July 2009: garden party

“Danielle, phone call for you. It’s your dad.” I broke away from a conversation with my husband’s cousins – from glancing, distracted talk about the kids who were playing yards away in their floral sundresses under a soft English garden-party sun. Rising from the picnic table, I took the phone from him and walked a few steps.

“Hi, Dad.”

“Danielle, it’s Michael.”

My father’s voice – the careful, clipped speech of a retired professor – came from across the Atlantic, from Maryland through the ether, but sounded as if it were miles beneath the seas, crackling, wispy as if through the first-ever transatlantic cables.

“He’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dead. They found him shot in a car.”

“What?”

“Dead.”

“I’m coming.”

Michael. My cousin. My baby cuz.

Sometimes on English spring mornings, a gauzy haze clings to the air. This, though, was July, and now afternoon, but that same sort of whiteness suddenly seemed to wrap the sky and the surrounding willows. I nearly collapsed, staggered into my husband’s arms and said: “Jim, we have to go.”

“What?”

“Michael’s dead.”

“What?”

“Dead. We have to go.”

Straightaway we had to go, to Los Angeles. And so we left.

June 2006: release day

Three years earlier, I had arisen one Thursday morning well before dawn. I was in my palm-tree-shrouded vacation condo in Hollywood, California, feeling the most glorious sense of anticipation I have ever known.

My aunt Karen – my father’s youngest sister, the baby of a set of 12 – was about to drive a crew of us to collect her own baby – her third child, Michael – from reception and release, or, as it is known, “R&R”. Prison life is rife with black humour.

I was there. So was Michael’s “Big Sis” by 18 months, Roslyn, and one of Roslyn’s own babies, Michael’s eight-year-old nephew, Joshua. We were on our way to collect the last son of an extended clan, youngest child of the youngest daughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Allen

If I had it to do over again – to meet another loved one on his day of liberation – I’m sure the fear would now overpower the joy. It’s not that, on a rational level, we didn’t know how hard reentry into society after prison is, or how low the probability that any given life turns a corner. But to know something intellectually is so very different from feeling it in your flesh, straining after some goal with every fibre of your being, only to sink in the end to defeat.

Everyone was looking forward to a homecoming party for Michael. In the driveway of my aunt’s house, next to its postage stamp of a lawn, uncles and friends, cousins and second-cousins would pull folding chairs up to folding tables covered with paper tablecloths and laden with fried chicken and sweet tea. I was eight years old when Michael was born. My guess is that he was probably the first baby I ever got to hold. I had grown up with him. The baby of a sprawling family too numerous to count, he was also my baby, a child of magnetic energy and good humour.

He was 15 when we lost him, 11 long years ago. He had been gone from us almost half his life. Now he would be with us again.

The drive seems like something of a haze. I remember a wait, but I don’t think it was terribly long in the end. We all sat in the car, nerves taut.

It’s a cliche to say that someone has an electric smile, but what else can you call it when someone beams and all the lights come on? Michael arrived and smiled. He always had a little bob in his step that you could recognise as belonging to the playground athletes of your youth. He had that natural spring as a child, even at every prison visit, and still had on the day of his release after more than a decade of incarceration.

His late adolescence and early manhood were, like those of so many millions, gone behind bars, but nonetheless he bounded toward us. How could we not sing hosannas, and think, “God is great”?

Then we came to asking him what he wanted to do. Fulfilling that request would be my job, as would helping him in the months to come – I was the cousin-on-duty, the one with resources, the one who had been to college and who had turned into a professional.

I was ready, or at least I thought so. We had all been preparing for months – my father, the retired college professor; my aunt, the nurse; Michael’s older brother and sister, each struggling to make ends meet; my husband at the time, Bob, a poetry professor, himself near retirement; and me.

We did have plans, but they were not the plans we had hoped to have. For the last few years, while in prison, Michael had been working as a firefighter. He loved the work. He should have been paroled to a fire camp or to a fire station. We even had family in Riverside County who were ready to take him. He could have lived with them and gone to school and kept on pushing back and beating down wildfires.

But the rule was that you had to be paroled to the county where your crime was committed. In his case, this was Los Angeles County. Need I add that LA County is crime-ridden? We didn’t have the plans we had hoped to have because of this policy on parole, but we had developed the best alternatives we could.

Step one was this: on the way back to LA County, ask Michael what he wanted to do first.

Michael wanted to buy underwear.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael’s first steps

July 2009: the investigation

After my father’s phone call, we left the party immediately. We booked our plane tickets to southern California and tried to figure out what was going on. No one knew much. The best anyone could do was to direct me to a few news items gleaned from the internet.

Bullet-riddled body found in car: A body riddled with bullets was found inside in a car in south Los Angeles, police said Saturday. Police responded to a call of a suspicious person sleeping in a vehicle in the 1,000 block of West 60th Street at around 5.20pm Friday, said officer Rosario Herrera of the Los Angeles police department. On inspection, officers discovered the sleeping man propped up in the car’s passenger seat was really a bullet-riddled body wrapped in blankets. The body was identified as that of Michael Alexander Allen, 29. Allen suffered multiple shots to the torso, Herrera said. Police have no motive or suspects in Allen’s shooting. Anyone with any information on the shooting is asked to call the LAPD criminal/gang/homicide unit.



These were the basics. One didn’t know how he died, or how he had ended up in the car. About his corpse, however, there was information to be found in an LAPD blog.

Man found dead in car: The Los Angeles police department needs the public’s help to identify and locate suspect or suspects who fatally shot a 29-year-old man on 17 July. Yesterday, at around 5.20pm, a patrol unit from 77th Division was dispatched to the 1,000 block of West 60th Street. The radio call was generated in response to a report of a suspicious vehicle with what appeared to be a person sleeping inside. When the officers arrived they found Michael Alexander Allen, a 29-year-old male Black, wrapped in bedding on the passenger seat. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The vehicle and victim were transported to the coroner’s office where he was taken out of the car.



As we waited to fly across an ocean and continent, Karen and her daughter, Roslyn, Michael’s “Big Sis”, went to claim his few, forgettable belongings. The little hatchback appeared to have bloodstains on the floor of the passenger’s seat, but my cousin, Roslyn, struggling with poverty, so needed a car that she would soon claim it as her own all the same.

June-July 2006: getting started

After Michael’s homecoming party, we got down to business pretty quickly. Michael did spend a certain amount of time eating his favourite foods – Doritos, fried chicken and his sister’s homemade mac and cheese. He played Football Manager with eight-year-old Joshua and other nephews and nieces who had been born while he was in prison. But he wanted to make something of himself. He had flourished as a firefighter in prison. He was ready to find something to do again, to create a life, a span of action of which he could be proud.

Neither of us had time to waste. Eight years older than Michael, I was telecommuting that summer from LA to my job as dean of the Division of Humanities at the University of Chicago. One year earlier, at 32, I had been appointed one of the youngest top administrators in the university’s history. I couldn’t afford to appear to slacken my focus. The pressure of my job would limit my time with Michael.

Michael and I made task lists and we moved through them efficiently. We met the parole officer, a woman Michael thought was tolerable, and we figured out the routine. Or rather, I waited outside in the car. During those early days, I was the willing chauffeur. In fact, I would never meet Michael’s parole officer. Now, years later, I realise he wanted to keep me separate from his life as a convicted felon. He wanted to show me only the other side, the part of him that could have gone to college.

From the parole office we went to the bank, and Michael opened an account. Then it was the library. This time I went in. These places were, after all, my turf, and under my watch, Michael got a library card and started learning how to use the computer. As we began searching for jobs, Michael met Google, which hadn’t existed when he went to prison.

Next was the driver’s license. Although Michael had driven trucks as part of his work on the inmate fire crew, he’d never had a license. He was arrested when he was 15, and didn’t leave the prison system for 11 years. He loved cars, and now, finally, he was going to get a license. I drove him to the DMV and waited outside while he took the test. He passed easily, which was no surprise.

Then we started the job hunt in earnest. Day after day – under the scorching sun of the worst California heatwave in nearly 60 years – we returned to the cool library and scoured websites for opportunities. One hot day in late July, with temperatures soaring to well above 37C (100F), Michael’s efforts bore fruit. He was invited in for interviews at Sears department store and an airport food service company. This was the moment we had been waiting for – but it was, for me, also the most terrifying. I don’t know if the moment was as fraught for Michael, but I was very anxious about how he could make the case that he ought to be hired – despite having been imprisoned since he was 15 for attempted carjacking.

Michael was going to have to tell his story in full. He would not be able to hide the fact that he’d been convicted – and not merely of a serious crime, but of the kind that had sent Los Angeles in the early 1990s into paroxysms of fear. He would have to explain why he believed he was ready to put his life on a new footing. We practised bits and pieces of his story, but never the whole thing. I never once heard Michael recount his own tale from start to finish, in any version. In hindsight, I think this was because the necessarily abbreviated versions that he was practising telling his new world would have led me to ask questions. These Michael did not want to deal with.

He donned his new khaki trousers and a button-down shirt, and we headed to Hollywood, to Santa Monica and Western Avenue, to a branch of Sears. If you folded a map of LA in half, north to south, using the 10 Freeway for the crease, Michael’s mother’s house in South Central and that Sears (now long since shuttered) would have squarely kissed. It felt like the perfect chance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The author and her cousin at her wedding

July 2006: a job

Upstairs in the Sears personnel department, everything was beige but brightly lit; the baseboards and linoleum floor tiles were well scuffed. The people who greeted us were kind. I sat on one of a row of metal chairs against the wall and waited while Michael, dressed in his khakis, had his interview down the hall in a closed office. Forty-five long minutes later, the door opened and I learned that the managers had offered Michael a job as an inventory clerk.

Relief does not begin to describe it. Time started. That’s just what it was like. Now there was a future with stories, possibly even happy endings, suddenly flooding my imagination. Immediately, it seemed OK to think about a day further out than tomorrow. I restrained myself from any actual fantasies, but I now relished the teasing tickle at the edges of my mind from a new dawn. This, I believe, is the most dangerous turn in a journey of this kind: the moment where you begin to hope for real. There is never a reason to let down one’s guard. Never. And maintaining such a heightened level of self-discipline, warding off all expectation that something might get easier, is beyond the capacity of most of us. I am speaking for myself here, but I think it was true for Michael, too.

Despite the good news, we stuck to our plan and headed out to the airport so Michael could have his second interview. He got that one, too. The hiring manager told him: “I want to hire you. I like your smile.” Yes, Michael’s beautiful smile, always the first thing everyone noticed. Not that they immediately noticed that, with his high cheekbones, teak skin, wide grin and lithe frame, he was beautiful, which he was; but they were instantly drawn to him, as to the sun. He was a source of vitality and warmth.

July 2009: the investigation

The Saturday morning after Michael’s body was discovered, and just after his mother, Karen, had got the call from the police, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s car was parked outside her house. It was still the early dawn.

My aunt had expected Michael home on Thursday night, two days earlier, and so was consumed with anxiety all day Friday and into the night. Over the course of the week, the normally warm July temperatures had slumped below average. Her dread had only increased alongside the chill. Karen’s daughter Roslyn, too, had been consumed with worry. On Monday, she dreamed that someone had told her Michael was dead. She woke in tears. When she told Michael about the dream, he said: “My life ain’t like that to where I’ll be dead.”

But he also said: “Sis, if anything happens to me, tell the police it was Bree.” Bree was Michael’s girlfriend.

Roslyn and Michael spoke on the phone almost every day. That week, increasingly anxious, Roslyn doubled her efforts to stay in touch. On Friday, Michael didn’t answer his phone all day. When he didn’t pick up, she could sometimes tell from the sound of the ring that he was travelling, or had turned his phone off. His phone had rung funny like that on Friday.

Like her mother, Roslyn didn’t have much to tell the police, beyond the story about her dream and her brother’s warning, but the detectives had things to tell them. To them Michael was not Michael, but “Big Mike”. He was someone not to be messed with on the street. This was news, and shocking.

I myself would learn this only much later on. The day before Michael died, while I was conversing with my husband and catching up on some pleasure reading, I got a rare message from Michael. It would have been Thursday, midmorning LA time, when he’d sent it. Just a few weeks earlier, he had been at our wedding in New Jersey. The trip to our wedding was Michael’s first plane flight since his release.

That June wedding in New Jersey was my second. I hadn’t invited anyone but my parents and one friend to the first. To my eternal shame, I hadn’t even invited my brother. This time I wanted all my family standing by me, joining in the bond I was about to form. Michael was the usher, greeting every guest at the door with joy.

After that celebratory day, I sent Michael a photo of the two of us, me in my splurge Armani dress, him typically handsome in a beige jacket and crimson shirt. His matching crimson alligator-skin shoes, which made us smile, were, sadly, not visible in the frame.

After he got the photo, he had written me to say thank you:

Thank you for my picture. I’m sorry to say that I don’t check my email often and haven’t since I printed the plane tickets. I love you so much and I am happy that you are happy and enjoying yourself. I will call you Saturday but I don’t know what time is good so be sure to let me know. I love you and I miss you. Love Always, Michael



These were the kinds of small scraps that we could share about his final 24 hours: that on Thursday at 10.47am, he had used a computer. I am lucky, I suppose, that those words were my final contact.

The police put out a request for information. Beyond this, all we knew was that the police were looking for a woman, and that Bree, Michael’s good-looking, hairstylist girlfriend, was nowhere to be found.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Allen during his second phase in prison 2007-08

August 2006: school

Michael chose the Sears job, and our attention next turned to school and housing. We had a checklist – a mission – and expected teamwork to get us through. The goal was for Michael to work full-time and to enrol in one of California’s famed community colleges. About half a century earlier, these junior colleges had been a remarkable pathway to opportunity, a true engine of mobility for the Golden State. By 2006, they were no longer free, but they were still a good deal.

Los Angeles Valley College, in Valley Glen, was the obvious target: a decent school with good general education courses and a fire technology program, and the subway’s red line had stops at Santa Monica and Vermont, about a mile from the Sears, and in North Hollywood, not too far from the campus.

During his first year in prison, Michael, a compulsively good and imaginative writer, had completed his high-school equivalency test at lightning speed, and in the 11 ensuing years he completed a handful of liberal arts correspondence college courses from the University of Indiana. We reviewed the LA Valley College courses with an eye to laying the path toward the school’s fire technology program. That was the goal. We battled our way through the thicket of federal financial aid forms and visited the tutoring centre and library, and hungrily collected and studied the various flyers advertising internships, jobs and apartments for rent.

Here were the gates of opportunity. In Homer’s Odyssey, dreams that tell you the truth are said to have come through the gates of horn; the ones that deceive you, through gates of ivory. We believed that the gleaming white entrance portico to Los Angeles Valley College was the poet’s fabled gates of horn. And Michael was poised to pass through.

27 July 2009: the funeral

The day of Michael’s funeral was strenuous. It was a full day of churchgoing and family meals, all with strained emotions.

We’d had a viewing a few days earlier. I’d been set back by seeing him, his still face so sombrely in repose, with a slightly grayish tinge. There he lay in the satin-lined casket, in the very suit he had worn to my wedding a month earlier. For the first time, I saw how big he looked. At 5ft 8in, he was two inches shorter than I am, and I had never thought of him as big. But as I looked at my little cousin’s settled face, I was astonished by his solidity. I had never noticed how much he had bulked up. In the casket, there was no smile. The light was gone and with it, I suppose, the lightness.

Later, much later, writing this, I’ve had to face the fact that on that day at that viewing I was looking at “Big Mike” lying there, not at little Michael.

At the funeral, my younger brother, Marc, a 6ft 4in, loose-limbed leader of men, unfolded himself from the pew and showed us all, for the very first time, that he could orate.

“I really loved Michael,” he began, and paused, waiting three heart beats. “Didn’t you?”

He painted a picture of the loving, lively, impish Michael he had known. He prayed for his soul. So love rose, in my brother’s words and radiant face, and Michael was there after all.

After the service, we went to Aunt Karen’s house for one last homecoming celebration for Michael. Next to that postage stamp of a lawn, we all gathered round folding chairs pulled up to portable tables, laden with fried chicken and sweet tea, to celebrate the baby of the family once more.

November 2006: hitting bottom

Because he had us – his family, his clan – I believed Michael could defy the pattern of parolees. College was the first element to fall out of the plan. The commute was, not surprisingly, just too much. Michael might not have made it through even two weeks of classes. The job lasted until November, and then I got a nearly hysterical call. Michael was drowning – he couldn’t do it, he said. He wasn’t going to make it. When I had left LA, with plans to return over the winter break, I had promised him that, in the meantime, if he ever called and said he needed me, I would be there. On receiving his call, I went straight to the airport. I flew across the country west of the Mississippi in a cold panic, trying to forestall speculation about what I might find. Arriving just in time to take him to dinner, I found Michael teary and despondent. With only 24 hours to spend in Los Angeles, I tried to lift him off the bottom.

His account of what had happened was that, one day after work, some of his Latino coworkers had called him nigger. He fought them in the parking lot, and walked away from the job, never to return. He never told his bosses or coworkers that he was quitting. He just didn’t go back.

So now he was back to square one, or less than that, since now he had proven himself unreliable to an employer. He didn’t see a future, and didn’t know what steps to take next. The world hadn’t yielded up the fruits he had fantasised about at the end of the summer.

Just before the winter break, I flew out to LA, happy to escape Chicago’s precipitous chill and looking forward to winter oranges and nuts. Shortly after I arrived, I got a good-news call from Michael. He had found an apartment, and was ready to put the deposit down. Could I come and see it? Michael and I visited the fourth-floor unit, which was in a vintage 1920s building. It was big and spacious, with gleaming wood floors, and Michael began describing to me how he and his girlfriend, Bree, wanted to move in.

I was taken aback. I had no idea he was seeing someone, let alone making plans to move in together. I imagine my face must have conveyed surprise, although I think I tried not to react too strongly. What I wanted to know, I said, was what the job situation was. Had he lined up a new job? What did Bree do? Did she have a job? Our voices were echoey in the empty apartment, Michael leaning against a windowsill with the sky and freeway as a backdrop.

This was the one and only time in my life when my interaction with my cousin had an edge. There was somehow something shamefaced in him as he answered. No, he didn’t have a job. Bree was into hairstyling but, no, she didn’t have one either. What exactly were they thinking, I found myself asking? He didn’t have much of an answer, and plainly the plan involved some degree of taking advantage of me.

In that moment, I encountered a different Michael from the one I knew. I saw something calculating, which I had never seen and would never see again. I didn’t ask to talk to Bree. All I was able to say was that, no, I couldn’t possibly pay the deposit plus some number of months’ rent plus cosign for an apartment when neither of them had jobs.

Michael’s face tensed. He said he understood. And that was the end.

I had believed that I could help. I had hoped we were entering the gate of horn, the passage of true dreams. Now, and only now, I realised that my dream of standing my baby cousin up on his own two feet was a fantasy. It had always had, perhaps, too much of me in it. From this point on, Michael ceased confiding in me. Our phone conversations never crawled below the surface. I no longer knew a way of helping. I couldn’t have, really, because I no longer knew what was going on.

I later learned that, in the following months, Michael started working as a plumber’s apprentice for a friend of his mother’s. He had earned several vocational certificates while in prison. And he spent time with Bree. We would learn that her possessiveness was violent, yet Michael spent increasing amounts of time with her. According to Karen, Bree cut him three times between December and May, and each time Michael tried to pass the cuts off as the result of someone attempting to rob him.

His mother would, almost kiddingly, tell him: “Michael, I really have to get some life insurance on you,” but he did not say no.

Not quite a year after his release, in May or June 2007, Michael got into a fight with one of Bree’s lovers. Michael related the story in a letter: “I wish every day that I would’ve stayed in bed. But how could I when my stomach was telling me that she was cheating? I figured if I catch her cheating, then I could resolve the relationship right there and then. I didn’t have the will to say it was over, but surely if I caught her in the act then it would make ending it more simple. I was wrong, Danielle, dead wrong. Needless to say, me and the guy had an altercation. He called the police and now I’m here.”

Michael went straight to prison for a parole violation. This pushed back the date of his sentence completion by a full year, from June 2008 to June 2009. I wish I could describe how I felt when I got this news, but I just can’t.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Allen outside his childhood home

It was such a catastrophic defeat that, after Michael’s death, my memory obliterated all traces of his return to prison. I guess I sent him a few packages and must have written a couple of letters, because I have his. But I was in a bad state before the news came – my first marriage was coming apart. The intersecting professional and personal demands on each of us were beyond what we could handle together. And I simply have no memory of Michael’s second phase in prison, perhaps because of the torturous fighting as Bob and I moved toward separation, perhaps because of the magnitude of the defeat.

For years after Michael died, I told people that my cousin went to prison when he was 15, got out when he was 26, and died one year later. A permanent amnesia seems to have erased the time from his second trip to prison to the end of his life. It was only when I came across an August 2007 email from Karen with a prison address for Michael that I realised – and it wouldn’t be correct to say “remembered” – that he had gone back. There is a seed of truth in this trick of my memory. Other than just superficially, I was not there for Michael’s last two years, one back in prison and that final year, still on parole, until, in his final three weeks alive, he was, officially at least, free at last. The disappearance of this stretch of time, and what I presume was also my disappearance on Michael, are probably the most painful and shameful things I have to admit.

Now that I am able to correct the distortions brought on by my shame, though, I can confirm that the barebones facts of my cousin’s biography are these. He was born on 30 November 1979, when Barbara Streisand’s No More Tears was the country’s No 1 song. On 18 September 1995, at 15, two weeks before OJ Simpson was acquitted for the murder of his wife, Michael was arrested for the first time, for an attempted carjacking. On 10 June 1996, five days after the first birthday of the niece who, like me, would grow up to be a track star, he was sentenced to 12 years and eight months in prison. In November 1996, on his 17th birthday, he was transferred to adult prison. He got out of prison in June of 2006, when he was 26, just before the Great North American Heatwave killed more than 200 people. He went back to prison in June of 2007, when he was 27, got out again in August 2008, when he was 28, and was finally clear of all parole in June 2009. Less than a month later, on 18 July 2009, at the age of 29, he died.

One of so many millions gone.

This is an edited extract from Cuz by Danielle Allen, published by The Bodley Head on 9 November. © Democratic Knowledge Project 2017. Buy it for £9.34 at bookshop.theguardian.com

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