Pubdate: Wed, 01 Aug 2001
Source: Village Voice (NY)
Copyright: 2001 Village Voice Media, Inc
Contact:  http://www.villagevoice.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/482
Author: Jennifer Gonnerman
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/tulia.htm (Tulia, Texas)

  TULIA BLUES

How the Lingering Effects of a Massive Drug Bust Devastated One 
Family in a Small Texas Town

TULIA, TEXAS-Only a few years ago, Mattie White liked to sit on the 
front porch of her one-story house. In the park across the street, 
young people played basketball and hung out on the swings, their 
shouts echoing through the neighborhood. These days, though, Conner 
Park is quiet. Many of the people who once gathered there are now in 
prison.

In Tulia, a dry town without a bar or nightclub, Conner Park was a 
favorite hangout for the town's black youth. Today, it has become a 
symbol of the community's devastation. For Mattie and many others, 
the park is a lonely sight, a constant reminder of all the friends, 
neighbors, and relatives who are gone.

Early on the morning of July 23, 1999, cops burst into homes all over 
this tiny town in the Texas panhandle. Forty-six people-a few whites 
and almost half the town's black adult population-were indicted for 
drug trafficking. Dozens of children became virtual orphans as their 
parents were hauled to jail. In the coming months, 19 people would be 
shipped to state prison, some with sentences of 20, 60, or even 99 
years.

The last trial ended in the fall of 2000, but this chapter in Tulia 
history has certainly not closed. Ever since the arrests, prisoners' 
relatives and friends have been struggling with the aftermath: 
destroyed families, traumatized children, townspeople's cold stares. 
The ripple effects of a large drug bust may be the same everywhere, 
but they are especially apparent in a small town, where there is none 
of the frenzy of urban life to hide the damage.

Mattie, a 50-year-old mother of six, was never accused of selling 
drugs, but she too has been punished. The undercover drug operation 
snared her two sons, one daughter, one brother-in-law, two nephews, 
one son-in-law, one niece, and two cousins. Now Mattie struggles to 
raise her daughter's two children and juggle two jobs, including one 
as a prison guard. (Her ex-husband took in a few other 
grandchildren.) About the undercover drug operation, Mattie says, "It 
has made my life miserable. My whole world seems like it fell down on 
me."

Drive 45 minutes south of Amarillo, Texas, and you'll arrive in Tulia 
(pop. 5117), where a billboard welcomes visitors to the town with 
"the Richest Land and the Finest People." Perhaps a more accurate 
description these days would be "the Driest Land and the Most Divided 
People."

Tulia has the feel of a ghost town. Most of the parking spaces 
downtown are empty and nearly all the fields are brown. Like many 
rural farming towns, Tulia has been ailing for years. Farmers who 
received federal subsidies survived, but the poorer residents, 
including most of the black population, were hard hit. Farmhand jobs 
disappeared. Two of the main employers for blacks are a meatpacking 
plant and a Wal-Mart distribution center, both located in a small 
city 22 miles away. Working there requires a car, which many people 
here do not own.

In some ways, the civil rights era seems to have never quite reached 
Tulia. Poor blacks here live in trailers and subsidized houses in

"Sunset Addition," a neighborhood on the west side that some people 
still call "Niggertown." Once an almost all-white town, Tulia is now 
51 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent black.

Cocaine has been readily available here for years, as it has been 
across the rural South. But over the last year, Tulia has emerged as 
a hotbed of drug-war politics. Activists point to the situation in 
Tulia as a perfect example of all that is wrong with the war on 
drugs-from dubious police tactics to ultra-stiff prison sentences to 
shattered families.

How could such a small, impoverished town possibly support 46 drug 
dealers? The answer appears to have nothing to do with uncovering a 
well-organized drug ring and everything to do with a narcotics agent 
named Tom Coleman. The undercover agent spent 18 months infiltrating 
the black community here, and the entire drug bust was built on his 
undercover work. There were no wiretaps, no surveillance photos, and 
virtually no secondary witnesses. The morning that cops barged into 
the suspects' homes, they found no weapons, money, or drugs.

Questions about Coleman's credibility have been buzzing along Tulia's 
grapevine ever since. The black community here insists that Coleman 
targeted its members, setting up small-time users and fabricating 
evidence against others. Some defendants charged with selling Coleman 
drugs said they did not know him. In one case, the agent said he was 
not certain whether a defendant actually sold him cocaine. The 
charges against that man were dropped.

While he was working undercover in Tulia, Coleman himself was 
arrested. The sheriff at a police department where he'd previously 
worked filed charges of theft and issued an arrest warrant in 1998, 
after Coleman disappeared mid shift and never returned, leaving 
behind a pile of debts and a police car parked next to his house. 
Coleman paid back the money after he was arrested. He did not spend a 
night in jail. (The NAACP is planning to try to get Coleman indicted 
for perjury based on a statement he made about his past during a 
court hearing.)

None of these incidents curbed the Swisher County district attorney's 
enthusiasm for prosecuting Coleman's cases. Over the next year, 
Mattie and many others spent hours pacing the corridor of the town 
courthouse. Mattie's three children decided to go to trial; not one 
of their jurors was black. Mattie knew many of the jurors, including 
a few who had played with her on a town softball team. In the end, 
all three juries voted to convict her children. Of the eight 
defendants who did not plead guilty and instead went to trial, 
everyone was found guilty.

Shortly after the arrests, The Tulia Sentinel ran a story on its 
front page with the headline "Tulia's Streets Cleared of Garbage." A 
reader skimming the newspaper might have thought the article had 
something to do with local sanitation efforts. In fact, the first 
paragraph stated that the arrests of the town's "known" drug dealers 
"had cleared away some of the garbage off Tulia's streets."

The first of Mattie's children to go on trial was 30-year-old Donnie 
Smith, a former Tulia High football star who briefly attended a local 
college. Afterward, for several years, he battled a crack habit and 
eventually went to rehab. By the time of his arrest, he had been 
clean for six months. During his trial in March 2000, Donnie admitted 
to smoking crack, but said he was not a dealer. The jury disagreed, 
convicting him of delivering three-fifths of a gram of crack. He 
received a two-year sentence.

Donnie still faced charges of delivering cocaine on six other 
occasions. He insisted he was innocent-these charges involved powder 
cocaine, which Donnie said he did not use-but he decided to accept a 
plea bargain to avoid the sort of lengthy sentences other defendants 
received. In return, Donnie got 12 years.

Donnie's 24-year-old sister Kizzie might have expected to receive a 
mild punishment, since she had no felony record. During a two-day 
trial in April 2000, Coleman testified that he had bought cocaine 
from Kizzie seven times. The jury gave her a 25-year prison sentence. 
Five months later, another jury convicted her brother Kareem Abdul 
Jabbar White, whom everyone calls "Creamy," of delivering one 
eight-ball of cocaine (about $200 worth). Because he had a prior 
felony, 25-year-old Creamy got 60 years.

To Mattie, it seemed the motives of the sheriff, the prosecutor, and 
the undercover agent had less to do with shrinking the town's drug 
supply than with shrinking the size of Tulia's black population. 
"They don't want no black people in this town," she says. "I don't 
care what nobody says. If I put a [for sale] sign in my yard tomorrow 
and . . . all the rest of these black families [did], they would be 
the happiest people in the world. They're seeing colors. They're not 
seeing that we're human just like they are."

District Attorney Terry D. McEachern, who stands behind Coleman's 
investigation, denies racism motivated the arrests. "Nobody was 
targeted that I was aware of," he says. The prosecutor contends that 
once Coleman, who is white, befriended a few members of Tulia's black 
community, he could not penetrate the town's other ethnic groups. 
"Some of my best friends are blacks," McEachern says. "I feel sadness 
for the families of everybody that has to go to the penitentiary 
because it puts them through pain, but the person who goes to the 
penitentiary made a choice to commit a crime, and so they must pay 
for their choice."

On a recent afternoon, Mattie did what she has been doing for weeks. 
She lay on the flowered sofa in her dark living room, propped her 
sock-covered feet on a pillow, and watched The Young and the 
Restless. Seven weeks ago, a surgeon operated on both feet to remove 
bone spurs and bunions. Her doctor told her she would heal by now. 
But every time she hobbles to the front door to check on her 
grandchildren outside, the pain returns.

The morning that Mattie's three children were arrested, she was in 
class, learning how to be a prison guard. Since she was a teenager, 
she has always worked two or three jobs at a time-picking cotton in 
the fields, pressing pants at a Levi's factory, selling insurance 
policies, fixing radios, styling hair. Once she became a prison 
guard, Mattie hoped to get by on just one paycheck.

Mattie has been supervising prisoners for two years, and she has few 
complaints. "I love my job," she says. "I wouldn't trade it for 
nothing." The average per-capita income in Tulia is $9113; Mattie 
earns more than twice that amount. About her children, Mattie says, 
"They were proud of me being a guard. If they hadn't got in trouble, 
I imagine all of them probably would've gone to school to be a guard."

The promise of paying her bills with one employer vanished after 
Kizzie's children moved in. Supporting seven-year-old Roneisha and 
four-year-old Cashawn meant that Mattie had to get a part-time job 
too, this time as a home health aide. Now her workday begins at 8 
a.m. and ends after 10 p.m. Still, Mattie is deep in debt. Behind on 
her mortgage payments, she worries she may lose her four-bedroom home.

When someone goes to prison, the family left behind often suffers 
financially, charged with a slew of unofficial taxes. Mattie's phone 
bills soared to $500 a month with all the collect calls she was 
receiving from prison. Whenever she can, she tries to send her 
children money to get shorts (the prison only provides long pants), 
buy food from the commissary, go to the doctor (each visit costs $3), 
and purchase shoes when theirs wear out. Better than most prisoners' 
mothers, Mattie knows what inmates need to get by. "Ten or 20 dollars 
a month is really not enough," she says.

Each of Mattie's three children is in a different prison, so seeing 
them requires gas money and plenty of stamina. Kizzie is the farthest 
away, at a prison in Gatesville. Visiting her means driving eight 
hours for a four-hour visit, then turning around and driving another 
eight hours home. She cannot afford a motel, or she would spend the 
night and visit Kizzie for two days in a row. Donnie and Creamy are 
closer. If Mattie leaves around 3 a.m., she can squeeze in visits 
with both sons in one day.

Sometimes Mattie takes her grandchildren along on these car trips, 
but the ride home is never fun. "I try to hold myself up for them," 
she says. "I try not to cry because it makes them cry."

Mattie has noticed a change in the children since their parents went 
to prison. Cashawn, especially, has not coped well. He cries in 
school and is sometimes mean to other children. "He's not a bad 
little boy," Mattie says. "He likes to play. But when they make him 
mad, he'll kick one of them. You can't tell him nothing."

She rarely talks to the children about their mother because the 
subject makes everyone too sad. Instead, she just says, "I'll be glad 
when your mama comes home."

Mattie is hardly the only grandparent in Tulia buckling under the 
burden of raising young children. Her ex-husband, Rickey, a 50-year- 
old machinist, lives nearby in a three-bedroom trailer. Rickey's 
girlfriend was locked up in the same drug bust. Now he and a 
daughter- in-law are raising six grandchildren.

Mattie tries to stay strong by reading the Bible and going to church. 
Across the computer monitor in her dining room, a screen saver 
flashes, announcing "Jesus Will Fix It, He Is Always on Time." "I 
don't drink. I don't smoke. I don't do none of that stuff," Mattie 
says. "I work, I go home, and I go to church. Jesus is the only drug 
I take."

Over the last two years, a small group has started in Tulia on behalf 
of the people who were arrested. Mattie joined the organization, 
Friends of Justice, which is run by a white minister's family. On the 
night of July 22, Mattie, Rickey, their grandchildren, and 200 other 
people gathered at Conner Park across from Mattie's house for a rally 
put together by the organization. The event coincided with the second 
anniversary of the drug bust.

Preachers, farmers, and lawyers joined prisoners' families to eat 
hamburgers and listen to speakers. Two busloads of activists arrived 
from Austin. Five mothers of drug prisoners flew in from New York 
City. Parked along the edge of the park, a police officer in a patrol 
car monitored the action, a video camera mounted on his rearview 
mirror.

The six-hour event featured several rounds of "This Land Is Your 
Land," led by a minister strumming a guitar. Many people wore 
T-shirts listing the names of all the defendants. A yellow banner 
hanging behind the makeshift wooden stage proclaimed "Never Again. 
Not in Tulia. Not Anywhere." The event ended with a midnight march to 
the courthouse.

The rally temporarily boosted Mattie's spirits, but now she is back 
where she was in the days leading up the event, her feet resting atop 
pillows, wondering when she will be able to return to work. 
"Sometimes I be so tired that I just be wanting to give up," Mattie 
says. "But I say, 'No, I just got to go on a little bit farther. I'll 
be OK.' "
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MAP posted-by: Josh Sutcliffe