by Donna Britt
Mattox was very angry, Mom said. “I kind of felt threatened so I left it at that. But I let him know I thought it was unjust. That this was a valuable person they had killed.”
Steve—who by now had changed his name to Ben Melech Yehudah to reflect his association with the Hebrew Israelite culture—realized for the first time that his closeness in age to Darrell had made him regard his brother almost as a twin. As someone who’d always been, and would always be, around for him. Steve-now-Melech had thought of Darrell as Robin to his Batman, his little compadre. He kept thinking about what Darrell’s roommates had found on his water bed after his death: a poem Darrell had written called “Love Is All There Is.” The poem said love is the only thing worth living for, that everything else was “an artificial bore.”
The poem, Melech felt, was proof that Darrell had been serious about something he’d told the family a few weeks before his death: he had embraced God and intended to enter the ministry. Darrell’s espousal of the religion that he’d paid little attention to since childhood surprised Melech, despite his having undergone a spiritual metamorphosis of his own. He and Darrell had spent years being freewheeling and hedonistic—drinking, partying, experimenting with drugs. When Melech had talked with Darrell about his own conversion months earlier, about “the beauty of living in the Word,” Darrell had told him that if you go too deep into the Bible, “you’ll die. God just takes you.” He had said, “I’m going to have fun, live my life.”
So Melech couldn’t have been more surprised when Darrell did a complete 360. “The last time I saw him,” Melech said, Darrell was a Christian. “His face radiated a glow and a peace that couldn’t be faked.” It was obvious he’d experienced a sincere conversion, Melech said, that he was no longer dealing with religion as most people understood it. His brother hadn’t said, “I’m interested in God and going to start going to church.” Darrell was transformed and had an entirely new aura about him. Listening to him, Melech looked at himself—and realized that as serious as he was about his faith, religion hadn’t altered his personality. Though he was more biblically knowledgeable, “I was still kind of crazy,” he said. But Darrell had changed. Weeks later, he would be gone.
Consumed by rage and pain, Melech hurled at Mom and me his certainty that we’d wished he’d been the one to die in that ditch. Our muted denials must have sounded hollow. Yet in a way, Melech did die that day. Darrell’s death gave him his first inkling of how conflicted his family members were about him. One of their number had died. Yet Melech—the Britt who’d taken risks, courted danger, loved life on the edge—was still among them. No one was prepared for even the possibility of Darrell being taken.
For Melech, Darrell’s death was “an awakening.” The family’s most facile liar decided it was beneath him to lie, to be phony, to be veiled in any way. Darrell’s death inspired Melech to tell people the truth, regardless of the consequences.
Bruce’s reaction to his brother’s slaying was the most puzzling: fury directed at Darrell for, as he put it, “getting himself killed.” The police report suggested that his big brother hadn’t done what every black man knows to do when confronted by cops: be calm, restrained, conciliatory. Knowing Darrell’s rare but explosive temper, Bruce assumed he’d lost control. Bruce was even more incensed with Darrell for having abandoned him. How dare the brother he most enjoyed leave him alone to face Gary’s hopelessness? As the weeks passed, Bruce became a virtual recluse, spending so much time in bed that once, when he tried to rise, his knees buckled like a newborn calf’s.
I neither understood nor related to Bruce’s anger. How could I, when I’d never been mad at Darrell in my life? Even when he’d disappointed me—like the time he got so high on one of his visits home from college that Bruce and I found him passed out naked on his bed—my major concern had been making sure Mom didn’t find out. People you adore can and will mess up. My job was to forgive them, protect them. Darrell had never even raised his voice to me. How could I accuse him now?
My accusations were directed at me.
Maybe that’s when the seed was planted. When my guilt provided fertile enough soil for what had been a tendency toward giving to blossom into a near addiction. If my relationship with Darrell had been troubled, I might have felt less remorse for having allowed us to drift apart. It didn’t matter that the drifting had been natural, even necessary. His death had made it traitorous. Now I knew: inattention toward a loved one, even for an instant, was perilous.
It didn’t help knowing that the last time I spoke to Darrell, he had reached out to me.
Darrell phoned me three days before he was shot. Pleasantly surprised to hear from him, I was astonished when he said he’d missed our childhood closeness. Couldn’t we try to recapture it? Touched beyond speech, I sputtered something like “I want that, too.” Then he told me about his decision to become a minister.
Years ago, he explained, Mom had told him that at his birth, Nana had laid hands on him and stated, “This boy is going to be a preacher.” Said Darrell: “I resisted that my whole life, but it was always there.” Then he said, so quietly, “When I was six or seven, I used to talk to Jesus. I heard Him, felt so close to Him… but I never told anybody because I knew people would think I was nuts.”
Nuts? Never you. Not the most reflexively good person I’d ever met, not the brother who, when he and Steve played cowboys as toddlers, resisted when Steve used his big-brother status to force Darrell to be the villain. Darrell sobbed for Mom to make him stop because “bad guys always lose.”
Sometimes, in fact, they do. Like the policemen whose use of deadly force was ruled “justifiable homicide” by the powers that be in Darrell’s death. The day after his bullet punctured Darrell’s thigh, Officer Mattox hit and kicked a handcuffed Hispanic suspect, shot up his car, and slammed the door on the man’s legs; he was sentenced to three years’ probation for violating the man’s civil rights. At his trial, Mattox attributed his behavior to having participated in Darrell’s killing, saying, “I’d never shot anyone before.” Five years later, he was ousted from the force after being convicted of theft. Officer Cyprian had been arrested by Portage, Indiana, police a year before Darrell’s killing for shooting at his estranged wife and pointing a loaded .45-caliber pistol at her head. In 1979, he too was kicked off the force after his conviction for sexually assaulting a girl of ten who had babysat for his children.
I don’t remember how Darrell and I ended that last phone conversation. But I didn’t insist that he come to Ann Arbor for an extended visit, or call me every night, or avoid going out by himself in his neighborhood, where somebody might mischaracterize his request for a ride home as an admission of thievery. I didn’t save him.
The haze that enveloped me after the shooting followed me to Michigan, where I finished the semester in a fog. I still counseled my girls, attended classes, taught journalism. I kept breathing and moving and smiling and doing everything required of me. None of it felt real. I wasn’t offended when people treated me like the walking wounded; that’s what I was. Consumed by thoughts of a man who’d left me for regions I could neither imagine nor see, I began to feel as invisible as he’d become.
So as the weeks passed and Jon—the nineteen-year-old in my journalism class whom I’d insisted had no interest me—became a constant visitor, I accepted it. I let myself notice his compact wrestler’s waist and acre-wide chest. I appreciated his obvious concern, the kindness and hesitancy in his green-flecked eyes, even his youth itself. His lingering simplicity was a sweet antidote to all that had become rudely complex.
There was no shelter anywhere. No one could see me, so there could be no consequences. When Jon’s desire for a relationship became unmistakable and he reached for me, I reached back.
Jon’s whiteness, I suspect, pulled me to him as much as his thoughtfulness. Embracing a white man after such an essential black one had been stolen by his kind kept me from hating the rest of them, helped me continue to move among them. I was cl
inging to my friendships with Garth and John, so I wasn’t entirely surprised to find myself loving Jon when I needed to. His unique purpose, I believe now, was to preserve white men’s humanity for me. Our liaison was too brief to describe as serious. But its meaning—connecting me to a group that suddenly seemed unsalvageable—was almost sacred.
As the weeks and months passed, I wondered if I would live long enough to experience an afternoon, an hour, or even five minutes free of the breathless hurt crowding my chest. Still unable to accept Darrell’s death, I repeated the fact of it to myself as if that would help me digest it. Whether I was trying on a pretty dress or savoring a perfect slice of cheesecake, I’d pause to remind myself, “Darrell’s dead,” or “My brother died,” purposely short-circuiting my pleasure.
Would Officers Cyprian and Mattox have cared that the shot that pierced my brother’s chest had excised my capacity for joy? How could I be happy when Darrell was dead? When each laugh had to wind its way around a knot of guilt?
I wanted to remember my brother, to never let him go. I also wanted to stop hurting. I tried to do both, but each memory was a knife that slashed at my wound. It hurt, replaying my mind’s video of Darrell taking over the basketball court at I.U., the day he made the junior varsity team. It hurt, recalling the good wishes I’d sent with him to California, and my certainty of his impending stardom. It hurt, recalling how he’d enchanted me with tales of Hollywood egos and nights sleeping under starry Arizona skies.
It was agonizing, remembering how he’d loved living in Miller, close enough to Lake Michigan to walk to the beach and gaze wonderingly at the water. How meaningful his work as a drug counselor had been to him, and his disappointment when the program’s new funders fired him after decreeing that every staffer had to have a college degree. How after he’d taken the job in the mill, I assured myself such work wouldn’t long satisfy a man of his curiosity and intellect. Soon he’d be back on his path.
Most torturous to recall was his humor. Like the times Darrell tied a bandanna around the smooth, black head of our dog, Taffy, whose patient expression made her resemble the homeliest of peasant women. And how he’d “sneak” into a room, purportedly slipping unnoticed behind Bruce or me to scare us. Sidling past us in a burlesque tiptoe, Darrell would move in plain sight from one inadequate hiding place to another, “concealing” his 175-pound body behind a slender vase or a fourteen-inch footrest. His impish “I’m invisible” look convulsed me, even before he leapt at me shouting, “Boo!” I’d recall Darrell and Bruce sitting astride (in fact, inches above) their “horses” Taffy and her son, Scooter, posing with their short-legged steeds as if riding into battle: plastic swords raised, nostrils flared, Napoleon and Simón Bolívar in Afros and sneakers.
Happy or sad, memories of Darrell tightened the knot that never left my throat. So without quite realizing it, I started doing what I’d unwittingly done before he died: turning away from him. Slowly, subtly, my least vivid memories slipped away. Next I unconsciously shifted his laughter, his voice, his smell, his Darrell- ness, from too-vivid constancy to a cranny so deep, I was barely aware of it. Cut off from consciousness, Darrell started visiting my dreams, where his presence was welcome; where it didn’t hurt to linger with him.
I’d begun the decades-long task of forgetting him.
True—or Just Accurate?—Love
Donna kissing Hamani, 1983.
Was it his diminutiveness that threw me off? Six additional inches, half a foot more in height, and I might have seen the similarities between him and the man I’d left behind: The whip-thin muscularity. Curly-wavy-shiny hair. The effortless way he wore a suit. All features I’d admired in the most influential man in my life, the father whose defenses I’d never penetrated, who in his seventy-plus years couldn’t express his love for me. This man was as bantam-sized as Daddy was tall. Still, I must have sensed the impossibility of making this new love—so like my first—happy. So I married him, and quickly.
In 1985, I knew little about the things people do with their eyes wide open that are entirely hidden to them. We take jobs not because the work thrills us but because it’s what Mother expects. We bed inappropriate strangers and call ourselves liberated, though fecklessness born of past hurts is hardly free. We marry for love—not for love of the person we’ve wed but for love of someone long gone, whose memory we’ve tucked deep in one of our heart’s unexamined pockets.
I did know this: my first marriage ended because my cocaine-addicted husband smoked his car. Or was it because I accidentally incinerated the diamond engagement ring I had paid for myself? Either way, the symbolism was clear: the disastrous union had finally gone up in smoke.
I’d met Greg in Detroit in 1980. I’d landed in the Motor City after leaving Michigan, where it had taken me three years to complete U of M’s two-year master’s program. What I remember most clearly about the months after Darrell’s death is the tears. Everything else is murmurs and shadows.
At some point during that last year of grad school, it occurred to me people might actually be able to look through me. The whole-body invisibility I’d felt after Darrell’s death had contracted, becoming a hole in my gut so palpable, I could feel wind gusting between my ribs. Spanning the space from breastbone to navel, the emptiness was so tangible, it rendered organs and muscles irrelevant. All that was real was the void, and the mantra echoing inside it:
My brother is dead. My brother is dead. Darrell is dead.
But just as in grad school, my feet kept taking me where I had to go. I have no recollection of graduating from the master’s program, though I have paperwork attesting to it. Bruce had moved to Ann Arbor and joined me in a light-filled basement apartment. He’d gotten a job selling shoes after he saw a Help Wanted sign in a window, strolled in, and told the manager, “You’ll love me!” His presence was my one solace. Every time I’d thought of him in Gary, vulnerable to errant police, accusatory white people, local thugs, I’d felt a stab of panic. Now he was out of danger; my presence would protect him as I traversed streets I barely saw, took classes whose lessons didn’t penetrate, and turned in papers produced by the automaton who resembled me.
Repeatedly, I was drawn to men younger than I. Not dangerously, illegally younger, but younger nonetheless. Jon was the first, then came Tony, a dashing, whip-smart black Detroiter four years my junior, a journalism major who for months was a perfectly satisfactory boyfriend—except when he acted his age, which was often. After one passionate argument, Tony stood in my doorway and announced, “At least you’ve known one good man in your life!” That this immature eighteen-year-old would pronounce himself the best man I’d known when I’d lost one far better incensed me so much that I envisioned—no felt—myself jabbing the pair of scissors I’d been using into his back. The impulse scared me into breaking up with him. At one point, I felt hugely attracted to a youth of seventeen whom I was mentoring. I actually let this kid kiss me before asking the woman who moved, looked, and sounded like me, “What are you doing?” I wasn’t sure, even when a female friend pointedly asked, “Don’t you like any adults?”
I couldn’t see it then, but my intent seems obvious: I’d just lost my childhood’s most admired and gallant youth. I wanted him—his openness, his lack of guile, his desire to take care of me—back. So I’d found several boys—or boyish men. But not him.
Careerwise, I’d had successful summer internships at the Charlotte Observer, a highly regarded Knight-Ridder paper in North Carolina, and at the Ann Arbor News, the folksy Booth paper that served U of M’s home city. Editors at the News wanted to hire me full-time; I was thrilled because it would fulfill the terms of my Booth fellowship. In my new, risk-filled world, the prospect of remaining in Ann Arbor—and in Bruce’s safe, familiar orbit—seemed ideal. Ann Arbor’s rambunctious students were so full of themselves that they distracted me from my emptiness. But Booth fellowship officials insisted that I work at a smaller paper in tiny Bay City, a ten-square-mile town more than an hour and a half a
way. Only 2 percent of Bay City’s 15,000 residents were black.
The thought of being alone with the hole in my midsection was harrowing. I appealed to Booth to be allowed to stay where I felt safe, editors wanted me, and I had a shot at meeting a mate. Booth’s response: Bay City or nothing. I felt duty-bound to take the job, though I had no contractural obligation. I’d been so certain that I’d stay at the News that I’d sought no other offers. I felt trapped.
Weeks before graduation and unbeknownst to me, Neal Shine, a top editor at the venerable Detroit Free Press, looked around his large, vibrant newsroom and noted, “There are no black people here.” He said nothing of his revelation when he visited Michigan to speak to our graduate program, but was intrigued by a pushy black female student’s pointed questions, not realizing that people without insides have nothing to fear. I became the first Michigan journalism master’s grad hired by the exalted Freep.
As thrilled as I was, everything in life still felt squishy and unsettled. Yet I was sure that Detroit, a hardscrabble city as racially divided as any, was the perfect place for me as a journalist to address the most solid fact of my existence: Darrell would still be alive if those policemen had known whom they were shooting. Whomever they thought they saw in that ditch—and I was sure they saw black—they had no inkling of the valuable human being they’d blown away.