Tell the Truth & Shame the Devil
Page 19
She hung up and just as Brittanie was coming back in the front door with the food, Kat came running, out of breath, her chest heaving. She could barely get her words out.
“They, they, they just shot Mike Mike!” she screamed.
“Who?”
The bag of sandwiches slipped from Brittanie’s hands and landed with a thud on the floor.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Brittanie let out a moan.
Mama stood up slowly, thinking Kat must’ve made a mistake.
MJ and Kiah started screaming, talking over each other, “Mike Mike! Mike Mike got shot? Mama, what is happening?”
“Don’t leave this house!” Mama ordered MJ and Kiah.
Brittanie burst out the screen door and took off running toward Canfield Drive, which was just off the short lane Mama lived on at the back of the complex. Mama was running behind her. The last thing she was worried about was her heart.
“Nette . . . Nette Pooh!” Brittanie’s voice cracked, in and out of a high-pitched quiver, then they stopped. Between big gulping sounds, she got out eight words to me: “Nette Pooh, the police just shot Mike Mike.”
I was paralyzed at first, and then a gust of wind shot through my body. I took off like lightning. All I could think was Oh God, I gotta get to my son, make sure he all right.
I burst into the front doors of Straub’s, frantically shouting, “I need to get to my son! The police just shot my son! Get me to Ferguson, please!” I screamed before collapsing into my coworker Erica’s arms.
• • • •
Mama was huffing and puffing by the time she reached where Brittanie was standing. Her mouth was moving like a fish that had been washed up on the riverbank. She couldn’t breathe. When she saw Mike Mike’s body laying out there in the street, she screamed.
“Can I hold him?” Mama begged the police. Of course they wouldn’t let her. Mama stumbled back to the house.
Brittanie’s phone rang. It was Déja. “What happened to Mike Mike?”
“Déja, I’mma call you back,” Brittanie said.
“Tell me what happened?” Déja begged.
“The police shot Mike Mike, Déja,” Brittanie said.
Déja started screaming into the phone, and then she hung up. She immediately got Moo Moo and Jazzy together, and they started walking to Mama’s house.
By the time I jumped out of my coworker’s car at the top of Canfield Drive, it was filled with people and police cars. I spotted Big Mike and we both started running.
They had covered Mike Mike’s body by the time we got there, but Brittanie, Mama, Bernard, and Kat had seen him. I was going out of my mind begging for information, answers, something. But the cops told me nothing, no matter how loud I screamed, cursed, or punched the air.
Time kept ticking. One hour, two hours, three, then four, then four and a half. Covered or not covered, he was left out like old rotting garbage. Leaving somebody’s child out there like the police did wasn’t procedure, or protocol, or even human.
My baby’s body, underneath a white sheet, motionless. The bullet had blown his red cap off and it was resting quietly several feet away.
Then time just stopped and so did my breath.
• • • •
They took Mike Mike’s body away and didn’t even allow me to give him a proper good-bye. Maybe I wouldn’t have wanted to see him like he was, but I’m his mama. That should’ve been my choice. They said it was because this was an official police investigation. But how are the police going to investigate themselves?
Louis grabbed a piece of cardboard, scribbled words on it, and ran to the corner, holding up a sign that read FERGUSON POLICE JUST EXECUTED MY UNARMED SON.
I waited and waited, walked up and down the hot concrete, sweating till my hair fell limp and began to curl and kink up at the roots. Who had killed my baby? I was on a mission, and I needed his name. I wanted to know what he looked like. I wanted to look him right in the eye, and ask him why. Why had he, a police officer, just murdered my unarmed son. But all the cops were tight-lipped. They were protecting the killer, but who had been protecting my son?
I was dizzy under the sweltering heat. Brittanie was trying to be strong for me, but she kept breaking down into tears herself. At one point we was both walking around aimlessly trying to get answers.
“Nette Pooh, we need to find somebody . . .” Her words trailed off. Her face had a pained and confused expression on it. I saw a short, round officer and swiftly made my way to him. I was determined to get his attention. He sharply motioned for me to back up.
“Just settle down!” he ordered.
“Settle down?” I said, jumping up and down. I threw a plastic water bottle hard at the sidewalk. The water splattered on the pavement. “That muthafucka shot my baby, and you tellin’ me to settle down? Kiss my ass. That’s what you do!” I turned and walked away, but not before taking my hand and yanking a piece of the yellow crime-scene tape down.
• • • •
Me and Brittanie slowly moved toward the bloodstained pavement where Mike Mike’s body had been left under the baking sun and stood in a daze, and I began shaking my head. “Why?” I called out. The police had left him out there like he wasn’t nobody’s. But I needed them and the rest of the world to know that Mike Mike did belong to somebody, a whole damn family, and he was mine before he was anybody else’s.
A crowd of strangers gathered around, chanting, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
A hand reached through the crowd and handed me a bouquet of roses. I pulled off each rose petal and dropped it on the pavement, covering what was now sacred ground to me.
More police cars rushed into the area. It was as if they were daring anybody to get out of hand. Helicopters swarmed overhead. News cameras were rolling, and some guy clicked photos of me. A TV reporter shoved a microphone in my face and asked, “What do you have to say about what happened to your son?”
“What I got to say is to the policeman who murdered my son,” I said, looking directly into the camera. “You’re not God! You don’t get to decide when you get to take somebody from here!” I could feel a powerful force rising up in me. “You don’t do a dog like that. You didn’t have to shoot him eight times if he was doin’ nothin’ to you and you was tryin’ to stop him!”
Each word I shouted made my body jerk forward. “You just shot all through my baby’s body. This was wrong and coldhearted!”
“What are the police saying to you right now about what’s happened to your son?” the woman reporter asked me.
“They haven’t told me anything. They wouldn’t even let me identify my son. The only way I knew it was my son was from people out here showing me his picture on the Internet!”
“He threw his hands up! He ain’t have no gun. The boy threw his hands up, and the police just shot him,” I heard a woman yell out from the crowd.
Louis was holding me from behind, but when we heard that, he slumped over my shoulders and started to wail in a low tone.
“You took my son away from me!” I wanted my words to rip through that officer. “You know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and graduate? You know how many black men graduate? Not many! Because you bring them down to this type of level where they feel like ‘I don’t have nothin’ to live for anyway. They gon’ try to take me out anyway.’ ”
All breath had escaped me. I felt myself getting limp, but Louis was right there holding me up on my feet.
A man stepped through the crowd and ushered us over to a prayer circle. Some were young, some old. There were arms stretched out to the sky and toward me.
“Lord, we just come here now, and we ask that you lift this family up, this mother and this father.”
His words were firm, and I started to feel breath in my body again.
A woman reached out and placed her hand on my arm.
“We know that you are the answer to everything and every situation. God, we ask that you help us to endure this situation,” the man
continued.
The crowd started growing larger and larger. I didn’t know who was a preacher or just a caring supporter, but I welcomed everybody. I had never had this many people praying around me in my life, let alone for me and mine. Another man joined in with his spirit-filled message, raising his arms in the air. “You are the strength of our lives, and, Lord, we need you this hour. Strengthen us today. We ask that your will be done!”
I turned back into Louis’s arms, and he rocked me back and forth.
I was begging the police for answers, but my words fell on deaf ears. The cop who killed my son had vanished into thin air.
My son was gone.
• • • •
That night, me and Louis, Mama, and Brittanie went up on West Florrisant to stand with the protestors for a peaceful candlelight vigil. But you could feel the tension building in the air. Young people were getting fired up as they shouted, “No justice, no peace!” The chanting got louder and angrier. “Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
Suddenly, I heard the sound of breaking glass, and store alarms began to sound. We were rushed away from the scene into a nearby building with NAACP leaders. I watched black men and women, even kids as young as ten, running afraid. I saw people covering their faces with bandannas and T-shirts, running with everything in their hands from car rims to sneakers to boxes of hair extensions. Car tires skidded and burned rubber out of parking lots.
I was furious as I watched all this. These people were disrespecting the memory of Mike Mike, and none of this was going to do any good for my cause—seeking justice for my son. My legs felt weak, and I was light-headed. I just wanted to go home.
August 10, 2014
It had been twenty-four hours since Mike Mike was killed. I still didn’t have no answers. I still didn’t have a name of the cop. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, a cigarette hanging half off my lip, just looking into space, sweaty and cold at the same time. My heart was beating slow. I don’t know what time I woke up or went to bed. The world was spinning one hundred miles an hour around me, but I was stuck on Canfield Drive.
I heard voices coming from the kitchen—Louis, Daddy, I don’t know who else. I couldn’t make out what anybody was saying. The kids were at Mama’s. I needed to check on them and Mama and Brittanie, but I couldn’t stop shaking long enough to actually get up and move about. I felt like if I did I’d break into a million pieces. I closed my eyes and the tears came again. This time harder. My whole body began to tremble.
Mike Mike’s cell phone was broken, so I didn’t speak to him the night before he was shot or that morning. But I didn’t worry because he was with his grandmother. I was racking my brain trying to piece together everything we talked about in our last conversation.
“Mama, my phone broke; I need to get my phone fixed.” I could tell he didn’t want to ask me for no money. He hated to be a burden.
“I get paid next week, and I’ll give it to you then,” I said, busying myself, folding laundry.
“OK, Mama.”
Mike Mike was never a kid who asked for much. I knew how much his phone meant to him.
“Mike Mike, look, I’mma get it fixed. Just use your laptop if you need to do that social media stuff,” I said.
But it was too late now.
August 11, 2014
The next morning the television flickered. I saw the St. Louis County police chief, Jon Belmar, appear on the screen. I could only get a moan out to Louis, who was in the other room. He sat down next to me and grabbed my hand. My stomach began to churn.
“I cannot say at this time how many times the subject was struck by gunfire. It’s hard to know if it was more than just a couple, but I don’t think it was many more than that. The medical examiner is conducting a medical examination today to determine that, and please keep in mind it’s going to take as long as six weeks.”
He still refused to name the officer who had shot Mike Mike.
“They need to show the cop’s face like they showing Mike Mike!” Louis said, shaking his head.
“They some cowards!” I screamed at the television.
I didn’t want to see another second of the news. I stalked into the living room and sat down for what seemed like hours in a zombie state. I didn’t even hear my husband let my coworker Miss B in. My face was swollen, and I had cried so much it hurt to even look up. She touched me on my shoulder. I turned toward her.
“I just came by to see if you needed anything, Lezley,” she whispered softly.
I couldn’t answer. She swallowed hard, not sure what to say next. “I’m not gonna stay, but we all prayin’ for you. Your customers are, too. Um, Mrs. Hirschfield came by the store and wanted me to give you this.” She pulled out an envelope and handed it to me.
I opened it slowly and pulled out a picture. It had a tiny note written on it. I couldn’t believe it was a class picture of me in the fourth grade at Reed Elementary. I was trying to make sense of how Mrs. Hirschfield got this.
“That lady was real upset after seein’ the news. She wanted us all to know that she really knew you. She even wanted everyone to know that your son couldn’t have done nothin’ wrong, because you were a good person, and you had to have raised a good son.”
Just like I didn’t notice Miss B coming in, it didn’t register that she had left. I just held the picture, my hand trembling. Mrs. Hirschfield’s son had been my elementary school classmate, and they remembered me from back then. From the moment I met her at Straub’s, it always felt like I knew her from somewhere else. Now it all made sense.
“They gonna set up a fund for you at Straub’s,” Louis said softly.
I turned toward him and nodded, placing my hand over my mouth. I had been loyal to Straub’s for all these years, but I never imagined that they’d do something like this for me.
Even as my community pulled together to support my family, last night’s looting made it clear that things were becoming dangerously divided in St. Louis.
For the black people, Mike Mike getting shot was like an old scab being pulled off a wound filled with racism. Young people were mad about not having jobs, money, how the white police mainly be treating young black men—pulling them over, locking them up, beating them down. Older black people felt like it was time to raise their voices. Some white people just saw the shooting as the police doing their job and looked at the black people out there looting as animals. I was upset at the looting, too. Why would we tear up our own neighborhood? And I didn’t want anybody doing anything in Mike Mike’s name if it wasn’t about getting that cop convicted. At the same time, I’ve been around a long time, and I know what it’s like to be mad because you feel like you don’t have any opportunities out there. I just didn’t want any more violence. I didn’t want anybody else to get hurt or killed.
My cousin Chevelle was rounding up lawyers. I didn’t know at the time that Daddy had called Reverend Al Sharpton.
• • • •
“Nette, we gonna get the Trayvon Martin lawyers, Benjamin Crump and Daryl Parks. We gotta make sure you get the publicity you need, and they the new civil rights lawyers out here. What do you think?” Chevelle’s voice was going in and out. I was only seeing parts of him. His long, slender fingers rubbing the top of his salt-and-pepper-speckled hair, the hem of his tailored slacks, and the leather laces of his Italian dress shoes made a quick clicking sound from him nervously tapping his foot.
I could hear Daddy’s voice from the kitchen. “Yeah, my name is Leslie McSpadden, and my daughter’s name is Lezley McSpadden too. She’s the mother of Michael Brown. He laid in the street for four and a half hours. Yes, he was my grandson from Ferguson!” Daddy would raise and lower his voice each time he got frustrated from explaining.
It was all too much filling up my brain. I just wanted to escape. I crawled back into my bed. Random thoughts bounced inside my head. I closed my eyes, but all I saw was Mike Mike’s face.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THREE SIDES TO EVERY STORY
“It can’t be an airplane, it’s too small,” Chevelle said, looking out the front blinds.
Suddenly we heard thunderous shots go off and then we heard helicopters coming and we turned on the TV and we saw that some protesters had been teargassed and one of the protestors threw a smoke bomb back at the police.
I was shaking with fear. It was all happening too close to our house and my other babies.
Six days had passed since Mike Mike was killed. School openings were postponed until August 19. I was relieved. I just wanted to keep my kids in the house. I feared for their lives. I didn’t want the media to harass them. I worried about them going back to school too soon. Would they be able to handle it? Would the kids ask them a lot of questions? How were the teachers going to treat them? Right now, I just wanted them with me.
“I don’t want y’all goin’ out the house or goin’ to Granny’s,” I said, pacing the kitchen, puffing on a cigarette. “I don’t want you nowhere near Canfield.” Déja knew I was mainly talking to her.
Déja was sitting at the table scrolling through her phone, looking half interested.
“Why, Mama?” Jazzy asked in a soft voice, peeking around the kitchen entry.
“ ’Cause Mike Mike ain’t here no more,” Moo Moo said, leaning against the refrigerator. He lowered his head, and tears began to fall down his chubby cheeks.
He reminded me so much of Mike Mike. Moo Moo was ten now, and he was laid-back like Mike Mike. He was chunky like Mike Mike was at his age. I didn’t know if he was going to get as tall as his brother, right now he was short, but he was going to be a healthy, thick boy.
Jazzy, only being five, still had that baby thing. She teared up. “Mama, Mike Mike ain’t have no weapon,” Jazzy said, twisting her mouth as she began to cry.