a cold beer, wearing jeans, being White, feeling justified and good about himself. What did he do with your car? Your phone? What day is it? You pray to God, but you cannot hear the reply. Or, God’s reply sounds like your current predicament, silence and jail sounds (hisses, thumps, air conditioning, doors opening and closing, guards gossiping on the phone to friends, hums of a wall clock). Then the second, long night. Then Sunday, Day Three. Is it three or four?

You can’t keep track anymore. Tick tock tick tock. You are choking on shame and rage. For three days and a morning, you have been replaying the embarrassment and pain that happened out on that grass by the road. With every replaying, you get sicker. You remember how even the female officer didn’t see that you were in the right, didn’t see you were a person. Sunday is utterly unacceptable to you. You have been drained, in three short days, of all your confidence and joy and hope and moxie. They’ve left you nothing but powerless and scared and full of rage at the utter injustice. From a turn signal to three nights and four days in jail in the dark, stripped of your own real life. You think: I’ll leave you nothing but my body. Monks have set themselves on fire.A grand, ultimate protest grows in your disordered mind. You can taste your death. It tastes exactly like death.

Sandra, you are a 28-year-old in a bit of a fix. It’s Monday, and pretty soon you’ll get in front of a judge and you’ll reach someone on the phone and paperwork will get signed, and your family will come. This will be a crazy story to tell later. You can look back on this in a month, a decade. Don’t you want children? Don’t you want to smoke another cigarette, in your new apartment. Didn’t your mother ever tell you that things will look different in the morning? Or in a week. Just pay them some money and have this blip of badness on your record. The torn ligament in your arm. The explanations at work, if you still have that job. The world is your oyster.

A neat trick, turning a stupid cruelty into a national day of mourning and outrage. Everyone in the world can see your point now. The plastic bag is thin, but strong. Blood pounds in your ears to a beat. Dumb, sweet, incorrect, final.