It Messes Up the Child in the Head

“I shot him. And then all these thoughts rushed through my head.” Cyntoia Brown’s face is close, the frame doubly marked by a dark doorway. Her rush of words suggests her rush of thoughts at the time: “Did I just kill him? Is he okay?” she remembers. “What’s that noise he’s making? Because I heard the blood pour. It was like water pouring onto the ground.” As Cyntoia moves her hand to her face, you see the handcuffs and she goes on. “And I was thinking, ‘Ugh, the blood’s going to come from under the bed.’ That was a big thought, I kept thinking that, and touch me.”

At the start of Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story, in 2004, Cyntoia is 16 years old. She’s describing the event that sent her to the Juvenile Detention Center in Nashville, Tennessee for forensic psychiatrist William Benet. He presses her further, asking about other events, other thoughts, that might have brought her to that night when she murdered Johnny Allen, a local real estate agent. As Bernet finds, “This is a kid who had some horrible life experiences.” Hearing about what he calls “a pattern of bad things,” Bernet points out, “This shaped the way she related to people.”

That is, her experiences of physical, sexual, and emotional abuse shaped her distrust and dishonesty, her paranoia and rage, and was repeated in her own behaviors. Her biological mother Georgina was an addict who takes the camera along on a tour of the area “where I first got on drugs.” She points to an assortment of shabby structures: “All these apartments, I’m pretty sure I smoked in all these buildings.” She brought her child along as she walked “along all these roads and, of course, she did not want to walk. She wanted to be carried.” Georgina is rueful as she remembers Cyntoia’s effort at rebellion, and she says she blames herself for what’s happened (“I didn’t do what I was supposed to do”).

Cyntoia’s understanding of their relationship is different: she’s spoken with enough therapists and lawyers and fellow inmates to know that her situation is not unusual, that her deviance has been produced over years and by many factors. She knows that feeling abandoned has affected her: “It messes up the child in the head,” she says. Cyntoia remembers seeing Georgina after years apart. Though they look different, Cyntoia says, “We’re a lot alike on the inside, it’s purely genetic. When we talk, it’s like we talk just alike. It feels weird because I thought no one was like me.” 

Airing this month as part of PBS’ Independent Lens, Daniel Birman’s documentary makes clear that Cyntoia’s self-discovery is coming late in her short life. Her adoptive mother, Ellenette, calls her a “complex child, she is the little girl that everyone would love to have.” Recalling that Cyntoia could be manipulative, stubborn, and aggressive, Ellenette, like Georgina, voices a sense of responsibility for what she calls her “personality disorder.” “I thought I was doing all the right things,” she says sadly.

But this is the film’s primary question: what might “the right things” be and how can Ellenette—or anyone else—know them? Abuse produces more abuse: Cyntoia was exploited by adults and peers, called worthless by pimps and johns. She believed what she was told, that “She has no value.” But even as this self-image develops in so many children, intervention seems a function of chance, given the underfunding and ineffectiveness of public social services and legal systems. As the film notes in an opening epigraph, “An average of 2.3 million juveniles are arrested each year in the United States. One third of them are girls.” It can’t be a surprise that “most reported a history of physical or sexual abuse,” but it is a disappointment. If causes and effects are at least generally understood, how can it be that so little is done to intercede?

And then again, as Bernet points out, even after that chance is lost, even after Cyntoia has shot a man to death, the system—such as it is—has no coherent response. Trying her as an adult, sentencing her to life, might or might not satisfy Johnny Allen’s family and friends (the film doesn’t approach them), but it plainly doesn’t address or even acknowledge systemic concerns. The pathology is not only Cyntoia’s, submits Me Facing Life. If its formulation here is vague and awkward (“What do we do, as a society?”), the question is key. However “we” comprehend ourselves, “we” are all affected by this “pattern of bad things.”