Top Quotes: “The Forerunner: A Story of Pain and Perseverance in America” — Cori Bush

“SOME PEOPLE START THEIR political careers with a run for the local school board or a statewide seat. Not me. That’s not my story.

In 2016, I ran for the U.S. Senate, challenging Missouri’s then secretary of state in the Democratic primary. That August, I lost the race. But I’d gained invaluable experience that would later serve me in the two subsequent runs for Congress I’d make before winning my seat representing Missouri’s First Congressional District.”

“The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department kills more people per capita than any other metropolitan police force in the country. We consistently have some of the nation’s highest homicides for our population size. A child is more likely to die from gun violence in St. Louis than anywhere else in the US.”

“My father, Errol Bush, worked as a union meatcutter. I loved seeing him at the local grocery store when my mom sent my brother and me on an errand. He wore a long red coat and smock, white hat, and white cloth gloves that would often be tinged pink from the hours he spent handling meat. My dad was popular. Everyone seemed to know him. And he wasn’t popular only at the grocery store where he worked.

Over the years, I watched my dad lead in every group or institution he was a part of. He was president of our family reunion planning committee, and as such he gathered more than a hundred of our family members from all over the country in St. Louis when I was a child. He was president of the PTA at the Catholic elementary school I attended. I watched him be elected alderman in the City of Northwoods, in St. Louis County, when I was ten. Later, he would be elected mayor. I watched him put his mind to something, work hard, and accomplish it. In my eyes, my dad was a giant.”

“I remember the questions that flooded my mind in those minutes before the abortion: I was further along this time, and what if something goes wrong? What if I am never able to get pregnant again? What if God punishes me for terminating these two pregnancies?

I walked into the white-walled room where the procedure was due to take place. A doctor and the nurse assisting him were there already, waiting for me. They instructed me to climb onto the bed. I lay down, as I was told. But I had reservations. And I heard a voice in my head grow louder. Did I really want to go through with this? As the nurse standing nearby started to explain what was about to happen, I interrupted. “I don’t want to do this,” I said. But she continued. She described to me, in detail, what the doctor was doing. I watched him prepare what looked like a long straw connected to tubing. Again, I told her, “I don’t want to do this.” She never responded. She grabbed my hand as the doctor had instructed her to. She told me to look up at a mural of a stained-glass window that was on the room’s ceiling. I wasn’t confident enough in those moments before the procedure started to realize that they didn’t have the power to do anything against my will. It didn’t occur to me that the choice was mine, whether to leave or stay. I felt the doctor snake the long straw inside me, and then I heard the awful sounds as the vacuum sucked the fetus out of my body.

I hadn’t heard such a sound with the first abortion, but I assumed it was because I had had that procedure earlier in the pregnancy, at nine weeks. I remember the intense pain and the feeling of helplessness in that moment. I was furious. That doctor ignored my pleas. I was just another person in his assembly line, just another little Black girl. I lay there, wanting to scream. But I couldn’t find my voice. They showed me no compassion. No one asked if I needed to take some time to think about what was happening. When the sucking and cracking sounds ceased, I knew it was over. I got up off the table and walked out of the room.”

“Over the ten years I ended up working at Lighthouse, I was never paid much above minimum wage, $4.25 at the time. I started at $5.35 an hour. If my supervisor determined that I deserved a merit raise in any given year, they would increase my salary by five or ten cents each year. When I took over hiring for the center, I saw firsthand how offering so little narrowed our applicant pool. I remember hearing one of the owners, who we called Pastor Doris or Mrs. Rice, talk about wanting to increase salaries but how difficult it was to do. Balancing “more affordable” out-of-pocket rates for parents and not enough of a reimbursement from the state was challenging. We didn’t always get people who wanted to work with kids. And I would often have to turn down qualified and trained professionals because they wanted more than we could pay. People walked in with a master’s degree asking for $15.00 an hour, but I could offer only $9.00.”

“DEVON WAS CLINGY from the very beginning. I loved that he always wanted to cuddle and hold me, and I’d come to accept that he wanted to be with me twenty-four hours a day. If I went to the manicurist, he wanted to come. If I went to get my hair done, he was there with me. I loved that he wanted to spend so much time together. But I slowly started to see that clinginess in a new light.

One day, we squabbled over something relatively small. Maybe I hadn’t called him back as quickly as he’d thought I should. I don’t remember exactly. What I do remember is that I’d been away from the house. When I came home, I walked into the basement bedroom we shared, and I froze. Before me was not the usual scene — some stray articles of clothing strewn on the chair, my jewelry neatly arranged on the dresser, a book on the nightstand. Instead, I was looking at the remains of a bonfire in the middle of the floor. I stepped closer and saw it was a pile of my burned belongings.

While I’d been at work, DeVon had gathered everything I had at his house — clothes, shoes, purses, books — and he had set them on fire. I blinked several times. I could not believe what I was seeing. The pile was half my height and as wide as a full-sized bed. Items were charred, melted together. Nothing was salvageable. I only had left what was on my back.”

“As I approached, DeVon wore an ugly, mischievous grin. He reached toward the passenger’s window with the plates in his hand. When I was near, I reached to grab them, and suddenly he dropped the plates and took hold of my arm, firmly and viciously. Through the window, he yanked me as far inside his DeVille as he could, and then he drove off.

My torso dangled out of the open window, my body whipped along as he sped through the streets. He pulled me in farther, and once DeVon was able to get me fully inside his car, he pulled my torso and head into his lap. He held me there and punched me and punched me as he drove. I struggled. I screamed. I scrambled frantically trying to get myself out of the car any way I could, but I couldn’t.

When we stopped at red lights, people in nearby cars heard my screams. I could see them turn their heads and see DeVon pummeling me. They turned away. They didn’t want to get involved. DeVon kept at me as he drove at frantic speeds on residential roads and then on the highway. We were on a multilane thoroughfare when I realized I needed to risk death to save myself from whatever he intended to do with me. I opened the door the first chance I had and tucked my body into a ball to roll out. But DeVon grabbed my legs. And he held on tight.

I could make out that there was an older woman driving in the next lane. She heard my screams and looked over at me as I flung the door open. She could tell what I was about to do, and yet again she turned her head. DeVon put his foot on the gas and took off again. The door was open, and half of my body was flying, flailing out of the car as he gripped me. My blood streaked the car. I couldn’t stop hollering. I couldn’t get away from him. He raced on to the street where he would try to break my will to live, or at least my will to live without him.

DeVon made sure to park in a deserted place where no one could watch as he tortured me. He pushed me beneath the steering wheel, trapping me in the small space between his legs. He held me captive in that makeshift cage for hours. He bit me. Repeatedly and fiercely, he pulled whole chunks of meat from my body with his teeth. He pinched me, using his fingers to tear at my flesh and rip into my skin. He stomped, kicked, and punched my body. He choked me. He used his hands and his mouth to degrade me. “How could you do this to me? Who was that at your house?” DeVon demanded, yelling with an uncontrollable rage as he beat me into submission. “You don’t really love me. You, my mama, how could you do this to me?”

In that moment, one of the most desperate of my entire life, while fighting with every inch of my body to survive, I reflected that it had always struck me as strange that he called me Mama. His own I knew was an addict. She hadn’t shown him much nurturing throughout his young life. His father had been found dead years ago, in prison. DeVon had lived through more trauma than his nineteen years could hold, and here he was taking out his pain by inflicting it on me, his “mama.”

For four hours, I screamed and cried. I was dizzy from pain and lack of oxygen. I prayed and prayed that someone might come to my rescue. Then I heard a voice in my head, clear as a bell. “Tell him you’ll get back with him,” the voice said. “Okay, okay,” I eventually sputtered out, tears and blood crusting on my face. “We can get back together,” I told him.

Then, like magic, it was over. He pulled me up from under the steering wheel, pushed me into the passenger’s seat, and drove me back to his house, where my car was waiting for me.”

“MY SISTER AND DEONTE, just thirteen or fourteen at the time, were waiting there for me. They were too young to drive away themselves, and they didn’t know what else to do but stay put. As we neared, before DeVon even brought his Cadillac to a full stop, I jumped out, and I started running.

That morning, I had started the day in a white shirt and shorts set. That set was now completely soaked through with my blood. DeVon peeled off as I climbed into my own car and what I felt was safety. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I go home? To the hospital? The three of us pulled onto I-70 eastbound. I breathed a small sigh of relief, still trembling, but it was too soon.

Someone rammed their car into ours from behind. It was DeVon. He must have parked nearby and patiently waited to follow. I kept driving and sped up, but he followed close behind, hitting us repeatedly over and over. I switched lanes. DeVon did too. He rammed us from the side. He knocked us into the median, but still I kept driving. The whole time, my sister was screaming. She was looking out the passenger’s side mirror and screaming. Deonte was cursing. He kept yelling instructions out to me as he watched DeVon’s movements: “Go faster.” “Swerve left.” “Go.”

But the faster I went, the more DeVon sped after me. I thought I had broken free, but here I was again, hours later, out of control, pursued by someone who wanted something from me that I couldn’t quite name. I took an exit that I knew would lead me to a neighborhood where I felt safe, a place where I knew the guys likely to be outside, including Cain. I hoped they would have my back and do what they could to run DeVon off.

As we pulled onto a street I had in mind, DeVon rammed us again. I was driving the block in circles. The noise brought a crowd. About a dozen people ran out of their homes, screaming and cursing as he barreled toward us. Gunshots rang out behind us. I kept driving. I made it to the corner while DeVon, being shot at, finally stopped the car.

I made Kelli and Deonte get out of the car, and I told them to run, fast. DeVon wanted me, so if I was going to die, I didn’t want them hurt too. I drove back in the other direction to lure DeVon away from them and give them time to make it to safety. I could see Cain and the neighborhood guys chasing DeVon’s car on foot as he chased mine. He caught up with me yet again, pounded my car so hard with his that there were only three wheels left touching the ground.

I thought that I had reached my end. DeVon had caught me now, and my life was going to be over. But the guys kept running and kept shooting at DeVon’s Cadillac, until, finally, he drove off – away from me, away from the neighborhood, and away from my sister and Deonte.”

“Our first night in our new place together, after we’d moved our things in, DeVon gestured at a low cabinet in the kitchen and told me to open it. I bent down to do so and saw a gun lying in it on its side. “That’s for your father if you ever try to leave me,” he said. And I believed him. I felt stupid. He’d been relentless, doing everything he possibly could to convince me that he’d changed and that our lives would be different. I also felt trapped.

I was scared of what he would do to me if he became upset, and I had no idea what might trigger him. I walked on eggshells. That gun in the cabinet wasn’t the only gun in our home. At night, DeVon made us sleep with a gun in the space between our pillows. Our little bedroom was so small our bed had to be pushed against a wall to fit, and I slept flush against it. Each night, I lay there, trapped between that wall and DeVon’s body.

If I climbed out of bed in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I would come back to find him sitting on the edge of the bed, the gun in his hand, waiting for me, and ready to pounce in case I’d try and leave.”

“WE LEARNED HOW TO attract as little attention as possible. We parked on a street in a residential neighborhood, in a space between two homes, never directly in front of one. That would be too suspicious. We never stayed in the same place all night. I got maybe an hour or two of sleep a night, just enough to avoid being incoherent. Angel was two months old, and Zion was almost as small as his sister. They were both on formula.

I couldn’t produce enough milk for them by then. I mixed their bottles in the bathrooms of fast-food restaurants, after asking the cashier for a cup of water. I learned that McDonald’s had the most accessible bathroom. It never required a key. That is where I would get cleaned up for work every morning. Some nights, a friend or a relative might take us in. I would spend a couple hours ironing clothes to last us for the week or more. But people usually weren’t willing to open their doors for long to a family of four, especially when there were babies in tow. Even if we could find a place to sleep for a night, we often had to be gone by dawn when others in the household got up and moving.

No one at my job knew that I was unhoused, living out of our 1996 Ford Explorer, and I put on a brave face every day. The days spent in the car were warm, but the nights were cool at first. Cool turned to cold as the days went by. We kept our clothes and necessities in trash bags in the backseat. We let the backseat down, smashing the clothes underneath, and that back area of the SUV was where we stood up the two playpens for the babies to sleep. I spent most of those nights watching them sleep, turning the car on and off to keep warm but being cognizant of running the gas out too quickly.”

“I filed for divorce. I contacted Legal Aid because I did not know where else to turn. They accepted me into a program that helped people leave marriages. It was exactly what I needed. They provided me with an attorney who worked on my case for free. If not for them, I don’t know how I would have managed to complete my divorce from Hakim. I couldn’t have afforded it.”

“I knew many women who stopped attending church because they’d been harassed or sexually assaulted there. Some felt ashamed because the preacher was married, and the women felt the unwanted attention was their fault. I knew what it was like to be hit on repeatedly and relentlessly, deceived, and lied to by a married pastor. There were single pastors and ministers who did the same. But not in my church. Mine was going to be one of the few congregations where that wasn’t the case.”

“As the protests progressed, police vehicles followed us as we ran, firing more tear gas as they pursued us. We were stunned, unaccustomed to this level of cruelty, but we kept on, and we stayed.”

“We were still on the streets every day, twenty-four hours a day. Some days, I questioned whether I should keep showing up the way I did. So many of my protest family on the front lines were struggling; too many of us were getting evicted or couldn’t make enough money for our food or to pay our bills.

As a working professional who was slightly older than the younger people who made up the front line, I was often serving as a caretaker for some of my protest family while I struggled to provide for my own household and my own kids. I was spread too thin, and I considered quitting. I asked God to show me what to do. At one protest at Ferguson October, He did.

Ferguson October was a four-day series of events that brought people from all over the country into St. Louis for a weekend of resistance. We marched, rallied, and sharpened our political analysis with like-minded people. We knew the grand jury was deliberating on whether to indict Darren Wilson, and we wanted to send a message to them, to show them that the world was still watching. Protesters made themselves impossible to ignore at unexpected places, including during a performance of the Saint Louis Symphony, at a Cardinals’ playoff game at Busch Stadium, and at a Saint Louis Rams game. We were everywhere.

One particular day that weekend, during a march to the Ferguson police station, a group of folks from out of state brought with them an enormous speaker system. They rolled it out through the streets on a dolly as we moved toward the building that represented the injustices we were up against. The booming system blasted modern-day movement anthems, songs from N.W.A and Public Enemy. Listening to those anthems in my community gave me hope. The 1989 classic “Fight the Power” came on. We had listened to that song probably a million times on the front lines, but as I stood alongside people from all around the country again, who were there to fight the power with us, it felt special. Ferguson Frontline needed support. We were all spent and traumatized. But, in this moment, my heart filled.

We rode the waves of Chuck D and Flavor Flav’s voices, throwing our fists up in the air. I looked around me and thought to myself, “These are my people. Something is still happening here. This is real.””

“Ferguson Frontline, my movement family, became well known in the media and well known to police. We paid a price for our visibility and dedication to the cause. Our lives and livelihoods were endangered. Some of us lost homes and jobs. We were followed out of town and harassed on flights and in airports.

One evening, I was leaving a meeting of activists and lawyers who had gotten together to collaborate on a challenge to police violence. After pulling out of my parking spot, I looked in my rearview mirror to see a car with no headlights pull up close behind me. The car started driving faster than I was, riding my tail. I sped up and moved into the next lane, but the car moved with me. I realized that whoever it was, they were chasing me.

My heart raced. I sped down Kingshighway Boulevard, a major artery that runs through the west side of the city. I was driving too fast, weaving between lanes, and putting my own life and others’ at risk, all in an effort to escape from my pursuer. To my right were businesses and homes. To my left, a median with large traffic barrier planters that could have flipped my car if I got too close. I was stiff with terror, aware that one false move and I’d be in the middle of a tragedy. I saw a red light just up ahead. was forced to stop so as not to collide with the cars right in front of me. My tail stopped too. I looked to my right at a dark-tinted car. The driver rolled down his window partway, and I could see the top of his brow. When the light turned green, he sped off. The car chase had ended, but fear still gripped me.”

“As the days and months of protests went on, I got to know members of our Palestinian community in St. Louis. Even though they weren’t the ones disproportionately killed by police in our city, they came out regularly to stand with us. Our conversations about the oppression they and their family members experienced opened my eyes.”

“The law enforcement officers who stopped us ignored our efforts to get Lisa to safety. Instead, they pointed their long guns at us. “Drop her!” they shouted, again and again until Lisa’s rescue squad did just that. But I wasn’t ready to stop the interventions my training had taught me. I continued trying to rouse her. I said, “I’m the nurse helping her. I’m not letting her go. You are not skilled to help her in this moment. She needs a medic!”

Then I remember seeing stars. Not cartoonish stars or some otherabstraction. I saw the actual celestial ex-panse. I felt the sky getting closer and closer, and it wasn’t until I flipped and the ground started rushing toward me that I realized what was happening. “Oh my goodness. How much is this about to hurt?” Then impact.

I hit the ground. Half a dozen officers surrounded me in a circle, stomping and kicking me as if I were nothing. Boots rained down on my body, kicking me from all angles and grinding my face and abdomen into the asphalt. My body jerked from side to side as it absorbed the impact of the officers’ boots. I wanted to yell, cry out to my protest family. But not only could I not see them, what could they do? “Who do I call out to for help when it’s the police who are assaulting me?” I wondered. I remember telling myself, “If you don’t get up, they’re going to kill you.”

I jumped up, still numb to the pain in my body. I don’t know how I had the strength to get up off the ground, other than with the help of the Lord. The police had tear- gassed Lisa and me, but my body hadn’t recognized the signs yet. Now up on my feet, I stretched out my arms and yelled, “Stop! I’m the nurse helping.” I couldn’t say one more word. I felt my throat begin to tighten and I felt burning. My throat was on fire. That’s when I realized my bandanna had fallen from my face and I was feeling the tear gas flooding my airways. I yelled, “I,” and took a shallow breath. “Can’t, I managed. Took another shallow breath. “Breathe!” I got out to the officers. “I-HAVE-ASTHMA!” I said between more shallow breaths. One re-sponded, “She’s lying. Arrest her!” They grabbed me and I went limp too.

When I woke up, an oxygen mask covered my face and I saw a paramedic standing over me, tending to me. I could breathe better, but I felt an uncomfortable pressure on the right side of my head. I realized that that pressure was the barrel of a gun. “I told you she was lying,” said the police officer responsible for threatening my life as I came back into consciousness. The paramedic said that I wasn’t and knocked the gun away from my face. Eventually, the officer left. I never found out what happened to Lisa. I know that we were teargassed together, but she wasn’t there when I finally came to.

The next twenty-four hours are a blur of activity. Adrenaline pumped through me and I walked, stood, and moved until a friend finally made me sit down by sitting Or me. Bruises covered my arms and knees, but I escaped the abuse without too many more severe physical injuries.”

“An older white woman approached me, interrupting a conversation I was having, and grabbed my left hand with one hand, and with her other hand, she started to rub the back of my hand with her fingers in a circular motion. I looked at her in aston-ishment, feeling a bit violated, and withdrew my hand. I asked her what she was doing, and she responded, “I wanted to see if it rubs off.” I froze, in shock, my mouth partly hanging open. A few others who stood near us and witnessed our exchange looked mortified. I took a second to think before I responded, and I realized I was dealing with ignorance. I said to the woman, “No, it doesn’t rub off. It’s the color of my skin.” “You have to understand,” she replied, “We’ve never seen Black people before. Everything we know about Blacks is from television, that all of you are thugs, gang members, and murderers or on welfare. But that’s not true at all! Look at you!””

“Working in the humidity, rain, or heat meant I had to get my hair done sometimes more than once a day. I needed to apply and re-apply makeup and change my clothes a few times a day. A man can put on a white shirt, a suit, and a tie and be seen in the same outfit multiple times in a week.

When a woman is photographed wearing the same blouse a handful of times over the same period, she’s criticized. I might spend $30 at the thrift shop on a new suit and $50 on shoes that were professional and comfortable enough to stand and walk in for hours at a time. That was $80 I simply didn’t have.

All of a sudden, I needed a budget for hair, makeup, jewelry, and nails. I had to spend money on eating out because of the long and unpredictable hours, while also buying groceries for my children at home. After spending years in boots, T-shirts, jeans, and scrubs, I had to consistently look as though I belonged in public life. The hidden costs of entering electoral politics were many.

I didn’t have much extra money to spend prior to running for office, so the costs of extra gas, eating out, and new (or, new-to-me) clothing made it increasingly difficult for me to make ends meet. A few times, I came home to find that my electricity had been shut off. Or I’d find that the stove wouldn’t come on — because the gas was disconnected. Or there would be no hot water running from the faucets. Sometimes, I simply didn’t have money to pay a bill on time.”

“We knew it was a type of privilege to be able to volunteer on a campaign, so we decided that we needed to create another way for people to get involved. As 2019 drew to a close, we announced that we would hire canvassers to knock on doors and pay them $17.50 an hour. We offered four-hour shifts every day for three weeks and weekly pay.

The winter holidays were right around the corner. And the response to our efforts was tremendous. People signed up and came out in droves. It was heartening, but it also broke my heart to see so many show up for a job that would last for only a few weeks. People were hungry for good work that didn’t pay poverty wages.”