On occasion she apparently felt the tug of motherhood and called the agency to see how her children were doing or to make another attempt to have us returned. The calls came from all over the Northeast: Rhode Island, Maine, New York City, Connecticut. In more than one instance she called from a detoxification center, but when the agency called back a few days later looking for her, they were informed she had left—against the center’s wishes. She continued to rebuff her family’s repeated attempts to help her.
Soon the calls to the agency became less and less frequent, and they stopped altogether in January 1975. In October that same year, the Department of Social Services determined that “any contact with Ms. Klakowicz, or her family, would cause an unnecessary uproar in the case.” The long reach of this judgment would span across time, erecting bureaucratic barriers that, for the next twenty years, would thwart the efforts of Marian’s children to find her—and one another. This was the same obstacle Joseph Murphy had run into when he tried to find his grandchildren. My mother was notified by form letter, at her last known address, that the agency petitioned the court to terminate her parental rights, the law of man trumping the law of nature.
Her children scattered, with no possibility of return, my mother sank even further into despair and depression. Her family would hear from her from time to time, usually when she needed money or someone to bail her out. Our mother’s story could have ended right there, relegated to little more than a footnote in some future genealogical tree, and perhaps a question (Marian, now wasn’t she the one who had some trouble?), if not for her children’s quests to find out what had become of her. But when we did find her, we had little understanding of what she had endured. We had been so immersed in our own battles to survive, to make some sense of what fate had dealt us, that we’d reserved no room to understand our mother’s futile struggle to keep us in her life.
I could now see that Marian Klakowicz née Murphy was a tortured, lonely, and desperate soul, constantly in search of someone or something that could bring a sense of normalcy to her life. She was almost certainly afflicted with some form of depressive condition that had gone undiagnosed and untreated, a condition made worse because she was an alcoholic. The agency had taken Joni and Marc from her. It would be three years before she got them back only to lose them again two years later. She had lost a baby, my twin sister Starla, shortly after we were born. She sought rescue in a number of relationships, but they were all fleeting. She had been imprisoned for nearly a year, was estranged from her family, condemned to a nomadic lifestyle, and frequently preyed upon by sadistic and violent men. Most damaging of all, she had lost the only thing anchoring her to this world—her children. No one would have willingly chosen that life for herself or her children.
When the superintendent had broken down the door of the apartment to find my mother collapsed and unresponsive in the chair, smoke billowing around her, he had no idea she’d predicted this very day: “I will not be able to live without my children.” Less than three years after losing the last of her six children, my mother slipped away. No one was by her side.
CHAPTER 41
For of all sad words of tongue and pen
The saddest are these: “It might have been.”
—JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER, “MAUD MULLER” (1856)
In December 2010, four small letters, tightly sealed in a FedEx envelope, arrived at our home. The envelopes that contained the letters were tinged a light yellow, corners frayed, the black ink of the mail stamps now ghostly apparitions of letters and numbers. They were dated from June 1969 and were addressed to George Carmo of New Bedford, whose love for the author had never allowed him to throw the letters away. The writer was corresponding from prison, where he had been incarcerated since November of the previous year. He was on trial for murder. The author of the letters was Kenny Pemberton.
Over the years, I have been sought out by many of his old friends who want to meet his son. The heroes of our childhood never really die and death further mythologizes them, turning these once corporeal figures into timeless icons. So it is with this once “golden boy” of New Bedford. Kenny’s friends are tough, seasoned men but none of them can talk about him without weeping. They want to share a story or two about him, about the man he was, his love and loyalty to those he cared about. Though he was not those things to me, I politely listen, appreciating their genuine desire to connect a son to a father he never knew, to convince the boy that his father was more than he appeared to be.
These accounts are important to me but they are not the same as the voice of a father. And as I opened the first of the four letters, the forty-year-old paper crackling, I realized that I had never heard from Kenny directly. And the story he told of his own life was very different than any I had heard.
The same week Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States, a seventy-seven-year-old man from Rochester, Massachusetts, named Manuel DeSylvia Jr. was discovered lying in a pool of blood in his home. He had been brutally assaulted, beaten around his head and face, and the police concluded that he’d been beaten to death by someone’s fists. Only a trained fighter, the police and criminal investigators said, could have inflicted such damage. Kenny Pemberton immediately became a suspect. They also had evidence that Kenny, on horseback, had been on the man’s property. An all-points bulletin was immediately issued, and within a couple of days Kenny turned himself in to the New Bedford police. The story of his arrest ran on the front pages of the New Bedford Standard-Times, showing a picture of a defiant Kenny being taken into custody. For eight months Kenny languished in prison awaiting trial.
In his letters he proclaimed his innocence while remaining uncertain what would become of him. Reading the letters, it was clear to me that the Carmo family—Charlie, George, and their mother—had become his family after his own had disintegrated. He referred to Mrs. Carmo as “Mother” and told George he thought of him as a younger brother. He revisited childhood memories, recalling previous summers of fun while riding double on a scooter.
He referred to Louie Carmo—George and Charlie’s younger brother and Kenny’s best friend—as his “twin.” Recalling Louie must have pained him, for three years earlier Louie had been allegedly murdered, poisoned by well-connected men who were brought in for questioning. While they were being questioned, an enraged Kenny stood across the street from the New Bedford police station firing bottles at the building in an unsuccessful attempt to get arrested so he could get inside to deliver his own version of justice. The men were never charged with Louie’s death. During Louie’s funeral services, Kenny had been so distraught that he had to be dragged away from his friend’s grave site. But that is not the only heartbreak the letters reveal.
Kenny wrote of more disappointment, saying that the only love he had ever known was “the destructive kind,” that he’d had one shot at true love and had lost her. “Guess it’s something I’ll just have to live with,” he wrote. And the way he lived with it was by believing that love and family were for other men but not for him. Heartbroken over his losses, he said he would never marry any woman, let alone a white woman.
The letters reveal glimpses of the Kenny who still commands the loyalty and love of those who knew him. He seems more concerned about the plight of others than about himself. He was happy for George and proud of him that he was getting married: “I believe a man should do what he feels in his heart . . . the heart is the way to happiness.” He told him to take care of his wife and new baby. His last words to George are telling, a fatherly bit of advice that speaks to me now, more than forty years later: “Keep family safe.”
Kenny was painfully aware of the precariousness of his situation. “Jail is not a place fit for a dog to stay,” he wrote. He knew life in prison awaited him if he were found guilty, a fate that he said was the equivalent of death. In each of the four letters, he insisted on his innocence, saying that he did nothing wrong and was confident he would be acquitted. In none of them did he mention boxing.
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The trial took place in the Plymouth County Courthouse in July 1969. Without air-conditioning in the ancient courtroom, even the proximity to Plymouth Harbor just outside the open windows did little to ameliorate the intense summer heat. The all-white jury listened to the state’s evidence that established Kenny’s horse was stabled near DeSylvia’s home and that Kenny had the boxing skills to inflict the kind of damage that killed the victim. But his attorney, Malcolm Jones, deftly countered the state’s evidence and made a mockery of the state medical examiner’s shabby handling of the body and the timeline of the alleged murder. Jones chose to keep Kenny off the witness stand, deciding that the state would be unable to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Late in the afternoon of July 16, after less than a day of deliberation, the jury came back with a verdict of not guilty. Kenny embraced Jones and Charlie Carmo, who had been a daily fixture in the courtroom throughout the trial. Back in New Bedford, the newly freed Kenny returned to the place that had always been his sanctuary, the boxing gym. He reconnected with one of his former trainers, Jerry Huston, and decided to make another run at boxing glory. Jerry was happy to take Kenny back. He knew of Kenny’s checkered past, but he had great personal affection for the young fighter. A year away from the ring did little to dull Kenny’s boxing skills. He was just twenty-three years old and was back in the ring within weeks of his release, fighting a national AAU middleweight champion to a draw, though the decision went to his opponent.
By February 1970, Kenny was back in Lowell fighting once more in the finals of the New England Golden Gloves tournament. He won the tournament for the third time, and in the aftermath, Kenny and Huston prepared for a spot in the National Golden Gloves championships in Las Vegas. Kenny had returned to New Bedford in triumph after the Lowell match and was interviewed by a local television sportscaster. In the video, he and Huston appeared on the broadcast together, and Kenny, in soft, barely audible tones, talked about turning pro that summer. Huston predicted a huge win for Kenny at the nationals. But Huston had a full-time job and could not leave to accompany Kenny to Las Vegas.
The Golden Gloves provided cornermen for each fighter, and Kenny easily won his first two bouts to advance to the finals. In the championship fight, Kenny apparently soundly defeated a white middleweight from Grand Rapids, Michigan, named Larry Woods, but Woods was awarded the decision by a tenth of a point. The crowd booed the decision and threw bottles and chairs into the ring.
Kenny believed the decision had been racially motivated. And as it turned out, the New Bedford he returned to from Las Vegas was about to explode in the racial violence of the riots of the summer of 1970. Though he hadn’t been politically active, Kenny could no longer ignore the growing rage in the West End streets. Kenny’s change in physical appearance reflected the changing times. Pictures of Kenny while in Las Vegas show a clean-shaven young man who had maintained the processed hairstyle in deference to his idol, Sugar Ray Robinson. But a few months later, he had grown a beard, grown his hair into an Afro, and had taken to wearing a red bandanna around his head.
Unemployment had sapped the African American community in New Bedford of pride and hope. The Black Panthers had established a base in the city, and confrontations with the police and the white community began to occur more frequently as a hot, tense summer began. The riots that had raged around the country in 1968 finally arrived at New Bedford’s doorstep. This waterfront city, its long ties to liberty a distant memory, suddenly became reacquainted with the struggle for access and opportunity.
On Wednesday, July 8, a routine traffic stop and the arrest of a black man in the West End ignited a night of clashes with police and firefighters. Groups of angry youths shouted “Off the pig!” amid fires, gunshots, and arrests. On the next night, violence escalated and then spread to the South End. Abandoned buildings were firebombed in an attempt to draw police away from Kempton Street, where the action was centered. Eventually, the police erected barricades around the West End to seal off the area.
On Saturday a group of West Enders, including African Americans, Cape Verdeans, and Hispanics, were gathered outside a club when a car screeched to a halt on the street. The car had swerved around the barricades and came tearing into the area. Three white men jumped from the car, and the driver leaned over the hood with a shotgun and fired wildly into the group. A seventeen-year-old Cape Verdean youth was struck, along with three others. The white men peeled away in their car, and the crowd grew into an angry mob.
Kenny emerged from the crowd and leaned down over the youth who was most seriously hurt and was stunned to see his cousin, Lester Lima, a gentle, nonviolent boy who was affectionately nicknamed Shoobie. Kenny, his brother Bobby, and another friend loaded Lester into a car and took him to St. Luke’s Hospital several blocks away, passing right by the house on Arnold Street. It was too late. Later that night, Lester died. The city exploded into full-scale riots and several days of shooting, looting, burning, and rage. State leaders, such as U.S. Senator Ed Brooke, came to New Bedford to try to quell the violence, and Senator Brooke asked Kenny and Charlie Carmo to be members of an ad hoc committee to help calm the community. Kenny’s stature as a local boxing hero made him an ironic figure in the quest for nonviolence, but with his arm in a sling as a result of a motorcycle accident, he grabbed a bullhorn and helped bring the city under a tense control. Less than two blocks away, my brothers Steven and Marc, our sister, Joni, and I were in a life-and-death struggle with our mother.
In one of the letters he wrote while imprisoned, Kenny, dejected and sullen over his circumstances, had said, “I’ve learned a lot about life.” And he had. By the age of twenty-three, Kenny had suffered an extraordinary series of crushing disappointments and losses, heartbreaks I don’t think he ever recovered from: the disintegration of his family after the fire that consumed their home; the early death of his mother when he was just fifteen; the tragic deaths of two siblings, Gordon and Elaine; the alleged murder of his best friend, Louie Carmo; his almost yearlong imprisonment; the riots that had taken the life of his cousin; his failed relationships.
For some men, losing that which you love can ignite a relentless search to find those things fate and circumstances have denied you. There is boldness in that mission, a confidence that it’s not possible to lose more than you already have. Hope is your companion in that search; a belief that those things which you yearn for can one day— someday—come to pass. And when you find that place, you will also find peace. I had recognized that quest in my own life and now I could see it in my father’s life as well.
For a time boxing appeared to offer Kenny that sanctuary, but the sweet science can also be a harsh mistress, and so it was with my father. The controversial decision in Las Vegas denied him a national title and could well have altered the arc of his life. Boxing had also blurred the lines between friends and acquaintances; Kenny couldn’t discern who was a friend and who was a flatterer, more interested in hanging onto his coattails.
I was born during this time, making Kenny something he was not ready to be: a father. Lois Gibbs believes Kenny knew of my existence, as does Kenny’s friend Ray Mott. And somehow Betty Robinson knew as well. It appears that while living with another woman—possibly his on-again, off-again girlfriend Evelyn Brown—Kenny had carried on a secretive relationship with my mother for several months. When my mother confronted him about the pregnancy, he initially denied it, claiming that the baby could not be his. But my mother, who knew the identity of each of her children’s fathers, had insisted. Kenny, who at least knew that it was possible for my mother to be pregnant with his child, adopted the conventional street wisdom of the time—the baby was my mother’s problem to solve.
As his losses racked up, and he searched in vain for some type of connection, Kenny muted his pain by turning to the harsh and unforgiving world of drugs, although his addiction wasn’t immediately apparent to those who knew him. For many, he was still Kenny the promising fighter, the fiercely devoted friend.
But Kenny’s vices were winning over his virtues. In time he abandoned the ring, and his family and friends watched helplessly as their champion slid away from his pedestal into a heroin-induced darkness. Fate would soon deal Kenny yet another unkind blow.
In March 1971, Kenny and his brothers planned a get-together with their father. Kenny still maintained strong ties to his father and had actually lived with him for a time. Joseph Pemberton had been a fighter, and the two of them often discussed the sweet science and Kenny’s promising boxing career. Right before Kenny went to Las Vegas, Kenny and his father took a playful picture in which his father is throwing a right cross to Kenny’s jaw and Kenny is pretending to be knocked out. This get-together with Joe Pemberton was to be extra-special; the “fight of the century” between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was to be fought in Madison Square Garden, and the Pemberton sons planned to take their father to a closed-circuit venue at nearby Lincoln Park to see the fight. They would never make it.
That afternoon, while resting in his favorite chair at his daughter Gerri’s home, Joseph Pemberton died of a massive heart attack. Kenny took his father’s death hard, nearly suffocating Gerri in a grief-stricken hug. Her brothers had to pull him away. A few days later, Kenny once again found himself standing at a grave site, devastated by the loss of someone he loved. He fell shuddering and trembling upon his father’s grave with such force that family members backed away from him. He stopped only when Gerri gently told him that their mother would not want to see him carrying on like he was.
A Chance in the World Page 24