Wee The Fishes

Behind every story an author tells is another story, a back story of his or her life. With the rerelease of "Meet Addy," after 31 years, https://people.com/american-girl-brings-back-three-classic-fan-favorite-dolls-8645293 this essay, in part, is about that back story, what was unfolding as I prepared for the series launch and began the author tour in September of 1993. This essay is also a part of the story of ongoing gun violence that the community in Buffalo is still facing. https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/buffalo/stop-killing-our-kids-mothers-against-violence-call-for-end-to-gun-violence-in-buffalo

Saturday July 13, 2019.? When the police were not allowed to release the identity of victim who had been killed in an overnight shooting, to name the voice of the blood crying out from the ground, we knew. We are a small school of Facebook friends, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Caucasians, and Yemenis who grew up in Lackawanna, NY, a small city just south of Buffalo. We lived our childhoods there in the 60’s and 70’s in the projects or the modest houses of the First Ward, witnessing the steady, devastating decline of Bethlehem Steel. It was one of the oldest steel plants in America, once the fourth largest in the world. By the time it closed in 1983, it was a shell of its former self, and when it went down it wiped out 2/3 of Lackawanna’s tax base. ?Some of us stayed in our town, moved into Buffalo or its suburbs, or left the area all together. We now have this virtual channel through which we all pass, where the waters are not swift, but can be deep. Like on July 13.? It was through one of the Facebook members that the name of the victim, the voice of his blood seeped from the ground and into the waters.

Paul Humphrey. He was seventeen. A member of our group had a relationship with him and his family. He had watched Paul grow up and had mentored him through the years. ?He was a football player, a running back and rising junior at a prestigious Catholic school in Buffalo.? The shock and disbelief were fresh. ?He was a kid getting some air on a summer night. Shot down in the darkness, Paul died leaving the unanswered question. Why??

When the story was later told that day in the Buffalo News, a woman who lived near the murder scene, Heaven Jones, revealed she heard seven to eight gunshots a little before one AM. Paul was struck, and so was a fifteen-year-old boy who was treated and released later that day from the children’s hospital. Another neighbor, Nyshon Ross, who had a bonfire going on this typically cool night of 62 degrees deep into the heart of a Buffalo summer, heard the shots too.? Heaven had taken off running with a group of others and had not witnessed the shooting. She did say, however that Paul had fallen beside a dead tree.?

The Monday after Paul’s murder, his family gathered with students and faculty at his school to show their love, their solidarity. They came to pray. They came to comfort. They came to cry. They came to remember. His teammates, wearing green and gold jerseys, stood on the steps behind the chaplain, their shining faces stunned into solemnity. So many who knew Paul commented on his ready smile. It was said that he had a “smile that lit up a room.”? His smile shines through in his pictures posted online, and later in media outlets, his round and hope filled baby face turned out into the world.? With his light brown skin and alluring hazel eyes he looks to be what his friends, family, teammates said he was, a young man who was chill, one who had not retreated into the icy, protective appearance of the cool pose. ?Looking into the grief-stricken faces of those who came to remember him, I found them hard to bear, but I did not look away. ?In the dazzling light of this day, it was clear to see what Paul’s murder had taken from them.?

One player carried Paul’s green jersey. The coach was interviewed and revealed that Paul’s mother had made a request of him.? She wanted his other jersey, the white one. She wanted to bury Paul in it. His team will wear his number on their helmets this season, and the school will have a new motto, one printed on his prayer card. ?“2-gether.” ??Paul was buried on July 19. ?

In the statement Nyshon Ross made to the Buffalo News, he added this about the shooting, “It usually never happens here." I don’t know how many readers paused at the juxtaposition of the words “usually” and “never.”? I stopped cold, contemplating what he said, not seeing a contradiction, but understanding the truth he spoke. It’s be’s that way sometime. Something that usually never happens here, happens here. It happens there too. When that “thing” is being shot to death, one by one, two by two, young American youth, especially African-American youth are murdered night after night after night after night after night.

According to the website Gun Violence Archive, on July 13, nationally there were nine incidents of gunfire involving youth between the ages of twelve and seventeen that resulted in six injuries and five deaths. The night Paul Humphrey was shot, two other young men were also killed, Donte Webb, who was also seventeen was shot in Baltimore. Fifteen-year-old Kaylen Marion Middleton died in Clayton, NC. Both were African American.? Two additional fifteen-year-olds, both African American were killed. The girl, Ramisi Yarborough, was eight months pregnant. The shooter was her boyfriend, Troy Randall Jr.? He killed himself.

Friday night, July 12 had not been any kinder. ?It also had five gun deaths in this age group. All were male. Three were seventeen, one sixteen, one fifteen. Four of the five were African American.? ?

Gun Violence Archive collects statistics, track incidents, links articles, lists names. Relying on that data, the National Gun Violence Memorial goes one step further. It is a virtual memorial where more information is kept, perhaps a victim’s nickname, personality traits, where he or she worked or went to school. Visitors can leave messages and light candles. There are pictures of the victims, names attached to faces. Paul Humphrey is on this site.? Among his nicknames listed are “Lil P” “P Money” and “Pretty Boy.” Over 600 candles have been lit in his memory. And in his picture, where he is sporting Yankees gear, he is smiling.?????

*??????

When my niece, Tia Porter was murdered back in 1993, there were no virtual memorials. Instead, her name (like many other young murder victims) was written by a friend on a wall in her neighborhood. ?Having just turned 20, she was shot to death in Buffalo, NY when a gun fight erupted in front of her second-floor apartment in the wee hours of the morning. A group of teens had gathered for a party on the street. Tia was not at the party. She was home with her one-year-old son and had called 911 because her house was being sprayed with gunfire. ?A bullet pierced the wall below the wooden frame of a window and struck her in the back of the head. ?When the ambulance came, the paramedics tried to save her. They transported her to the hospital, where alone in a trauma unit she was worked on by a medical team. They tried to get her to breathe. To get her heart to pump. Her blood to circulate.? But there is only so much that medical science, that doctors can do for gunshot victims. The lower part of Tia’s skull had been blasted away.

I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and got the call about her murder early Saturday morning. Her father, my older brother waited until daylight. Our mother had always told us, if someone dies in the middle of the night, don’t call with the news, especially if the person being notified is alone. I was alone, and Tia was alone by then. In the morgue.

My other niece, Tia’s older sister, Nicole, who had rushed to the hospital after the shooting had been assured by doctors that Tia had not suffered.? I know they told her that so our family could be comforted. She had not been in pain as she died without her hand in any of ours, without her baby, without words of prayers wished for her, without the waters of our love blessing her as she left us all.?

I don’t know whose idea it was to have an open casket. I do not think my brother made that decision. Tia was dressed beautifully in a white dress. Her head was slightly swollen and there was a protrusion on her forehead.? An attempt had been made to disguise the fatal wound. A scarf had been artfully bunched and carefully placed at the side of her neck, but we all saw. The lower back of her head was missing and darkened, hardened skin flared out. I remember thinking, that flute of skin was hideous, but in its own way beautiful, the petal of an enormous fully opened lily. How dare her neck look like that? ?Whoever made the decision wanted Tia to be seen. Why should she be hidden?? The reality of her death? What a bullet to the head does to a body?

Her friends, mostly girls and boys in their late teens came to her viewing the night before the funeral. They entered the small, dark funeral home slowly, fearfully, bunched in groups. Schools of fish. Out of the warm shallows of youth and into the deep and cold waters of the mature. They walked up to their friend in a box, and they cried, rushed away together, but many returned before the viewing was over. They had the stunned eyes. One girl took pictures of Tia, and none of us family members stopped her. She was one of the younger ones, just 16 or 17. Tia was her friend, and she wanted to capture her image to take forward in life with her. Tia’s younger brother, not yet 10, was bold, walked right up to the casket, ran his fingers through Tia’s hair. He lingered next to her. “This does not look like Tia,” he declared. “She’s not smiling.”

Tia, like Paul, had an inviting, infectious smile. ?One of the last pictures we have of her was taken just a few months earlier when she and her son came down from Buffalo down to Pittsburgh. They are sitting in front of the Christmas tree at my sister’s house. Tia, a thick woman like my mother, is dressed is a cream sweater, wearing gold hoop earrings and a gold chain. Her son is on her lap. Content. He is dressed in gold sweater, his pacifier clipped to the front. Tia is beaming. She had a gap in her teeth like my mother, and it is on full display. This image of her is comforting.

The image of Tia in the casket was not. No matter what the doctors told my niece about Tia not suffering, I wondered if that was true. A face in death, is not that of one in life. But hers was different. I did not, like a child expect her to be smiling, but I did not expect her face to look anguished. In her final moments, it did look like she had suffered. It appeared she felt an agony that froze her face into a pained mask.

For the funeral some of the girls did not know what to wear, so they wore prom dresses. The young men wore fresh jeans, dress pants and dress shirts. Her baby did not attend. Most of the service was lost on me. My brother and Tia’s mother had divorced years before. She died of a heart attack when Tia was a junior in high school. Less like a niece, Tia felt more like a daughter to me. She visited me when I worked at a boarding school in New England, brought her son to see me when I moved on to teach at the University of Southern Illinois. We talked on the phone often. She was a voracious reader who loved the works of Terri McMillan. When I told her we shared the same editor, she was impressed. Not by me and my work, but that somehow, she was a few degrees of separation from her idol. Tia worked minimum wage jobs, and I loved a story she told me once about working them. “If you get fired from McDonald’s, take off your uniform and go across the street and work at Burger King. You ain’t even got to tell them you worked at McDonald’s. They’ll hire you.” ?

Before my sisters and I had driven up to Buffalo to attend the funeral, I thought I would be strong. I made lists of who I wanted to see, conversations I wanted to have. One item on the list was to go to Tia’s apartment. It was one common to Buffalo, a second story unit in double decker house with wood siding. This house on East Delavan was different. It was peppered with dozens of bullet holes. Houses sprayed with bullets on the eastside of Buffalo usually never exist.?

I ascended the staircase, steep and narrow and entered the front room where she was shot. It had brown shag carpet, and where she had fallen after she was struck, was a dark and still wet stain. Paramedics had been there. Police and detectives had been there. There is only so much they do. They do not clean up crime scenes. There was still blood, still fluid, staining newspaper that had been spread on the floor. I did not cry.? I stooped, the way Tia had the night looking for safety and peered through the hole where the fatal shot had come. Blue light streamed through. I was safe in that moment. I was strong.

I had been strong a few years earlier when my father committed suicide in the childhood project apartment I grew up in in Lackawanna. He and my mother were separated. She was living in Buffalo, and I was teaching at the boarding school. Home for Christmas break, my mother and I went to spend some time with him. We had packed our bags, packed up food and settled in to comfort him as he faced surgery. A diabetic, he had already had one leg amputated. He needed the second leg amputated. We were joined in our stay by his older sister who had arrived from Columbus.

In this three-bedroom apartment that had held seven of nine growing children (two had already grown up and left home before we moved there) my father slept downstairs in a hospital bed. The morning we were going to go with him to the hospital for his surgery, my aunt was up early in the kitchen making him breakfast. My mom and I were still upstairs. I heard the shot. Then the frantic words of my aunt. “Call 911, Brother shot himself. Call 911, Brother shot himself.” I literally rolled out of bed and bolted down the steps. My aunt was next to his bed, her breath shallow.

The revolver my father used for his protection, the one he kept tucked under his pillow was in his right hand. He had pressed it into in chin and pulled the trigger.? Blood was seeping from his neck.? There was spot of blood growing on his pajama coat.? I knew he was gone. His eyes were closed. He looked sleep. He looked peaceful. He looked like he did not suffer. By this time my mother was headed down the stairs, and I told her to go back, and my aunt to go up with her. ?I called 911 and told the dispatcher that my father had shot himself.? Was he breathing? No. I opened the front door, leaving the glassed screen door closed to wait for the ambulance.? When I hung up, I ran upstairs for a moment to find my mother and aunt who had been friends since childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, sitting side by side in the bedroom I had shared with my four sisters. They were both crying. My mother kept asking, “Connie, what are we going to do? What are we going to do?” My aunt kept asking, “Why, Brother, why?”? I had no answers for them. I only had my arms and stunned eyes.? I raced back downstairs as a howling siren and red and blue swirls of light filled our snowy street.??

First the ambulance arrived, followed by the police. My mother and aunt came down and they and I were escorted into the kitchen by the police. We filed past the paramedics who surrounded my father. ?We sat in the kitchen while the police questioned us. We told our stories. What we saw. What we heard.? We did not cry. The food my aunt was preparing was out. Grits, eggs, sausage. A pot of water was on the stove. After a while a paramedic appeared in the doorframe of the kitchen, and an officer went in the living room with him.? The officer let us know what we all knew by then.? My father was dead.?

It was hours before we left the apartment, before my father’s body could be moved. I’m not sure of all who came, perhaps detectives, but we had to wait for the coroner before my father left for the last time. Neighbors and friends had heard the news by then. This was Lackawanna, a small pond. Word had spread fast and the neighbors came to comfort. Some came in to see him. Others stood outside in the cold.?

My father was in the generation who suffered through the Great Depression.? With his sixth-grade education, he had been working since he was12, and was an old school hustler. On two good legs he would walk the neighborhood all day.? He sold liquor out the back door, and front door, cut grass, did clean outs of empty apartments, painted, and loan-sharked—a quarter on the dollar. ?He had a horrible, debilitating stutter, so often when he was out walking about, he would whistle.? He would sing Mills Brothers songs. ?He loved “Cab Driver.”

“Cab Driver, once more down the street

There's a little place we used to meet

That's where I laid my future at her feet

Cab Driver, once more down the street”

Someone had dropped off my father’s other sister from Buffalo, and along with my aunt who had been there, and my mother, they said tearful good-byes to him. By this time the gun had been removed and his blanket was pulled up around him. They touched his arm. Caressed his shoulder. Held his hand.? I could not bring myself to go back to his side. We all left the living room before he was put into a body bag. None of us wanted to see him taken away like that.? We went upstairs to pack our things.

While my mother and aunts stayed upstairs, I went back down to see if I should do something before they joined me.? My father was gone, but what was left behind? The bed had been stripped bare. All the bedding was put in the body bag.? A blood smear was on the blue, plastic mattress. Still smelling the gun powder that clung in the air, still hearing the ringing of the gun shot in my ears, I cleaned the mattress. Noticing blood that had dripped down a rail, I cleaned that, only to notice a few more drops that clung underneath the bed support, and some drops that had fallen to the wood floor. I cleaned.? Then gathered my mother and aunts in my car, and in silence, we drove to Buffalo.

My father’s funeral was five day later in St. Mark’s AME Zion church. It was the church we children had grown up in. ?It was a small, sturdily built of red bricks and had red and weathered double doors.? It was within walking distance of the projects, just a few steps away from the junior high in the First Ward.? The pastor did not mention suicide. I had grown up hearing suicide was considered a sin. I did not know this pastor. I don’t know if that was what he believed. He was not the pastor from my youth. ?He did not mention the word but said that we should all endure to the end. ?I did not like that. I felt a heat inside me when he said that. He did not know my father, the mental illness he suffered with, the physical suffering he was enduring. My father had more than his fair share of sins, but to me, his suicide was not one them. I did not cry for my father. He was sick. He was old. He was weary.? He was not up to one more battle, one more fight. But for Tia it was different.

She had recently turned 20 and was excited. ?As we talked on the phone one night after her birthday, I told her, “Most people are excited about turning 21, not 20.”? She told me, “I don’t feel any different, but I’m 20. ?I’m not a teenager anymore!”

I thought about that as I arrived for the funeral, saw the program, “In Loving Memory of Tia Renee Porter, February 23, 1973-- June 12, 1993.”? She had gotten to be 20 for less than four months.

Her casket was still open when we arrived. I was going to walk up, to look in her face as much as it was not hers, one last time, but the funeral directors closed the casket and began locking it.

I slipped into the bathroom, and there I lost it all. I began crying so hard, I had to hang onto a wall. I knew I was loud. I could hear my wails. They did not sound like they were a part of me, though they emanated from deep within my being, and as they emerged from my throat, they racked my body so strongly, I could barely breathe. I doubled over, and one of my sisters and one of my cousins came to me. They held me up. These women. These pillars. They spoke to me. Wrapped their arms around me. They took me from the bathroom to my seat. Someone brought cold presses that they held to my head. They used them to wipe my face. They fanned me with church fans. They rubbed my back. Squeezed my hands tightly in theirs. All through the funeral they tended me. They literally held me up in my seat. I leaned on one and then the other. ?I could not even hold my head up most of the time. I heard a little of the eulogy from the priest.

He told a story of Tia as a child trying to sing a duet in church with her sister, Nicole. Nicole has always shy, but Tia never was. Tia sang out to the church, encouraging her sister to join in, repeating, “Come on, Nicole” so often that it became a refrain in the song. ?For a moment, I laughed. But just as quickly, I was despondent.? Sinking. Sinking. Sinking. ?But my sister, my cousin, would not let go. They were the strong ones.

I was not strong. I thought about all of what Tia would not have. She would not have a chance to see her son grow up. She would not have the chance to turn 21.? She would not have the chance laugh one more time.? She would not have one more smile.?

I was not strong. I thought of all we had lost. A daughter. A sister. A niece.? A granddaughter. An aunt. A cousin. A neighbor. A coworker. A schoolmate. A friend. ?

One moment. One bullet. One gun. One shooter had taken all of this away.

*

The U.S. Department of Justice lists the number of homicides by firearm in 1993 as 18,253 with 29.9% of the victims being between the ages of 12 and 24.? While the overall rate out of 100,000 was 7, for African Americans, it was 30.1. Despite firearm deaths dropping steadily since then, the website Everytown for Gun Safety provides evidence that African American youth are still being killed disproportionately: “Firearms are the leading cause of death for Black children and teens in America, and they are 14 times more likely than their white counterparts to die by gun homicide. Black children are 10 times more likely to be hospitalized for a firearm assault than white children.” Gun Violence Archive reports over 1,800 children between the ages of 12-17 have been killed or injured by guns so far this year.

In the Buffalo News story about Paul Humphrey’s death, a nearby male resident who did not want to be identified, "heard everything," but didn’t want to talk about it.? He added, "I love my city. I don't want my children to be part of this."

?Children are a part of “this.” One way or another, they have always been. Growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, I cannot say they, we were direct victims in the way children are now. ?The adults around us were being killed.

The first shooting deaths I remember happened when I was eight. My Sunday school teacher at St. Mark’s was murdered in 1968. She was shot to death by her husband, also a Sunday school teacher. He then turned the gun on himself. She was far along in a pregnancy, but the baby could not be saved. My oldest sister, just 14, had brought the news home, and in the tiny bedroom the girls shared, told us of the shooting.

My teacher had been at her parents’ house when her husband came in. It was not clear if he was let in, or forced his way in. Was there an argument? A fight? What was clear was that he had ended the lives, and that of their unborn child, and I at eight, in the upper bunk of one set of our bunk beds, could not make sense of this news. ?I don’t know if anyone in our community could make sense of it.

He was a fireman at Bethlehem Steel, a provisional police officer in Lackawanna when African Americans were all but absent from law enforcement. He was a Scoutmaster. A Sunday school teacher.? I thought he was handsome, and so strong, as I saw him in the front pews of the church teaching his class while I sat with his wife and my class. She was beautiful and kind and dedicated. I looked forward to her teaching on Sundays.? I was friends with one of their daughters, one of their five children.?

The day my sister carried the news of the deaths, I felt sick. My stomach hurt; I pulled the covers over my head. I was scared. My parents argued. They physically fought, so did other kids’ parents.? This was an open secret. I also felt guilty, like the worst of sinners. I had always secretly envied my friend. I was jealous that her father worked, and mine was “crazy,” drawing a Social Security check monthly and hustling to feed seven children. I was jealous because her parents were young. I did not know their exact ages, but in news accounts her mother was listed at 25, her father, 27. I was the eighth of nine children, and my mother was 36 when I was born, my father older. I was jealous because my friend’s parents were in Sunday school every Sunday. Mine weren’t.

As a child, I never recalled my father attending church, not even once, though once we had grown up, he did sometimes attend. In my youth, my mother seldom attended, but became an avid church goer later in life, as she had been when raised in the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.? It was not until I was older that she told me why she did not attend much when we were children. ?

She had me and my siblings dressed to the nines, my brothers in starched shirts and freshly pressed pants. They wore polished dress shoes. ?She had her five girls in beautifully sown dresses she made for us, lace socks and Stride Rite patent leather, Mary Janes, but she had few dresses herself. She felt embarrassed to be seen at church, like she would be judged. For all I knew, she may have been judged, but if she was, she never confessed that to me.?

So many people were attending my friend’s parents’ funeral, it was held at the local community center, the Friendship House. ?I did not go. It was not an occasion for children.? The service was presided over by our pastor, Reverend Wells, a middle-aged man. With his light-light skin and straight hair, he looked like Adam Clayton Powell Jr.? I do not know if suicide was mentioned at the funeral, or the word murder.? Both words were true. I feel if he touched on them directly or even in a euphemistic manner, he did not do so in fiery judgment.

Reverend Wells was a man a compassion, one who truly embodied love.? While our Sunday school lessons wound down, he would come up the center aisle of the church. He would kneel in front of the alter, make the sign of the cross and pray.? Some Sundays well after church had ended, he would come to our apartment in Albright Court to visit, to have prayer. Our father would speak in his stammering voice, calling down from upstairs, but would not join in. My mother did, after spending her morning cooking dinner while we were in Sunday school, and her afternoon preparing clothes for us to wear to school on Monday, she and we children would kneel in the living room. Reverend Wells touched our heads. Blessed us. He would give us money so one of my older brothers could go to the corner store to buy ice cream for our dessert. I have never forgotten his kindness. This man was a Christian. Soon after the tragedy, my friend and her siblings stopped attending the church. They moved in with their mother’s parents.?

It is said that in the early Christian church that believers had a stealthy way of recognizing one another upon first meeting. It was based on the Greek word, “ichthys,” fish.? The word was turned into an acrostic—Iesous Christos Theou Yios Soter: “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.” One believer would draw an arc in the dirt. If another drew an arc that connected them and formed a fish, they had a safe way of identifying one another. In a time that Roman prosecution of Christians could mean death, the fish was a safe way of identifying one another in perilous waters.??? ?

After all these passing years, I think about the deaths of my friend’s parents. I remember them. Remember her. The shared fates of our fathers many years apart. I remember two other boys who I grew up with whose mothers were murdered. ?One boy was my first crush in elementary school. I was in third grade. He was beautiful. He sat two rows behind me, and I would find myself turning away from the front to stare at him, turning away from the board, the teacher, away from the education that could lift me out of the ghetto. His mother was raped and murdered, killed by a young man, her body left in a field. A few months later, his father died. Adults said it was his heart. It gave out. The other boy’s mother was murdered when we were in junior high. I don’t recall exactly how she died, and I suspect I blocked out the details from my mind. I had a crush on him also, and he had one on me. One day a bold classmate came out and told us that was what was going on between us. My friend and I looked at each other and laughed. Impossible. We were science geeks. We were both goofy. We debated topics like what would happen if the sun disappeared and if our solar system was really one big atom. ?I don’t know what ever happened to these boys as adults. They too disappeared from our community, the first one and his siblings went to live with family in Buffalo, the other, it was said, to live with family on the reservation. One resurfaced in his late teens. Spotting me downtown waiting on a bus, he threw his arms around unannounced. I pulled him to me and held on, but I have not seen him since. ?If I ever see him, the other boy, or my friend from church, will we draw arcs in the dirt, identifying it is safe to connect?? Sharing our lives after all these years would we recognize ourselves as having been the wee fishes? ???

*

When my niece was murdered, I was working on a novel, Imani All Mine, a book about the surging violence in the inner-city of Buffalo and a murder that took place in my niece’s neighborhood. ?I wanted to shelve the book because it was too much like art imitating life. Life imitating art. I had a compassionate and brilliant editor at Houghton Mifflin who helped me reshape that novel, and it was published in 1999. Midway through the book, Tasha, the teenage narrator, notes the memorials in her neighborhood that contain the names or nicknames of young murder victims. “Seem like memorials be everywhere now. On the sides of buildings. On phone booths. On street signs. Inside the girls’ bathroom at school. . .. I ain’t never see a memorial where the person resting in peace was older than twenty-one.”? She goes onto say, “I know the kids who write the memorials put them up to make people remember even when they want to forget. To forget the names. To have amnesia. Or pretend they do and look away.”

We cannot, should not look away from a Paul Humphrey and the hundreds and hundreds of other young murder victims. Their names are on virtual memorial walls. ?And their names should be in our mouths. We should say them aloud. We cannot give them back their lives, but we can listen to the voices of their blood crying out from the ground, seeping into the waters. They are our children, dressed in red, white and blue and even in death, we must do what we may not have had the chance to do for them in life. Wade into the troubled water. ?There is no need for us to hide when our children are dying. They die daily. We cannot, one by one, or in like-minded schools of thought turn away from their suffering. They are the ones who die. We live on to remember their lives. Share their stories. Say their names.

I say his name.? Paul Humphrey.

The only danger we face is not entering the water, staying instead on dry ground and if we ever meet, drawing unconnectable, unintelligible signs in the dust that allows society to forget them.?