We lost one. Heaven gain one. RIP. J-Rae
Dear Brandon, I’m so fucked up right now. I can’t start 2 explain. I will always love you. You were my all back in the day. You didn’t deserve this. I love you. Yo Pumpkin
R.I.P. Daddy, love Miracle
The only Angel in our family. Ama miss you Angel Love Nelly R.
They leave candles and empty liquor bottles, usually the deceased’s beverage of choice, often Hennessy Cognac and Moët & Chandon Champagne and grapefruit juice (which is mixed with the Moët). To fenceposts and streetlamps they tie balloons, which soon deflate and droop, making them appear less a celebration of the dead than a statement of fact. People leave objects, like basketballs or flowers or photographs, or stuffed animals or toys if the victim is unusually young. I’ve seen dolls and battery-powered cars, anything that might comfort the dead—and the living. It’s a kind of community catharsis. The acronym RIP—rest in peace—is everywhere. It’s penned on the sheets of posterboard hanging by these makeshift memorials. It’s tattooed on people’s bodies. Painted on the walls of apartments. Scrawled on the side of buildings. Embossed on T-shirts and jackets. It’s as if these communities are piecing together the equivalent of a war memorial.
But then there’s the personal grief, the turbulence of guilt and loss and anger, gnawing away at individuals, especially mothers, exposing the rawest and most unpredictable of emotions and behavior. One mother I knew, Afaf Ahmed, a tall, stately woman, had fled war-torn Sudan for Chicago with her husband and her son, and as the son, Khalid, grew into adolescence, he made connections in their mostly Hispanic neighborhood. At one point Khalid witnessed a murder committed by an older friend and was so distressed that he couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop hinting to neighbors what he’d seen. One day the friend, concerned that all the chatter would get him in trouble, beckoned Khalid to meet him behind a garage, in an alley, and there shot him six times. As Khalid lay dying, the friend allegedly whispered, I love you, but I had to do it.
Afaf was at first invigorated by her own amateur detective work, trying to find evidence to arrest her son’s murderer, but the case stalled, and in the weeks and months to follow she pulled into herself, her face tightening like a fist. There would be afternoons I’d stop by and she’d still be in her nightgown, curled up on the couch in her small living room, smoking, her hair uncombed. She looked as if she was wilting. Unwashed dishes lay cluttered around the kitchen sink. In need of money, she sold various items from the house, including her television and some furniture. The house got emptier and emptier. At one point she told me, “If I can’t protect my son, I’m worth nothing.” She became so depressed, so inward, so sour, that—I’m not proud to admit this—I began to go around less often. “Nobody wants to be with me,” she told me, apologizing for not being better company. “It’s like lenses. I see everything through this tragedy.”
Afaf complained about a bitter, almost metallic taste in her mouth. She couldn’t rid herself of it, and she told me that it only intensified when she ate. So she stopped eating. The only thing that helped was candy she could suck on, but even that only diminished the bitterness. It didn’t erase it. One day, when she had taken her younger son to Lake Michigan, she reached into her pockets and realized she’d forgotten to bring any candy. The metallic taste was unusually strong, and so she reached down, scooped up a small handful of sand, and slowly sucked on it. It took away the bitterness. The sand gave her taste. It is, I suppose, the equivalent of finding solace in an empty room. It was the only joy—albeit a muted one—she could find. She purchased bags of play sand from Home Depot and told her husband it was for their son to play in, but when he figured it out, he began cooking elaborate Sudanese meals, mostly lamb, which Afaf ordinarily savored; but nothing kept that bitterness away like the sand. She had to stop when, months later, her doctor informed her of an alarming iron deficiency. “This tragedy is like my shadow,” Afaf told me. “I’m trying to save what is left of me.”
I could tell story after story like this, of mothers who drift on a sea of heartache, without oars and without destination. One young mother I met told me she cuts herself. On a warm summer day she had been sitting on her front stoop, braiding her six-year-old daughter’s hair, when her daughter doubled over, caught in crossfire. “The moment I cut myself, it burns,” the mother told me. “I’m in so much pain I stop thinking of my daughter—and I have some peace.” Many hold on to what anchor they can, a piece of their child no one can take away. One mother I know held her seven-year-old daughter as she died in her arms, and in her closet she keeps her daughter’s bloodied clothes in a plastic bag, a kind of talisman. Another had her son’s EKG record, his last heartbeats, tattooed on her forearm. Still another propped against her fireplace a life-sized cardboard likeness of her son. A few have convinced the city to name a street or a park after their child: Ryan Harris Memorial Park, Hadiya Pendleton Park, Derrion J. Albert Way, Dantrell Davis Way, Blair Delane Holt Way.
One mother told me, “I didn’t know there were so many different ways to grieve.” Some try to give purpose to their child’s death. They find oars; they imagine a destination. Some, like Afaf, turn into amateur sleuths, searching for the killer. One mother I know took in a troubled girl who she thought could help lead her to her son’s killer. They become activists, lobbying for gun control or a greater police presence or longer sentences. They comfort other moms in the immediate turbulence of having their child torn from them. In Chicago there are roughly half a dozen groups of mothers who have lost children to the violence: Parents for Peace and Justice, Sisterhood, Chicago Survivors, Purpose Over Pain, Mothers of Murdered Sons. They hold vigils. They attend each other’s court cases. They celebrate their children on the anniversary of their deaths or on their birthdays. They march, hold prayer circles, host barbecues, and release balloons to the heavens. Sometimes they arrange block parties, replete with inflatable bounce houses. One group of mothers held a party where they all received tattoos on their pinkies which read Promise—as if to remind themselves and others of all the things they’d promised to do in the wake of losing a child. Because these mothers have each other, they live richly in mourning.
I’ve asked moms about getting closure, and they shake their heads, as if there were any way to put the death of a child behind you, as if there were any way to heal a wound that opens and reopens at the slightest bump. A mention of your child’s name. Hearing of someone else’s loss. A dream. (Or not a dream. One mother told me she was troubled because she could never conjure up her son in her sleep.) A memory. A keepsake. There’s a lot to keep that wound from closing. But here’s the thing, most go on. They continue. They have to. Some have other children and so need to be in the present, to nurture, to comfort, to make others laugh. Some have husbands. Or jobs. Or friends. One mother I know, Myrna Roman, has an uncanny ability to lift everyone around her. Her twenty-three-year-old son, Manny, was killed randomly, stopped at a streetlight by a young man who was angry at things having nothing to do with Manny and who Manny didn’t even know. Myrna told me that she used to be all “heels and skirts” and now she was just “gym shoes and sweatpants.” She said, “The minute it happens [that you lose a child], you’re a different person. We’re built different. We see life different.”
Years ago I read Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart, a searing account of post-apartheid South Africa. Malan told the story of his country by telling the story of several murders. In death, he was suggesting, you can understand life. At the book’s end he tells the story of Creina Hancock. She and her husband, Neil, lived in KwaZulu among the Zulus, tirelessly working toward creating sustainable agriculture, trying to undo some of the harm done by apartheid. Neil was murdered by Zulus in a tribal dispute. Creina, though, stayed on, continuing her and her husband’s work. What she told Malan has stayed with me: “The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instea
d of the total, obliterating darkness.” That, I think, is at the heart of Lisa’s story—and, honestly, the default setting of most mothers who have lost a child to the violence.
* * *
—
At the age of seventeen, Lisa had her first child, Kevin; then, at the age of twenty-four, she had Darren. The two boys had different fathers and because of the age difference were never particularly close. Lisa raised them herself, first in Bronzeville, a neighborhood on the South Side, and then in the southern suburbs, some of which are more distressed than the most hardscrabble parts of Chicago. Her older son, Kevin, was focused on what lay ahead. He knew what he wanted. He was keyed into school and would go on to the University of Illinois to study electrical engineering. Darren was more unpredictable. Hardheaded. Restless. Impatient. Lisa has tried to figure out where it started, why Darren seemed so agitated all the time. Maybe, she thought, it was because his dad, who had remarried and had three more children, wasn’t a part of his life. Maybe that was too pat an explanation. Darren played football in high school, first as quarterback. But he didn’t like the pressure, so he switched positions, to running back. He liked to hang out at home and watch documentaries, especially on the Discovery Channel. He had a lot going for him: he was athletic, good-looking, and personable. And he and his mother were close. (So were Lisa and Kevin, though Lisa says her relationship with Kevin, because she was so young when she had him, felt more like that of siblings than that of mother and son.) Darren loved his mother’s peach cobbler, and so she’d make it especially for him. He always remembered her birthday and Mother’s Day, once giving her a card filled with recipes, which she still has. But he started straying. She can’t pinpoint when it started. It began as a trickle and then before long turned into a roaring river.
In high school he got suspended for possession of marijuana. After a football game he and friends got arrested after stealing candy from a corner store. Two days later he got caught in a K-mart slipping a pack of condoms into his jacket pocket. Darren would apologize, assure his mother it wouldn’t happen again, tell her I’m going to get it together. One birthday he wrote her a card which read:
Thank you for still loving me after 18 long years even though I was bad for 17. Love you with all my heart. And mom don’t forget that I’m still going to make it. And you will see a change. Just watch. You don’t have to say nothing. Happy Birthday. Love your baby boy Darren.
He got expelled from three different high schools and never graduated. “It seemed he was always looking for something,” Lisa told me. “He couldn’t seem to grab hold of what he was looking for, and honestly, I’m not sure what that was.” Lisa kicked him out of her house after she found a small bag of crack cocaine in a shoebox which he clearly intended to sell. He spent eighteen months in prison for carrying a gun. And then he continued dealing drugs. He had two children with his girlfriend and was an attentive dad, but his relationship with their mother was on-again, off-again. “We never stopped being close,” Lisa recalled. “He was respectful. He said he needed to take care of his kids [as a way to justify selling drugs]. I always told him that was BS. You could do something different. This is not what you need to do. Nobody you know in your family lives like this, so stop it.” Lisa was too ashamed to share any of this with those around her, until one day, on the phone with her mother, who before retirement had worked as a nurse, she broke down and spilled everything—the expulsions, the drugs, the arrests. She sobbed, barely able to get the words through gasps for air. “My mom said the best thing I probably ever heard my mother say,” Lisa told me. “She listened while I cried. When I stopped to take a breath, she said, Stop. Stop blaming yourself. This is not your journey. Darren has to take his own journey. It was freeing for me. She also assured me he was going to be okay.”
On Sunday evening, July 22 of last year, 2012, Lisa received a phone call from a friend of her son’s. The friend said he couldn’t reach Darren and that he had heard someone had been shot in the Park Forest suburb where he thought Darren had been heading. Lisa called the Park Forest police, but they had no record of an encounter with a Darren Easterling. Nor did St. James Hospital. Then her husband suggested she call the county morgue. She remembers speaking to a man there who asked Lisa for her son’s name and his birthdate. He put her on hold, and when he returned he told Lisa, Yes, he’s here. His tone was so matter-of-fact that Lisa was about to ask, Can I talk to him? When she got off the phone, her husband tried to embrace her, but she told him, I’m fine. I’m okay. And when she called Darren’s friend back and he burst into tears, wailing, Lisa, uncharacteristically, told him to shut up. It doesn’t make sense to cry, she thought to herself. You all chose to live this lifestyle.
* * *
—
I know this sounds odd, but on some level Lisa felt a sense of relief. Kathryn, the social worker, who has seen this in other mothers, calls it “compassionate relief.” Lisa knew where her son was headed. She knew it wasn’t good. She worried about him. All the time. Her friend Ernest Johnson remembers that when he called Lisa, “I was expecting her to be really shook up, but she seemed peaceful and calm.” In fact, she gave the eulogy at Darren’s funeral, chastising his friends for their upside-down priorities. She thanked them for purchasing Darren’s outfit—$270 for designer jeans and a plaid button-down shirt—but she said that if they had that money, why didn’t they lend it to Darren so he didn’t feel he needed to rob someone?
Lisa had learned the circumstances of Darren’s death from his friends and then from the police. Early in the afternoon of that Sunday, Darren and a friend had driven to the Park Forest suburb to meet a small-time drug dealer, Michael Reed, to buy two ounces of marijuana. Reed lived in Park Forest, a postwar community of compact, mostly single-story ranch homes, and had agreed to meet Darren and his friend on his way to his job at Burger King. When Darren and his friend pulled up in a car driven by a woman friend of theirs, Reed got into the backseat alongside Darren’s friend. Darren sat in the front passenger seat. Here’s where the story diverges, depending on whom you talk to.
The prosecution theorized that Reed intended to rob Darren and his friend. Because of what she’s heard on the street, Lisa is convinced that Darren and his friend intended to rob Reed. It may well be that they were there to rob each other. Regardless, here’s what the police believe happened. When Reed got into the backseat, he saw Darren’s friend tap his .380 pistol, tucked under his thigh. The friend might have been reaching for it or simply making sure it was still there. Reed pulled out a 9mm pistol and opened fire. He shot twice through the passenger car seat, hitting Darren in the back and the buttocks. He shot Darren’s friend twice, in the thigh. And then, as Reed backed out of the car, his gun extended, Darren’s friend shot Reed in the hip and the chest. Darren, with two bullet wounds in his back, pulled himself out of the car and leaned over the roof, shooting a .22-caliber pistol with an extended clip. His gun jammed. This is a lot of shooting in a pretty confined area—sixteen shots total. It would be almost cartoonish in its everyone-shooting-everyone-else way if it weren’t so damn real, if it weren’t so damn fatal. And as it turned out, Michael Reed did not have the promised two ounces of marijuana on him. Nor did Darren or his friend have the $800 for the purchase. No one, it seemed, had come with good intentions.
Reed, injured, ran to a car driven by friends, who drove him to a nearby hospital. Darren’s friend was driven to the same hospital by his woman friend. They left behind Darren, who stumbled to the curb in front of a one-story brick home, where he collapsed on top of his gun, gasping for breath. He died on the patchy grass of the parkway, his hand held by a young woman who happened to be passing by. Reed and Darren’s friend were both arrested at the hospital.
Lisa initially felt shame. It could just as easily have been Reed who was killed and her son who faced prison. They had pulled guns on each other. Victim. Perpetrator. The lines blurred. There was no nobility in he
r son’s death, no heroism. He had brought it upon himself. Lisa knew that. She didn’t take issue with that. What did bother her, though, was that people, total strangers, thought they knew her son. What do you know? she’d ask. When the Southtown Star had run its story, readers responded with online comments calling Darren “an out of town thug” and “a clown.” One asked, “Where are his parents?” (This is not an uncommon refrain. After a seven-year-old was fatally shot in the chest with a bullet intended for someone else, Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, publicly asked of the shooter, “Where were you raised and who raised you?”) Lisa didn’t dispute the facts of the article, but it vexed her that the newspaper and its readers saw her son through the lens of this one incident, that they thought they knew the shape of Darren’s narrative, that they thought they knew him, and by inference her. And so she wrote a letter to the paper, which read, in part:
The beautiful thing I have come to recognize about the experience of being Darren’s mother, is that his love for me made me just a little bit happier about being me. I could feel his love and the warmth of his embrace (he never forsook an opportunity to hug his mother).
She wrote about his two children, about his love for football, about how she believed he was more than people imagined:
His legacy will not fall to the ground and wither after a blaze of gunfire. I am positive, however, that even after reading my words many will stand firm on their position as to who Darren B. Easterling was based on what the court records show, and will insist on believing that he was a trash laden thug from another town (we are former residents of Park Forest and he had many associations in the city). However, the truth is that my son, just like many before him, has a mother who loved him (and misses him) dearly, he was a brother, a father, a nephew, a friend to many…You all have the right to own your perspective, but I have spoken my son’s truth.
An American Summer Page 3