Again, we failed a slain child
By Leonard Pitts Jr.
lpitts@MiamiHerald.com
Sherdavia Jenkins was a thin girl and very pretty. In life, she had one of those smiles that seems composed of too much joy. In death Saturday, she lay in solemn repose.
Her casket was white and small, only two handles on each side. A red teddy bear stood sentinel near her head. There was a note pinned to it: "May you rest in God's care. We love and miss you." Sherdavia's hair had been done up with ribbons and beads.
A week after she was playing in front of her home in Miami's Liberty Square housing project, a week after somebody shot at somebody else and a bullet took her in the neck, a week after she became the latest victim of a string of child murders - black child murders - that has appalled South Florida not nearly enough, Sherdavia was funeralized on a gray morning at the Joseph Caleb Center. A crowd of maybe 500 people was on hand. With the exception of working media, a handful of educators and a politician or two, they were virtually all black.
And many of the speakers spoke with practiced ease the language of black funerals, drew knowingly from that store of well-polished axioms by which African Americans often seek to comfort the inconsolable.
"We'll understand it better, by and by."
"Earth has no sorrows that heaven cannot heal."
"Weeping may endure for a night, but joy . . . cometh in the morning."
But the manner in which the little girl died was too raw and too hurtful and too there to be contained or explained by axioms, so people kept departing from the well-worn script.
"This is a sin," said Florida Rep. Dorothy Bendross-Mindingall, her words squeezing out past tears. "This is horrible, for us to be standing before this baby because she lived in public housing. It's no crime - other than a crime such as this - to live in public housing. Poor is not a synonym for death."
"Where I live, no 9-year-old girls will be shot today," said incoming Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio. "Or tomorrow. They never will." People in South Florida, he said, would spend this day on their boats or in the malls or at the movies, then come home and watch this funeral on the news "like something happening somewhere else in the world."
". . . And yet," he said, "in our very midst, we sit on a crisis of epic proportions." A crisis we fail to recognize.
Let three people get bitten by sharks, he said, and we sound the alarm about the shark crisis. Let three people get chewed by alligators and there are headlines about the alligator crisis. Yet, "this happens, and it's just . . . the way it is."
Congressman Kendrick Meek came to the stage next. For a long moment, his mouth worked without sound, as if struggling to frame words to fit his feelings. Finally he said simply, "Let's just go to work," and walked away. It ignited a furious chant. "Let's go to work! Let's go to work!"
No one stood there and said, "See how we failed this child." Not in words. And yet, what else did it mean, Meek's false starts, Bendross-Mindingall's choked voice, Rubio's declaration that "We need to do something different"? What else does it mean when a 9-year-old cannot play in safety on her own front stoop?
It tells of failure. It smells of failure. Failure of government, police, families, media, church, culture, country. Failure to find ways to keep guns out of the hands of punks. Failure to raise reckless, hot-tempered boys into powerful, prideful men. Failure to ensure that poor is, indeed, not a synonym for death. Failure to protect the youngest and most vulnerable among us.
Failure that leaves you staggered and gasping and sick to your soul. Nothing makes you more tired, nothing has as much power to suck the joy from your bones, as this, the senseless, wanton, repeated destruction of children. And then you hear the same axioms and consolations, the same vows of "not in vain" and you find yourself wondering how long before it is all forgotten and gone, how long before it happens again.
You feel trapped in an endless loop, impatient for change, yet doomed to stand witness as the future disintegrates itself before your very eyes. For what else is the murder of children but the murder of what might have been?
At the funeral, they passed out a booklet filled with certificates honoring Sherdavia's achievements. One said she was a "master reader," one said she was the "best all-around student" at Lillie C. Evans Elementary, one recognized her for outstanding work in science, one noted her "excellence in music," one praised her "outstanding . . . achievements" in mathematics, one was a "certificado de reconocimiento" for her work in Spanish. Her principal, Reginald Johnson, told the mourners Sherdavia had the best FCAT scores in math in the entire school.
All that she might have done, all that she might have achieved, all that might have been, all . . .
Gone.
And the worst of it is that endless loop, that knowledge that tomorrow this can, tomorrow this very well might, happen again. The possibility is always there in places like Liberty Square, mean, poor places where media come only when there is blood on the sidewalks, where lives are valued less and where people are hostage to terrorists. Where you grow up with the knowledge that you could be next.
A few miles away in Coral Gables, "they're safer than we are," said Amerlin Moise, 16, standing in a hallway outside the auditorium. "Over here, you have to watch your back 24/7. You got crazy people over here that'll come up to you in the street and shoot you point-blank." He was wearing a T-shirt that said Brothers of the Same Mind; it was, he said, the umbrella organization for a local group called FUN-V - For Us, Non-Violence - that works with young people to stem the tide of youth murder.
Amerlin said he wants to be an attorney when he grows up. He wants to ban guns. "One person can make a difference," he said.
The funeral lasted about two hours. There was preaching and there were songs. Afterward, Sherdavia was interred at Dade Memorial Park, North. To get there, mourners drove past a youth baseball game and an ice cream truck chiming Angels We Have Heard On High. Under a tent upon a field of the dead, a minister prayed prayers of consolation.
Then there was the sound of gunfire and people jumped. A squad of riflemen was honoring a soldier being buried not far away. And, inadvertently, offering a reminder of the awful way Sherdavia died. The awful way so many children die.
The minister turned again to axiomatic wisdom, invoking the gospel lyric "Some glad morning when this life is over, I'll fly away."
Right on cue, a dove was released. Wings batting furiously, it curled toward the west, skimming low through the trees. And just like that, it was gone.