route—and ran the movies we wanted to see, sometimes a picture with black actors in it, but usually an old Bruce Lee movie, or some kung-fu flick that tried but never matched the style of the old Bruce Lee movies. It was where all my friends went, and I always took the bus down there with no flack from Ma, but when children started dying and disappearing, she was all of a sudden worried.
I was sitting at the kitchen table, Ma standing behind me while she applied permanent relaxer to my hair and cancelled my weekend plans. I wondered how far I should push the matter. Ma didn’t much like being questioned, and at that moment, she was applying lye to my head. Putting up a fight just then would be foolish, not because Ma would do anything to hurt me, but once I set her off on a lecture, she might have forgotten how long the chemicals had been burning into my scalp. But I did it anyway.
“Those boys were found in Southwest—I won’t be anywhere around there. I’ll be downtown.”
“One of the missing boys, the one that might be the unidentified body laying in the morgue right now, was on his way downtown to the movies the last time anyone saw him alive.”
“There’s more than one theater downtown. He was going to the Coronet, not the Rialto.”
Ma didn’t hear me, and only said, “The other boy was last seen leaving the same skating rink you go to sometimes.”
“What’s that got to do with the Rialto downtown? I don’t want to go to the skating rink.”
“Watch your tone, girl. You can’t go because it’s too close, and because I said so.” As usual, the reasonable logic she applied to her cases, the weighing of facts, had no place in our house. In our house, everything came down to because I said so.
I tried again because her tone hadn’t yet changed from I’m mildly peeved to y ou’ve gone too far . “The skating rink and the Rialto are miles apart.”
“I don’t mean too close in proximity. I mean too close to you . The same skating rink? You might’ve skated right past that boy once. You could have been there that night and they picked you instead.”
I knew then it was useless to fight. When something happened to a child, that child became any child, all children, to Ma. In her mind, she could easily substitute me or my sister with the kid who had been kidnapped, or raped, or beaten up in whatever case she was working. No more logic in the discussion. I shut up about it and hoped that by Saturday, either the case would be solved and have nothing to do with my world, or the dead boys would have been pushed out of her mind by some other terrible thing. In a city considered the murder capital of America, this last option was not at all impossible.
*
They say bad things come in threes, but in this case, there was one extra. In November, Milton’s and Yusef’s bodies were found, bringing the number dead to four. The mother who’d sent her boy on an errand for her neighbor was angry and made herself heard; we saw her on the news, read about her in the paper. People began paying attention to what she was saying, instead of comforting themselves with the idea that it was all just a coincidence. She said in the news what Ma had been thinking, what other cops had been thinking but what the city denied—that the boys’ murders were related. People started to talk about it wherever you went. There were even rumors that the Klan was behind it, and how we might see race riots like they did up north and in Los Angeles in ’66 and ’67. When I asked Ma what she thought about the Klan theory, at first, she waved her hand to dismiss it, but then she said, “You never know.”
At the time, the only thing I knew of the Klan was what I’d seen on TV, or the stories told to me by my grandparents and my great-grandfather. They grew up in a time when black folks knew more about the Klan than they’d ever wanted to, mostly about how to stay out of the Klan’s way. I’d yet to have rocks
I was sitting at the kitchen table, Ma standing behind me while she applied permanent relaxer to my hair and cancelled my weekend plans. I wondered how far I should push the matter. Ma didn’t much like being questioned, and at that moment, she was applying lye to my head. Putting up a fight just then would be foolish, not because Ma would do anything to hurt me, but once I set her off on a lecture, she might have forgotten how long the chemicals had been burning into my scalp. But I did it anyway.
“Those boys were found in Southwest—I won’t be anywhere around there. I’ll be downtown.”
“One of the missing boys, the one that might be the unidentified body laying in the morgue right now, was on his way downtown to the movies the last time anyone saw him alive.”
“There’s more than one theater downtown. He was going to the Coronet, not the Rialto.”
Ma didn’t hear me, and only said, “The other boy was last seen leaving the same skating rink you go to sometimes.”
“What’s that got to do with the Rialto downtown? I don’t want to go to the skating rink.”
“Watch your tone, girl. You can’t go because it’s too close, and because I said so.” As usual, the reasonable logic she applied to her cases, the weighing of facts, had no place in our house. In our house, everything came down to because I said so.
I tried again because her tone hadn’t yet changed from I’m mildly peeved to y ou’ve gone too far . “The skating rink and the Rialto are miles apart.”
“I don’t mean too close in proximity. I mean too close to you . The same skating rink? You might’ve skated right past that boy once. You could have been there that night and they picked you instead.”
I knew then it was useless to fight. When something happened to a child, that child became any child, all children, to Ma. In her mind, she could easily substitute me or my sister with the kid who had been kidnapped, or raped, or beaten up in whatever case she was working. No more logic in the discussion. I shut up about it and hoped that by Saturday, either the case would be solved and have nothing to do with my world, or the dead boys would have been pushed out of her mind by some other terrible thing. In a city considered the murder capital of America, this last option was not at all impossible.
*
They say bad things come in threes, but in this case, there was one extra. In November, Milton’s and Yusef’s bodies were found, bringing the number dead to four. The mother who’d sent her boy on an errand for her neighbor was angry and made herself heard; we saw her on the news, read about her in the paper. People began paying attention to what she was saying, instead of comforting themselves with the idea that it was all just a coincidence. She said in the news what Ma had been thinking, what other cops had been thinking but what the city denied—that the boys’ murders were related. People started to talk about it wherever you went. There were even rumors that the Klan was behind it, and how we might see race riots like they did up north and in Los Angeles in ’66 and ’67. When I asked Ma what she thought about the Klan theory, at first, she waved her hand to dismiss it, but then she said, “You never know.”
At the time, the only thing I knew of the Klan was what I’d seen on TV, or the stories told to me by my grandparents and my great-grandfather. They grew up in a time when black folks knew more about the Klan than they’d ever wanted to, mostly about how to stay out of the Klan’s way. I’d yet to have rocks
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