Interview by Aaron Hughes and Amber Ginsburg, republished from Remaking the Exceptional: Tea, Torture, and Reparations | Chicago to Guantánamo (DePaul Art Museum, 2022)
La Tanya Jenifor-Sublett:
My name is La Tanya Jenifor-Sublett. I am pretty much the only woman to come forward as a torture survivor of the Chicago Police Department. And while that [experience] has shaped me, and does hold a very broad space in my life, it is not the only thing that makes me who I am. I am a community activist. I advocate for individuals who don’t have the platform that I have. I fight for the underdog because I’ve been the underdog. But I am also a daughter. I want to say I’m a feminist, but I don’t know because the definition has changed so many times. I’m an avid writer. I bake cupcakes. But, I will say, the worst thing that ever happened to me, created space for me [to be who I am today].
Aaron Hughes:
Could you share a story from your life so people can get to know you better?
LJS: I walked into Area 2 police station at the age of nineteen, which is on the South Side of Chicago. I had information about a crime. I was connected to both the victim and the perpetrator. The perpetrator is actually who came to me and said, This is what happened. I told my mom, and she said we have to tell the police. So, I walked into the police station as a young person, ignorant of the law. I had never even had a parking ticket. I had never been suspended from school. I had never come face-to-face with a police officer other than in the store, in passing. I walked into that police station with the misconception that I would be able to tell my story and say, “Hey, I don’t think this is right. I want no part of this, and I am turning this person in.” I walked in at about eleven o’clock, and I was there until maybe about one or two o’clock the next afternoon. My mother waited for me downstairs the entire time. I was in an interrogation room with two white men. The only other white men that I came in contact with, up to that point, were just school teachers. I did not think that I was in danger. Especially not in a police station. I thought that I was just telling them what happened, what had been told to me. I thought, I can tell them to arrest this person, and I had nothing to do with this. Then I’m done.
There was one detective standing, one sitting—and he’s writing. I’m thinking that he is writing what I am saying to him. But when he gives me the statement, I read it, and it is actually a different narrative. I go, “That’s not what happened. That’s not what I just said to you.” And he said, “You better fucking sign it.”
After I refused to sign it, I was slapped, choked, beaten, slammed into the concrete wall, handcuffed, called names that I had never been called before. I was in that interrogation room for hours without water, nothing to eat. I urinated on myself. They threatened to incarcerate my mother if I did not sign it. And still I said, “I’m not gonna sign this.” One detective walked out of the interrogation room. When he came back, he opened the door and my mother was standing there in handcuffs. They said, “We’re taking your mom to jail for this. Fucking sign it, or your mom’s going to jail.” My mom was just crying. And I’m like, “How are you [taking her to jail]? I’m telling you what happened.” And they took my mom away. And I thought that she’s in jail. So, I’m like, “Okay, okay, okay. [I will sign it.]” Then they literally grabbed my hand. One of them held me by the neck as I signed this statement. In several places. They don’t make you just sign it at the bottom—you sign it in all the spots where it incriminates you. That young, nineteen-year-old woman thought she could go to the police station and say, “I’m mad about this crime. Don’t be mad at me; be mad with me.”
AH: That’s an incredibly unjust, harrowing experience.
LJS: I was so glad to be out of there, smelling like urine, starving. I was six weeks pregnant at the time. I had a doctor’s appointment a couple days after that. I went to the appointment and they put the heart monitor on my stomach. And they didn’t hear the baby’s heartbeat. So immediately. . . it got frantic, like, We don’t hear the baby’s heartbeat. They ordered an emergency sonogram. And they saw that the amniotic sac—where the baby is—was torn. They showed it to me, and there was a rip in it. The doctor asked the sonogram technician to leave the room. And she said to me, “Are you an abused woman?” And I said no. And she said, “This could have only happened to you if you had experienced some trauma. Were you in a car accident?” I said no. She said, “Is your partner beating you?” And I said no. She said, “You can tell me.” Could I really tell her about the two white men and the police station? Could I really tell her that? So, not only did I lose—I won’t say “innocence”—not only did I lose my perspective on who the police were, I lost my baby in that interrogation room.
Then [the police] came to pick me up seven months later with that same narrative. They said, “We are here to arrest you for murder, under the theory of accountability in the State of Illinois.” The theory of accountability says that you are a part of [a crime] before, during, or after. How ridiculous is that? They said I was accountable for this crime because the person came and told me at nine o’clock the night before. And I didn’t come to the police station until eleven o’clock the next day. I was convicted October 30, 1992. Sentenced November 25, 1992. I went to prison December 2, 1992. And I was released October 4, 2013. Twenty-one years.
Amber Ginsburg:
What allowed you to find your voice again? What helped you sustain and survive?
LJS: Even after they convicted me, I still thought, Surely, I’m going to Harold Washington College. I’m like, Surely they’ll see I’m innocent. I never had a parking ticket. I called home one day from Cook County [Jail] while waiting for sentencing. I said, “Well, Mom, if I get twenty years, I’ll be out in nine and a half. I think I can make it.” My mother was a child of the [19]60s, was in the struggle for freedom. She said, “Baby, I am here for you. But we don’t know how this is going to go. Don’t look to get the minimum.” She said, “But whatever they give you, they only have your body. Let your mind be free.” And she sent me every book, every magazine, every newspaper. She said, “Educate yourself.” And I did. I spent my time going to school.
AG: Having had those experiences, and gaining such knowledge, what does justice look like to you?
LJS: I have to say that I don’t think that there is justice without mercy and restoration. I don’t think justice ends when the gavel hits. Justice, for me, is a second chance that is restorative, that is redemptive, that is true renewal. I’m a Black woman, and I’m formerly incarcerated, and I’m over forty-five years old. Justice for me would mean that when I went to prison, there would have been an individual plan for my incarceration. We’re not talking about slave labor. We’re not talking about warehousing. You see people who come home after thirty years, and they can’t even go to the grocery store. Because [prisons] don’t prepare them. Justice for me would have been acknowledgement that my mother had to return to our community as the mother of “a murderer.” Where was the restorative justice for her? Where were the community programs for her? How does she go back to work after that?
When I think of justice, I think of a holistic approach. Why are these people standing out on the corner at nine o’clock in the morning? They don’t have no community center to go to. You want to know why they drug addicts? You don’t want nobody sleeping in bus stops? Well, where’s the nearest shelter in their neighborhood? Justice to me is holistic and happens in the community.
But, for little old me, La Tanya, justice would be a second chance. A true second chance. I can do everything that I’m supposed to do. I can make just as much money as you do. I can live where I want. That would be justice for me. And justice would be to allow my counterparts, my other brothers and sisters in the struggle, to say what justice is for them, too.
AG: There’s another term we use when talking about justice, which is reparations. I wonder, what does that term mean to you?
LJS: Reparations is like the f-bomb [laughs]. When you drop the r-word, reparations, it does what the f-bomb does: it quiets a room. You can be in a place with the most progressive liberals and you say “reparations,” and it’s like [gasps]!
First and foremost, reparations means that you have to acknowledge [wrongdoing], and we live in a society that says, “Get over it.”
And when I think about reparations, you can’t tell me I have until August so-and-so of this year to make a claim. This is not a commercial at two o’clock in the morning: “If you have mesothelioma, you call us and we’ll file a suit.” We’re talking about torture. How dare you put a timeframe on it? You cannot give me forty acres and a mule and tell me to go on my merry way. Take this $100,000, and you can live in any Chicago Housing Authority [(CHA)] building, apartment, whatever you want to. You can go to Chicago City Colleges. We’re going to repair the harm done to your family, too. Let them go to City College. You can teach [the history of Jon Burge torture] to kids in Chicago Public Schools. And you’ll get the [Chicago Torture Justice] Center. I work every day—I work two jobs. $100,000? I can live in any CHA I want to? But did you not say that CHA could not receive people who were formerly incarcerated? City Colleges? I came home from prison with more degrees than a thermometer. City College doesn’t really do anything for me. What you can do is allow me to get a PhD from the University of Chicago. You can let me go someplace where the education is generative for me.
Reparations, for me, means that I am able to foster a child. I work; I pay my taxes. And I really would like to foster a child. But they put them in houses with people who don’t have a felony conviction. Surely, you can let me adopt a kid, right? Really, that’s what reparations would be to me. So simple. Let me have an impact on a young person’s life. But, because I have a felony conviction, I can’t do that. You just want to give me some money. Put me in a CHA apartment, send me to City College, and say, “We’ve repaired the harm.” No, you have not.
You can’t repair the harm until you ask me what I need. Don’t tell me what you want me to have. That makes me feel like I’m being further imprisoned. I was already imprisoned for twenty-one years, where they only gave me what they wanted me to have. It’s not a “free community” if you give me what you think makes it better for me. No, thank you.
AH: All of the people we have interviewed for this project have struggled for justice and demanded the recognition of their humanity. They’ve expressed beauty, made art, written poetry. They’ve been activists, all despite the violence that they faced. Can you talk a little bit about what that means to you?
LJS: It has been liberating for me to speak and to be heard. It has taken the shame out of it for me and given me a power in the pain that I never knew existed. My audience gives me liberation and a feeling of creativity that I think is felt by individuals who paint, who sculpt, who write poetry, who sing, who dance. My audience gives me that energy. It’s something about being received—to be able to tell my story, and for people to know that it’s really true.
AG: Where do you find joy? What inspires you to keep fighting for justice and reparations? What helps you heal?
LJS: I love being in community. That brings me joy. I still fight because there’s this fire . . . there’s something inside of me. I read this social worker’s quote and it said, “If you ever come to the point where you feel like you’re burnt out, just remember that once upon a time you were on fire.” I’m still on fire. I just have to keep going. One of these days, I’m going to pass the baton. Then she’s gonna run. And not just one person, because we’re all running this race. I think the women who did not come forward [after being tortured by Chicago Police] created space for me. They exist. I feel them saying, “Okay, La Tanya, we can’t speak out. We want to raise our kids. We want to be grandmamas. But you can.” So I do.
When I’m in the bookstore, I feel like, This is all the stuff I have yet to learn. That’s one place I go when I feel like I need to regroup. I go to the bookstore. And I don’t live far from the lake. I love to just look at the water, Lake Michigan. And a good cup of tea. I have about thirty different types of tea. Tea with people in conversation is healing. Tea, for me, has healing properties, and I think that’s why I have so much of it.
While I was in prison, I told my mom that I wanted pillows, because we only got one pillow. Twenty years of having only one pillow. And when I came home, my mom had pillows for me. Little cute pillows, a body pillow. And I was just like [relieved sigh]. I now have a king size bed that has about thirty pillows. I have so many pillows, and it’s so comfortable. It’s about the simple, simple things. Allow me to get back to that fire.