Part 13 (1/2)

I thought about this essay a lot over the next few days, like he was beside me, equal parts familiar and strange. But the thing about life is that you simply cannot settle for melancholy, even when it's true. You are not a tragedy, you are a personal essay. You must rise above and you must do it in the last paragraph with basic grammar and easily recognized words.

Anyway, come November I will be buying every copy of Marie Claire I can get my one good hand on! You'll find me on [>]. If you haven't looked death straight in the eye or been sued by a sister wife, you won't see yourself in my story. But you will find solace in knowing your own problems are petty and ba.n.a.l. I have ascended victorious from the ashes of immeasurable self-doubt and pain. And I have not simply survived, I have flourished.

Unprepared.

Jerald Walker.

FROM Harvard Review.

WE DROVE CAUTIOUSLY through the downpour, making the kind of small talk one would expect of strangers, when my companion slid a jacket from his lap, exposing his p.e.n.i.s. It rose up high through his zipper, like a single meerkat surveying the land for trouble. To be sure, there was trouble to be had because, despite being a skinny seventeen-year-old, I never left home without my razor.

But what I'd really needed that morning was an umbrella. Rain had begun falling in sheets a few minutes earlier as I'd sprinted to catch the Seventy-ninth Street bus, which pulled away just before I reached it. My frustration had not had a chance to sink in when an Oldsmobile stopped in front of me. The driver offered me a ride. I was immediately put on guard, since random acts of kindness were rare for the South Side of Chicago. In the instant before I opened the pa.s.senger door, I decided that a robbery would put me back only six dollars, making it worth the risk. But if he had designs on my leather Converse All Stars, as had a previous robber, I might have to offer some resistance, depending on whether or not he drew a gun.

The other robber had not. He'd merely dragged me into an alley and begun punching my face while explaining, ”This is a stickup, motherf.u.c.ker!” Next he searched my pockets, finding and taking my only dollar and a bus transfer. He cursed and hit me once more. Then he jabbed a finger at my shoes. ”Give me those!” he commanded. ”Give me your coat too!” He didn't seem to mind that it was winter and the ground was covered in snow. After he fled with my belongings, I went back to where he had accosted me to wait for the bus that would complete the final leg of my trip to basketball practice, due to start in twenty minutes at 7 A.M. When the bus arrived, I explained to the driver what had happened. He waived the fare, gave me a tissue to wipe my bloodied nose, and a few miles later deposited me between stops, right at the fieldhouse door. This had happened five years earlier, when I was only a child of twelve. And unarmed.

”So, do you play sports?” this driver was asking me. He wore a large Afro and lush sideburns that reached to his chin, typical of the current style. I figured him to be around fifty.

”Little bit,” I said.

”What do you play?”

”Hoops.”

”Oh, yeah?”

I nodded. ”Yeah.”

”What position?”

”Point guard.”

”Going to shoot some now?”

I shook my head. ”Work.”

”What do you do?”

”I'm a lab a.s.sistant at the medical center.”

”What does a lab a.s.sistant do?”

”Clean p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t from test tubes.”

”Does that pay well?”

I looked at him. ”Well enough.”

We stopped at a red light. The wipers slapped at the rain, filling the silence. The p.e.n.i.s continued its watch. I looked around myself, amazed at how dark it was for midmorning, and at how many people, like me, had been caught unprepared. They darted about beneath newspapers or stood huddled in doorways, while I sat relatively dry, convinced that both my six dollars and my All Stars were safe. It was my body this man wanted, and that, I believed, was safe too. When the subject of s.e.x was broached-verbally, that is-I would simply state that men weren't my thing. I relaxed in my seat and waited for his proposition, hoping it wouldn't come before we'd traveled the remaining ten blocks to the elevated train station, where he'd agreed to take me.

Meanwhile, fifteen hundred miles away in Atlanta, another black male may also have believed his body was safe, just prior to being slain and dumped in the Chattahoochee River.

His name was Nathaniel Cater. His murder was unusual only in the fact that he was twenty-seven, much older than the other victims, and in the fact that there had been other victims. Twenty by that point, all of them between the ages of nine and fourteen, and all of them black males. The first murder had occurred two years prior, in 1979-a fourteen-year-old boy found in the woods, a gunshot to his head. Nearby was the boy's friend, who had been asphyxiated. A few months later, a ten-year-old boy was found dead in a dumpster. And then a strangled nine-year-old; a stabbed fourteen-year-old; a strangled thirteen-year-old; murder after murder until the capriciousness of Negroes could no longer be sustained as a viable cause. There was clearly a holocaust in the making, a systemic denial of future black generations, a conclusion that flowed logically from the vicious legacy of the Deep South. This was the work of the Ku Klux Klan, people believed, and I believed it too. The South, as promised, was rising again.

Each night, on the evening news, I watched efforts to keep it down. New York's Guardian Angels, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and grieving parents gave press conferences. There were images of helicopters flying over homes and of bloodhounds sniffing through parks. Psychics traveled through time and returned with tips and warnings. Confidential hotlines collected the names of would-be killers. Rewards were posted. Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra gave a benefit concert. Green ribbons were worn. And through it all, the murders continued to mount, until June 21, 1981-just a month after I'd accepted the ride with the stranger-when the police arrested a twenty-three-year-old man named Wayne Williams.

Being male, single, introverted, and a loner, Williams fit the general profile of a serial killer, except for the all-important fact that he was black. And so rather than a collective sigh of relief in the black community, there was broad outrage, for we all understood that we were not serial killers. The arrest of Williams was a smoke screen, it was decided, another cover-up by white supremacists of their sordid deeds. Sure, we had some rotten apples among us, your garden variety of thugs, burglars, prost.i.tutes, g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers, and dope dealers. We even had middle-aged men in cars who'd solicit s.e.x from teenaged boys, but the torturing and execution of people for sport or at the behest of inner voices, that pathological s.h.i.+t, was the strict domain of white folks. It wasn't in our DNA.

That's why we'd not produced an Ed Gein, for instance, the man whose barbarity inspired the movies Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. When his ten-year killing spree ended, it was discovered that he lived, literally, in a house of horrors, with the flesh of his victims serving as furniture upholstery, jewelry, and clothing. His mother's heart was simmering on the stove. John Wayne Gacy was another: he killed twenty-four boys and men, cutting their throats while in the act of raping them. And how about Herman Mugett, the doctor who was said to have murdered over two hundred women by asphyxiating them in a secret chamber in his office? Then there was Albert Fish, who may have mutilated and killed up to one hundred boys; Ted Bundy, the necrophiliac who applied makeup to his victims and slept with them until they decomposed; David ”Son of Sam” Berkowitz, who killed women by order of howling dogs. The list also includes Richard Angelo, Jeffrey Dalmer, Gary Ridgeway, Andrew Cunanan, but no one knew of them yet, because it was still only the spring of 1981, a month before Wayne Williams's arrest and a year before his conviction of the Atlanta Child Murders. All during the trial he maintained his innocence, and I, convinced not of a lack of evidence-there was plenty-but only of our genetic superiority, was among the many blacks who believed him.

As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of these crimes, Williams has yet to own his guilt. I use this occasion to own mine. My belief that blacks could be only so bad was equivalent to the view, promulgated since slavery, that we could be only so good; to hold one of these views necessitates the holding of the other. And both views, albeit used for different purposes, place false restrictions on our humanity. At the time of Williams's conviction, I was incapable of reaching this conclusion. The seed of it was planted, however, only three weeks later, when a thirty-three-year-old black man from Michigan, ”Coral” Eugene Watts, confessed to killing forty women and girls. His preferred modi operandi were death by drowning, strangling, and stabbing, and his preferred race was white. This was in part why he was so difficult to capture, since a defining trait of serial killers is that they rarely kill outside of their own ethnic group, and this was the same trait that, ironically, made the case stronger against Williams. But just as many blacks came to Williams's defense, the impulse was to defend Watts as well, for here might be a vigilante of sorts, an intensely angry brother out to exact the ultimate revenge on his oppressor. That argument couldn't hold water, though; all it took was for Watts to explain that he'd dreamed of killing women since he was twelve, describe at length his conversations with demons, and express his need to drown some of his victims in order to keep their evil spirits from floating free. This was no vigilante. This was just a man-as vile and deranged as any white counterpart who had preceded him or who would follow. And he, like Wayne Williams, and like Gein, Bundy, Mugett, and the others, belonged to us all.

As did my driver. As did I. And so the scenario in which we found ourselves that rainy morning was susceptible to the full range of human behavior, not merely the one I had envisioned and, luckily, the one that played out. A block from my destination, he removed a twenty-dollar bill from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and positioned it on the seat between us. Just before that we'd spoken of the Bulls, the White Sox, the storm, and then, as the train station came into view, he circled the conversation back to my job at the medical center. ”I wouldn't care for that,” he said. ”Do you like it?”

”It's just a job,” I said. ”Pays the bills.”

It was the wrong thing to say, or maybe it was the right thing, because my reference to money brought the issue to the fore. It was then that he'd produced the twenty-dollar bill. ”Would you like to make a little extra?” he asked, winking at me. ”Have a little fun in the process?”

I stated the response I'd mentally rehea.r.s.ed since he'd exposed himself: ”Sorry, brother, but men just aren't my thing.”

”I can give you forty,” he said quickly, as if he'd been mentally rehearsing too. I told him no again. He swore. But I didn't panic. I didn't reach for my razor. I repeated my position and thanked him for the ride. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Just before he stopped the car, he pulled his jacket back onto his lap, picked up the money, and in this manner-without theft, without violence, without murder, without the slightest decrease in my stupidity-the trip came to an end.

The Was.h.i.+ng.

Reshma Memon Yaqub.

FROM The Was.h.i.+ngton Post Magazine.

I HADN'T PLANNED to wash the corpse.

But sometimes you just get caught up in the moment.

Through a series of slight miscalculations, I am the first of the deceased woman's relatives to arrive at the March Funeral Home in west Baltimore on this Monday morning. The body of the woman whom everyone in the family refers to simply as Dadee, which means ”grandmother” in Urdu, is scheduled to arrive at 10 A.M., after being released from Howard County General Hospital in Columbia. I get to the funeral home at 10 A.M. and make somber chitchat with the five women from the local mosque who have volunteered to help with funeral preparations, which includes was.h.i.+ng the deceased's body.

According to Islamic practices, family members of the same gender as the deceased are expected to bathe and shroud the body for burial. But because it's such a detailed ritual and because so many second-generation American Muslim families have yet to bury a loved one here, mosques have volunteers to a.s.sist grieving families. These women have come from the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where Dadee's funeral prayer service will be held this afternoon.

When the body arrives at 11:30 A.M., I am still the only family member here, and the body-washers naturally usher me in to join them for the ritual cleansing. It feels too late to tell them that technically I'm not a relative. When I first met the women an hour ago and spoke to them in my halting Urdu, it seemed unnecessary to explain that I was only about to become Dadee's relative. That she was the visiting grandmother of the woman engaged to marry my younger brother. That she had flown in from South Africa just ten days earlier to attend the upcoming wedding. That the only time I'd ever seen Dadee was last night at the hospital, a few hours after she died of sudden cardiac arrest, and then I hadn't even seen her face. When I had arrived at the hospital after getting the call from my brother, a white sheet was already drawn up over Dadee's face and tucked around her slight, eight-decade-old frame.

But the body-washers are understandably in a bit of a hurry. They've been kept waiting. And these genuinely kind women, five middle-aged homemakers, have their own responsibilities to get back to. I call my brother's fiancee to tell her the women want to start the hour-l ong was.h.i.+ng, and she gives the go-ahead because she and her parents are still at the hospital. I tell the washers they can start, and they look at me expectantly. ”Let's go,” they say in Urdu. ”Uh, okay,” I reply. It's not that I don't want to wash the body. It's actually something I've wanted to experience for a while. Earlier in the year, I told the funeral coordinator at my mosque to keep me in mind if the need ever arose when I'm available. A few years ago, I attended a daylong workshop on how to perform the ritual. It's just, I didn't think today was going to be the day. I didn't think this was going to be my first body. I had come here, on this fall day in 2008, only to offer emotional support to my future sister-in-law and her mother.