When someone looks at this drum, I want them to see black children playing jail. They see the innocence of childhood play. You see what your experience has constructed. We all identify with the experience of being a child. You may see yourself in a familiar or unfamiliar way.

 

The fence has been a reoccurring symbol in my work since I was a child, and it represents some sort of confinement.  The fence has been seen as bars communicating imprisonment and confinement. Some of us see the fence and interpret it as imprisonment, confinement, and jail. We’ve inherited conditions that cause us to perceive a fence as a prison. To experience children playing prison reveals an awareness of a lived experience that feels contained. 

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There are physical mental and spiritual prisons created specifically for me here in America. It’s hard to be heard when black in America. What you experience is dismissed and called an overstatement. When you witness a 3-year-old playing jail there is a level of truth that can’t be denied or argued. The truth forces itself to be experienced. Playing jail isn’t a preconceived idea in an effort to make a political statement. Playing jail is a discovery that represents subconscious and suppressed thoughts and feelings.

 

People who are uncomfortable or unaware of the lived experiences that black people face tend to push back on the validity of those experiences. The push back usually shows up in the form of an implication that my experience of mental, emotional and physical confinement is a past experience—that it used to happen back in the day.  The push back comes in the form of refusing to look at what is being expressed and experienced. 

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Living in direct proximity with people in and out of jail, and decades of personal encounters with the police, creates a psychological fear that never leaves you. 

The justice system has created the myth that “bad” people are in jail. What society says about jail doesn’t always line up with what you may be experiencing. We are told that jail represents good or bad, right and wrong. Only bad people go to jail and if you aren’t in jail then you must be good.

 

The police are the gatekeepers of jail. I have a childhood memory of a fight between my parents. My dad went to jail when my mom was arguably in the wrong. My mom’s calm response to the police kept her from going to jail. My dad’s nasty reaction to a female cop caused him to be arrested. This experience expanded my perception of right and wrong and good and bad. At six-years-old, I understood that self-control and personal awareness was what determined if someone went to jail.

 

Walking away from the police isn’t as random as we are being conditioned to believe. The more aware you are you increase the chances of making decisions that will keep you safe when you are being engaged by the police. The less self-control that you have the more likely for a negative outcome when dealing with police. As a child, lack of awareness and lack of self-control equaled jail. I’ve experienced police guns drawn on me since I was a teenager, and a heightened awareness and serious self-control is the only reason I’m still alive to tell this story through the expression of the work. I was taught as a child that I fit the description of the people that police kill. This learning caused me to not react when being negatively engaged by police.