Michael Brown Sr. and the Agony of the Black Father in America
It is Thanksgiving at Mike Brown’s house, three days after a grand jury declined to bring charges against the policeman who killed his son and his city exploded in riots. His wife, Calvina, and her mother and various daughters and sisters and cousins bustle around the kitchen preparing the feast. The men gather downstairs in the man cave, watching the Eagles school the Cowboys. Because they’re Americans and this is the day Americans consecrate to gratitude, the Brown family tries to stick to easy topics—food, sports, music, children, absent relatives—everything but the nightmare that has changed their lives forever. Soon they will take their places around the table. Soon they will bow their heads and pray. Soon they will declare the things that still make them, despite everything, thankful.
Brown’s house is an ordinary ranch in a pleasant, safe neighborhood a few miles from where his son was killed, completely average except for one thing—down in the man cave the walls are decorated with photos of Brown’s dead son, a tapestry of his dead son, a photo of a mural dedicated to his dead son. Hanging on the corner of the TV is a black necktie with his dead son’s face peeking out at the very bottom, like a bit of sun under a long black cloud. Brown leans against a pillow bearing his dead son’s face. Mike-Mike, they called him, as if saying his name once weren’t enough to express their love.
Brown is a tall, powerfully built man with a shaved head and a handsome face that seems perpetually solemn. In the months since his son died, he’s stopped cutting his beard, which makes him look like a figure from the Old Testament. As always, he’s wearing a T-shirt bearing his dead son’s face. He just got back from an overnight trip to New York, where he did five TV interviews in one day, and he looks exhausted but also relieved. The tension is over, the faint hope of a conviction extinguished, and now the real struggle begins. He leans back into the sofa and tries to relax, tapping ashes from a Newport into a red plastic cup.
BROWN IS THIRTY-SEVEN, BUT IN THE MONTHS SINCE HIS SON WAS KILLED HE HAS STOPPED CUTTING HIS BEARD AND SEEMS MUCH OLDER.
Downstairs, the men make a real effort to focus on the game, but in the absence of women and children the conversation turns to the big subject: the protests all across the country, the gratifyingly widespread criticism of the prosecutor and his tactics, the news coming out about how the Ferguson authorities bungled the crime-scene investigation by failing to measure the distance between shooter and victim, failing to record the first interview with the officer, failing to take his gun away at the scene, failing to prevent him from washing his hands, the medical examiner who couldn’t be bothered to replace a dead camera battery—a series of errors so relentless it’s hard to believe they weren’t screwing up things on purpose.
And the thing his son’s killer said about feeling like a five-year-old fighting Hulk Hogan? “He was six four,” Brown says. “So now they’re saying Mike-Mike was six six. He was six four. Just had a little more weight on him, and most of it was flab.”
Kids run in and out, and the men change the subject. Cal’s mom comes down to smoke a cigarette, taking off a shoe to rub her foot over her tiny toy poodle. Brown goes upstairs and comes back with his baby daughter on his arm, dressed in a holiday dress and pretty shoes. He props her on the cushion and she stares ahead with a sleepy, solemn face. Then Rev. DeVes Toon of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network arrives with an uncle of Oscar Grant’s—the man whose death at the hands of a California police officer was memorialized in the movie Fruitvale Station—and he describes his latest idea for a publicity campaign: pictures of families at their Thanksgiving tables with one seat empty, propping up a picture of their lost child. “You gotta keep the heat on them,” he says. Through peaceful means, he adds, although he believes the officer who killed his nephew never would have been convicted if not for the riots that followed his death. “In the back of their minds, they gotta smell the smoke. You know what I’m saying?”
Brown listens but doesn’t respond. Soon the conversation shifts to yesterday’s interviews. Of course they all wanted to know how it feels. The lawyers have been telling him to open up, so that’s what he tried to do. But some of it’s just weird, like pretending to walk down the hall so they can get some B-roll footage.
“Like acting?”
He laughs. “That’s what I’ve been doing for the last three months—acting, acting, acting.”
http://www.esquire.com/features/michael-brown-father-interview-0115
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