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.' "