by Kim Reid
“Put that away, the smell is making me sick.” Those were the only words Ma said the whole ride home. I wanted to look back at Bridgette to sympathize, but anything could set Ma off when she was angry. I knew whatever she was thinking about, maybe what her supervisor had said, was making her angrier by the minute. So when we got home, Bridgette offered to make the salad, and I told her I’d start cutting up a chicken. Ma just went straight to her room and turned on the evening news. When the chicken had been browned and the onions caramelized, all of it poured into a casserole, smothered with a can of cream of mushroom soup and put into the oven, when Bridgette had sliced the last tomato into the salad, we went into her room and sat on the bed.
“Ma, did we get you fired today?” Bridgette asked, and I thought she was braver than I.
“Why do you think you got me fired?”
“Because we came to your office when all the Wayne Williams stuff was happening, then that man came to talk to you, and you’ve been mad ever since.”
“I’m not mad at you. And he didn’t fire me. He can’t fire me, only the district attorney can do that. But he did let me know that the DA wouldn’t be needing me in the courtroom, and that there was no sense in me hanging around waiting to be asked. And he was right, there was no sense in that at all.”
On the TV screen, the cameras panned the Fulton County courthouse, the prosecution team walking down the steps while reporters stuck microphones in their faces. My mother’s face was not among them because she had been dismissed and was sitting on her bed with us. That’s when it occurred to me that hers had never been among the faces during any of the news film during the eighteen days the trial had dragged on.
“Ma, why aren’t you ever on the news walking down the courthouse steps?” I asked.
“Because I wasn’t part of the courtroom team.”
“But I mean before today.”
“I’ve never been part of it. I was good enough to represent the DA on the Task Force, good enough to help build the trial investigation. But I didn’t make the cut when it came to the courtroom team for the biggest trial we’ve ever had.”
When she said that, Ma looked the way she did on too many days before the arrest—broken down and defeated, her hope drained into the soft riverbank soil of a crime scene. All my anger of the last two years was fresh again in that moment. I remembered the nights and weekends without my mother, the last few years of my childhood I gave up so Bridgette wouldn’t have to give up as much of hers. The phone calls from Ma when she couldn’t hide the panic in her voice because she’d already called ten times and I hadn’t answered because I’d missed my regular bus and had gotten home late. My fear for all of us when my strong-as-blue-steel mother told me she saw the ghosts of children.
The newscaster came on and said that the jury had not reached a verdict, so there would be another day of deliberations. Another day of waiting.
*
The next day was Saturday, and Bridgette and I stepped delicately around Ma because even though she wasn’t angry with us, she was still angry. I wanted to stay close by because I still thought she might need me, so I called work and said I was sick. By evening, her anger had softened into a kind of sadness, so we sprawled on her bed again as though it was any other night, bits of pecan shell lost in the stitching of her thick comforter, camouflaged by its brown and tan print. Copper snored loudly at the foot of the bed, and I could feel the vibration of it.
“I wish the Carol Burnett Show was still on,” Bridgette said, sounding the way old people do when they wish for things they can’t bring back, and would surely find lacking even if they could.
“Quiet, the news is coming on.”
“But you already know the verdict,” I said. She had received a phone call, and I knew from the way she wore her relief that a verdict had been reached, but she didn’t tell me what it was. As she’d done since the arrest, Ma was still holding back because it was part of her job as a cop or as a mother, I wasn’t sure which. I thought maybe she didn’t need me at all.
There was more film on the courthouse steps that didn’t include Ma, more pictures of crying mothers, pulled from two-year-old footage in case we’d forgotten how painful it had been. The news anchor announced that a jury had convicted Wayne Williams on two counts of murder in the cases of Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Ray Payne. Then Ma began to cry right in front of us, not saving it for when she was behind her bedroom door, and I didn’t know if it was from anger, frustration, sadness, or relief. I figured it was all those things and more, because soon enough Bridgette and I were crying, too. When we got it all out, we acted as though it had never happened, because that’s the way we were, that was how we needed each other to be. And that was fine.
Bridgette fought with me over who would go get more pecans from the big burlap sack, brought home from the farmers’ market on a late autumn day when they were at peak season.
“Don’t tell me what to do, you aren’t my mother.”
“Yeah, but I’m the oldest.”
Ma said, “Hush, the both of you,” and went to fill the bowl herself.
Epilogue
After the conviction, my mother continued to work as an investigator for the district attorney until the last day of 1987, when a construction crane working on the new Underground Atlanta complex dropped a beam on the car she and her partner were in. The difference between them living and dying was a few inches. Her back was injured and she had to take a desk job in the solicitor’s office to earn enough years to receive part of her pension. She figured it was a sign anyway, an omen that she’d better get out of police work before some crackhead shot her first.
During those years she dreamt of leaving, she met a public defender who was her nemesis in the courtroom but who she chose as a life partner outside of it. Three years before she gave up her badge and government-issued gun, she married and brought home a white boy, proving anything is possible. They still work together in Atlanta, but on the same side—he’s in private practice as a criminal defense attorney, and she does the investigative work for his firm. They gave Bridgette and me the gift of another sister, and a brother.
For a long time, I followed the plan I laid out for myself when I first started at the private school. I earned degrees from a mostly white undergraduate school, then a mostly white graduate school, because I bought into the belief that it was required to succeed. I learned to play the game, and enjoyed it too, steadily reaching my goals of making it in America—a six-figure corporate job with a nice title. When I realized no one was making me follow the plan but myself, I decided to write again, calling up a forgotten childhood desire to become an author. As for my mother’s admonishment to never bring home a white boy, and my certainty that I would only come home with someone who looked liked me, I did neither. I married a Korean man, which brought with it another set of lessons, along with enough joy to make the effort seem inconsequential.
Bridgette grew up, got married, and had kids of her own. She always had plans of opening a hair salon, but in her thirties, went back to college to complete the degree she left unfinished when she married, earning a master’s in sociology. She became a social worker for Atlanta’s homeless community and inner-city kids, children who matched the victim profile of the cases the Task Force cops worked. Even though I’m sure it influenced her career decision, I’m glad Bridgette was young enough to avoid being as affected by the investigation as I was. Even after dealing with the harsh reality of her job every day, she was always able to hold on to to that light she had as a child.
Questions still remain about who killed Atlanta’s children, within our family and among Atlantans. In May 2005, the police chief of Dekalb County reopened five of the closed cases. He was an investigator on the Task Force and never believed Williams killed anyone, even the two adults he was convicted of murdering. A year later when the police chief left office, the case was closed again, which is unfortunate because now police can look at the case with the benefit of what thi
rty years can bring: better methodology, DNA testing, and perspective. I still hold out hope that the case will be reexamined, even though it might mean that my mother’s involvement in the investigation didn’t end in 1982 after all.
Also by Kim Reid
Kim Reid lives outside Denver with her husband, but grew up in Atlanta and still calls it home–her roots are too deeply planted in Georgia clay for home to be anywhere else. When she’s not writing, she loves to cook, travel, and listen to just about any kind of music.
Visit her Website at http://kimreid.com.
No Place Safe: A Family Memoir, is her first book. Kim also writes novels for young adults under the name Kimberly Reid.
Kim’s books in the young adult Langdon Prep series include:
My Own Worst Frenemy
Creeping with the Enemy
Sweet 16 to Life
Author’s Note
Writing one’s own story naturally goes the way the writer remembers it, and while I tried to be as true to the facts and to my experience as possible, surely someone will interpret the same event a different way. I don’t mean to contradict them, but I can only tell the story as I know it.
The changes it caused my family, not the investigation itself, is the story I tell here. But the investigation gives the story its backdrop, so I didn’t rely only on memory for the details of the case. I was supported by case documents, my mother’s notes and accounts, and the occasional news article.
With the exception of using real names of my family members and any names made public during the investigation, all character names have been changed, but each “character” is a real individual, and not a composite of people I knew. The locations I describe around Atlanta are real and distinct places, as best I can recall them—or they used to be at one time. A lot changes in thirty years, but I hope folks who were there still remember some of those places.
While I believe I have a great memory, there is no way to remember people’s words just as they said them—no one expects they’d ever have to—so the dialogue here is not an exact retelling, but it is true to the story.
NO PLACE SAFE
A Family Memoir
Kim Reid
Copyright © 2013
All Rights Reserved.
AGENCY INFORMATION
NLA Digital Liaison Platform LLC
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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