people who would populate a casino in Primm, Nev., at 3:48 on a Sunday morning.
And the tape plays. Sherrice’s braids bounce as she skips and peeks around the edges of
walls and partitions, as she engages her new friend in a game everyone knows, as she just
tries to be a kid in a place that probably smelled of whiskey and sweat and loss. Her
father, just in from LA with Sherrice and her 14-year-old brother, is mesmerized by the
insistent neon, bells and whistles and flashing lights and the occasional clink of coins.
It is nearly 4 in the morning, and he is warned three times by casino security not to
leave the child alone, but he does. He gambles her away. And she darts into a safe haven,
sure that her crafty playmate could not, would not follow. He follows. And while the
camera films women entering and exiting the restroom, Sherrice Iverson is being murdered
inside. She is losing the game.
Some kids never even get to play. Consider the fragile newborn who met his end in
Somerville, swathed not in plump blankets but in plastic, his bones broken, his skull
cracked, dead before living, living only to be killed. The tiny lungs pulled in air, but
never took a gulp of the world. The 22-year-old woman whose body was allegedly his home
before the plastic bag became his home is quoted in police reports as saying that she
”did not remember having a baby on Saturday night.”
Umm. Let’s see, what did I do yesterday? I folded and stored winter clothes, scrubbed
the sink, caught up on my reading, phoned a few friends. What? Did a writhing, squalling
human being emerge from a teeny opening in my body after growing, kicking and sparking
hormonal chaos for nine months? Gosh, I don’t remember.
This may be the case of a frightened young girl, new to the country, terrified at the
prospect of taking responsibility for a new life, who panicked and snuffed out something
which didn’t really seem alive because it was so small, so new, so utterly foreign. Maybe
she had the child and someone else killed it. All scenarios end with a barely there baby
boy dead on the sidewalk. The film keeps looping, and the ending can’t be changed.
There will be resolution, of sorts. Jeremy Strohmeyer,the 18-year-old high-school
student accused of Sherrice Iverson’s murder, bragged of the killing and was scooped up in
Long Beach. The halting story of Glendi Rivera Mendes, the new mother with the flawed
memory, will unreel in a Somerville court.
Oh, and while I’m thinking of it, you’ve heard of the Tamagotchi, those electronic
keychain critters who emulate real children? Sure they’re cute now, but when the novelty
has worn off and their ”parents” get tired of their beeping and buzzing and constant
demands, they toss them in the trash. There the lil’ techno-toddlers land on top of
flesh-and-blood kids like Baby Boy Mendes and Sherrice Iverson. Yesterday’s news. Utterly
disposable. "The silence in the story"
Source: http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/smith/pulitzer98/080497.htm
August 4, 1997
In black family tradition, there’s always a storyteller, a front porch griot who spins
tales with touches of down-home magic, someone who could deftly weave together the
branches of a family tree and create a story for the ages. Many of us with roots in the
American South can remember sitting at the feet of a M’Dear or a Nana or an Uncle Willie,
a human catalog of tall tales and family ways who could tell you why your mother has
darker skin than her sister, why it’s bad luck to add a pinch of sugar to the cornbread
batter, or what life was like as a slave.
In the Smith family the griot was my grandmother Ethel Conner, a gravel-voiced wisp of
a woman who always had two long, silvery braids hanging down on either side of her thin
face. I was only 4 years old when she died, but I remember being mesmerized by how she
would take people I knew — my mother, my aunt Lula, my cousin Demetria, my
great-grandfather Earl — and place them at the center of greater stories, stories that
rivaled any adventure ”The Golden Treasury of Children’s Literature” could serve up.
From her I got the sense that our family was never-ending, that our genealogy stretched
back as far as the stars. She made me believe that we were necessary threads in the fabric
of the world.
But even these congenial storytellers held secrets. Someone would ask one of those
”Whatever happened to . . . ?” questions, and silence would descend, my grandmother’s
eyes would cloud, the tale would end before it began. There were things you just didn’t
talk about, stories that didn’t respond to touches of magic. There were the children who
died too young. In the days of the great migration from the South to the North, there were
those felled by big-city vices. And I was an adult before I learned that we never, ever
talk about ”the disappeared” — those family members or friends who simply vanished in
Mississippi or Alabama or Arkansas, the one rumored to be resting at the bottom of a river
or buried under summer soil, the one who languished and died mysteriously in a small-town
jail, the one found swinging from the thick branch of a tree.
Yesterday I talked to Patricia Johnson, a friend in Elk Creek, Va. Pat is a born
storyteller, loquacious and electric. She tells stories for a living. But this time her
words were heavy and few, her voice threaded with pain. Her cousin Garnett P. ”G.P.”
Johnson was buried on Wednesday.
It’s one of those stories no one wants to tell. Garnett Johnson was the only black man
at a small gathering of five people. His body was doused with gasoline, set on fire, and
later decapitated. Since someone hated enough to kill him twice, the FBI is investigating
the incident as a possible hate crime. For Patricia, long-ago memories were stirred,
memories of a South that’s supposed to have gone the way of Pet Rocks and 8-track players.
A time when black folks were there, then they weren’t.
Patricia reached her threshold of pain and shut down in the middle of our conversation.
She had held up for as long as she could. Already she considered her cousin among ”the
disappeared,” someone who could not be reconstructed through misty-eyed reminiscence and
humorous anecdote. Once our lifeline was broken, I sat for a long, long moment, staring at
the phone in my hand.
Then I tried calling my mother. Too rooted in the present, she just hasn’t been very
good at keeping up the storytelling tradition. She didn’t inherit the gift of gab from my
grandmother. She did, however, tell me about the prayer circle.
In the South, whenever there was a death in the family, the women would dress in white,
grasp hands, and kneel, leaning forward until their heads touched. And they would begin to
moan, deep wrenching moans from someplace unfathomable, moans that would leave their
bodies and shudder almost visibly in the open air. No words recognizable as English would
be spoken. The bone-deep grief brought forth another language, raw and guttural, a purging
of the poison that loss leaves behind.
Garnett Johnson, twisted so violently from this world, will be an uncomfortable place
in the memories of those he left behind. He will be an awkward conversational moment, a
persistent question, a scar that won’t seal. He will be the silence in the story.
Patricia Johnson’s hand is hundreds of miles away, but I’m holding it now. We are
telling the story no one else will tell. We are dressed in white, grasping hands across
the void, grieving once again for the disappeared.
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