“And you were never contacted again?”
He shook his head. “Not by that person.”
“Others?”
“I get calls all the time. A few others have claimed to be involved.”
“Any recently?”
He nodded.
“One who called recently said he enjoyed my sermon from the previous Sunday and even quoted from it.”
“Could he have seen it on TV?”
“It hadn’t aired yet.”
I nodded and thought about it, excitement arcing through me.
“You know who you should talk to . . .” he said. “There’s a lady in our congregation who runs a daycare. She’s been part of STOP since the beginning. Her son was one of the victims who didn’t make the list.”
12
Ida Williams owned and operated a daycare and aftercare center called Safe Haven just down Flat Shoals Road from the church.
It was located in a converted home that had been retrofitted and zoned commercial. The large yard, now a playground, was filled with swings and sandboxes and toys, surrounded by a chain-link fence.
I pulled up, parked to one side of the circular driveway, and got out.
By the time I reached the gate, a uniformed security guard was waiting for me.
He was a rotundish, pale man with short blond hair cut in a military-style side-part, and a neatly trimmed blond mustache. His smallish light blue eyes blinked so often behind his glasses they seemed hooded.
“How can I help you?” he asked.
“I’m here to see Ida Williams,” I said.
“Have an appointment?”
I shook my head.
“You’ll need to make one before she can see you. She’s with her kids now. Will be ’til eight. Maybe later.”
“But––”
He shook his head. “Sorry. No exceptions.”
“I’ve just––”
“I’m gonna need you to leave the premises, sir. Now.”
When he raised his hands, I could see a bright orange Swatch watch stretched around his thick right wrist. It looked odd and out of place and as if at any moment the band would snap and it would slingshot off.
“Can you just tell me––”
“I won’t tell you again.”
I wondered what he would do instead of telling me again, but an intervening angel prevented me from finding out.
“What is it, Ralph?” she asked.
Small enough to be a schoolgirl. Shy green eyes. Straight sun-streaked blond hair. Smooth, unvarnished, suntanned skin. A simple, understated, graceful beauty I found irresistible.
I knew no one could make me forget Anna, but this alluring, vulnerable, pretty woman-child creature came as close as any to making me believe it was possible.
“No appointment,” he said. “Refusing to leave.”
“I’m not refusing to leave,” I said to her. “I was just trying to explain that Bishop Paulk sent me over and to find out how to go about making an appointment.”
“What’d you need?” she asked.
“Just to talk to Ms. Williams for a few minutes.”
“Well, you can certainly do that,” she said. “I’ll take care of it, Ralph.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll radio and let her know you two are coming up.”
Ralph opened the gate and I walked through.
“I’m Jordan Moore,” she said, extending her small, cold hand.
I smiled. “Really? I’m John Jordan.”
She smiled but looked a bit embarrassed, her face and neck blushing crimson.
“Sorry my hands are cold,” she said. “Ninety-degree weather and my extremities are little blocks of ice.”
She ushered me up the covered walkway and we fell in step beside one another.
“And sorry about Ralph,” she said. “He means well. I’m sure you can tell . . . security is taken very seriously around here.”
I wondered if she had used the passive voice––is taken instead of we take––because she found the measures a little extreme.
“It’s sort of our speciality,” she said.
“Bishop Paulk mentioned Ms. Williams had a son who was killed.”
“Changes everything,” she said.
We walked in silence for a few moments.
I was young and what I did next had never occurred to me to do before.
When she was looking away, I stole a quick glance at her left hand ring finger, but what I saw gave me questions not answers.
The small, thin, elegant finger held no ring, but it did bear the white, untanned mark where one had recently been.
“How long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Seems like all my life,” she said. “I’ve lost track.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Daycare during the day. Aftercare in the afternoon and evening. An emphasis on a safe, positive environment. Clean. Accredited. Family owned and operated. It’s not affiliated with the church but most of us go there. And most of our kids are from there.”
To our right, beyond another fence, the playground was empty, the sun glinting off its shiny surfaces, a swing squeaking as it emptily back-and-forthed in the breeze.
“Where are the kids?” I said. “Figured they’d be on the playground this time of day.”
“Finishing up an art project,” she said. “They’ll be out here” ––she looked at her watch–– “in four minutes. In fact, we can have a seat here and wait on Miss Ida to come out.”
She nodded toward a plastic-mesh-covered metal bench and we sat down.
“Do you go to Chapel Hill?” she asked.
“Came to attend EPI. Just moved here a few weeks ago.”
“How do you like Atlanta?”
“Haven’t seen much of it yet,” I said. “But I like it here. A lot. I’m from a small town in the Florida Panhandle of about a tenth of the size of the church.”
“Really?” she asked in surprise. “You don’t seem . . .”
“What?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Yes you do. What were you going to say?”
“Small town. You don’t seem that small town.”
I smiled and she blushed again.
“I’m as small town as John Cougar Mellencamp.”
We sat in silence a moment as I tried to work up my nerve to ask her out.
“You lived here long?” I asked.
“My whole life.”
“I could use someone to see the city with,” I said. “Show me around. Play tour guide. Would you like to––”
“I can’t,” she said. “Sorry. Let me go see what’s keeping Miss Ida.”
13
Ida Williams––Miss Ida to the kids in her care and the staff that adored her––was a heavy middle-aged black woman with beautiful, smooth skin, big, bright eyes, and brown lips only a shade or two lighter than the rest of her.
Her hair was up in a colorful head wrap of orange and brown and green that matched the large, loose tunic dress she was wearing.
We were seated on the same bench Jordan and I had been on. In front of us, visible through the rings in the fence, children ran and climbed and swung and jumped and talked and laughed, each of them, in one way or another, resembling the victims on the list.
And those not on the list.
Like so many others, LaMarcus Williams never made the list. As in the case with the others, I wasn’t sure why. Neither was his mom.
How did she do it? How did she see them every day, day after day, these little fresh faces that looked so much like the son who would never grow old, never become any of what he might have been, never come home again?
“Nothin’ in this world like losing a child,” she said. “You’s not much more’n a child yourself, but if you were older and had a child of your own, you still wouldn’t know what I’s talkin’ about. I didn’t. Saw all these grievin’ mamas. Felt bad for ’em. Real bad. Thought ’cause I had a kid I knew what they
’s goin’ through. Didn’t have a clue.”
I nodded but knew better than to say anything. There was nothing to say, no words in the history of all words to utter.
“They’s nothin’ like it, nothin’ come close,” she said. “But what make it even worse is not knowing, not knowing who did it and why, not knowing if his name should be on that list or not.”
Across the playground, Jordan was watching a group of girls jump rope. She was one of only a handful of white faces and the only worker who was in the yard. It may have just been me imagining or wanting, but I thought I saw her looking my way occasionally, even turning red and smiling once when our eyes met.
“That’s why I can’t quit, can’t give up,” she said. “People say the man in jail, the murders stopped. Time to let go, move on.”
I understood why she couldn’t, why she would never be able to. At least not until––it was at that moment that I decided to dedicate myself to finding out what happened to LaMarcus Williams.
“I joined STOP even before my boy was taken from me,” she said. “Been workin’ ’long side Camille and Willie Mae and all the others all these years. Seen lots of people come and go.”
STOP was the name used by the committee of mothers formed to stop children’s murders. It began when three of the victims’ mothers, Camille Bell, Willie Mae Mathis, and Venus Taylor, joined with Reverend Earl Carroll to bring attention to Atlanta, to the slaughter of the innocent, the ineffectiveness of the police, and the indifference of too many in the white power establishment.
“They’s a group of us still meets every week,” she said. “Every single week.”
“May I come to it?” I asked. “I’d like to get involved.”
She nodded. “It’s open to anyone. Meet right here every Thursday night.”
“I’ll be here. Thank you.”
“There’s also a support group at the church,” she said. “For anyone who’s lost a child. It’s a closed group, but you can come as my guest if you like.”
“I would. Thank you.”
She turned and looked down across Flat Shoals Road at the K Center and Chapel Hill’s other facilities, her first time taking her eyes off the children.
“Not sure I’d’ve made it without them,” she said. “The Paulks. They were all so good to me. Bishop. Don and Clariece. Still are, but I mean when it happened . . . they kept me from going crazy. Them and my daughter. I had lost my husband the year before. It was just . . . too . . .”
“Do you . . . mind . . . would you . . . be willing to tell me what happened?”
Her watchful gaze was back on the children.
“Happened right here,” she said. “Wasn’t a daycare then. Was our home. Saturday after Thanksgiving. November twenty-ninth.”
I was here at that same time, I thought. Safely tucked away inside the Omni with my family while she was losing everything.
“He was only twelve,” she said. “Just a twelve-year-old little boy.”
We had been the same age, would still be had he not been cut loose from whatever it is that tethers us here.
“Out in the yard playing,” she said. “The backyard. Away from the road. Back where nobody could get to him, back where I could see him. I was back and forth between the living room and kitchen, cooking supper and wrapping his Christmas presents. A Star Wars lunchbox. Guess Who game. GI Joe. Star Trek Communicators. Rubik’s Cube. Train set. Michael Jackson and Kool and the Gang records. Spent too much. Didn’t care. Was so happy I found them. Both rooms had big windows that looked out over the backyard. I watched him like a hawk. Always had, but once our children started bein’ taken . . . I never took my eyes off of him.”
But she had, hadn’t she? For a moment, a split second, maybe a little longer.
She was still looking at the children before us, but I wondered what she was really seeing.
“I didn’t think I had . . . I don’t remember not seeing him for even a moment––least out the corner of my eye. But . . . one moment he was there, another he was gone. Just vanished. Gone. Just like that. Never saw my boy alive again.”
She was crying now. Still looking straight ahead as tears streamed down her dark, round cheeks.
“I’s the reason he’s out there,” she said. “I wanted to wrap his gifts I had just gotten the day before and get ’em up under the tree. I sent him out there. I did. I’m the reason my boy’s dead.”
14
EPI was too new and too small to have dormitories, so school housing was a three-story apartment in Trade Winds Apartment Complex up off Wesley Chapel Road near I-20.
My new address was 4636 Pleasant Point Drive, my home, a drug-ridden, rundown low-income complex where I shared an apartment designed for a family of four with eight testosterone-ridden late-teen men, only about half of whom were actually attending EPI. The others were single young men from the church who needed a place to live.
Many of the students complained about the living conditions at Trade Winds, the shape of the property itself, the makeup of those who called it home, but I loved it. As a young white man from a tiny town in Florida, I was an outsider and part of a small minority. I was surrounded by mostly poor African-Americans and I had never felt more at home, more at ease, never before felt more in the center of exactly where I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to be doing.
Of course, the truth was I had always felt more at home around Merrill and his mom and their family and friends and the black woman who had kept me as a child than I had nearly anyone else.
I had undergone a sea change long before coming to Atlanta and was now undergoing another. Not only had I gone from a small North Florida town with one traffic light to the eight-lane interstates of a crowded metropolitan area, but I had left behind my virtually solitary existence, so comfortable to my essentially introverted nature, for a crowded, close community where I was surrounded by people––lots and lots of them––nearly every waking moment of every single day.
In the mornings on my way to class, I’d stop in the little doughnut shop on Wesley Chapel for maple and strawberry iced doughnuts. In the evenings, I’d go through the drive-thru of the Dairy Queen. Both were within a block of Trade Winds and made up in convenience and cost for what they lacked in taste and variety.
This afternoon I came home without grabbing my usual chicken sandwich and fries. Hearing Ida Williams’s heartbreaking account of what happened to her son left me without an appetite and with a sharp need to spend some extra time with the best friend I’d made in the city so far, my little neighbor basketball buddy, Martin Fisher.
Martin was the age LaMarcus had been when age ceased to be something he could be measured by, the age I had been when I had confronted Wayne Williams––something I had done just twenty short minutes from where we stood right now.
Martin was small and scrawny for his age, often sick. Chronic untreated ear infections as a small child had left him almost completely deaf and with a pretty severe speech impediment.
Martin’s monotone voice was nasally and guttural and difficult for most people to understand, but we had spent so much time together we had very little trouble communicating.
We both loved basketball and met each afternoon on the small asphalt court in the center of the complex.
The backboards were metal and the old, oblong goals were canted and netless.
“Yon, Yon,” Martin yelled, “I . . . ’m . . . o’en.”
He was dancing around under the goal with his hands up, imploring me to pass him the ball.
“Of course you’re open,” I said. “Nobody here but us. Move around. Post up. Get in a good position. Catch the ball. Gather. Go up strong. Ready?”
“’een ’eady.”
I bounce-passed him the ball.
He tried to shoot too quickly, before he even had the ball, and lost it as he went up.
“You’ve got to catch it first,” I said. “Catch it. Gather yourself. Go up strong.”
“I ’ow,”
he said. “I ’ot ’is. Do it a’ain.”
We did the same thing again. We got the same results.
The next time, he caught and gathered, but was too small and weak to get the ball up over the rim.
“Practice the right form,” I said. “Elbow straight, arch the ball, follow through. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t go in. Just shoot it the right way.”
“It ’oes ’atter, Yon,” he said.
I shook my head, took a dribble and then a step-back jumper from about twenty feet.
He squealed when it fell through the rim without touching anything until it hit the asphalt below.
“Get your form right now,” I said. “Size and strength will come later.”
I passed him the ball and he began dribbling. Unable to dribble between his legs, he lifted one and went under it to approximate the same move.
“What’s for ’inner ’oonight, Yon?”
I didn’t know a lot about Martin’s situation, had no idea what life was like for him once the apartment door closed behind him. He lived in the unit directly next to ours and I had seen several people come and go, but had yet to identify or meet anyone who would pass for parents.
Of the little I had been able to gather, two constants had emerged. He seemed to never be supervised and to always be hungry.
Lately, we had been taking to the kitchen to find something to feed him following our hoop exploits.
“Whatta you want?” I asked. “You can have fish sticks or I could whip up some fish sticks.”
He laughed. “Yon,” he said, holding out the ball.
Since I rarely cooked, I kept very little food in what was the community kitchen of the EPI dorm apartment, but after Martin identified them as his favorite, I had maintained a large bag of fish sticks in the small freezer.
“You decide buddy,” I said. “It’s up to you.”
“’ish sticks,” he shouted.
“Okay,” I said. “Make ten layups on each side and we’ll adjourn to the kitchen.”
As he began his layup attempts, Frank Morgan pulled up in an unmarked.
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