Who
Shot Johnny, A day in the life of Black America
January 1, 1998
Given
my level of political awareness, it was inevitable that
I would come to view the everyday events of my life through
the prism of politics and the national discourse. I read
The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New Yorker,
Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, National Review,
Black Enterprise and Essence and wrote a weekly column
for the Harvard Law School Record during my three years
just ended there. I do this because I know that those
of us who are not well-fed white guys in suits must not
yield the debate to them, however well-intentioned or
well-informed they may be. Accordingly, I am unrepentant
and vocal about having gained admittance to Harvard through
affirmative action; I am a feminist, stoic about my marriage
chances as a well-educated, 36-year-old black woman who
won't pretend to need help taking care of herself. My
strength flags, though, in the face of the latest role
assigned to my family in the national drama. On July 27,
1995, my 16-year-old nephew was shot and paralyzed.
Talking with friends in front of his home, Johnny saw
a car he thought he recognized. He waved boisterously--his
trademark--throwing both arms in the air in a full-bodied,
hip-hop Y. When he got no response, he and his friends
sauntered down the walk to join a group loitering in front
of an apartment building. The car followed. The driver
got out, brandished a revolver and fired into the air.
Everyone scattered. Then he took aim and shot my running
nephew in the back. Johnny never lost consciousness. He
lay in the road, trying to understand what had happened
to him, why he couldn't get up. Emotionlessly, he told
the story again and again on demand, remaining apologetically
firm against all demands to divulge the missing details
that would make sense of the shooting but bad light. Being
black, male and shot, he must, apparently, be gang- or
drug-involved. Probably both. Witnesses corroborate his
version of events.
Nearly six months have passed since that phone call in
the night and my nightmarish, headlong drive from Boston
to Charlotte. After twenty hours behind the wheel, I arrived
haggard enough to reduce my mother to fresh tears and
to find my nephew reassuring well-wishers with an eerie
sangfroid.
I take the day shift in his hospital room; his mother
and grandmother, a clerk and cafeteria worker, respectively,
alternate nights there on a cot. They don their uniforms
the next day, gaunt after hours spent listening to Johnny
moan in his sleep. How often must his subconscious replay
those events and curse its host for saying hello without
permission, for being carefree and young while a would-be
murderer hefted the weight of his uselessness and failure
like Jacob Marley's chains? How often must he watch himself
lying stubbornly immobile on the pavement of his nightmares
while the sound of running feet syncopate his attacker's
taunts?
I spend these days beating him at gin rummy and Scrabble,
holding a basin while he coughs up phlegm and crying in
the corridor while he catheterizes himself. There are
children here much worse off than he. I should be grateful.
The doctors can't, or won't, say whether he'll walk again.
I am at once repulsed and fascinated by the bullet, which
remains lodged in his spine (having done all the damage
it can do, the doctors say). The wound is undramatic--small,
neat and perfectly centered--an impossibly pink pit surrounded
by an otherwise undisturbed expanse of mahogany. Johnny
has asked me several times to describe it but politely
declines to look in the mirror I hold for him.
Here on the pediatric rehab ward, Johnny speaks little,
never cries, never complains, works diligently to become
independent. He does whatever he is told; if two hours
remain until the next pain pill, he waits quietly. Eyes
bloodshot, hands gripping the bed rails. During the week
of his intravenous feeding when he was tormented by the
primal need to masticate, he never asked for food. He
just listened while we counted down the days for him and
planned his favorite meals. Now required to dress himself
unassisted, he does so without demur, rolling himself
back and forth valiantly on the bed and shivering afterwards,
exhausted. He "ma'am"s and "sir"s
everyone politely. Before his "accident," a
simple request to take out the trash could provoke a firestorm
of teenage attitude. We, the women who have raised him,
have changed as well; we've finally come to appreciate
those boxer-baring, oversized pants we used to hate--it
would be much more difficult to fit properly sized pants
over his diaper.
He spends a lot of time tethered to rap music still loud
enough to break my concentration as I read my many magazines.
I hear him try to soundlessly mouth the obligatory "mothafuckers"
overlaying the funereal dirge of the music tracks. I do
not normally tolerate disrespectful music in my or my
mother's presence, but if it
distracts him now...
"Johnny," I ask later, "do you still like
gangster rap?"
During the long pause I hear him think loudly, I'm paralyzed
Auntie, not stupid. "I mostly just listen to hip
hop," he says evasively into his Sports Illustrated.
Miserable though it is, time passes quickly here. We always
seem to be jerking awake in our chairs just in time for
the next pill, his every-other-night bowel program, the
doctor's rounds. Harvard feels a galaxy away--the world
revolves around Family Members Living With Spinal Cord
Injury class, Johnny's urine output and strategizing with
my sister to find affordable, accessible housing. There
is always another long-distance uncle in need of an update,
another church member wanting to pray with us or Johnny's
little brother in need of some attention.
We Dickerson women are so constant a presence the ward
nurses and cleaning staff call us by name and join us
for cafeteria meals and cigarette breaks. At Johnny's
birthday pizza party, they crack jokes and make fun of
each other's husbands (there are no men here). I pass
slices around and try not to think, "17 with a bullet."
Oddly, we feel little curiosity or specific anger toward
the man who shot him. We have to remind ourselves to check
in with the police. Even so, it feels pro forma, like
sending in those $2 rebate forms that come with new pantyhose:
you know your request will fall into a deep, dark hole
somewhere but, still, it's
your duty to try. We push for an arrest because we owe
it to Johnny and to ourselves as citizens. We don't think
about it otherwise--our low expectations are too ingrained.
A Harvard aunt notwithstanding, for people like Johnny,
Marvin Gaye was right that only three things are sure:
taxes, death and trouble. At least it wasn't the second.
We rarely wonder about or discuss the brother who shot
him because we already know everything about him. When
the call came, my first thought was the same one I'd had
when I'd heard about Rosa Parks's beating: a brother did
it. A non-job-having, middle-of-the-day malt-liquor-drinking,
crotch- clutching, loud-talking brother with many neglected
children born of many forgotten women. He lives in his
mother's basement with furniture rented at an astronomical
interest rate, the exact amount of which he does not know.
He has a car phone, an $80 monthly cable bill and every
possible phone feature but no savings. He steals Social
Security numbers from unsuspecting relatives and assumes
their identities
to acquire large TV sets for which he will never pay.
On the slim chance
that he is brought to justice, he will have a colorful
criminal history and no coherent explanation to offer
for this act. His family will raucously defend
him and cry cover-up. Some liberal lawyer just like me
will help him plea bargain his way to yet another short
stay in a prison pesthouse that will serve only to add
another layer to the brother's sociopathology and formless,
mindless nihilism. We know him. We've known and feared
him all our lives.
As
a teenager, he called, "Hey, baby, gimme somma
that boodie!" at us from car windows. Indignant
at our lack of response, he followed up with, "
you, then, 'ho!" He called me a "white-boy
lovin' nigger bitch oreo" for being in the gifted
program and loving it. At 27, he got my 17-year-old
sister pregnant with Johnny and lost interest without
ever informing her that he was married.
He snatched my widowed mother's purse as she waited
in pre- dawn darkness for the bus to work and then broke
into our house while she soldered on an assembly line.
He chased all the small entrepreneurs from our neighborhood
with his violent thievery, and put bars on our windows.
He kept us from sitting on our own front porch after
dark and laid the foundation for our periodic bouts
of self-hating anger and racial embarrassment. He made
our neighborhood a ghetto. He is the poster fool behind
the addening community knowledge that there are still
some black mothers who raise their daughters but merely
love their
sons. He and his cancerous carbon copies eclipse the
vast majority of us who are not sociopaths and render
us invisible. He is the Siamese twin who has died but
cannot be separated from his living, vibrant sibling;
which of us must attract more notice? We despise and
disown this anomalous loser but, for many, he is black
America. We know him, we know that he is outside the
fold, and we know that he will only get worse. What
we didn't know is that, because of him, my little sister
would one day be the latest hysterical black mother
wailing over
a fallen child on TV.
Alone, lying in the road bleeding and paralyzed but
hideously conscious, Johnny had lain helpless as he
watched his would-be murderer come to stand over him
and offer this prophecy: "Betch'ou won't be doin'
nomo' wavin', motha' fucker."
Fuck you, asshole. He's fine from the waist up. You
just can't do
anything right, can you?
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