Jumping at Shadows by Sasha Abramsky

Author:Sasha Abramsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

FLOYD’S FATHER, JAMES FAILS, was asleep at his home on an overgrown street on Detroit’s West Side—a street that, like so many in the Motor City, had a smattering of lived-in homes among a greater number of abandoned lots, the old house windows boarded up, the grass waist high—when his phone rang. In his late seventies, missing the first joint on two fingers of his right hand, and deaf at the best of times, he struggled to make out what the strange lady on the other end of the line was saying. She asked him if he had a son named Denis. She told him that his son had been harshly beaten by the police. James couldn’t make head or tail of what he was hearing. Eventually he put on his granddaughter, who was living with him. “All I heard was this whispering,” James’s granddaughter remembered afterwards. “She was whispering, telling me her name, said she was calling on behalf of Floyd and he’d been beat up by the police.”

Dent’s guards were wandering through the emergency room waiting area, and Jordan was fearful of attracting their attention if she spoke too long, so she hung up. She went back to the area near where Dent was being held. She watched, horrified, when he told the nurses and the police officers that he needed to pee: there was no curtain around him. She saw when they refused to take his handcuffs off. Watched as a nurse was brought in to hold his penis so that he could pee into a chamber pot. Saw the absolute humiliation on his face. She listened as the doctors explained to the shackled Dent that he probably had bleeding on the brain.

And then she phoned James’s granddaughter, Floyd’s niece, back. Over the next few minutes, she punched the number into her cell phone, to provide short, cryptic, updates, several times. By then, Floyd’s immediate family, spread across several locales throughout the Detroit area, had all been woken up. They were phoning the hospital, the police station, lawyers they knew, and anyone else they could think of, desperately trying to get information. Nobody was telling them anything. Nobody was even acknowledging that Dent had been brought to the Garden City Hospital. At one point, Marlene phoned Dent’s niece, who, on another phone, called her father, Dent’s brother. With one phone pressed to the other, Marlene told him to hurry. “You better get here right away,” she urged him. “Before they kill him.”

“I felt like if I hadn’t called his family, they would have killed him,” Jordan recounted. “Pumped him up with drugs and said he was a drug addict.”

That night, and for many nights afterwards, Jordan couldn’t get out of her mind the image of Floyd Dent, his body bruised, bloodied, broken, chained. “My son told me he looked like Emmett Till,” she explained, referencing the photos of the body of the teenage African American killed by a Mississippi lynch mob in August 1955. “All they didn’t do was hang him from a noose.

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