by Kim Reid
Later, after the Mass, after having our post-church Krispy Kreme doughnuts and stopping by the grocery for Sunday dinner, we learned that Aaron Jackson had just been found. The discovery of this child’s body is the one that stays with me most because he was found on my street.
When Ma got the call, it was hard for her not to walk down the street to the scene. The case wasn’t assigned to her; she didn’t need to be there. I asked her not to go. It was enough knowing that just a short walk from my home, a murder investigation was beginning. I didn’t need to wonder later that night, as I tried to make sleep come, what Ma had found there, so close to the place I thought was safe. Home.
I didn’t ask Ma for the details because I didn’t want to dream about them that night. But I read them in the paper the next day. The boy had been found beneath a bridge that spanned a slow-moving creek. He died of suffocation, and was left “stretched out on the bank of the South River,” which to me sounded strange, as if he had lain down there to rest himself. He’d been friends with the tenth victim, a ten-year-old boy who had until now been the body found closest to where I lived, about a mile and a half away. This latest boy had been killed somewhere else like the others, and his body left just a few yards off the road, tossed over the bridge.
There was a long stretch of houses along the three or so miles of the street, with the final quarter mile on the north end being empty of houses, only a junkyard filled with rusted cars. The junkyard was a strange sight against a backdrop of green pine, a seemingly thick and endless forest that hid Lake Charlotte, or maybe it was the sign of things to come—five years later, the city turned the whole area around the lake into a landfill.
My house was on the north end, not far from where the woods began. That green and houseless stretch was my favorite part of the street, though I had to work hard to ignore the junkyard in order to see the prettiness in the rest of it. This stretch was where as a kid, before public transportation grew my world to places beyond my neighborhood, I’d ride my bike fast downhill, imagining I was flying through a forest. Even though I bought my own weekly bus pass and would soon turn fifteen, I’d still pull out my ten-speed occasionally and pump hard up that hill until I had to get off and walk the bike, then ride back down, arms stretched out instead of holding the handlebars, and pretend I was flying.
That all changed. Soon after the boy’s body was found, someone—maybe his mother, an angry and powerless grandfather, or a weeping aunt—placed a white wooden cross on the side of the road, marking the spot. I rode my bike up there, wanted to see if there was any clue that would tell me the boy had not died painfully, that his last place on earth was a good one. I didn’t want the kind of clues that cops look for, physical things that told secrets of the flesh. I wanted to feel something move through me in that place, maybe God’s presence, or something bigger than me, or the boy, or all of the people whose hearts were broken when his body was found. I wanted to know if maybe the pine and greenness of the place sent him off with something of the feeling I had when I flew down that hill. Nothing came to me but a great hole that was filled with sadness.
He went missing on a Saturday, was found on a Sunday, but it wasn’t clear exactly when he was left on my street. It seemed likely that it happened Saturday night, but it could almost as easily have happened during daylight. There were no houses down that way, and most people left the neighborhood through the south end of the street, heading toward I-75 and I-285. Traffic was light through that part of the street most times of the day. For a long time, I wondered what exactly I was doing at the moment he was left there. Was I drifting off to sleep in my warm bed, lulled by the far-off sound of a train’s horn? Was I giving Ma a hard time about not wanting to start dinner, Why do I always have to make dinner? Maybe we drove past the killer on his way to our street when we took that route to church Sunday morning. Maybe I was down the street shooting basketball in the yard of the boys who had the net and was like a magnet for kids on the weekends. We probably all felt safe, nothing on our minds but making the shot, while a quarter mile down the road, the little boy was being tossed aside like somebody’s bad mistake.
*
That Tuesday was voting day. Ma was getting off work early to vote and wanted me to come with her. When the next election came, I’d be old enough to vote and she wanted to make sure I understood the importance of it and didn’t waste the privilege. My family wasn’t very political, but there were two things that were taken seriously: supporting the unions and voting. My great-grandfather, who was born a decade after Reconstruction to a freed slave, visited with us for a month each year, and he’d tell me stories of how I came to be. And always he’d say, “Girl, don’t you know men and women swung from ropes for a hundred years so you could vote?”
I got off the bus from the suburbs and met Ma at the Task Force building, which everyone just called the Task Force because those two words came to represent a place, a group of people, and a mission all at once. Located between Spring and Williams streets on the northern edge of downtown, it was once a car dealership, but sat empty until the owners donated it temporarily to the city. Even full of desks, cops, witnesses, and ringing phones, it still felt like it was designed for selling cars. The space, with its floors bare of carpet, caused an echo in the early days of the Task Force, when there were fewer desks, cops, and witnesses to fill it.
The first time I asked Ma where the bathroom was, she warned me it wouldn’t be pretty. Clearly it was never intended to be used by women, probably because back when the dealership was open, women didn’t work as car salesmen or mechanics. The lighting was almost as bad as the smell, and there were no metal boxes that sold Kotex or Tampax for a dime. Ma and the other two or three female cops, along with the secretaries, decided to fix the place up themselves rather than asking the bosses, because in 1980, the majority still didn’t believe women should be anywhere near a police department wearing a badge and a gun. From their own pockets, they made sure the soap dispensers stayed full, put a bottle of hand lotion on the sink, and kept a supply of feminine hygiene products handy.
But I didn’t mind the Spartan conditions—the bleakness of stark walls or the chill during the cold months. When the secretary’s high heels clicked along the concrete floor, making the place seem especially desolate, it didn’t bother me much. Being there made me feel like I was part of something that was the biggest something in the city. Mostly I’d sit at Ma’s desk during my visits, listening to her one-sided phone conversations. She sounded very much like a cop, using military time, talking about the alleged assailant and referring to some person unknown to me as the subject. In these moments, she turned into the other woman without warning.
After we left her office and picked up Bridgette from her afterschool program, we went to the high school in our neighborhood that I would have attended if I wasn’t going to the private school. Ma said she was trying to help President Carter stay in Washington for another term, though the price of gas and the Beirut hostages made re-election seem unlikely, even against an actor-turned-politician.
She made Bridgette and I stand outside the voting booth even though I’d tried to convince her to let me in. We had mock elections in civics class, but all we did was darken circles on a bubble sheet at our desks. There was no blue curtain to hide our decisions, or special cards to punch holes into. Bridgette and I just stood guard outside, hearing the rickety booth rattle every time Ma punched a hole into her cards.
On the way back to the car, we saw a man on the ground in the middle of the parking lot. He was convulsing, and didn’t seem to have any kind of control of himself, his arms thrashing about in a way that reminded me of the robot on Lost in Space. Then he started to throw up. My first thought was that he was crazy, and the next was that he was on drugs. Beyond that, I wasn’t creative enough to come up with any other possibilities. My experience in this area was limited to what I’d seen on MARTA or at Grady, and in most of those cases, drugs and plain craziness was behind most stra
nge behavior.
Luckily, Ma had more sense. She dropped to the ground like this was something she saw happen every day and tried to get the man to lie on his side.
“We have to keep him from choking,” she told Bridgette and me while she looked through her purse like the answer to the man’s problems was hidden in there. I half expected her to pull out a syringe full of something, or a bottle of pills. I was disappointed when all she came up with was a scarf.
“It looks like he hit his head when he fell, there’s blood. And he’s starting to seize again. Run into the school and call an ambulance.”
I didn’t move, just stood there watching her lift the man’s head and put the folded-up scarf under it. She repeated her instructions, this time using a few cuss words so I’d see the urgency in the request, and I took off running.
When I returned, my task completed and some of the polling workers following me, Ma was still on the ground trying get the man on his side again when he started having another attack. That’s when the ambulance arrived. We got out of the way and let the paramedics take over, and I watched Ma talking to one of them, explaining how the man’s seizures came in succession. The rest of the evening I wondered, as I told my friends what happened, how many of them would be able to say they helped their mother save a man between school and dinner. I was certain not one of them could.
Chapter Sixteen
After the dance that had gone bust, I decided to treat school like a job—put in my eight hours and get out. There were no extracurricular activities that might keep me on campus a minute longer than required. My friends would be better described as acquaintances. The only way I’d survive those eight hours was to keep my two lives separate, be two different people like Ma. Unlike her, I enjoyed only one of my personas, and one didn’t complement the other. At home and with my real friends, I was me—comfortable, still street enough to be respected despite the plaid skirt and crested blazer I wore. Black. At school, I found a new group of friends who worked hard at not fitting in. They were white, but not quite rich. A few of them had part-time jobs. They talked about anti-establishmentarianism, and on the weekends sprayed their hair purple, wore black nail polish, and stuck safety pins through their cheeks. I liked how much they didn’t want to belong, and they took me in.
I got a room full of blank looks. Surely I wasn’t going to have to explain the concept of lawyers to them. “What do lawyers have to do with stopping the misuse of magic?” Mr. Hartwell asked.
We went to the Rocky Horror Picture Show, where I learned the lyrics to “The Time Warp” and the matching dance steps, and the right moment to throw toast at the screen. These friends introduced me to yet another new music by groups called the Ramones and the Sex Pistols. Like all the other music, it had no beat I could move to, but it sounded angry and I was angry—at rich kids who didn’t have to work to afford tuition, and at white kids who didn’t have to understand me though I had to try to understand them. At a child killer who took my mother away from me for an hour, a night, a weekend at a time until there was little of her left for me. And at the weakness that kept me in a school I hated.
When I was with my new friends on the weekends, I painted my nails black (but only the pinkies), I turned safety pins into accessories (but only in already pierced ears), and I sprayed my hair purple (only the bangs). Nothing too radical because it all had to be changed back to my regular self before I reached downtown, where such a look would surely result in a beat-down on the bus ride home. The black polish was peeled off on the bus from the suburbs into town, the safety pins replaced by earrings, the purple hair spray brushed out of my bangs.
I spent more time trying to fit in somewhere—at home, where my friends and I straddled the line between being street and being middle class; at work, where my friends lived in a world that included housing projects and raising children though they were only children themselves; and at school. A little more each day, it seemed to me that I fit nowhere at all.
*
Between classes, I made my usual stop in the girl’s room to slick on lipgloss and fix my hair. I couldn’t find my hair pick in my purse. When I realized I must have left it in the gym locker room, I headed that direction but was stopped short by what was happening in the second-floor hallway. My hair pick, the plastic kind with a handle shaped into a black power fist but by 1980 more a grooming tool than a cultural statement, was being passed around by a group in the hall.
The group was made of boys and girls, all white. They were putting on impromptu skits with my comb as a stage prop, taking turns pretending to be some TV version of a black person, the only black folks they knew save me and the other seven black kids in the school.
“Dy-no-mite!”
“Well we’re movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky…”
“Whatchu talking ’bout, Willis?”
When they saw me, they didn’t stop the comedy show even though they must have known that the odds the pick was mine was one out of eight. I was embarrassed that it was my pick, and even more embarrassed that I did nothing about it, and instead just walked on by like I didn’t notice them. Throughout the day as I went from class to class, I saw the pick in different hands, white hands where the black power fist looked so foreign, but still I said nothing.
At the end of school, after I’d killed my usual twenty minutes in the library instead of the cold street corner waiting for the bus, I saw that they’d finally grown tired of the game. I saw my pick laying on top of soda cans and potato chip bags in a trash can on the bridge connecting the library to the main building. I felt a sudden surge of rage toward the kids for being ignorant, but mostly at myself for doing nothing about the modern-day minstrel show they’d put on. As I walked to the bus stop, I made a mental note to stop by McCrory’s on the way home to buy another pick.
*
Ma still had her doubts about what the FBI would bring to the investigation, but she had to admit she was relieved to have them join, not so much because the Task Force cops couldn’t do the job, but because there weren’t enough of them, or enough money. She was spending crazy hours at the Task Force building, and often I’d be down there spending some of them with her. My bus home stopped running before seven o’clock, and on days when I had to stay after school to study in the library, or when traffic was really bad from school into downtown because of an accident on I-85, I’d miss the last bus home. I didn’t have a choice but to hang out at the Task Force building until Ma was ready to go home. Sometimes this wouldn’t be until after eight o’clock.
Bridgette sometimes slept across town at her friend Nadine’s house in Northeast where she was going to school, because Ma couldn’t always pick her up early enough. Unlike Bridgette, Nadine wasn’t on the M-to-M transfer and actually lived in the same district as the school. Her mother told Ma not to worry about Bridgette staying over so often, it was more important that she was safe. She said she was glad to know her own daughter had someone to walk home with after the school bus dropped her down the street from their apartment complex.
Usually I didn’t mind spending time at the Task Force, and luckily for Ma, her bosses didn’t mind either. They understood that there was just her. They knew that while she was working sixteen hours a day, one of her children was waiting for a bus home at the same bus stop one of the victims did. Her other child used to go to school two blocks from where one victim was last seen. A child had been found dead just a few hundred yards from where her children and their friends lived and played every day. While she was talking to a victim’s mother about what route he took home, she was wondering if her own child had made it home okay. So her bosses knew they’d better understand when her daughter showed up at her desk, doing homework in the seat reserved for possible witnesses, tipsters, and people who had official business with the Task Force.
The cops didn’t seem to mind me being there. I either went unnoticed or provided a brief diversion. I liked to think I helped them in a small wa
y by being there, especially those who didn’t have children. Maybe it was a good thing for them to be around a kid who they could get to know in person and not through crime-scene photos and interviews with grieving parents. Sometimes they made food runs and would ask me for my order because Ma was out on a call or in some office taking a report. A detective might look over my shoulder at my homework and ask what I was studying, but then be off toward his desk and a mountain of work before I could look up and answer.
Sometimes when I was hanging around the Task Force, the detectives included me in their work, making me feel as though I was helping them find the killer. While I sat at Ma’s desk practicing my French verb conjugations, she or some other cop would ask me whether a kid would do this, might a kid try that.
“If you really needed some extra cash and a regular rider on your bus day offers you twenty dollars to help him with a small job, would you get off at his stop instead of your own?”
No, I’d figure it was a con. Besides, Ma would kill me if I did that.
“Let’s say you’re walking along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive near Ashby Street, and it’s raining hard and you forgot your umbrella, and a white man pulls alongside you and asks if you need a ride. What would you do?”
How many white men do you see hanging around MLK and Ashby? I’d know right off it was a scam.
“What if he said he was a cop and he thought someone was after you?”
I’d look for the Motorola antennae on his car. I’d check the make—is it a Crown Vic, or some other model police departments like to use? I’d wonder why he didn’t show his badge right off the bat. I’d run. You should ask another kid that question, one who wouldn’t know the difference.
I stared at the Special Bulletins on Missing Children tacked on corkboards, memorizing the faces because I thought trying not to forget them was the least I could do. Maybe I thought I’d see one of those faces one day, the ones still missing, staring from the back window of a car as it pulled away, begging me to do something.
