Part 7 (2/2)
As for the videotape of the killing, Geoffrey Fieger said he did not have it.
I was allowed to meet with Charles Jones the following morning at Fieger's office, but with the caveat that I could only ask him questions about the evening his daughter was killed.
Jones, twenty-five, a slight man with frizzy braids, wore a dingy T-s.h.i.+rt. An eleventh-grade dropout and convicted robber, he said he supported his seven children with ”a little this, a little that-I got a few tricks and trades.”
He has three boys with Aiyana's mother, Dominika Stanley, and three boys with another woman, whom he had left long ago.
Jones's new family had been on the drift for the past few years as he tried to pull it together. His mother's house on Lillibridge, he said, was just supposed to be a way station to better things.
They had even kept Aiyana in her old school, Trix Elementary, because it was something consistent in her life, a clean and safe school in a city with too few. They drove her there every morning, five miles.
”I can accept the shooting was a mistake,” Jones said about his daughter's death as a bleary-eyed Stanley sat motionless next to him. ”But I can't accept it because they lied about it. I can't heal properly because of it. It was all for the cameras. I don't want no apology from no police. It's too late.”
I asked him if the way he was raising his daughter, the people he exposed her to, or the neighborhood where they lived-with its decaying houses and liquor stores-may have played a role.
Stanley suddenly emerged from her stupor. ”What's that got to do with it?” she hissed.
”My daughter got love, honor, and respect. The environment didn't affect us none,” Jones said. ”The environment got nothing to do with kids.”
Aiyana was laid to rest six days after her killing. The service was held at Second Ebenezer Church in Detroit, a drab cake-shaped megachurch near the Chrysler Freeway. A thousand people attended, as did the predictable plump of media.
The Reverend Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy, though his heart did not seem to be in it. It was a white cop who killed the girl, but Detroit is America's largest black city with a black mayor and a black chief of police. The sad and confusing circ.u.mstances of the murders of Je'Rean Blake n.o.bles and Officer Huff, both black, robbed Sharpton of some of his customary indignation.
”We're here today not to find blame, but to find out how we never have to come here again,” said Sharpton, standing in the grand pulpit. ”It's easy in our anger, our rage, to just vent and scream. But I would be doing Aiyana a disservice if we just vented instead of dealing with the real problems.”
He went on: ”This child is the breaking point.”
Aiyana's pink-robed body was carried away by a horse-drawn carriage to the Trinity Cemetery, the same carriage that five years earlier had taken the body of Rosa Parks to Woodlawn Cemetery on the city's West Side. Once at Aiyana's graveside, Charles Jones re-leased a dove.
Sharpton left and the Reverend Horace Sheffield, a local version of Sharpton, got stiffed for $4,000 in funeral costs, claiming Aiyana's father made off with the donations people gave to cover it. ”I'm trying to find him,” Sheffield complained. ”But he doesn't return my calls. It's always like that. People taking advantage of my benevolence. They went hog-wild. I mean, hiring the Rosa Parks carriage?”
”I don't owe Sheffield s.h.i.+t,” says Jones. ”He got paid exactly what he was supposed to be paid.”
While a thousand people mourned the tragic death of Aiyana, the body of Je'Rean Blake n.o.bles sat in a refrigerator at a local funeral parlor; his mother was too poor to bury him herself and too respectful to bury him until after the little girl's funeral anyhow. The mortician charged $700 for the most basic viewing casket, even though the body was to be cremated.
Sharpton's people called Je'Rean's mother, Lyvonne Cargill, promising to come over to her house after Aiyana's funeral. She waited, but Sharpton never came.
”Sharpton's full of s.h.i.+t,” said Cargill, a bra.s.sy thirty-nine-year-old who works as a stock clerk at Target. ”He came here for publicity. He's from New York. What the h.e.l.l you doing up here for? The kids are dropping like flies-especially young black males-and he's got nothing but useless words.”
The Reverend Sheffield came to see Cargill. He gave her $800 for funeral costs.
As summer dragged on, the story of Aiyana faded from even the regional press. As for the tape that Geoffrey Fieger claimed would show the cops firing on Aiyana's house from outside, A&E turned it over to the police. The mayor's office is said to have a copy, as well as the Michigan State Police, who are now handling the investigation. Even on Lillibridge Street, the outrage has died down. But the people of Lillibridge Street still look like they've been picked up by their hair and dropped from the rooftop. The crumbling houses still crumble. The streetlights still go on and off. The landlord of the duplex, Edward Taylor, let me into the Jones apartment. A woman was in his car, the motor running.
”They still owe me rent,” he said with a face about the Joneses. ”Don't bother locking it. It's now just another abandoned house in Detroit.”
And with that, he was off.
Inside, toys, Hannah Montana shoes, and a pyramid of KFC cartons were left to rot. The smell was beastly. Outside, three men were loading the boiler, tubs, and sinks into a trailer to take to the sc.r.a.p yard.
”Would you take a job at that Chrysler plant if there were any jobs there?” I asked one of the men, who was sweating under the weight of the cast iron.
”What the f.u.c.k do you think?” he said. ”Of course I would. Except there ain't no job. We're taking what's left.”
I went to visit Cargill, who lived just around the way. She told me that Je'Rean's best friend, Chaise Sherrors, seventeen, had been murdered the night before-an innocent bystander who took a bullet in the head as he was on a porch clipping someone's hair.
”It just goes on,” she said. ”The silent suffering.”
Chaise lived on the other side of the Chrysler complex. He too was about to graduate from Southeastern High. A good kid who showed neighborhood children how to work electric clippers, his dream was to open a barbershop. The morning after he was shot, Chaise's clippers were mysteriously deposited on his front porch, wiped clean and free of hair. There was no note.
If such a thing could be true, Chaise's neighborhood is worse than Je'Rean's. The house next door to his is rubble smelling of burned pine, p.i.s.sed on by the spray cans of the East Warren Crips. The house on the other side is in much the same state. So is the house across the street. In this s.h.i.+t, a one-year-old played next door, barefoot.
Chaise's mother, Britta McNeal, thirty-nine, sat on the porch staring blankly into the distance, smoking no-brand cigarettes. She thanked me for coming and showed me her home, which was clean and well kept. Then she introduced me to her fourteen-year-old son, De'Erion, whose remains sat in an urn on the mantel. He was shot in the head and killed last year.
She had already cleared a s.p.a.ce on the other end of the mantel for Chaise's urn.
”That's a h.e.l.l of a pair of bookends,” I offered.
”You know? I was thinking that,” she said with tears.
The daughter of an autoworker and a home nurse, McNeal grew up in the promise of the black middle cla.s.s that Detroit once offered. But McNeal messed up-she admits as much. She got pregnant at fifteen. She later went to nursing school but got sidetracked by her own health problems. School wasn't a priority. Besides, there was always a job in America when you needed one. Until there wasn't. Like so many across the country, she's being evicted with no job and no place to go.
”I want to get out of here, but I can't,” she said. ”I got no money. I'm stuck. Not all of us are blessed.”
She looked at her barefoot grandson playing in the wreckage of the dwelling next door and wondered if he would make it to manhood.
”I keep calling about these falling-down houses, but the city never comes,” she said.
McNeal wondered how she was going to pay the $3,000 for her son's funeral. Desperation, she said, feels like someone's reaching down your throat and ripping out your guts.
It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circ.u.mstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can't keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist's match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children's milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn't manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation's children with a burden of debt? Can she be blamed for that?
”I know society looks at a person like me and wants me to go away,” she said. ”'Go ahead, walk in the Detroit River and disappear.' But I can't. I'm alive. I need help. But when you call for help, it seems like no one's there.
”It feels like there ain't no love no more.”
I left McNeal's porch and started my car. The radio was tuned to NPR and A Prairie Home Companion came warbling out of my speakers. I stared through the winds.h.i.+eld at the little boy in the diaper playing amid the ruins, reached over, and switched it off.
Magical Dinners.
Chang-Rae Lee.
FROM The New Yorker.
SO PICTURE THIS: Thanksgiving 1972. The Harbor House apartments on Davenport Avenue, New Roch.e.l.le, New York, red brick, low-rise, shot through with blacks and Puerto Ricans and then a smattering of us immigrants, the rest mostly white people of modest means, everyone deciding New York City is going to h.e.l.l. Or, at least, that's the excuse. The apartments are cramped, hard-used, but the rent is low. Around the rickety dining room table, the end of which nearly blocks the front door, sit my father, my baby sister, myself, and my uncle, who with my aunt has come earlier this fall to attend graduate school. They're sleeping on the pullout in the living room. In the ab.u.t.ting closet-size kitchen, my aunt is helping my mother, who is fretting over the turkey. Look how doughy-faced the grownups still are, so young and slim, like they shouldn't yet be out in the world. My father and uncle wear the same brow-line-style eyegla.s.ses that have not yet gone out of fas.h.i.+on back in Seoul, the black plastic cap over the metal frames making them look perennially consternated, square. My mother and my aunt, despite ap.r.o.ns stained with grease and kimchi juice, look pretty in their colorful polyester blouses with the sleeves rolled up, and volleying back and forth between the women and the men is much excited chatter about relatives back home (we're the sole permanent emigrants of either clan), of the economy and politics in the old country and in our new one, none of which I'm paying any mind. My sister and I, ages five and seven, the only ones speaking English, are talking about the bird in the oven-our very first-and already bickering over what parts are best, what parts the other should favor, our conception of it gleaned exclusively from television commercials and ill.u.s.trations in magazines. We rarely eat poultry, because my mother is nauseated by the odor of raw chicken, but early in the preparations she brightly announces that this larger bird is different-it smells clean, even b.u.t.tery-and I can already imagine how my father will slice into the grainy white flesh beneath the honeyed skin of the breast, this luscious sphere of meat that is being readied all around the apartment complex.
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