The Best American Essays 2011

by Edwidge Danticat

  Meanwhile, fifteen hundred miles away in Atlanta, another black male may also have believed his body was safe, just prior to being slain and dumped in the Chattahoochee River.

  His name was Nathaniel Cater. His murder was unusual only in the fact that he was twenty-seven, much older than the other victims, and in the fact that there had been other victims. Twenty by that point, all of them between the ages of nine and fourteen, and all of them black males. The first murder had occurred two years prior, in 1979—a fourteen-year-old boy found in the woods, a gunshot to his head. Nearby was the boy’s friend, who had been asphyxiated. A few months later, a ten-year-old boy was found dead in a dumpster. And then a strangled nine-year-old; a stabbed fourteen-year-old; a strangled thirteen-year-old; murder after murder until the capriciousness of Negroes could no longer be sustained as a viable cause. There was clearly a holocaust in the making, a systemic denial of future black generations, a conclusion that flowed logically from the vicious legacy of the Deep South. This was the work of the Ku Klux Klan, people believed, and I believed it too. The South, as promised, was rising again.

  Each night, on the evening news, I watched efforts to keep it down. New York’s Guardian Angels, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and grieving parents gave press conferences. There were images of helicopters flying over homes and of bloodhounds sniffing through parks. Psychics traveled through time and returned with tips and warnings. Confidential hotlines collected the names of would-be killers. Rewards were posted. Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra gave a benefit concert. Green ribbons were worn. And through it all, the murders continued to mount, until June 21, 1981—just a month after I’d accepted the ride with the stranger—when the police arrested a twenty-three-year-old man named Wayne Williams.

  Being male, single, introverted, and a loner, Williams fit the general profile of a serial killer, except for the all-important fact that he was black. And so rather than a collective sigh of relief in the black community, there was broad outrage, for we all understood that we were not serial killers. The arrest of Williams was a smoke screen, it was decided, another cover-up by white supremacists of their sordid deeds. Sure, we had some rotten apples among us, your garden variety of thugs, burglars, prostitutes, gangbangers, and dope dealers. We even had middle-aged men in cars who’d solicit sex from teenaged boys, but the torturing and execution of people for sport or at the behest of inner voices, that pathological shit, was the strict domain of white folks. It wasn’t in our DNA.

  That’s why we’d not produced an Ed Gein, for instance, the man whose barbarity inspired the movies Psycho and Silence of the Lambs. When his ten-year killing spree ended, it was discovered that he lived, literally, in a house of horrors, with the flesh of his victims serving as furniture upholstery, jewelry, and clothing. His mother’s heart was simmering on the stove. John Wayne Gacy was another: he killed twenty-four boys and men, cutting their throats while in the act of raping them. And how about Herman Mugett, the doctor who was said to have murdered over two hundred women by asphyxiating them in a secret chamber in his office? Then there was Albert Fish, who may have mutilated and killed up to one hundred boys; Ted Bundy, the necrophiliac who applied makeup to his victims and slept with them until they decomposed; David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz, who killed women by order of howling dogs. The list also includes Richard Angelo, Jeffrey Dalmer, Gary Ridgeway, Andrew Cunanan, but no one knew of them yet, because it was still only the spring of 1981, a month before Wayne Williams’s arrest and a year before his conviction of the Atlanta Child Murders. All during the trial he maintained his innocence, and I, convinced not of a lack of evidence—there was plenty—but only of our genetic superiority, was among the many blacks who believed him.

  As we approach the thirtieth anniversary of these crimes, Williams has yet to own his guilt. I use this occasion to own mine. My belief that blacks could be only so bad was equivalent to the view, promulgated since slavery, that we could be only so good; to hold one of these views necessitates the holding of the other. And both views, albeit used for different purposes, place false restrictions on our humanity. At the time of Williams’s conviction, I was incapable of reaching this conclusion. The seed of it was planted, however, only three weeks later, when a thirty-three-year-old black man from Michigan, “Coral” Eugene Watts, confessed to killing forty women and girls. His preferred modi operandi were death by drowning, strangling, and stabbing, and his preferred race was white. This was in part why he was so difficult to capture, since a defining trait of serial killers is that they rarely kill outside of their own ethnic group, and this was the same trait that, ironically, made the case stronger against Williams. But just as many blacks came to Williams’s defense, the impulse was to defend Watts as well, for here might be a vigilante of sorts, an intensely angry brother out to exact the ultimate revenge on his oppressor. That argument couldn’t hold water, though; all it took was for Watts to explain that he’d dreamed of killing women since he was twelve, describe at length his conversations with demons, and express his need to drown some of his victims in order to keep their evil spirits from floating free. This was no vigilante. This was just a man—as vile and deranged as any white counterpart who had preceded him or who would follow. And he, like Wayne Williams, and like Gein, Bundy, Mugett, and the others, belonged to us all.

  As did my driver. As did I. And so the scenario in which we found ourselves that rainy morning was susceptible to the full range of human behavior, not merely the one I had envisioned and, luckily, the one that played out. A block from my destination, he removed a twenty-dollar bill from his shirt pocket and positioned it on the seat between us. Just before that we’d spoken of the Bulls, the White Sox, the storm, and then, as the train station came into view, he circled the conversation back to my job at the medical center. “I wouldn’t care for that,” he said. “Do you like it?”

  “It’s just a job,” I said. “Pays the bills.”

  It was the wrong thing to say, or maybe it was the right thing, because my reference to money brought the issue to the fore. It was then that he’d produced the twenty-dollar bill. “Would you like to make a little extra?” he asked, winking at me. “Have a little fun in the process?”

  I stated the response I’d mentally rehearsed since he’d exposed himself: “Sorry, brother, but men just aren’t my thing.”

  “I can give you forty,” he said quickly, as if he’d been mentally rehearsing too. I told him no again. He swore. But I didn’t panic. I didn’t reach for my razor. I repeated my position and thanked him for the ride. We drove the rest of the way in silence. Just before he stopped the car, he pulled his jacket back onto his lap, picked up the money, and in this manner—without theft, without violence, without murder, without the slightest decrease in my stupidity—the trip came to an end.

  The Washing

  Reshma Memon Yaqub

  FROM The Washington Post Magazine

  I HADN’T PLANNED to wash the corpse.

  But sometimes you just get caught up in the moment.

  Through a series of slight miscalculations, I am the first of the deceased woman’s relatives to arrive at the March Funeral Home in west Baltimore on this Monday morning. The body of the woman whom everyone in the family refers to simply as Dadee, which means “grandmother” in Urdu, is scheduled to arrive at 10 A.M., after being released from Howard County General Hospital in Columbia. I get to the funeral home at 10 A.M. and make somber chitchat with the five women from the local mosque who have volunteered to help with funeral preparations, which includes washing the deceased’s body.

  According to Islamic practices, family members of the same gender as the deceased are expected to bathe and shroud the body for burial. But because it’s such a detailed ritual and because so many second-generation American Muslim families have yet to bury a loved one here, mosques have volunteers to assist grieving families. These women have come from the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where Dadee’s funeral prayer service will be held this afternoon.
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  When the body arrives at 11:30 A.M., I am still the only family member here, and the body-washers naturally usher me in to join them for the ritual cleansing. It feels too late to tell them that technically I’m not a relative. When I first met the women an hour ago and spoke to them in my halting Urdu, it seemed unnecessary to explain that I was only about to become Dadee’s relative. That she was the visiting grandmother of the woman engaged to marry my younger brother. That she had flown in from South Africa just ten days earlier to attend the upcoming wedding. That the only time I’d ever seen Dadee was last night at the hospital, a few hours after she died of sudden cardiac arrest, and then I hadn’t even seen her face. When I had arrived at the hospital after getting the call from my brother, a white sheet was already drawn up over Dadee’s face and tucked around her slight, eight-decade-old frame.

  But the body-washers are understandably in a bit of a hurry. They’ve been kept waiting. And these genuinely kind women, five middle-aged homemakers, have their own responsibilities to get back to. I call my brother’s fiancée to tell her the women want to start the hour-long washing, and she gives the go-ahead because she and her parents are still at the hospital. I tell the washers they can start, and they look at me expectantly. “Let’s go,” they say in Urdu. “Uh, okay,” I reply. It’s not that I don’t want to wash the body. It’s actually something I’ve wanted to experience for a while. Earlier in the year, I told the funeral coordinator at my mosque to keep me in mind if the need ever arose when I’m available. A few years ago, I attended a daylong workshop on how to perform the ritual. It’s just, I didn’t think today was going to be the day. I didn’t think this was going to be my first body. I had come here, on this fall day in 2008, only to offer emotional support to my future sister-in-law and her mother.

  I mutely follow the women through a heavy door marked “Staff Only,” then down a flight of concrete stairs into the recesses of the funeral home. I’m starting to feel as though I’m trapped in one of those old I Love Lucy episodes, where Lucille Ball finds herself stomping grapes or smuggling cheese and has no idea how to stop this runaway train. We reach a large open room, where I see some gurneys and a simple coffin—upholstered in blue fabric with a white interior. Another doorway leads into a smaller private room that has been set up for ritual washings such as these, one of the volunteers tells me. From the doorway, I see Dadee’s form in her hospital-issue white body bag, zipped all the way up. She is lying on a metal gurney, which, with its slightly raised edges, looks like a giant jellyroll pan. It has a quarter-sized hole at the bottom, near Dadee’s feet, and the silver tray is tilted slightly so the water we will use drains into a utility sink.

  I am not afraid of dead bodies. I have seen one up close three times in my thirty-six years: in high school at the funeral of a friend’s father; as a police reporter when I took a tour of the local morgue; and more recently when a friend’s ill baby died. But this is the first time I will touch a corpse, and that I am a little nervous about. But I’m also grateful for the opportunity. In Islam, it is a tremendous honor to give a body its final cleansing. The reward is immense—the erasure of forty major sins from your lifetime’s record. Few people I know have ever washed a body. Because my parents and their peers moved here from Pakistan as young adults, most of them missed the natural opportunity to wash their own parents’ or grandparents’ bodies when they passed away overseas. And because few of my Muslim peers have lost their parents, we are two generations that don’t know what to do when the time comes.

  I feel blessed not to be experiencing my first washing with one of my own loved ones, when I would be numb from loss. I would have had little time to prepare myself because Muslims are buried immediately after death—the same day when possible. There is no embalming, no makeup, no Sunday finery for the deceased. There is no wake, no long speech, no cherrywood coffin with brass handles. There is simply the ritual washing, the shrouding in plain white cloth, a funeral prayer that lasts five minutes, and then the burial—preferably the body straight into the dirt, but, when required by law, placed in a basic coffin.

  Body-washers put on sterile scrubs to protect us from whatever illness may have stricken the deceased. First I tie on a large paper apron. Then come rubber gloves. I see one of the women pull on a second pair of gloves over the first, and I follow. Next are puffy paper sleeves that attach from elbow to wrist and are tucked into the gloves. Then big paper booties. And finally a face mask with a large transparent plastic eye shield. By the end, I look like a cross between an overzealous nail technician and a Transformer.

  I watch the women unzip Dadee from her body bag. As it opens, I see her face for the first time. Muslims believe that at the moment of death, when a soul that’s headed to heaven emerges from its body, it slips out as easily as a drop of water spilling from a jug. But a soul that’s headed to less heavenly places emerges with great difficulty, like a thorny branch being ripped through a pile of wet wool. I’m relieved that Dadee’s face is peaceful, the way you hope somebody’s grandmother’s face would appear.

  I stand by Dadee’s feet, on her right side, and watch the women gently lift and rock Dadee to free her from the body bag. She’s still dressed in her blue-and-white hospital gown. One of the women slowly lifts the gown, while another drapes Dadee with one of the same long aprons that we are all wearing. Not for one moment are any private areas of the body exposed. In the ritual Islamic bathing, the body is to be given the utmost respect. Not only is it to stay covered at all times, but the washers are to remain forever silent about anything negative or unusual they may witness—for example, if there is an unexpected scar, or deformity, or tattoo. In this, a human’s most vulnerable of moments, she is guaranteed protection by her family and community.

  It is time to begin the washing. A thin rubber hose is attached to the faucet in the utility sink, and one of the women turns on the water, adjusting it until it is comfortably warm, as prescribed by Islamic tradition. Because I’m the only “relative” in the room, I’m expected to perform the lion’s share of the washing, but the women see that I have no idea what I’m doing, so they resume control, leaving me in charge of the feet. The first time I touch Dadee’s feet, I am surprised. I expect the corpse to be cold, but it feels warm. Then again, she left this shell less than a day earlier. Perhaps these things take time.

  A Muslim’s body is generally washed three times from head to toe with soap and clean water. The right side is washed first, then the left. During the final washing, a softly fragranced oil is rubbed onto the body. The body has to be repeatedly tilted from one side to the other, and it is harder than I expected to maneuver the dead weight of a human form. Dadee’s feet keep getting in the way of the hole at the bottom of the table, and every few minutes, the water pools up there and I have to lift her leg.

  Fifteen minutes into the washing, my brother’s fiancée and her mother knock at the door. The granddaughter is too distraught to join in and watches tearfully from the doorway. But Dadee’s daughter-in-law dons the gear and steps into her family role. She is understandably traumatized, having been the one to find Dadee collapsed at their home in Columbia last night and having performed CPR to try to revive her. This is her first time washing a body too. I can’t tell if she wants me to stay and keep washing, or leave, because we’ve met just a handful of times in the three months since my brother proposed to her daughter. But she doesn’t say anything, so I stay.

  Washing a body in this way, it’s impossible not to flash forward to your own ending. I have lain on a table like this before, draped strategically with white cloth, comforting hands laid on me. But that was just for a massage at the Red Door Spa. When I imagine my own washing, I see myself being handled by loved ones: my two oldest friends, Farin and Sajeela; my brothers’ wives; my mother and mother-in-law. I’ve also asked two women at my mosque whom I adore to participate. Maybe I’ll live long enough to have a daughter-in-law in the room with me. Should I be so lucky, even a granddaughter. The more I
see, the more I appreciate the way a Muslim’s body is handled after death. There is so much gentleness, so much privacy. The body isn’t left unattended in the short span between death and burial. It unnerves me when, walking through the funeral home’s hallway, I look into a room and see a dead man lying on a gurney, unattended. I wonder how long he has been there, how he has been handled, who has had access to him. Whether the water that ran over his body was warmed.

  The body-washers pass the rubber hose back and forth to each other and to me and my soon-to-be relative, who strokes her mother-in-law’s hair and washes it. At the end, we dry Dadee with clean white towels and slide several towels underneath her, with their edges hanging over the sides of the gurney. We then roll her gurney into the adjacent room where the coffin awaits for her transport to the mosque. We station her gurney next to a second one, where one of the women has already laid out Dadee’s funeral shroud, called a kafan, made of five white cloths of different sizes. We use the towels underneath Dadee as handles to lift her to the second gurney. Pieces of the white fabric are folded around Dadee’s body and secured with ropelike strands of the same cloth. One of the volunteers, Rabia Marfani, assembles these fabric kits at home, using cotton/polyester bed sheets that she buys at Walmart.

  When the cloth that wraps the hair back is tied on Dadee, she seems strangely transported. She looks so small and fragile, like a little girl with a bonnet tied around her hair. Finally, a large cloth is folded around the entire body, completely enclosing her. It’s tied shut with the ropelike strands, and the body looks almost like a wrapped gift. Together we lift Dadee into the coffin. One of the women shows me and Dadee’s daughter-in-law how to open the fabric around Dadee’s face, should any of her family members ask to see her one last time at the Janazah prayer service at the mosque.