Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (29 page)

“South Dallas blacks aren’t a deprived ethnic group,” wrote Peter Gent in the novel
North Dallas Forty.
“They’re a different civilization living in captivity. Just blocks from the phenomenal wealth of Elm and Commerce streets, South Dallas was a hyperbole. A grim joke on those who still believe we are all created equal. . . . The blacks seemed to be waiting, watching, knowing they would always be getting fucked. They took solace in the dependability.”
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Such is that part of the city where a child’s death is barely noteworthy. Broadly speaking, two borders demarcate the north from the south. The first is the Trinity River, which flows 711 miles southeast from north central Texas into an arm of Galveston Bay and then out to the Gulf of Mexico. Three of its four northern tributaries converge just northwest of Dallas, and then it snakes diagonally through the city—a narrow waterway chaperoned through much of the center by a thick greenbelt—before making more erratic dips and swerves as it heads toward the floodplains and pine forests of East Texas.

The other border is Interstate 30, which is half as long, starting in Fort Worth, Dallas’s western twin city, and veering northeast toward the Texas–Oklahoma state line before entering Arkansas and climbing diagonally past Hope—hometown of former president Bill Clinton—and ending in Little Rock.

The 7300 block of Schepps Parkway, in Pleasant Grove, where Samuel died, sits in the far southeast corner of the city, considerably south of I-30 but just north of the Trinity, close to one of the river’s final meandering kinks before it plunges precipitously toward Galveston. Geographically,
Pleasant Grove sits between the two borders; socially, economically, and racially it is very much in South Dallas. Driving from downtown, the imposing, reflective skyscrapers recede from the rearview mirror, making way for the smaller wooden houses and empty lots ahead. Supermarkets and other chain stores become scarce; fast food franchises, liquor stores, and check-cashing outlets mushroom. Even without seeing a single pedestrian, one knows, from having visited any number of American cities, that this is where the black and brown people live. None of this happened by accident.

Democracy came to Dallas at roughly the same time it came to the Eastern Bloc—in the early nineties. It’s not that people didn’t have the vote; first white men and then eventually everybody else got that. But the way votes were counted and the polity was structured meant that regardless of whom you voted for, the oligarchy always got in. All elections to the city council were citywide, which meant that even when minorities got the franchise they struggled to muster the numbers to make any impact. The voices calling for more resources in deprived areas in such a segregated city were as marginalized as the communities who needed those resources.

In a blend of the patrician, civic, and venal, a small cabal of wealthy white men ran the city according to what became known as the Dallas Way, with the interests of the local government and local business regarded as both synonymous and symbiotic, each embedded in the other. “Dallas had always belonged to the men who built it,” wrote Jim Henderson in 1987. “Men who did not need zoning laws to tell them where to put skyscrapers or which pastures to subdivide. . . . They ran their government the way they ran their privately held businesses.”
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The consensus for this arrangement did not stretch far beyond North Dallas and finally ended up being judged illegal. It also became increasingly untenable as whites became a minority in the city—in 2010, Dallas was 42 percent Latino, 25 percent black, and 29 percent white.
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But it took a series of federal court rulings before the city finally got a municipal democracy worthy of the name. From the nineties, those who lived in neighborhoods where poor, nonwhite people were the majority could
elect candidates who would at least ostensibly represent their interests. In 1995 the city elected its first black mayor.
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So for 149 of its 173 years, Dallas was run exclusively and overtly by white, wealthy business interests and often against the interests of African Americans, Latinos, and the poor. Dallas is a southern town and Texas was a confederate state. In
The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City,
Harvey Graff describes how Dallas revised its city charter in 1907 to allow racial segregation in public schools, housing, amusements, and churches; again in 1916 to legitimize residential segregation; and again in 1930 to restrict African Americans’ access to office by requiring all candidates to run at large and on a nonpartisan basis. “A second city was built in law as well as social practice,” he argues.
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And the separation was vigorously enforced. When African Americans moved into white areas, their homes were sometimes bombed. A granite cornerstone (since removed) in the building housing one of the city’s oldest adoption agencies revealed the Ku Klux Klan as a major donor—a sign of the group’s respectability during the early part of the century.

In areas like Pleasant Grove, where poor black people are concentrated, the facts that white women would not feel safe venturing there and Samuel could be shot dead without much media inquiry as to the causes were the direct results of public policy and private practice. Dallas did not simply end up that way; it was made that way.

“It’s just another black child and another statistic,” says Claudia. “Another black child in the ghetto. It wasn’t a white child who got killed in University Park or Highland Park, where SMU [Southern Methodist University] is. If it would have been one of them, it would have got a whole column instead of a paragraph. I don’t think that’s just Dallas. I think it’s just America.”

G
IVEN HOW LITTLE INFORMATION
was out there, I assumed finding Samuel would be difficult. I found no trace of him on social media, although that, it turned out, is because his Facebook page was under the
name Samuel Goodson—a pseudonym conveying his devotion to his mother. When I contacted Melissa at the
Dallas Morning News,
she gave me a primer for the racial dynamics of the city and generously told me what little she could about the shooting, which was not much more than she had written.

With little else to go on, I found the addresses for the funeral parlor that had handled Samuel’s remains and the church where his service had been held. From my headquarters at a Holiday Inn on the side of the motorway, I prepared two envelopes for his mother, both containing letters requesting an interview. I left one at the church and then headed to the funeral home, a large building on the far side of a mall wedged against a freeway.

I told the woman at the front desk my business. She listened only long enough to make sure it was above her pay grade and then fetched someone else. I started again. The next woman listened carefully, smiling throughout, and then, when I was done, told me that she could not understand a word I had said.

This is not as outlandish as it might sound. Language is a relatively small part of communication. The rest we pick up from context. I’d walked in off the street, with a black face and an English accent, to inform her that I was writing a book and needed to pass a package on to the family of someone I’d never met who had died more than two months earlier. On a regular day in a Dallas funeral parlor, there isn’t really a context for that.

It doesn’t help that I cut an unlikely figure in most professional circumstances. Small (five feet six), tubby, black, disheveled—when Americans think British journalist, which is rarely, I’m not what they think of. Things can get particularly disorienting once they hear the accent. African Americans often think I’m affected—a siddity negro with airs and graces. Sometimes that works to my advantage. People, especially those with a dim view of the mainstream media, may take comfort in what looks like the aesthetic of an outsider.

Others, perhaps seeking somebody authoritative to whom to tell their story, are unimpressed or unconvinced. While I was trying to report on Hurricane Katrina, a white policeman in Mississippi patted his gun and
told me to turn my car around as I tried to get to an affected area. I was following the same route as other—white—journalists who all made it through. Whatever people are expecting, they’re rarely expecting me. Yet here I am, in a funeral parlor in Dallas, waiting.

The woman who could not understand me brought a colleague out. I pared my story and request down to the bare minimum. She went to get Samuel’s file, came out a few minutes later, and said, “His aunt’s on the phone. She said she’ll speak with you.” I explained myself to the aunt, Debra, trying desperately not to sound too jaded as I went through my lines about the book I was writing for the fourth time in ten minutes. I gave her my number and e-mail address. She said she’d pass on the message to her sister. “I’ll call you back tonight and tell you what she says.”

No call came that night. Nor that week, after I’d returned home to Chicago. I didn’t have Debra’s number. I was about to call the church and try my luck there. Then, eight days later, as I was picking up my son from his comic-book class, I got a call from a number I didn’t recognize with a Dallas area code. As thrown as the woman in the funeral parlor, I needed a moment to find the context to make the words make sense. It was Audry Smith. Samuel’s mother.

I
F
P
LEASANT
G
ROVE WAS
part of a deliberate effort to corral poor, black people into certain areas of Dallas, then the story Audry told me of how she and her family ended up there owes more to a string of unfortunate events that highlights the precariousness of the American middle class.

Audry, Samuel, and Whitney were living together in the suburb of Garland, just outside Dallas. Audry was working as an administrator for a company that provided home help. Her boss was arrested for Medicaid and Medicare fraud. On the advice of her lawyer, she was told to leave the job because, given her role in the company, staying there could be incriminating. In September 2011 she quit. She took the opportunity of an enforced break to undergo a major elective surgical procedure that she
needed but had been putting off. She applied for unemployment benefits, was first denied, and then was accepted on appeal.

She had the operation in March 2012 and needed to convalesce for several weeks. That May, she was on the mend and starting to look for work. She picked the children up from school one day. As she headed west on I-30 with Whitney in the back and Samuel in the front, the car ahead of her in the carpool lane slammed on its brakes. Caught unawares, she bumped into it. “I bent the hood of my car. But everyone could have driven away at that point,” she says. Just as she unbuckled her seat belt to check on Whitney, a Chevy Impala slammed into the back of her car. Because she was driving an SUV, which was raised substantially from the ground, the Impala actually ran under her car as it crashed. It was travelling at quite a pace. Her back windshield flew in; her steering wheel went into the motor; her shoes were up on the dashboard; her glasses were in the backseat; her seat collapsed into the back. She blacked out. When she came to, she found her leg jammed under the steering wheel.

The children were fine, but a woman in the Impala had broken some ribs, and Audry was left with a damaged knee. She couldn’t walk for about six weeks. Because she couldn’t walk, she couldn’t work, and because the driver in the Impala didn’t have insurance, she couldn’t be compensated for loss of potential earnings.

Her unemployment assistance was due to run out in July, and the lease on her rented apartment ran out in August. To qualify for disability she needed to be disabled for a year. She was in a tight spot. She looked for some money to tide her over until she could, literally, get back on her feet. The Dallas Urban League, a longstanding civil rights organization, agreed to pay her rent for that final month while she looked for somewhere cheaper. But the League’s funds fell through at the last minute. She couldn’t make rent. She was evicted. In less than a year, she’d gone from being housed and employed to homeless and unemployed.