There Are No Children Here (30 page)

The judge ran through the rules, though Pharoah and Clarise hardly listened. Pharoah was too busy thinking about not stuttering. When his turn came, he stood poised and ready.

“Acceptable,”
the judge said.
“Acceptable.”
Pharoah drew a deep breath and took his time.

“Acceptable
,” Pharoah repeated. “A-C-C-E-P”—he pulled the microphone down toward him so that his voice would be amplified—“T-A-B-L-E.
Acceptable
.” He went to the back of the line.

Clarise, shaking slightly from nerves, was given the word
abdicate
.

“Abdicate
,” she repeated, in a forceful voice that carried through the gymnasium. She almost shouted the individual letters into the microphone.
“Abdicate.”

By the third round, four students had missed words. It was Pharoah’s turn again. As the contest progressed, he felt more self-assured. Nary a stutter, and the competition was nearly half over.

“Aerial
,” the judge said.
“Aerial
.” Pharoah wasn’t sure how to spell it. He’d never seen the word in print. He wasn’t even quite sure what it meant. He paused and then guessed.

“A,” he said tentatively, almost asking. No buzzer. Fifteen seconds elapsed. E-R-I-A-L.” He thought he’d gotten it wrong and, his head bowed, started to head for the steps off the stage.

“Come back. That was right,” the judge yelled out to him.

“It was?” Pharoah said in disbelief. Mr. Rogers gave him an okay sign with his hand. Students giggled. Pharoah put his hands over his eyes in embarrassment.

The words kept coming, round after round, until there were only three contestants left: Pharoah, Clarise, and a boy named William. William went first.

“Amendment
,” the judge said.
“Amendment.”

“Amendment,”
William repeated. “A-M-E-N-D-M-A-N-T.
Amendment
.” The buzzer sounded, and William walked off the stage. Pharoah broke into a big grin and, as if he’d just scored the final point of a basketball game, threw a fist into the air. He quickly caught himself and pulled his hand down. But he didn’t stop smiling. He was guaranteed at least second place. Now it was between him and Clarise. Both wished they could have stopped right there and shared first place, neither wanted the other to lose.

Clarise got the word
catbird
.

“Catbird.”
She enunciated each letter with precision and punctuation. She liked compound words; they were easier to sound out in your head.
“Catbird.”

The judge gave Pharoah
cellblock
.

“Cellblock
. S-A-L-E-B-L-O-C-K.
Cellblock.”
The buzzer sounded. Clarise now had to spell it right to win. She stepped up to the microphone and twisted it so that she didn’t have to bend over.

“Cellblock
. S-A-I-L-B-L-O-C-K.
Cellblock.”
The buzzer sounded again. They would get one more word, the judge told them. Otherwise, he’d declare it a tie.

“Darken
,” the judge said.
“Darken
.” Clarise looked at her
partner. She knew how to spell it. Pharoah wasn’t so sure. But he proceeded as if he knew. He couldn’t or wouldn’t lose it now.

“Darken
,” he repeated. “D-A-R-K”—he hesitated for a moment—“I-N.
Darken.”
The buzzer sounded. He’d gotten it wrong. Now, Clarise had to spell it correctly. She stepped confidently to the microphone.

“Darken,”
she repeated. “D-A-R-K-E-N.
Darken
.” Her classmates erupted in wild applause. Pharoah might have been upset, except that he was happy for his friend and satisfied with second place. The two children embraced each other, their faces radiant in victory.

“Congratulations,” they muttered to each other. Pharoah felt good. He’d accomplished what he’d set out to do. He hadn’t stuttered. Not once. Not even close. From her seat in the audience, their fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Barone, thought her two former students looked proud and charming in their celebration. She had never doubted they would win. Huge grins covered both their faces. Pharoah thrust his fist into the air, waving it back and forth. This time, he didn’t bring it back down.

In his joy, Pharoah alternately skipped and ran home from school, a pad of paper and a textbook clutched tightly in one hand, his red ribbon flapping in the other. He couldn’t wait to tell his mother of his triumph and show her his award. He had kept his promise. Though not the champion, he had done better than last year.

Pharoah pushed open the door to the apartment, which his mother left unlocked when school let out. Everyone and everything was eerily quiet. The television was turned down. The triplets were in their room. Pharoah could even hear the running bathtub through the closed bathroom door. Lafeyette sat perched by the window on the microwave-turned-ironing board, his arms around his bent knees. He strained to hear the conversation at the kitchen table between LaJoe, Rochelle, and a neighbor, Clementine, whom everyone called Dutt; it was conducted in hollow whispers.

Pharoah first stood at the entranceway—“That little round pie of a face,” his mother later recalled, “it looked like the pie had just got cut all up and ate up; he was so happy”—and then
went to his mother’s side, thrusting the ribbon in her lap. “I-I-I c-c-came in second place.” In his excitement and in the spooky stillness, his stutter had returned.

LaJoe returned Pharoah’s smile. “Second place; that’s still good.”

“Mama, if-if-if I hadn’t m-m-missed a word …” He stumbled over his words and for a moment, flustered by the silence, lost his train of thought. “You know what they do?”

“What?”

“If-if you m-m-miss a word, Mama, they make you just get off the stage. That was so embarrassing to peoples. And, and w-w-when I saw that I couldn’t miss a word …” He told his mother that he had slipped up on the word
darken
when he substituted an
i
for the
e
.

“I-I-I-I knew right away it was wrong. My-my-my, you know, my heart, my heart was beating so fast,” he told her, the words streaming out of his mouth.

Pharoah realized that something was terribly wrong. He didn’t want to ask. No one seemed to care about his spelling bee triumph. No one wanted to hear what he had to say. Dutt was weeping. Lafeyette, while he had one ear to the conversation, stared vacantly out the window; he didn’t even congratulate Pharoah. LaJoe tucked Pharoah’s red ribbon into her pocket-book. (She would later display it in the living room alongside three achievement certificates earned by the triplets.) The family had just minutes earlier learned of Craig Davis’s death the night before.

LaJoe turned from Pharoah to Dutt, whose daughter had been Craig’s girlfriend and who felt partly responsible for Craig’s death. Last night, when Craig came over to the house to visit her daughter, she had gotten into a minor spat with the boy, so he had left. If she had let him stay, she told LaJoe, maybe he wouldn’t have been shot. LaJoe tried to comfort her.

“You know God, it’s up to him when you going to come and it’s up to him when you leave,” LaJoe told her neighbor. “In what way, I ain’t sure about no more, but if it’s time for you to go, you’re going to go and it wasn’t up to you. If he had stayed and you hadn’t exchanged words and you hadn’t asked him to leave, it probably would of still happened.”

For much of the rest of the afternoon, the three women remained
at the table, sometimes talking, sometimes sitting in silence. Lafeyette huddled on the microwave still as a statue, neither crying nor talking, listening alternately to the subdued conversation and to the roar of the El. During one long pause in the conversation, Lafeyette spoke, his voice flat and tired.

“He didn’t have to die like that.” His stare was directed at his mother. “He had to die the way that he lived, God’s way. You die the way that you live and Craig wasn’t bad, so why him?” LaJoe didn’t know how to respond; she felt the same way. She said nothing. Lafeyette returned to looking out the window, his face taut.

In the meantime, Pharoah had shuffled out the door, unnoticed. This was not the time or the place to celebrate his spelling victory. He went to play with Porkchop in the second-floor hallway. “I don’t like to see nobody sad,” he said later.

Craig’s funeral was nothing like Bird Leg’s. For starters, it was held at night. And it was conducted at the A. R. Leak Funeral Home, one of the city’s oldest and most esteemed black-owned funeral homes, a stark contrast to the storefront church where Bird Leg was memorialized. Sam Cooke, the rhythm and blues singer, had been put to rest here, as had Flukey Stokes, a notorious gambler and suspected drug dealer. Over five thousand people had viewed Stokes’s body, which lay in a coffin built in the shape of a Cadillac.

Of the funeral home’s four chapels, the Mahalia Jackson Room was the smallest. The room welcomed visitors with a black-and-white photo of Jackson—“The World’s Greatest Gospel Singer,” the caption read—and was decorated in varying shades of green; the patterned wallpaper in emerald green, the lush carpeting the color of well-watered grass. The room seated two hundred, but at Craig’s funeral an additional fifty to a hundred mourners stood along the walls, overflowing into the hallway outside.

Craig, whose head wound had been stuffed with cotton and sutured to prevent any leakage, was dressed in a fitted navy blue suit and light blue shirt and tie, all of which his mother had bought for $154. The casket’s baby blue paint job contrasted sharply with the dark occasion, but the cheerful color seemed to
brighten Craig, who even in death looked happy, his lips turned up slightly in a smile.

It was clear from the size of the crowd that Craig had many admirers. Six former teachers attended, one of whom had saved some of Craig’s writings and now planned to have them framed. Those teachers who couldn’t attend contributed $100 to the family. Children from both ABLA and Henry Horner were there, as were colleagues from work, including his boss, Percy Anderson. Flowers, almost an entire garden, it seemed, surrounded the casket. One bouquet had been sent by his teachers at Cregier, another by his co-workers at the stationery store. Two bunches had been sent by the residents of two different high-rises in the public housing complex where Craig grew up. And as tradition asked, Craig’s mother had contributed “a bleeding heart,” a set of pink and white carnations arranged in the shape of a heart with a cluster of red roses in the center.

Lafeyette came with LaJoe, who despised funerals as much as her son did. LaJoe knew Craig only from the dances in front of the building, but she understood how much he had meant to Lafeyette, so she wanted to be here with him. Lafeyette was older now and had abandoned the corduroys and nylon jacket he wore to Bird Leg’s funeral; instead, he wore a dapper blue, high-waisted silk suit that Terence, when he was making money selling drugs, had had made for himself. It no longer fit Terence, but clung to the sticklike frame of Lafeyette as if it had been tailored for him. Lafeyette also wore a white, furry Kangol cap, shaped like a golf cap, which made him look older, almost as if he were from a different era. LaJoe wore a gray dress given her by a friend who had outgrown it. Together, they made a handsome pair.

Pharoah chose not to come. He said it was because he didn’t have anything to wear, but more likely he didn’t want to be amid all the crying. He didn’t like to be around sad people, particularly if he knew he couldn’t cheer them up.

James, who wept when he first heard of Craig’s death, had thought of coming, too. His mother was there; in fact, she read the obituary at the opening of the service. But James turned fifteen that day and he felt it would bring him bad luck to attend a funeral on his birthday.

In the Mahalia Jackson Room, the crowd was unusually still.
Few cried. Even fewer yelled out for Craig as they had done for Bird Leg. Few mentioned the killing, though it was referred to once in the sermon, and then only obliquely as “the tragedy.” It was as if friends and family were burying an older man who had died of natural causes.

The silence, though, extended far beyond the funeral. Silence shrouded Craig’s death. Neither the police nor the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had contacted Craig’s mother. No phone call of apology or explanation. No letter. No telegram. Not even, Christine thought, flowers. She spent four days after his death trying to learn what had happened. She visited the police, the state authorities, and eventually the ATF. But she learned nothing. The ATF told her they couldn’t talk with her because the shooting was under investigation. We’ll get back in touch with you, they said. They never did.

The ATF continued to tell reporters that Craig had been a Black Gangster Disciple. One of Craig’s teachers angrily said it was a way to justify his death. Of eighteen thousand names the police had on file of people affiliated with the city’s west side gangs, Craig Davis was not among them. Moreover, Craig had no criminal record as a juvenile and had been arrested only once as an adult, and that was for allegedly stealing the cookies, a crime he had insisted he hadn’t done. When he died, the medical examiner found no trace of alcohol or drugs in his blood. His teachers and the principal at Cregier, all of whom thought the world of Craig, knew of no gang affiliation. Nor did his friends. And, people would point out, had he been a member of the Black Gangster Disciples he never would have been allowed to visit Lafeyette’s building, which was controlled by the Gangster Stones and the Vice Lords, both rival gangs. Even a policeman who knew Craig from Horner had only good things to say about him.

It wasn’t impossible that Craig had purchased a sawed-off shotgun. All the adults knew it was hard to resist the lures of the neighborhood. But no one close to Craig knew anything about any gun running by the boy. Friends said he avoided hanging out with known drug dealers and gang leaders. The police never produced any evidence. His mother just wanted to know what happened that night, why they stopped her son. Was it a case of mistaken identity? Did they have the wrong Craig?
Had he, in fact, bought a shotgun? She couldn’t find out. Other than the initial press release, the police and the ATF refused to say anything about the case. They ruled it an accidental homicide.