* * Ada, Suzie, and us

Ada is a gospel singer, a native of Radford, who lives near the majestic New River in McCoy. She’s in her 80s. She’s a friend of mine. I never knew Suzie Jackson. She died last week at age 87.

I met Ada last year while working with portrait artist Leslie Roberts Gregg on our book, Keepers of the Tradition. Ada is a gospel singer, singing in her home, in her church, whenever and wherever she can, bringing her joyful noise to the Lord and to anyone fortunate enough to hear her. When Leslie and I interviewed her at her home last year, she sang an a capella version of A Closer Walk With Thee that made the hairs on my arms jump to attention.

Ada Sherman is one of the nicest, gentlest, most sincere, thoughtful people that I have ever met. In spite of facing unspeakable injustices in her life, she harbors no ill will, no resentment that I could discern, and no negativity towards anybody. She seems like the type of person who would gently pick up a spider in her kitchen and set outside rather than killing it. 

As I mentioned, I never knew Susan “Suzie” Jackson. But from the obituaries I’ve read, she was active and energetic until her last day. According to a lifelong friend, “She cared about others. She would lend a helping hand, and do anything she could help with.” The accompanying photo showed a woman in an elegant lime-white dress suit, with gold earrings, a gold breast broach, two gold necklaces resting against her dark-skin neck, a shock of white hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. She has high cheekbones, a wide nose and full lips, and a pleasant smile. She is the picture of elegance and grace. She was also a singer, a soprano, in her lifelong church, the Mother Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, where on April 12, 1861 across the harbor, rebels fired on the federal arsenal at Fort Sumter, to start the Civil War.

I imagine Suzie was much like Ada Sherman.

Ada told Leslie and me about not being able to go to Lakeside Amusement Park in Salem when she was a girl growing up in Radford. She never understood why. She still doesn’t. She went to a segregated school that wasn’t as nice, new, or modern as the one where the white kids went. Ada and Suzie lived through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. Ada dreams of a nation where race no longer matters, where nobody even sees it anymore. I’m imagining Suzie might have as well.

Suzie died last week after a 21-year old racist and white supremacist fired one or more bullets into her. I envision those molten-hot bullets piercing her immaculate white dress, piercing her dark, aged skin, and piercing enough internal organs to kill her. She died alongside eight other parishioners, blood from their bodies spilling into the sanctuary floor, in the one building in the world she probably felt safest. Think about that word for a moment, please – sanctuary – and consider what it would have meant to blacks for decades in Charleston until that horrific moment.

It must be unspeakably tiring, burdensome, to be black in America, where at any moment somebody is ready to kill you for no other reason than your ancestors came – involuntarily – from Africa, rather than Europe or Asia.

My memory is jolted back to April 16, 2007, where another mass murder played out on the campus of my beloved alma mater here in my beloved town. My emotions are washed with an overwhelming dread as I contemplate the nation we have become.

While mass murders have happened in other advanced nations, we by far lead the world. When other nations have experienced mass murders, they have restricted gun access and increased funding for mental health. We’ve done the opposite.

The NRA, which in my youth was an organization that promoted safety and fellowship around the sport of gunmanship, is now the lobbying arm of the weapons industry. They would have you believe that Suzie’s death is her fault for not carrying a gun to church to defend herself and that personal well-being and security can only come from having more firepower than the next person.

Columbine High. Newtown. Aurora. Fort Hood. The Washington Navy Yard. Virginia Tech. The list goes on and on. Once again, we stare into the awful abyss of unspeakable misery we inflict upon each other, and as some of us reluctantly and sheepishly admit that we have a racial problem, a weapons problem, and a violence problem in this country, we remain polarized, immobilized by our pugnaciousness and fears, waiting for the inevitable next one, unable to do anything about it.