Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (30 page)

Although the circumstances by which Audry had reached this point were particular to her, the fragility that had allowed her to fall so far so fast are all too familiar in a nation without much of a safety net. One in three Americans either lives in poverty or struggles in the category
the census terms the “near poor.”
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According to one poll, 80 percent of American adults have, in the course of their lives, endured a year or more of periodic joblessness, lived in near poverty, or relied on welfare.
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“Poverty is no longer an issue of ‘them,’ it’s an issue of ‘us,’” Mark Rank, a professor at Washington University, in St. Louis, who calculated the numbers, told
USA Today.
“Only when poverty is thought of as a mainstream event, rather than a fringe experience that just affects blacks and Hispanics, can we really begin to build broader support for programs that lift people in need.”
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When such programs are lacking, it does not take much for those who are barely getting by to find themselves struggling to survive. “If something goes wrong there is simply no buffer,” writes Joseph Stiglitz in
The Price of Inequality.
“Even before the crisis, America’s poor lived on the precipice; but with the Great Recession, that became increasingly true even of the middle class. The human stories of this crisis are replete with tragedies; one missed mortgage payment escalates into a lost house; homelessness escalates into lost jobs and the eventual destruction of families. For these families, one shock may be manageable; the second is not.”
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With her credit shot and no job, Audry could not find another place to live at short notice. She, Whitney, and Samuel went to stay with Debra. Debra and Audry are close. The first two times they were pregnant they were pregnant together; they’ve always lived near each other; they call each other almost every day. Their children were more like brothers and sisters than cousins. Debra is two years older, but her role in the family has always implied a seniority beyond her years. “Every time something happens I’m the ‘go to’ person,” she says, less with resentment than as a matter of fact. “That’s the way they look at me in the family. Like I can fix everything, and I say, ‘I really can’t.’”

But she did what she could to help Audry. “I don’t know why this happened,” she told Audry. “But everything happens for a reason. Whatever it is, it’ll work out. Even though you’ve been evicted you really can’t say that you’re homeless. Because if I have somewhere to stay, you have somewhere to stay.”

That was true. But it was also tight. Debra lived in a two-bedroom apartment with her two youngest daughters—her eldest was already off in college. So when Audry, Whitney, and Samuel moved in (Jeremy lived with his grandmother), it was a squeeze. “It was different,” says Debra with a smile. “But we adjusted. There were no weird issues. It was just annoying that I had additional people. I talked to my girls. I said, ‘I know it’s going to be tight. But we family. This is what we do. We don’t have a choice.’”

Every day that she was able to, Audry looked for work. She was eager to find her own place. “I wasn’t in a hurry to get away from Debra. But in a way I was in a hurry because it was an inconvenience even though she wasn’t saying anything. Of course, who wants to stay in a two-bedroom with six or seven people?”

When Audry found a place in Pleasant Grove five months later that would accept her credit, she borrowed the deposit money from Debra and took it. “I don’t think she really wanted to go to Pleasant Grove,” says Debra. “But I understood. For her it was like, ‘Okay, this is my opportunity to get my own again.’ As a grown person with kids, you want your own. I think it was her gaining her independence back. That’s perfectly normal.”

Audry knew of Pleasant Grove’s reputation, but she wasn’t intimidated by it. “Back when I grew up, the neighborhood that I grew up in was considered worse then than Pleasant Grove is now,” she says. “People’d say, ‘Where you livin’?’ And I’d tell ’em, and they’d say, ‘You don’t act like you’re from South Dallas.’ The question that’s next is, ‘Well how am I supposed to act just because I live in a certain part of town? You tell me how am I supposed to act?’ Just because you grow up in a bad area doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. And that’s the stereotype that’s put on places like Pleasant Grove and Oak Cliff and South Dallas.”

Though it was not her desire to move there, Audry had no problems living in Pleasant Grove. “The neighborhood itself is okay,” she said. “We used to walk that area where DaDa was killed, just exercising. There’s always kids playing basketball at that corner.”

In any case, Audry was thinking long term. She’d found work in Plano, not far from the children’s school. “I had a plan. Move somewhere where the rent wasn’t that much. Work on my credit and then buy a house. I was trying to save money. And at the end of the day was it worth it?” she asks. “No! Did I even get to save money? No.” It was a fifty-mile round-trip commute from Pleasant Grove to work and school. “The transportation was just eating me up in gas.”

When we met, Audry had moved out of Dallas altogether, to the northwest suburb of Rowlett, half an hour away from Pleasant Grove, just off the George Bush Highway. Though they lived in Pleasant Grove for eleven months, they never really settled in. They knew their neighbors, an elderly pastor and his wife. But otherwise, the long commute to work and school didn’t leave much time to make friends. “That’s what makes Samuel’s shooting so random,” she says. “Because my son didn’t associate with anyone over there. He didn’t hang out, so no one in his age group there knew him.”

Such were the circumstances that came together to put Samuel in Pleasant Grove that night—an area where his mother had not expected to live but where others, schooled in Dallas’s geography of race and class, expected a young man of his age and race to die.

A
ROUND THE CORNER FROM
where Samuel was shot is Gayglen Drive, where rows of homes resembling army barracks sit back from the street—a community billeted as though prepared for war. This was the only part of the area Audry considered rough. “Asante, Murdock Villas, Trinity Trails. They kept changing the name of those apartments, but it was always the same problem. It was all contained in those apartments. So we never heard gunfire. It all happened over there.”

The stretch of Schepps Parkway where Samuel fell is literally on the way to nowhere: there is a barrier marking the end of the road, on the other side of which is a huge freeway. It sits wedged between middle class precarity and bucolic calm. On one side sprawls the Woodland
Springs Park, complete with picnic tables, which is in turn attached to McCommas Bluff Preserve, a 111-acre wooded commons that looks like an unlikely starting point for a leisurely ramble.

On the other side is a rabbit’s warren of streets with long, thin ranch-style houses. The mostly well-tended gardens and impressive cars in the driveways indicate more comfort than affluence; the bars on most of the doors and windows suggest a low-key sense of siege that has insinuated itself into everyday life. On the corner of Neuhoff and Schepps, the precise spot where Samuel fell, a makeshift sign pokes out of the ground offering “Cash 4 Junk cars.”

The census tells a story of population growth and white flight. Between 2000 and 2010 the white population of this tract plummeted by 41 percent while the Latino population grew by 39 percent and the black population by 25 percent, leaving it more than half black and more than a third Latino and, like most of America, more populous and less white than it had been.
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Samuel didn’t have any friends who lived in the neighborhood. But he did have a schoolmate, Denzel, who used to come to the area every month or so to visit his grandmother and who lived two streets down from Samuel. Denzel talks like molasses pours: slowly, richly, thickly. He tells his stories sparsely—with few embellishments and a Texas twang. He was dating Whitney at the time, so when she invited him over for a night in with the family he came right over.

They made an evening of it, watching
We’re the Millers
and drinking cocoa. “We had a mini family night I guess,” says Denzel. Whitney and Denzel were in the kitchen with Audry when Samuel took a break from his Xbox to suggest that they all play Uno. Audry initially declined. “We hadn’t played Uno in a while,” she said. “And Samuel used to cheat.”

“I’m not going to cheat this time,” Samuel protested. “I’m going to play fair.”

So they settled down to play on the floor. Samuel cheated, though not as egregiously as usual. Around eleven, Denzel decided to go home, and Samuel offered to walk him part of the way. It takes around seven minutes to walk from one home to the other. Samuel was just going to
walk him to the corner but decided to go a little further. He was on the phone to his girlfriend, Alexis, when he interrupted the conversation to point out to Denzel that they had passed a white Crown Victoria parked at the end of the street, near Gayglen. “I turned around and looked to see there was a car sitting there,” says Denzel. “It was all white. But it was black inside so you couldn’t see nothing. No bodies. Nothing. The headlights were off. But the brake lights were on. So we turned around and took some more steps. Didn’t think nothing of it. I’m thinking they just sitting there to just sit there, I guess. I don’t know. So we keep walking, and then two, three steps and I hear a shot fired.”

When I ask Denzel to describe the sound he shrugs. “It was just like
BLAH.”

He continued, “[Samuel] said, ‘Oh, I’m hit.’ I thought he was playing. I said, ‘Stop playing.’ So I rushed over there to him.” Denzel corrects himself. Had he known what had happened he would have rushed. But at that moment he still couldn’t believe what was happening. “I didn’t rush over there. I was walking towards him. And then he’s hopping towards the curb. And he told Alexis over the phone he’d got shot.” Then Denzel called Whitney. “Whitney. Sam been shot.” “What happened? What happened?” said Whitney. “He been shot, you gotta come right away.”

Audry drove straight down with Whitney to find Samuel lying on the ground. She stopped the car in the middle of the street, put it in park, and jumped out with the motor still running and the doors open. “When I did get round the corner Denzel is hollering and screaming and he’s upset. But for me I’m more in mama mode. Find the wound. Put pressure to it. When Samuel started regurgitating, turn him over to his side. Not hollering and screaming. I had no time for that. My reaction was more practical.”

Samuel was wearing only one of his shoes; the other was across the street. “He was moaning when I came out. He said, ‘Mama.’ We were trying to find out where he was hit. We called 911. We located the injury site of the wound. I was trying to apply pressure. He started regurgitating
from his nose and his mouth, and his eyes started to rolling in the back of his head. At that moment I knew that he was dying in my arms, but I was still hopeful.”

The questions from the 911 dispatcher irritated her. “They were asking, ‘Is the person still out there with the gun?’ I mean do you think it would even matter to me if he was? When I see my child laying there on the ground. Or, ‘Are y’all safe?’ ‘Are you in a well-lit area?’ None of that makes sense to me. My focus can’t be on the crazy questions. Or, ‘What’s the major cross street you at?’ when I know you’ve got GPS and pick up the cell phone signal. So they’re asking all these crazy questions.”

You can hear Audry’s frustration increasing during the call. She starts out urgent, clear, and panicked. “My son has been shot right here at Schepps and Parkway,” she yells, with Denzel and Whitney wailing in the background. “We need an ambulance.”

The dispatcher asks her to spell the street name.

“S-C-H-E-P-P-S,” she says, twice.

But while Audry is desperate for someone to come and save her son, the dispatcher dispassionately and professionally—if ponderously—gathers a full account of the scene. “Did he see who did it?”

“No.”

“And he just got shot. You didn’t see who did it?”

“No, he was walking with a friend.”

“Is the friend there too?”

“Yes,” and then Audry refocuses on Samuel. “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” she says.

While she is trying to encourage life back into her son, the dispatcher asks, “Was there a vehicle you saw or anything like that?”

Denzel’s voice enters from a short distance and then Audry relays the message. “It was a black Crown Vic. No. It was a white Crown Vic.”

“Where did he go?” the dispatcher asks, and at this point Audry loses patience and becomes more formal.

“I don’t know where it went, sir. I really don’t.”

“Alright. Where was he shot?”

“In the back.” She asks someone to get a blanket.

“Are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you don’t know which way the car went?”

“Sir, someone called me on the phone and told me to get around here, so I don’t know nothing,” Audry says, finally closing that line of questioning down for good.