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MIDDLE PASSAGE

1980 WAS A horrible year for a lot of reasons, only one of which had to do with the election of Ronald Reagan that November—itself a cause for sincere political mourning in the Wise home.

Only twelve days into the year, my mom’s father died at the relatively young age of sixty five, ending a life that had been of miserable quality for the past half-decade thanks to several strokes that had rendered him unable to care for himself. A few months later, one of my dad’s old theatre colleagues died on stage, the victim of a massive heart attack. The next month, another family friend was killed in a car accident, and one of my classmates, Roger Zimmerman, was killed when a drunk driver plowed into him while Roger had been riding his bike.

And then there was life with my father. In May, dad and I started working on a few scenes from the play “A Thousand Clowns,” which we would perform during my school’s spring theatre showcase. Ultimately the show went well, but he had shown up to dress rehearsal so blindrunning drunk that I had a complete emotional breakdown on stage. Even as I glared at him through a literal cascade of tears, he failed to comprehend the meaning behind the melancholy, incoherently mumbling something about how brilliant I was for being able to make myself cry, just like the character in the scene was supposed to. I guess he also thought my silent seething on the ride home was just a matter of staying in character, rather than what it really had been: the expression of profound embarrassment that he had exposed his illness for so many of my friends to see. Needless to say, as sixth grade came to a close, the combination of my tenuous connection to my father, my parents’ combative relationship, and all the deaths in our little corner of the universe had left me far more exhausted than any eleven-year-old should be.

Summer made things a bit better. Although my baseball team had muddled through another miserable year, I had enjoyed a fantastic season individually, making the city’s all-star team. My dad had been out of town for much of the summer, doing a play in Atlanta, which meant not only that he wouldn’t be showing up to my games loaded (as he had for much of the previous season), but that evenings at home with my mom would be blessedly quiet. We would get together on many of those evenings to watch old Alfred Hitchcock movies, or Twilight Zone reruns, the latter of which were among my favorite things to watch on TV.

By July, baseball season was over (this was long before the days of traveling teams and forty-game summer schedules), and I was enjoying doing nothing. I’d sleep in late, go swimming in the apartment’s pool most of the day, and then spend the rest of my time reading, adding to my baseball card collection, or hanging out at the local game room, trying to master Pac-Man, which had been released just two months earlier.

There were exactly eight weeks left before the start of Junior High School, that morning of July 6, when I was woken by the sound of my mother opening the apartment door to retrieve the Sunday paper from the hallway. Though I’d heard the door open, I tried not to wake up, preferring to linger in bed a while. I closed my eyes, hoping to fall back asleep, only to be shaken a minute later by my mother’s cry.

“Oh no,” was all she said.

I instantly knew that whatever was wrong had something to do with the newspaper she had just opened, and that whatever it was didn’t concern national politics or the Iran hostage crisis, which was in its ninth month. I scrambled out of bed and opened my door, afraid to learn what had happened, but curious. When I got to the living room I saw my mother crying. She turned away, hardly able to look at me.

“What happened?” I asked, as my stomach tightened, clenching around an abdominal hernia I’d had since infancy. My heart was pounding so hard that I could feel its beat, throbbing throughout my body. Before she could answer, a ringing sensation began in my ears, as if my body was somehow trying to prevent me from hearing the reply to my question.

She looked up, her eyes welling with tears, and delivered the news.

“Bobby Bell is dead.”

I heard her but somehow the words failed to register. It simply made no sense that Bobby, with whom I’d been friends since preschool at TSU, could be dead. It wasn’t conceivable that Bobby, the twelve-year-old who had coined that word, “douche ’n’ push,” to describe the middle school theatre teacher’s car, could be gone.

Bobby was one of the people I’d liked best all through school. We’d become close friends by fourth grade, and by sixth we were constantly to be found in class, the halls, or the lunchroom playing “pencil break” or “thump,” the latter of which was a typically absurd boy game, in which you’d coil back your middle finger in the crook of your hand and then flick it forward into your opponent’s clenched fist over and again until one player conceded the match due to pain. Bobby had these wonderfully fat knuckles, which made an almost drum-like noise when you’d thump them. And while the fleshiness of his hand probably provided extra protection to him, it also protected the thumper, since hitting a bony knuckle by accident when aiming instead for the meat below could be painful. How could this child, my thump rival, be dead?

In fact I was so sure it wasn’t the same Bobby that I immediately asked about another Bobby Bell we knew, who was a few years older than me, and a local Little League legend.

“You mean Fruit?” I asked, that being the nickname of the other Bobby Bell.

“No Tim, Bobby, your Bobby,” she said.

“How?” was all I could think to ask, still completely unwilling to get my head around the loss. The answer would be even harder to accept.

“He was killed last night at his dad’s store. Somebody shot him,” she explained.

And that’s when I knew it was real. It made sense, however horrifying. Bobby often helped his dad at one or the other of his father’s stores: convenience markets that also sold some of the most incredible barbecue in town. Bob Bell’s Market on Twelfth Avenue had not been held up even once in the eight previous years since its opening. Not once. But on that muggy July evening in 1980, part of the busy Fourth of July weekend, it would be. And although Bobby had done everything the robber had asked—stuffing money in a bag quickly even as he cried the frightened tears that any child would shed, looking down the barrel of a gun poised mere feet from his face—he was shot in the head anyway, at point blank range, and died in front of his father. As he fled the store, the shooter, Cecil Johnson—later identified by Bob Sr. and other witnesses—shot and killed two other men in a taxi outside.

Angry and confused I spun around and shoved my fist into the wall. Luckily, right before my hand met plaster I had started to ease up on the punch so that when contact was finally made it wouldn’t hurt so much. I was so numb that I couldn’t cry, and I would stay that way for days, weeks, months, even years. In fact the first time I think I ever really let myself cry about Bobby wasn’t until five years later, when I would talk about what had happened during a speech class, in which the assignment would be to discuss something emotionally painful that we had experienced growing up.

Both Bobby and his killer were black, the former the victim of, and the latter a practitioner of, a kind of racial self-hatred that has sadly claimed the lives of far too many African Americans over the years. Only someone who had long since given up on the notion of brotherhood could do something like this. Only someone who had long since concluded that human life was disposable—in this case black human life much like his own—could think to fire a .45 caliber weapon at a child while his father watched, all for two hundred dollars and some change. And in turn, the state of Tennessee (represented by D.A. Thomas Shriver, whose daughter Susan was a classmate of ours) would return the favor, seeking and obtaining a death sentence for Cecil Johnson, a rare occurrence when the racial identity of both perpetrator and victim is black. Studies have long found that death sentences are far more likely when whites are killed, especially by blacks. And in Davidson County, no death sentence had been obtained between 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the constitutionality of capital punishment, and the time of Cecil Johnson’s trial. But in this case, the death of such a caring and loving child, helping his dad from whom he had been inseparable, was enough to justify, in the eyes of the jury, ending the life of Cecil Johnson.

I cared deeply for Bobby, and was grieved by his death. So too, I understood why his father so steadfastly supported a death sentence for the man who had taken his only son from him right in front of his eyes. But even then, at the age of eleven, I never wanted Cecil Johnson to die. And even now, though I would want to kill, personally, anyone who murdered one of my children, I steadfastly believe that no matter how much a person may deserve to die, the bigger question is whether the state deserves to kill. And that calculation—given the inherent class and racial biases embedded in the justice system—is considerably trickier than a simple consideration of what a murderer has earned for him or herself.

On December 2, 2009, nearly thirty years after Cecil Johnson murdered three people, including my friend, the state of Tennessee intravenously delivered to him a lethal cocktail of drugs, ending his life, and bringing to a close this chapter in mine. The night of Johnson’s execution, as I thought about the waste of four lives—Bobby’s, the other two victims, James Moore and Charles House, and his own—I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of a society we are that so readily inculcates the notion of human disposability, whether in individuals who commit such senseless crimes, or in the body politic, which believes against all evidence to the contrary, that by ratifying that same mentality, it will somehow render its citizens safer.

JUNIOR HIGH WAS hell. To begin with, it looked like an industrial building where a call center might be housed: one level, bland office park architecture, and hardly any windows. It was (and still is) just one big brick structure, capable of squeezing all the joy out of the educational process by virtue of its physical plant alone. Though internally it had been constructed as an experimental, even progressive attempt at “open classroom” learning—no walls between classrooms, the idea being that teachers would co-teach in learning pods, linking, say, a literature lesson with a history lesson, and then with a geography lesson—none of the teachers at John Trotwood Moore made use of the open classroom approach. They didn’t seem to believe in it, so the internal architecture of the building, which could have been liberatory in the hands of the right teachers, became little more than a wall-less, open arena for noise.