, Research Paper
Patricia Smith wrote several hundred columns for the Boston Globe from
1994-1998. The columns presetned here are those the Globe put on line, making
them freely available to the public without cost, at the time they nominated Smith for the
Pulitzer Prize. Smith’s other columns are available for a fee from the Globe’s
online archive service at http://www.boston.com/globe/search/.
"Playgrounds full of jagged glass"
Source: http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/smith/pulitzer98/041197.htm
April 11, 1997
CHICAGO — Deborah. Lakinisha. Marie. Sybil. Sandra Ann. Vanessa.Each time I
pray, I give the little girl a different name so the vision I’ve conjured of her has a
soft sound attached to it. ”Girl X” is such a harsh, faceless label to slap on who
and what she is. It is a painfully sharp reminder that she could be any child at all.
You can go home again — but it’s hard to resurrect that idyllic vision of what
”home” used to be once the real world rocks you with an update. I was in my home town
when Patrick Sykes calmly confessed to dragging ”Girl X” into a vacant apartment, raping
her, stomping on her neck to silence her screams, emptying a can of roach spray down her
throat and leaving her crumpled in a dank hallway to die. The child remains blind,
voiceless. Her 10th birthday was Sunday.
My mother, who was part of the great exodus from the South to Chicago’s West Side in
the ’50s, takes the moral temperature of her adopted city every five minutes or so. ”Just
think he was on the streets all this time, just walking around, knowing what he did. What
kind of man would just grab that baby and hurt her that way? He just about killed that
chile. Things sure have changed since I was raisin’ you. I thank Jesus we didn’t have it
hard like they do today.
”Raisin’ children is like being in a war.”
Sykes, an ex-con who claimed that his devastating conquest of Girl X was merely in
pursuit of ‘’sexual gratification,” stalked the streets of the West Side, the
neighborhood where I grew up, the part of the city they warn you about. I came up on these
same streets two decades ago, back in the days when a village raised a child and every
city block was a village. Girls with floppingsweatsocks and a bottomless repertoire of
rhyming songs skipped double-dutchon blacktop or city sidewalk, right outin the open. Boys
with scraped kneesand dust in their hair screeched the ever-changing rules for
stickball.Neighborhoodresidents looked out for one another, Motown blared from wide-wide
opens and the soothing smell ofsteaming collards wafted throughthe air. Granted it was
still the ”poor black side” of town — no movie theaterand not afull-sized supermarket
in sight — but it was a place of pride, a pretty good place to be a kid.
You can go home again. But now home is dotted with shuttered, graffiti-splashed
storefronts and thriving taverns, along with piles of bricks and rubble where my apartment
building once stood. And trudging along that scarred landscape are people with compromised
souls, people who are forever teetering on the verge of surrender. No music streams from
windows long ago nailed shut. Men clog the street corners in front of abandoned factories.
Once-vibrant matriarchs, in sad imitation of their lives long ago, shuck peas and corn
behind the steel-grated balconies of project high-rises while they watch their children
and listen for bullets. They have learned to tell the difference between the giddy
high-pitched screams of childhood and the edgy screams that mean I’m being hurt. That man
has a gun.
So we teach our children the boundaries, invisible and resolute, that divide incomes,
social backgrounds, skin color. It is one of the city’s great ironies that the home turf
of two Chicago mayors — let’s call ‘em Daley and Daley — is a racial battlefield, a
neighborhood where 13-year-old Lenard Clark was pulled from his bicycle by three white men
and beaten so badly that his heart nearly stopped. During this visit home, I saw pictures
of Lenard for the first time. His face is bloated and blue, burst blood vessels like
fireworks beneath his skin. And there was his mother arced over his hospital bed,
whispering, whispering, searching frantically for a connection to a child who no longer
resembles her son.
I come home from going home and remember 9-month-old Matthew Eappen, his skull cracked,
the life seeping through. A 19-year-old, living on the rough periphery of hearth and home,
meets a fiery death in an abandoned trailer. We hurl our children forth without armor, and
we are running out of other ways to protect them. In all of our cities, in all our
fondly-recalled home towns, they are the casualties of war.
Meanwhile, two children are relearning speech, sight, movement. In some ways, they are
being reborn. Lenard, climbing back to the surface of the real world, found a word last
week. It was ”Mama.”
And you can be sure that when ”Girl X” finds those first stirrings in her battered
throat — if she ever speaks, ever remembers — they will be the hard words of a woman who
has survived a death blow. We won’t like listening to what she has to say. They won’t
sound like a child’s words at all. "Farewell toast to a legend"
Source: http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/smith/pulitzer98/050297.htm
May 02, 1997
Nowadays it’s difficult to fathom the glamour. Instead of those smoky, wonderfully
cluttered, testosterone-fueled city rooms drawn so deftly in films like ”The Front
Page,” newsrooms have become fluorescent-washed nods to technology and all its terror.
Computers wink suggestively, play music and make suggestions. Reporters e-mail each other
even when their desks are two feet apart. Ominously, there may be a tiny television studio
snuggled away in a corner. It’s hard to find a rotting cigar anywhere. And then there are
those endless meetings, seminars, memos touting some newfangled rigmarole called
”diversity.”
Once upon a time there was no such thing. When I was an enamored kid
learning all I could from television portrayals of the news biz, its grit was also its
romance. As far as I could tell, there was only one kind of newsroom — perpetually
chaotic — and just one kind of newsman, as predictable as if he’d been cranked from a
mold. I imagined that every paper from Manhattan to Montana was populated by grizzled
white guys with tobacco stained teeth and a bottle of 90-proof inspiration tucked in their
desk drawers. Their flat, cavernous butts wallowed in threadbare corduroys. They were
insufferable, petulant, egotistical, brooding — but when they sat down at the typewriter
(there were those who simply refused to give up those Jurassic Underwoods) and began
punching away with two stubby forefingers, their prose could make you weep. Or it could
make you mad enough to plunge a letter opener into their hunched little backs.
Goodbye, Mike Royko. Goodbye, scowling growler who cleared the aisles with
a glare, goodbye, spinning barstool, goodbye, ever-ready invective. Goodbye, badboy
brawler, editor’s nightmare, everyman, everyday. Goodbye, era.
In 1977, the year I got my first newspaper job, newsrooms were an
unsettling and potentially volatile mix of innovation and tradition, old farts and young
turks. And the Chicago Daily News was a newspaper in the grand tradition. Even today, 19
years after its untimely death, mention that you worked there and people nod respectfully,
wistfully. It was a dream paper, a true collective effort, in a time when the bottom line
didn’t necessarily provide a foundation. Writers were renegades. And Mike Royko prowled
the halls.
And the bars. And the backrooms. That was still where the lessons were
taught, over hard drinks and blade-edged babble, where a truly terrified yours truly could
worm her way into a circle of the old guys and ask the Mike Royko if he’d seen her very
first story and he’d grunt ”Sure doll, good work,” lying through his tobacco-stained
teeth, and everyone knew it and it didn’t matter. Egos clashed and fistfights were common.
It was the old newsman’s last stand, a landscape littered with drunks, prima donnas and
guys who were just mean for the hell of it. The next day, eyes bleary, they would arc
tired bodies over the keyboard and they would write — sweet, infuriating, righteous words
somehow beyond mere mortals. Who needed the fancy computers, the marketing studies, the
bright lights, progress? I wanted to be one of the guys.
So I clung to the old ways even as the old ways were slipping away. I
remember my buddy Sharon and I in the Billy Goat Tavern every Friday, puffing cigars and
asking Sam to fix us up with a couple of monster martinis, three olives each. We spent
long hours pondering a legal way to get our pictures up on the Goat’s newspaper wall of
fame. While Royko and his entourage snickered from their barstools, we’d scarf down
cheezborger, cheezborger, imagining ourselves part of the in-crowd, listening intently and
laughing much too loudly as soused sages told of newsroom antics that took place long
before either of us were born. I watched the fistfights, listened in awe to the virulent
gossip and continued to revel in writing that surprised me, enlightened me or, in the case
of Royko, made me mad enough to rip his column to shreds.
But even as his viewpoint sometimes made me see red, I realized that he’d
long ago hit that sweet spot we all look for, the one that brings a grunt of recognition
and respect from even the most discerning reader. The myth of the man was very much
anchored in the real world. It is his Slats Grobnik, the quintessential everyman, who will
miss him most. When I heard that Mike Royko had died, I went looking for a
sickly sweet cigar and a jolt of vodka for a stomach-twisting toast to the insufferable
old bastard, to the old days, to the ragged magic journalism once was. I hated him. I
loved him. He did what he did longer and better than most, PC sensibilities be damned. And
he’d probably offer up a sour grunt if he knew this — but he’s one of the reasons I’m
here. "Praise be these old black men"
Source: http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/smith/pulitzer98/052397.htm
May 23, 1997
There they were, stooped but standing, the five who were able to make the trek. And the
president of the United States stood teary-eyed before a microphone that amplified his
voice loud enough to reach back 60 years. ”I’m sorry,” he said to the survivors of the
debacle at Tuskegee, and the words weren’t hollow, they were filled with questions and
tears and the wronged blood of the men who were too dead to be there.
There they stood, awed and respectful Southern gentlemen, looking very much the way any
of our fathers might have looked, black fathers schooled in the polite ritual of the
Delta. They were men who trusted and believed, men who thought that the heartbeat in their
chests and the heartbeat of this country were one and the same.
And they deserve to be remembered because they believed. They deserve to be celebrated
because they stood tall, because while it took a long time for their country to do right
by them, what mattered most is that right was done.
They are the men who raised our parents, who raised us, who told us stories, who fed us
dreams. Their country may have forgotten who they were. But we never did.
So, to the survivors, all of them: Hallelujah for your grizzled lip, snuff chew, bended
slow walk and playin’ the dozens. Praise fatback, pork gravy, orange butter, Alaga syrup,
grits and those egg sandwiches you like, the ones mashed between sheets of wax paper. You,
my bended brothers, are wood whittling, you are three-day checker games and warm drink and
soft food sucked through holes where teeth once were.
All glory to the church deacons, their nappy knobs of gray hair greased flat and close
to conk, cracked voices teetering and testifying, reaching for the promise of the Promised
Land. Praise to you, lover of books and weavers of stories. Bless you postmen, whip-cloth
shoe shiners, porters bowing low and sweet. Bless you barbers, dead soldiers, welders and
pool sharks, bless you singers and sinners and jukebox boppers.
I hear all of you swear-scowling, gold-tooth giggling over games of bid whist and
craps, your thin shaky voices laying waste to a blues lyric ’bout a matchbox too small to
hold your clothes. And I watch as those clothes begin to swallow you, as muscle recedes
and collapses and you grow closer to the earth that will soon open its arms to receive
you.
And if I squeeze my eyes shut, I see you young again. I see your shining eyes, I see
you spit-shined and polished on sluggish Greyhound coaches or in the colored car of a
silver train traveling from Pine Bluff to Boston, from Aliceville, Ala., to Chicago, from
Oscaloosa, Minneola, Greenwood and Muscle Shoals. I know you dreamed of the North, where
factories churned. North, which felt like an ice cube dragged slowly over your burning
skin.
Young again. Mail-order zoot suit, wide-wing felt hats to dip low over one eye. You
learn slick walkin’, dip, swivel click heel tap and you study and dream. You dance, blues
through to bone and bony hip bump when the jukebox teases. And praise to the eagle that
flies on Friday and the Lincoln Mark, the Riviera, the Electra Deuce and a Quarter, the
always too much car for what you were.
You were the lucky number, the dream book. Here is to your mojo, your magic real, roots
and conjures. Here is to you, griots of rickety back porch and city sidewalk.
And you, my million fathers, are still here past your country and its plans of poison,
you are still here past chalk outlines, dripping needles and prison cots, past whippings,
tree hangings and the call of war. You are survivors, scarred and running, choking back
news of stomach cramps, high pressure, dimming eyes. Here’s for the secret of your rotting
teeth, your misaligned back, the wild corn on your little toe, the many rebellions of your
black and tired body.
I will rub your weary head, dance close to you, shuck you silver peas for dinner.
He was Otis, my father, but you are George Key, you are Herman Shaw, you are Fred
Simmons, you are Benjamin Rockamore, you are Willie Earl and James and Ernest and Jimmy
Lee, you are all our fathers. All of you old black men, gentle Delta, we grieve you
wandering toward death, we celebrate you clinging to life. We apologize for this slow
love, a long time coming.
Open your bony dark-veined arms and receive me, your daughter, who is taking on your
last days as her very blood, who is learning your whispered language too late to stop your
dying.
But not too late to tell this story. Children die just out of focus
Source: http://www.boston.com/globe/columns/smith/pulitzer98/060297.htm
June 2, 1997
Since I first heard the story and saw the grainy black-and-white film, it’s been
impossible to shake the image. The horrifying scene keeps looping, playing over and over
and over again in my head, and I wish there was some way to snip and paste the celluloid,
to move the two people in the film away from each other, to run the film backwards and
make what happened never happen.
In the film, Sherrice Iverson, a 7-year-old cocoa-colored child with twisted braids
framing her face, darts playfully in a game of hide-and-seek, a giggle on her face. She
scoots into a women’s restroom. A tall, cigarette-thin man follows her inside. Nearly half
an hour later, the man comes out alone.
The film was a surveillance tape that captured the comings and goings of patronsat the
Primadonna Resort, a casino complex southwest of Vegas. At 3:48 in the morning, while her
dad pushed his luck at the slot machines, while other children snuggled in safe beds,
Sherrice was raped and murdered by an 18-year-old monster who had befriended her while she
wandered the casino unsupervised. After the murder, dad-o’-the-year Leroy Iverson
allegedly promised not to sue if the resort would ante up free beer and a little extra
money for the slots. Who could blame him? Otherwise, his daughter would have died for
nothing.
Later I saw him on television, toothless and grizzled and beer-gutted, eyes filmy, arms
flailing as his mouth flapped and no words came out. The newscaster’s smooth commentary
took the place of whatever lies the father was busy crafting to explain away the fact that
he sacrificed his daughter, laid her down on an altar of greed in full view of the kind of