by Brad Parks
Point is, things had been a little strained between Tina and me. She answered her cell phone with a testy: “What do you want?”
“I’m heading to East Orange.”
“What’s in East Orange?”
“The widow Kipps, from what I’ve been able to learn,” I said.
“Who told you to go after the widow Kipps?”
“No one. But I live about five minutes from her. I can make it there and try to get her talking before every television station in New York has a hairpiece and a microphone camped on her front lawn.”
Tina didn’t respond for a second or two. I’m sure she was trying to find some reason my plan was a bad one—because that’s sort of the way things had been going between us lately—but there were really no nits to pick.
“Fine,” she said. “Don’t screw it up.”
* * *
Knocking on the door of a woman who has just lost her husband—and then having the nerve to ask her all about it—is certainly not one of the cheerier parts of my chosen profession. Done poorly, it can leave you feeling like some exploitative, soul-sucking parasite who feasts on the misery of others. Some reporters flatly loathe the task, even citing it as a reason for leaving the business.
But, strange as it sounds, it might be one of the things I find most satisfying. It’s not that I enjoy other people’s suffering or that I find the whole business any less discomfiting than anyone else.
It’s that I see it as an opportunity to do some real good, in my small way. One of the fundamental things I believe as a writer is that words have the power to move people. They can make us feel angry or hateful or sad, sure. But they can also uplift us. They can provide hope. They can even comfort a grieving family.
And that’s what I went into a situation like this trying to do. I believed I could wade into the agony of the Kipps family, and by writing a sympathetic story about Darius—something that captured the best of the man, his service to others and the sacrifice he made—I could make things a little better. Maybe not right away, when everything was still so fresh. But maybe someday it could be something his widow could look at and read with a smile on her face.
With this in mind, I made the turn onto Rutledge Avenue, a street lined with mature trees and cracked sidewalks. East Orange could be a rough town, having long ago been overtaken by the same urban malaise that blighted much of Newark. But this was one of the more livable areas. The definition of “livable” was, of course, that the dope fiends, dealers, and delinquents tended to stay at least a few blocks away.
I slowed as I reached the Kippses’ residence, an aging two-story brick duplex with a flower bed full of dead leaves that had accumulated over the winter. There were no window treatments on the second floor, which gave the house an unoccupied look. Except, of course there were lights on. So obviously someone was home. I parallel parked, noting—with relief—the lack of vans with television logos on them. At least for now, it looked like I would have the place to myself.
Walking up a short concrete pathway toward the house, then up the brick steps onto a small front porch, I felt the usual excitement. You never really knew what you were going to get when you knocked on one of these doors. I could be welcomed into the home with open arms, tossed into the street on my ass, or anything in between.
So I knocked, then held my breath.
The door was answered by a medium-height, slender African American woman with dark smudges under her eyes. She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her feet were bare. She looked like she hadn’t slept that night. Or the previous night. Or, for that matter, the previous month.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Hi, I’m sorry to trouble you. I know this is a difficult time,” I said as apologetically as possible. “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I’m here to write a tribute to Darius.”
The word “tribute” was deliberate, of course. If I said I was there merely to write a “story,” there would still have been some doubt as to my intentions. I wanted to make it clear I was coming in peace.
“Oh,” she said, like this surprised her.
“I’m Carter Ross. Are you Mrs. Kipps?”
“Yes. I’m Noemi”—she pronounced it no-em-mee—“but call me Mimi. Everyone else does.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said, opening the door a little wider.
And, just like that, I was in. I walked into a living room filled with older women, most of them substantially larger than Mimi, all of them staring at me, all of them black.
I always get a kick out of white people who complain that blacks are “obsessed” with race and talk about it too much. If those white people could, just once, walk into a room like this, where suddenly they were the Other Race, they’d understand the “obsession” just a little better. Because you know what? We can all say we’re color-blind, and we can claim that race doesn’t matter in an America that has elected a black president.
But that’s foolishness. Race matters. It mattered at my prep school, where in a student body of five hundred there were maybe fifteen black kids, thirteen of whom had been brought there to play football or basketball. It mattered at my alma mater, Amherst College, where we were all supposedly enlightened multiculturalists, yet we still fell back into the easy comfort of our groups, black, brown, white, and yellow. It matters in my workplace, where editors have been known to pair reporter and assignment based on skin color, simply because you just couldn’t send a white reporter to write Story X, or you really had to send a Hispanic reporter to do Story Y. And until some distant time many centuries from now when there is a truly American race—when we’ve all interbred enough that the races are no longer distinct—it will continue to matter everywhere else in our society, too.
So I was the white guy in the room. And not just any white guy. I’m a purebred WASP, straight off the not-so-hardscrabble streets of Millburn by way of tennis camp. My quick read told me Mimi didn’t have a problem with white guys. She had bought the “tribute” line. But these other black women were still undecided. They were eyeing me with a mix of curiosity and hostility, their protective instincts fully engaged.
“This is the man from the newspaper,” she announced. “He’s here to write about Darius.”
“I just want to be able to write about what kind of person he was,” I interjected, “tell some nice stories about him.”
Mimi proceeded to introduce me to the six women in the room, a series of aunties and cousins whose names I didn’t quite register. I’d get them later. I didn’t even have my notebook out to write them down. For now, it was more important to smile pleasantly, make good eye contact, and shake a hand if it was offered to me.
Then she led me around to the corner, where there was a crib, one of those portable Pack ‘N Play things. Inside, a shriveled-looking baby slept soundly.
“This is Jaquille,” she said. “Darius’s son. He’s five months.”
That explained the raccoon eyes Mimi was sporting. I thought she looked like she hadn’t slept for a month. She probably hadn’t, with this little guy in her life.
And I do mean little. Since I hadn’t entered the reproductive portion of my life—Tina’s entreaties having been unsuccessful—I didn’t know from babies. But this one looked awfully small.
“He was born two months premature,” Mimi said, reading my mind. “He weighed three pounds, four ounces. He was in the hospital the first two months, because of some stuff with his lungs. But he’s fine, now. He’s up to nine pounds.”
“He’s beautiful,” I said, which was a flat-out lie. Like most newborns, Jaquille looked like a spindly legged alien with a human diaper attached to him. But saying that didn’t seem like it would ingratiate me to Jaquille’s mother.
“Darius was so proud of him. We have a daughter who’s seven, and he loves her like any dad loves his little girl. But he always wanted a boy. He said a man�
�s gotta have a son. So we tried and tried. Darius only had one testicle.”
Now there was a piece of information that likely wouldn’t be making it into the next day’s paper.
“And we were wondering if maybe that had something to do with it,” Mimi continued. “We had him tested, and his count was pretty low.”
Yet another piece.
“But we kept trying and praying. I had just about given up, but then God heard our prayers and gave us a son. I always thought of him as my miracle baby.”
Mimi stared at Jaquille, while I furtively studied Mimi out of the corner of my eye. She had this calm about her that was almost eerie. A woman who loses her husband and is suddenly left to raise two children, one of them an infant, by herself? She ought to be oozing tears, snot, and despondence.
Instead, she was gazing down at her baby beatifically, like the Virgin Mary in a Renaissance frieze. She must have still been in shock, the tragedy so new her mind couldn’t yet process it.
One of the aunties, the one sitting in the corner, picked up the dialogue where Mimi left off: “You should have seen Darius with that boy. He visited him in the hospital every morning after his shift ended. He would just go in there and talk and talk and talk. He’d say, ‘You gonna be a Eagles fan, just like your daddy. And you gonna root for the Sixers, just like your daddy. And we gonna watch baseball together. And I’m gonna teach you to catch a ball and throw a ball. And you’re gonna be real smart. And you’re gonna go to college. And your daddy is going to be so proud of you.’”
Mimi chimed in: “Darius said our boy came out small, but he was going to love him so much he couldn’t help but get big. He was just going to fill that little boy up with his love.”
I looked down at Jaquille, the erstwhile miracle, and tried to swallow the cantaloupe that was suddenly growing in my throat. Right then, I knew what my story was going to be. It would be written as a letter to Jaquille, to be read on the day he graduated from college. And it would tell him all about the father he never got a chance to know.
* * *
Over the next few hours—as a succession of relatives, friends, and neighbors wandered to the house to offer their respects—I learned about who that man was.
Darius Kipps was born in Camden and grew up in nearby Pennsauken. Both places were in South Jersey, which explained why he rooted for all those Philadelphia teams. His father had been a cop, too, putting in twenty-five years with the Camden PD and retiring with a trunk full of commendations, which told me a little something about the tree from which Darius had fallen. Camden has long ranked in the top ten as the toughest American city in which to be a cop.
As a teenager, Darius was a bit of a prankster but also a natural leader, so he became the ringmaster of a group of quasi-misfits, who liked to party a little too much. It didn’t sound like they were bad kids, by any stretch. But it was subtly explained to me there may have been a mailbox or two that succumbed to Darius’s idea of a good time. I also heard an account of how he organized a group of fourteen guys to lift a principal’s car and move it back to the Dumpsters behind school. The distraught man ended up reporting it stolen before someone finally let him in on the gag.
After Darius graduated high school, he tried a variety of jobs, none of which really fit him. And finally he went to school and got an associate’s degree in criminal justice: police work was in his blood, after all. He took the police exam and posted a high score, such that he had a number of job offers—well-qualified black candidates were always in demand from departments looking to improve their diversity. His family urged him to accept an offer from one of the cozy, suburban police departments, where he wouldn’t have to dodge the same dangers as his father.
But Darius wanted to be where the action was. He wanted to be where he felt he could do the most good. He chose Newark.
Smart and hardworking, with those natural leadership skills, he rose quickly through the ranks, never going long without moving up. After a few years on patrol, with his potential obvious to all, he earned his detective’s shield. A few years after that, he aced his sergeant’s exam and got that promotion, too. Lieutenant couldn’t have been far away.
He was the kind of cop who kept the scanner on at home and listened to it as background noise—the way some people keep the television on—just so he knew what his fellow officers were up to. And if he heard something that sounded like trouble and was close? He stored his gun and his shield by the door so he could grab them quickly on the way out. He had once nabbed a carjacker that way. It was the kind of commitment to the job that had earned him commendation after commendation, just like his old man.
But he didn’t just look out for other cops. I heard another story about a witness he worked with during one of his cases. The kid had been shot up pretty badly and was in the hospital for a while. Darius kept visiting the kid, finding different ways to cheer him up, and kept doing it even after the case was closed. Last anyone had heard, the kid had recovered and Darius had helped him get a part-time job with Newark Parks and Recreation.
Meanwhile, it seemed the former prankster matured into a level-headed, responsible young man. Around the time he started working as a cop, he met Mimi, fell for her, and fell hard. They had been introduced through a friend of a friend. She had heard of his reputation as a hard-partying boozer, and being a teetotaler herself, she told him she couldn’t date someone who used alcohol. He quit cold turkey. They were married within a year.
“He said we were soul mates, so there was no point in waiting,” Mimi said.
A few years into the marriage, they had their daughter, Jasey. They bought the duplex in East Orange because Darius felt a family ought to have a house to call home. He took to fatherhood quickly, doting on his daughter.
“He’d kill me if I told you this,” said the corner auntie, “but he let that little girl paint his fingernails and toenails. He’d be running around before work, looking for the nail polish remover, trying to get that stuff off. Sometimes he ran out of time. I’m sure the guys down at the station just loved that.”
It sounded like Jaquille’s birth had cut into father-daughter time quite a bit. But once things settled down, he had talked of surprising Jasey with a family trip to Disney World as a present from her new baby brother. He had also been talking about moving his growing brood to a single-family house, maybe in a town with a better school system.
“He was all for the kids,” Mimi told me. “He was always saying, ‘It ain’t about us no more.’”
All in all, he seemed like a heck of a guy. I’m sure some of the stories were being embellished for my benefit, but I didn’t mind. Telling lies about the recently deceased is a long-standing tradition in our—and many other—cultures, and I wasn’t about to take too hard a look at them. As a reporter, I’ve learned to make a distinction between lies that could hurt someone and those that won’t. If I ended up making a slain police officer smell a bit rosier in death than he had in real life, it was hard to see who would be injured by that.
Throughout my interviewing, the phone in my pocket buzzed intermittently—no doubt Tina calling, looking for an update—but I wasn’t about to answer it. I was getting great material out of these people, and I didn’t want to break the spell.
The only mildly surprising thing is that none of the people knocking on the front door of the Kipps house were fellow members of the media. I would have thought for sure the rest of the horde would have learned about the dead cop and descended, locustlike, on the widow Kipps. It was hard to keep the lid on a story like this.
But there was no one. So as noontime came and went, I kept adding more good stuff in my notebook until, having filled it, I announced it was getting time for me to go. Mimi gave me her cell number, which I stored in my phone with a promise to keep in touch.
The last thing Mimi showed me was a picture of Darius with his kids at his birthday party a week earlier. There was a conical paper hat perched crookedly atop his bald head and secured with a thin
white elastic band. His smile seemed to take up the entire photo. He was a burly guy, and the children practically disappeared in his arms—his infant son cradled tenderly in one, his daughter tucked in the other. They were arms that held and loved, arms that offered comfort and protection, the arms of a man who considered himself a father and a guardian.
“You can keep that if you want,” Mimi said, handing me a printout, which I slipped in the back of my notebook. “I made a bunch of copies this morning. That’s really how I want people to remember him. I can’t believe he only had a week to live in that picture.”
It gave me the opening to finally pose the uncomfortable question, the one I nevertheless had to ask: “What has the Newark Police Department told you about your husband’s death?”
“They didn’t tell me anything,” Mimi said.
“What do you mean?”
“The chaplain came out last night and told me Darius wasn’t coming home, that he had died, and that’s all I’ve heard so far. I don’t know the details yet. I’m not sure if I even want to know. My husband was in law enforcement. I … we all, all of us wives, we talk about this and we prepare for it. We hope it never comes, of course, but we have to prepare. However he died, it doesn’t change who he was in life. And that’s what I want to think about.”
* * *
When I got back out on the street, my phone told me I had missed five calls, all of them from Tina. She had left no voice messages, just a text: “No story. Come back in.”
“The hell there’s no story,” I said out loud to my phone. In what parallel universe was she living? I had a notebook crammed with material that begged to differ.
In a huff, I called her but got voice mail on both her work and cell numbers. Which was just as well. Some arguments were better had in person.
My car was, unsurprisingly, still sitting where I parked it. For some people, this is not a given. Newark and its surrounding environs are somewhat notorious for car thefts, having raised some of the nation’s leading automobile pilferers for several generations now. But that is one of the only things I don’t have to worry about when it comes to my ride, a six-year-old Chevy Malibu. Anyone who cared enough about cars to steal one would be embarrassed to be seen in mine.