The Moth Presents All These Wonders

by Catherine Burns

  My story begins in the late sixties, when my wife and me and our three little girls moved to Atlanta because we wanted to be a part of the civil-rights movement. It seemed like the most promising thing happening in our country.

  We found a job working with the Quakers in a very poor neighborhood. A lot of kids used to come over to our house and play, and one of them was named Patricia.

  She was eight years old. Looked like her hair hadn’t been braided in ages—just terrible. Impetigo sores down her legs.

  She told me she never knew when she went home from school whether she would have an apartment to live in or not, because her mother was an alcoholic, and sometimes drank up the rent money. Often they had no place to sleep. Patricia started spending the night with us whenever her mother lost their apartment.

  She was one year older than our oldest girl, and she became very much a part of our family. When we moved away after two and a half years, she asked if she could come with us, and we were happy to have her. We moved to rural Georgia, and she lived there with us and blossomed.

  She grew into this beautiful young woman. She had a great sense of beauty and art and color. She made her high-school-graduation dress. Painted a mural on the high-school wall. She went on and graduated with highest honors from Fisk University in art. She went back to Atlanta and earned her master’s degree in library science and worked in the public library, with children who were often unloved and uncared for, such as she had been.

  She bought a house in a changing neighborhood. One night in November, she came home late from work. A crack addict who was stealing for his habit saw no light on in her house and went around the back. He broke in the window, stole some things, and took them to the local crack house. Got his first hit of crack.

  Later he was walking around the neighborhood, and there was still no light on, so he entered the house again. He was a heavy user and wanted another dose of crack, so he took a whole bunch of things.

  Trish came home while he was gathering them up.

  He hid in a closet. She opened the closet door and fell backwards. He tied her hands behind her back. I learned later that they had a conversation, which sounded exactly like Patricia.

  She told him to get help with his drug habit. She told him where there was food in the refrigerator. He told her to put burglar bars on the back of the house and always leave a light on.

  He asked about the sewing dummies that were in the house. And she told him that a woman named Susie—my wife—had taught her how to sew, and she made bridal gowns as a sideline income.

  He got a lot of stuff, and then went back out onto the streets and got a massive hit of crack. Coming by the house again, he thought she would be free by now. But the lights were still out. So he went in again.

  He asked for sex.

  She said, “You’ll have to kill me first.” And so he strangled her and violated her body.

  When we learned about this, it was the darkest thing that had ever happened to our family. We’d known death. But not like this, at the hand of another human being. Not this…brutality. We were all devastated.

  I’m a Quaker. I don’t believe in violence.

  And I yelled out, “I’ll kill the bastard!”

  I was furious at what he had done to our child. I wanted him to hurt.

  It’s very beautiful where we live in Tennessee, along a state scenic wild river. I’d go walking, and these visions of what had happened to Trish would come crashing in on me. I couldn’t control them.

  They would come and haunt me, no matter where I was or how beautiful it was around me. It was like he had control over me, and was pushing my head in the mud.

  As I said, I’m a Quaker, and part of what’s important to us is that we find God in every human being. And I knew I had to find that in this man.

  My first instinct had been that he was a monster. He was no human being. He deserved no compassion from me. Then I wanted to know what had happened to him that made it possible for him to do such a deed.

  Little by little I learned a bit about his life.

  His name was Ivan Simpson. He was born in a mental hospital. When he was eleven years old, his mother took him and his younger brother and little sister to a swimming pool, and declared that God was asking her to drown them because they were enemies of God.

  He and his little brother escaped, and he stood there while she drowned his little sister in front of him. He said he felt relief that his sister was not going to be tormented any longer.

  I couldn’t help thinking that here we are, the richest country the world has ever known—the most powerful. And there was no one for this little boy. What would I be like if the woman who brought me into the world had tried to destroy me? It wasn’t that I was trying to excuse what he had done. But I felt for him…as another human being, suffering.

  There was a hearing in Atlanta. The final hearing in his case. I had written the judge earlier, and told the judge how much we loved Patricia, and how much a part of our life she was. My youngest girl couldn’t remember life without Patricia.

  At the hearing they read all the charges against him. And I just sat with my wife, Susie, and held her hand and cried. I was thankful I was deaf, and that I couldn’t hear a lot of what they said. Susie noticed that we had a lot of friends in the courtroom, and there was nobody for him…no one.

  After he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole, those of us who knew Trish were given an opportunity to say how the crime had affected us.

  Her cousin got up and said, “I hate you, Ivan Simpson. I hate you because you took my beloved cousin away from me. I hate you because you’ll see the dawn, and she’ll never see the dawn again. And I hate you because my taxes are going to feed you.” She was weeping.

  And then it was my turn. I’d printed out a statement, because I didn’t know how steady I would be.

  I said how much we loved her. That she was not our daughter by any claim of birth, but she was our daughter by every claim of love.

  How sometimes when you do what you think is a kind thing, like taking in a needy child, you can pat yourself on the back. But how we received far more than we ever gave. She was God’s gift to our family. I described how she’s buried on our farm, and when our family got together to try to think of what to put on her tombstone, we found this saying: “All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.” I said to the judge, “Love is that candle. Love does not seek another death. Love brings life and healing and wholeness.”

  At the very end I said, “I don’t hate you, Ivan Simpson, but I hate with all my soul what you did to my daughter.”

  And then, it was almost as if two hands were on my shoulders, and I turned around and faced him when I said my last words.

  I said I wished “for all of us who had been so wounded by this crime, I wish that we might find God’s peace. And I wish this for you also, Ivan Simpson.”

  And our eyes met for the first time. The tears were streaming down his cheeks. I’ll never forget the look—like a soul in hell.

  He was being led off, and he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole, so he knew he was going to die in jail. He asked to come to the microphone.

  Twice, with the tears streaming down his cheeks, he said, “I’m so sorry for the pain I have caused. I’m so sorry for the pain I’ve caused.”

  There was a woman sitting next to us, whose job was to help people through these painful moments. She turned to me and said, “There’s something we rarely see: true remorse.”

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about what had happened in the courtroom. I could have just said, “You murdered my daughter…and you’re sorry? Big deal.”

  But I couldn’t. He was a man off the street. He had nothing. But he’d given me the only thing he had. He had nothing but his apology. With those words he’d asked me to forgive him.

  And he could have walked out of that courtroom and said, “To hell with all of you.
My life is over.”

  But he didn’t.

  I knew then that I had forgiven him. And I felt a peace that I hadn’t had in a long time. I felt a great burden lifted from me.

  I wrote him a letter. He wrote back. One of the things he said was that he missed God’s touch. Ever since he had killed Patricia, he felt as though God had abandoned him. But he said he felt he heard God’s voice by way of compassion in what I’d said in the courtroom.

  We sent him a Christmas package. And I thought, My God, what are you doing? What are you doing, sending a Christmas present to the man who murdered your daughter?

  But I knew I had to do it. Because I think when you forgive someone, you start to care about them. And I knew he had no one. No one in the world.

  We had a small group of people in Cookeville, Tennessee, where we live. We thought we’d maybe get together with other people who had lost loved ones to violence like this.

  I remember one woman whose brother had been killed fifteen years before, coming and telling her story. Her brother was a doctor. He was killed by a man off the streets—to her, a nobody. And she was as angry as if it had happened the day before.

  And I knew that was no way to live. That was not life. A friend of mine told me that when you hate, you take poison and you expect the other person to die. And I think that’s true. Revenge and anger hold you in the past; forgiveness can free you to go into the future.

  My wife and I went to south Georgia to visit Ivan in prison. It took a long time to arrange it. But we felt it was, again, something we needed to do.

  So we sat down together and talked for two and a half hours. It was just extraordinary. Because I’m very deaf, I was sitting very close to him. He was unshackled.

  When it got time for us to leave, he stood up, and I did, too. And it seemed the most natural thing in the world that we had our arms around one another.

  It was an unbelievable moment, that I could have my arms around the man who murdered my daughter.

  I think forgiveness is possible, even for the worst among us.

  And I do believe we all need forgiveness, God knows.

  HECTOR BLACK was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. He served in the army during World War II and graduated from Harvard in 1949. He worked in an interdenominational ministry in New Haven for one year, lived in a communal Christian community for eleven years, and later moved to an impoverished Atlanta neighborhood to work with Quakers. He founded Hidden Springs Nursery in rural Georgia and later moved the business to Tennessee, where he still lives with his family.

  This story was told on April 16, 2013, at The Players in New York City. The theme of the evening was Committed: Stories from the Inside. Director: Catherine Burns.

  I was born in Los Angeles, in a house, in a canyon. It was resting in a stand of palm trees that cast thin, unmoving shadows…like prison bars. It was very California Gothic.

  I am very California Gothic.

  I am the child of those people that you would see in ads for cigarettes in the back of Life magazine—those handsome people who were always wearing terry-cloth robes and penny loafers, smoking cigarettes, and looking like they just heard the funniest joke of their life. The Virginia Slims woman married the Marlboro Man and had me.

  It’s very California Gothic to have your best friend’s mother, who is a movie star, keep her Oscar in her kitchen, next to the salt and the cumin and the Coumadin.

  It’s very California Gothic to see Joan Didion crying in her green Jaguar at a stoplight on Moorpark…below Ventura.

  It’s also very California Gothic to have a cousin who is a rock star. My cousin is Chuck Negron, the lead singer of the group Three Dog Night. And he bears a startling resemblance to Charles Manson.

  Now, when you were a kid like me in 1970, growing up in Los Angeles, you knew that you shared the city with Charles Manson and his family, because that grizzly, murderous night of mayhem and helter-skelter was all anybody could talk about. And for those of you who are too young to know what helter-skelter is, it was kind of like twerking…but with blood.

  It was really scary. And really horrifying.

  And my parents were always going out on the town; they were never at home. They were always getting dressed up and leaving, like in Mad Men. I’d be home alone.

  One night they went out the door.

  My father stopped—and he said, “I want you to close every door and window in this house, because I don’t want these hippies to come in here and degut you.”

  That was an option in my childhood. To be degutted. And it left a tremendous psychic scar on my soul about the world being very scary and horrible. That I needed protection.

  I’m still very disturbed by hippies and longhairs and headbands, and large candles, and beads, and bandannas. I just don’t like any of it.

  I was twelve years old at the time. I was a tween. I was a changeling…because I was changing. Into a man. But childhood is a place where your fears are disproportionate. My fears were so huge.

  But so were my goals. And…and that’s where the magic can happen, in these goals.

  Now, my goal—my particular goal in my childhood—was to own a gorilla or ape. Anything from the monkey family that I could just, you know, play hide-and-go-seek with. Shoot dice. Swimming. Light ironing.

  My parents were from New York, from the Bronx. They didn’t have any connection to animals.

  And they were like, “You’re never going to get a monkey. You will never have an ape in this house. So get over it.”

  But something really magical had happened that Christmas of 1970. My Uncle Ishmael—that’s his real name—was a trucker, and he owned his own flatbed truck. This meant that he could go around and get stuff that fell off of other people’s trucks. He would arrive at our house one day in that flatbed truck, and it would be full of boxes of Roma tomatoes. Then, the following day, there’d be stacks of Eve and Lemon Twist cigarettes.

  Well, one day he was closing down this raggedy-ass Circus Vargas in the parking lot of the Hollywood Bowl on Highland, and he discovered a monkey that had been left behind.

  A live monkey. Named Carroll. Two r’s, two l’s. And we knew that because it was written on the cage. A free cage.

  And that’s what clinched the deal. Because my parents were like, “Well, if it’s free…how bad could it be?”

  Carroll arrived on that flatbed truck, in his cage, surrounded by boxes of grapefruit. I was so excited. When I looked into that monkey’s round eyes, I knew that he would understand everything that I had to say and think. And that I would experience unconditional love.

  Well, the monkey promptly squatted, shat into its hand, and then threw it into my face…underpaw.

  And from the shadow I heard the ice clink in my mom’s drink. And she said, “Well, it’s your monkey.”

  And it was my monkey. I loved my monkey so much, and I stuck with my monkey when everybody turned against him. Sometimes they even put a sheet over his cage. I stuck with him when he willfully and intentionally fucked my grandmother’s mink hat, missionary style. (I took the blame.)

  I never gave up on that monkey. Because Carroll was my most treasured early Christmas present.

  But he was not our only unexpected gift that holiday season. That Christmas, in 1970, the Santa Ana winds blew too hard against the glass in cold, frightening Los Angeles.

  I fell asleep on Christmas Eve, and when I awoke, I looked out the upstairs window at the driveway and saw a van pull up in front of the house and turn off the lights and just stop. Nothing happened, for thirty minutes. It just sat there.

  I realized, This is it. This is my nightmare, it’s going to come true.

  And I thought to myself, Well, I’m twelve. At least I made it to twelve.

  Then eventually the doors opened up, and this big plume of smoke came out. And these hippies staggered out on wobbly feet and started slinking up to the front of the house—Charles Manson and the family. I felt vulnerable lying there in my Charlie
Brown sleeping T-shirt. And I waited for the physical and emotional attack to begin.

  There was a knock on the door, and I heard my mother’s voice, muffled.

  I knew she was dead, throat cut. I’d read the papers.

  But then I heard her say, “Grilled cheese sandwiches for everyone!” And I’m thinking, Why is my mother offering protein to serial killers?

  Then my father bursts in the door, and he says, “Your cousin Chuck is here. Come down.”

  I timidly follow my father down the stairs. I see what appears to be Mama Cass Elliot, Jim Morrison, and assorted longhairs devouring Christmas cookies.

  My cousin stood by the record player, shyly holding a new Three Dog Night album.

  He told us he was going to play a song that none of us had heard before. Side A, Song 1.

  [Singing] “Jeremiah was a bullfrog. Was a good friend of

  mine. I never understood a single word he said, but I

  helped him a-drink-a his wine.”

  And on that cold, windy night, everyone stood up and started to dance. My father grabbed my mother, and they started dancing. I looked over and Jim Morrison—the Jim Morrison—was dancing the jitterbug with my grandmother on the coffee table.

  It was so extraordinary. It was magnificent. The hippies and the longhairs were all singing along to choruses of:

  [Singing] “Joy to the world, all the boys and girls now.”

  And then the song was over, and someone picked up the needle and put it back at the beginning. And the song continued, and the dancing continued. And there’s something emblematic about certain California Christmas memories, and here is one that was transcendent. Rock and roll.

  And this is what made my monkey legendary.

  Carroll came hurtling down the stairs. He’d escaped his cage. He went right up to the stereo and started dancing. Had we forgotten? Carroll was a circus monkey. And this was his cue:

  [Singing] “You know I love the ladies.”

  His arms outstretched like rubber bands. And he started picking off the ornaments from the Christmas tree.