All Souls (31 page)

For the jury trial, the state had gotten rid of the teenage witnesses and the Russian roulette theory. The DA was now calling it “horseplay” that had led to Tommy's death, but he claimed that Steven had pulled the trigger and should be removed from society. Detective Hensaw was now part of the clique. On the stand, he looked down at his hands when he said that when he'd arrived on the scene, Steven was very calm for someone who'd just lost his friend. My heart dropped when I heard him say those words.
They even got to him,
I thought. He'd been the only one I trusted to tell the truth. And you could tell by the way he spoke, slowly, with obvious regret, that he was doing something he didn't want to do. Fallon never brought up the fact that his testimony had completely changed since the first trial.

The state filed in its expert witnesses. We had no experts to do independent test firings with the gun, to challenge the credibility of stippling tests, or to testify to the average arm length of a five-foot-eight teenager. Steven tried to hold up through the whole trial. I kept telling him to have faith in God and in the truth. Ma's friend Mary Scott showed up and gave Steven a rose, a symbol of faith in the divine intervention of St. Theresa, she told him. I gave Steven a small silver cross, one that I'd kept in my pocket the whole time Kathy was in a coma.

Steven took the stand and told the truth, the same truth of every single detail he'd told from day one. Then Fallon threw Tommy's 8 × 10 autopsy photos in front of Steven while he was on the stand. Steven buckled over, wailed in agony, and held onto his stomach. Fallon was asking a barrage of questions about the identity of the person in the photo, who had a bullet hole in his head, and whether it was, in fact, his friend Tommy. I wasn't sure what Fallon was doing. We all cried for Steven. “What's he doing that for? That's wrong to torture a little kid like that!” My Aunt Mary said out loud. Mrs. Viens, too, buckled over at the sight of the photos. The judge called the court to order, and Fallon calmly put the photos away and dramatically requested a recess, speaking in a soft low tone. Fallon explained to us later that he'd wanted to show the jury Steven's gut reaction to the picture of Tommy, without any warning. Steven said he hated Fallon now. “I don't ever want to see those pictures again,” he moaned in the marble halls outside the courtroom.

The day we filed into the courtroom for the verdict, a number of court officers followed to keep the peace. Throughout the trial I'd studied each juror. Some guys looked as mean as O'Leary, big fat Irish Americans who kept looking at their watches as if they were wondering when lunch was. My biggest hope was the Haitian woman.
She's black,
I figured,
she knows what the cops are like.
I got nervous whenever I saw her dozing off during the trial, or reading her pocket Bible during recesses—“She's reading the fucking Old Testament, too!” I told my sister. I wanted to rip it from her hands and open it up to the part where Christ is accused by the Pharisees, but we weren't allowed to communicate with the jurors. The lead juror was a black woman too, but I didn't trust her because she looked wealthy and had the sober, oppressive face of a barrister herself.

“And how do you find the defendant?”

“Guilty.”

I wanted to do something drastic. I wanted to speak, but I was afraid that the judge would give Steven a harsher sentence if I said the words I wanted to say. I wanted to lash out at every whore representing the government, and every weak sucker on the jury. I wanted to kill again. But I was feeling so weak that I slid from the bench and my knees hit the floor. Johnnie dragged me back up to my seat and told me to stay calm for the judge. Fallon gave his arguments why the judge should be lenient, given the tragic circumstances of the case. It sounded like he was agreeing that Steven had shot Tommy, but that the court should let him go since it was an accident, a double tragedy. The prosecutor called Steven dangerous, and said he should be put away. And the judge determined that he should be sent to the Department of Youth Services. The DYS would be in charge of deciding how long to keep him; it could be a year or until his eighteenth birthday.

The guards led him away. We were allowed down to the basement to see Steven in his cell, before he was transported. We went down the same stairwell that Steven had been taken down five minutes earlier. On the way down, there on a windowsill, I found the crumpled-up rosebud that Steven had been keeping in his pocket, and there also was my cross. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. When we saw Steven, I wanted to ask him why he'd dumped the symbols of faith. But I didn't bother. It was one thing to feel forsaken by the criminal justice system. It was another to feel forsaken by God. I wanted to dump the symbols of faith too, but I couldn't. There was still some fighting left to do.

“My brother, you've got some nerve, strolling in here with no coat on!” Muadi DiBinga was talking about me to an invisible audience, and waiting for my explanation. I had walked to my new job through a blizzard, and I wasn't wearing a coat. Our boss Kathie came out of her office to see what was going on. Then she joined in, harassing me for looking like I wasn't sleeping or eating.

After I'd left Old Colony, I rested a few hours a night on friends' couches around Boston, secretly eating at soup kitchens, and spending my days and nights investigating for Steven's appeal and getting involved in efforts against violence and police abuse, especially in Roxbury, where things had only gotten worse since the Stuart case. At the same time I was trying to finish my studies at UMass, and taking extra courses in juvenile justice. I'd found Citizens for Safety only after many liberal organizations in Boston had shut the door in my face, since my story didn't fit with their upper-middle-class white plans to organize around civil rights issues. While Steven was locked up in the Department of Youth Services, I called every organization in town that talked about violence and the police department's reactionary ways in the black and Latino neighborhoods. One guy listened for fifteen minutes while I told him about the abuses in Steven's case, until I said “South Boston.” Then he asked me if Steven was, by chance, a minority who'd moved into South Boston. “Nope.” “Well, unless he's a minority or gay, I'm afraid there's not much we can do.” That was the end of that conversation.

I finally decided to call just one last place to volunteer. I didn't like the name Citizens for Safety. It sounded wimpy and suburban, and I was looking for a revolution to put all my rage into. But Kathie and Muadi were cool, and I soon figured out the name was a front; they were ready for battle.

Kathie Mainzer had come from a white middle-class background. She said she'd grown up liberal, but blind to the realities of poor people's lives. “I fell from the safety of that high horse,” she said. She'd left an alcoholic husband and been forced to raise her child alone on welfare. Kathie found that being on welfare was no picnic, experiencing firsthand the insults and abuses of the welfare bureaucracy. That's when she started fighting, leading welfare rights organizations up the grand steps of the State House. Before long she was executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, and was eventually asked by a group of civic leaders and activists to run a new citywide organization to deal with the violence that was making headlines every day in Boston. She took the job, and started wearing suits that contrasted sharply with her bright red lipstick and matching hair that looked as if Ma'd gotten hold of her with the scissors.

Muadi DiBinga was from Zaire. “Africa!” she'd add, loud and proud, just in case I needed to brush up on my geography. But she'd grown up in Roxbury, where her family got involved in all aspects of community development in their beleaguered neighborhood. Muadi was pro-black. And she wore her hair in natural twists, and dressed in an urban hip-hop style, with African trinkets that said she was damn proud of where she came from. I thought for sure she'd have resentments toward a white guy from Southie wearing claddagh symbols and lots of green that said
I
was damn proud of where I came from.

But Muadi was one hundred percent behind my cause after hearing the truth about Southie. She asked every day about Steven in DYS. I'd received no welcome from the white liberals running organizations that claimed to champion the cause of people like Muadi. But here was Muadi now, calling me her “brother” and us getting along just fine without them. Muadi called the white liberal organizations “plantations,” and said they were dominated by whites who had no clue, “with all these ‘house Negroes' running around and fetching their coffee.” Muadi was all about black power, which I learned had nothing to do with taking over the housing projects of Southie. I wished that the people from my neighborhood could know someone like Muadi; they'd have been for black power too. They'd love her, I thought. But she was black, and the plantation folks had already divided “us” from “them,” as far as I could see.

We were a good team, Kathie, Muadi, and I. We ran around the city, strategizing while riding on buses and pulling together groups in Roxbury for meetings with the police to air complaints from kids who were being detained and harassed and sometimes called “nigger” by cops. Residents spoke out about specific officers they felt were only adding to the violence of the streets.
Just like in Southie,
I thought to myself as we passed on a bus through the dark boulevards of Roxbury's Dudley Square, where I'd always been told never to set foot.

I still hated the cops for what they'd done to my little brother. I was working with many black people now, and even some of the liberal types who ran organizations. But the cops? Never. The strange thing was, whenever I went to meetings with activists from around the city, as much as I related to the black residents, there were still no people from the same place I was. The cops attending those meetings were the closest thing to my Southie neighbors, with shamrocks pinned to their lapels, heavy Boston accents, and stories about growing up tough. I found out that some had become cops because of their experiences with crime and violence. I decided to give them a chance in my own head.

We ended up working with the Boston Police Department when we started to organize a gun buyback program in the city. We had no choice in order to collect turned-in guns legally. The police had already committed themselves to “a new era of community policing,” which activists like us had been pushing for. We wanted to make sure their “community policing” was more than just another press conference catch phrase to shut people up after the Stuart case debacle. So we pushed the gun buyback as a way they could prove they meant what they were saying. We held our own press conference, announcing our plans to collect working firearms in exchange for money, amnesty, and anonymity. We knew the cops would jump on board; and they did, once we started getting thousands of dollars in private donations for buying back guns. Eventually, as thousands of guns were handed over, the cops wanted all the credit. We didn't care as long as the deadly weapons were coming in.

“Dudley Square, you're liable to get shot!” Ma screamed over the phone at me when I told her about my new job. “It's not that bad,” I told her. “Black people shoot black people, and white people shoot whites,” I added. I told her that according to statistics I was safer in Roxbury than I was in Southie or Charlestown. Ma was worried, but she told me proudly that she was an activist now too, in Colorado. Ma had gotten involved in fighting for the handicapped, and was leading a class-action lawsuit against the state on behalf of residents like Kathy, who'd become brain injured before the age of twenty-two, and was labeled “developmentally disabled.” Ma had found out that the developmentally disabled had no access to rehabilitation services, except to be thrown into a nursing home, while waiting on a list of eight thousand. The state took only two new clients a year from this list for services. “Now let's see,” Ma said in court to Judge Matsch, who presided over the case. “That means Kathy'll be eligible for services when she's four thousand and thirty years old.” Ma told me the whole court burst into laughter after she'd done the math on her hands, but the judge wasn't smiling.

Ma was speaking up passionately and leading other mothers in
King vs. Colorado.
She said she felt as if Davey was with her in the struggle—hundreds of mentally disabled people had signed on to the class action suit. She said the Association for Retarded Citizens had presented her with a “My Hero” certificate: “Because of her perseverance, and never taking ‘no' for an answer, her daughter and thousands of Coloradans will have services rather than remaining unserved on D.D. waiting lists. Helen King is a model of ‘parent power' at its finest.”

I too felt as if I brought “the kids” to work with me every day. In Roxbury and Dorchester I met survivors of the bloody streets who were helping us appeal to people to turn in their guns. I saw black mothers telling their stories at rallies, turning their pain into songs of redemption. I started speaking publicly about my own experiences growing up; but only in the black neighborhoods that welcomed my story with open hearts and minds. Never in Southie.

But despite all our keeping busy—Ma in Colorado and me in Boston—the painful truth was that Steven was locked away every night, without the freedom even to go to the toilet unsupervised. Each time I telephoned Ma, it seemed her voice got more and more shrill—she couldn't bear being thousands of miles from her baby. A lawyer had taken on the case for free, but he warned us it would be an uphill battle.