Five Days by Wes Moore & Erica L. Green

Author:Wes Moore & Erica L. Green [Moore, Wes & Green, Erica L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

Tawanda

MIKE BROWN. WALTER SCOTT. TAMIR RICE. Laquan McDonald. Eric Garner. Freddie Gray. Before all of them, there was Tyrone West.

Yet Tawanda’s brother was probably the least-known among the lineup of victims whose deaths had spurred marches throughout the nation over the last few years as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged. That wasn’t fair. But Tawanda had given up on fair a long time ago—from the moment they’d assigned Tyrone the name “John Doe” even though he had a driver’s license on him with all of his identifying information.

It was five days before they would let her see her brother’s body. The police officer who had been dropping in and out of her home did try to prepare her: “You might have to have a closed casket,” he said.

In the days since his death hit the news, community activists and city representatives had done what they do best: show up to help when it was too late. A community activist said he’d help pay for the funeral, and that would be $10,000 that she could keep in her daughter’s college fund and one less thing to worry about, so she gratefully accepted it. The gift never came through, after the family learned that the money would come with people dictating details of how they grieved, down to where they held a candlelight vigil.

Tawanda had called and asked the funeral home not to pump her brother full of embalming fluid until she saw what was left of him after his encounter with the police. The funeral director said something about germs, but she didn’t care. She and her brother shared the same blood.

In the car on the way over to Brown, she prayed for God to give her strength to see what was left of Tyrone. She expected that he’d be bruised, maybe even disfigured.

“I didn’t know your brother, but he looks pretty good,” the funeral home lady told Tawanda before leading her to the preparation room where her brother’s body awaited.

What she saw stopped her heart.

“No, no!” she screamed.

Tyrone was smiling.

Tawanda knew two things: that her brother had not been smiling when he died handcuffed on the hot pavement, and that someone had reconstructed his face to make it seem that for the past five days he had been resting in peace. She also knew that she couldn’t understand how the body she viewed, her brother’s soulless corpse, could be defined by anybody as looking good. In addition to boot prints on the side of his head, on his neck, and all over his body, she stared at the elongated scars on his torso from the baton beatings that she could only describe as looking like train tracks. He had chunks of skin cut away from his face. She placed the burgundy sheet back over his body, knowing the images she just witnessed would haunt her forever.

That’s when she realized that she couldn’t rely on any of those jokers in expensive suits, paying their respects to the family as if they cared.

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