The year may be winding to a close, but the anger over the killing of unarmed African-Americans by police and the decisions not to indict those responsible in Missouri and New York is not. The tragic killing last week of two police officers in New York by a man who apparently later committed suicide became an occasion for ugly recrimination.
“It pains me that, in 2014, in America, we have to publicly affirm that black lives matter,” wrote Syreeta McFadden in the Guardian.
If black protesters and their allies of all races and ethnicities feel exhausted, who can blame them? One feature of this fatigue is an irritation with having to explain it over and over again, to educate others in what it feels like to live with the expectation that your American dream is radically more constrained than that of your neighbors. Fortunately, two excellent books published in the past year and a half provide insight into the grief and protest that characterized so much of 2014.
None of the men who die in Jesmyn Ward’s stunning memoir, “Men We Reaped,” or Jeff Hobbs’s investigation into the death of his college roommate, “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace,” are killed by police. But both books are ghost stories.
Hobbs does the brutal arithmetic to explain the circumstances in which Robert, his roommate, grew up, and in which his father was convicted of a brutal homicide. “The violent crime rate of thirty-five hundred per one hundred thousand people was almost six times the national average of six hundred, and eight times that of adjacent South Orange, which stood at four hundred,” he writes.
For Ward, “Men We Reaped,” published in September 2013, is a chance to tell a wide audience the same thing that protesters would say in more general terms a year later: that her friends and brother mattered, that they had worth. “This story is only a hint of what my brother’s life was worth, more than the 19 years he lived, more than the 13 years he’s been dead,” she tells us, confessing a sense of inadequacy that is echoed in demonstrators’ psychological exhaustion.
Hobbs is able to go deeper, in part because he has only one subject. He chronicles in detail how boarding school, water polo, dedicated teachers and loving friends helped Robert Peace make it all the way to Yale, and how much Robert gave back in return, whether he was quietly presenting his earnings from school jobs, and later, his drug business, to his mother or extending emotional support and exceptional sensitivity to his friends.
As Hobbs presents it, Robert’s tragedy is less a matter of chance and poverty than was the application of a common dilemma to Robert’s specific circumstances. Like many gifted college students, Robert had trouble figuring out precisely how he wanted to apply his prodigious talents. As he drifted from one scheme to the next, he stayed involved in the drug business that in college had helped him pay for textbooks and forge friendships, hoping eventually to make enough money to stake a business.
And at the end, both books capture the ways in which race and poverty deny people time to grieve and justice that might ease their agony. After Robert is murdered in a slaying connected to his work in the drug trade, his mother is called down to identify him. “She parked and placed one foot in front of the other until she stood in the cold, metallic room that smelled of chemicals, and watched the coroner fold the white sheet down from her son’s face. She nodded and said, ‘Yeah, that’s Shawn, that’s my son,’ ” reports Hobbs. “From there, she drove straight to work.”
For Ward, Joshua’s death is marked by a double indignity: a prosecutor’s decision to charge the driver who killed her brother with leaving the scene of an accident rather than with vehicular manslaughter, and the idea that she is stupid to be surprised by that decision. Ward writes that she “called my college boyfriend and told him the verdict. I could hardly speak. ‘What do you expect?’ he said, impatient to return to work. ‘It’s Mississippi.’ ” That constant disappointment and the cost of that final diminution of expectations may be difficult for some readers to grapple with, but it is a central and critical insight.
