DIED 2017
ONE DAY MY NEIGHBOR took me with her to something called a shooting response. It was just a couple of miles from our house, on a corner in East Baltimore. Right there, a few days earlier, a high school senior had been shot in the face, though there was nothing in the backpack the killers took but a change of clothes. Now there were sixty people assembled, friends, family, neighbors, teachers, and members of an organization called MOMS, Mothers of Murdered Sons and Daughters. This Baltimore-based association is open to all: whether your child is killed by the cops, the dealers, the gangs, or the racists, you can join.
People brought boxes of white candles and Mylar balloons. They taped photos to a brick wall and placed tea lights on the sidewalk. Then his mother, a young woman with a turned-up nose and gold highlights in her long, loopy waves, arrived, and they handed her a microphone. Last Thursday started out like any other day, she said, telling her boy to do his chores, trying not to be late for work, missing a call from him on her phone, and by the end of it, finding herself in a hospital emergency room, realizing by how people were treating her that her son must be dead.
At seventeen, she told us, she had walked across the stage at her own graduation pregnant with her boy. They grew up together. He had quit school for a while himself, overwhelmed by deaths among his peers and the general negativity about his future, but he went back and would have graduated this June. The two of them planned to go together to community college. Lord, are you serious? she said. All these years I fought for my son? All the times I told him stay off these streets? All these people who loved him? My neighbor and I were the only two white people at this gathering, but when tears started pouring down my face, a tall young man put his arm around me.
A few months later, the boy’s mother attended his graduation, where he was awarded an honorary diploma. According to the Baltimore Sun, he was the fourth of five students from his high school to be killed during this school year. Look beyond the boundaries of Baltimore, one of the teachers urged the graduates. Their mothers must be thinking, Where?