Small Mercies

We’re not the same. She pleads her case to some unseen judge as she backs into a parking space. We’re just not.

As she turns off her ignition, a thuggish hulk of a young man stares in at her as he passes, maybe thinking about what she might have in her purse or entertaining even darker thoughts.

She has no idea why she does what she does next — terror? — but she does it: She smiles. A big friendly one and follows it with a small wave.

The young man — actually not all that big, not all that thuggish, just poor, his clothes not fitting him right — smiles back. It’s maybe a slightly confused smile, a tad hesitant, but it’s gentle, and he even returns her wave with a nod. And then he moves on, a boy really, couldn’t be older than fourteen.

She sits there, overcome suddenly with a fresh horror of the self. Her daughter is dead, Auggie Williamson is dead, the lives of several teenagers on the platform that night are ruined, and her mind still grasps with grubby desperation for ways to feel superior to them.

To feel superior to someone. Anyone.

Inside the church, she steps into a pew at the very back. She’s mildly surprised to discover she’s not the only white person to attend Auggie Williamson’s funeral; there are nine or ten others among the crowd of about a hundred. It’s an impressive turnout, though she gets a sense from looking around at the clothing that a lot of the mourners are politicians or activists. It’s all over the papers, how what appeared at first to have been an accident now looks to be a race crime perpetrated by four racist teens from the racist hotbed of South Boston.

The head of the Urban People of Color Action Committee has questioned whether Auggie Williamson’s death was just the first of the “lynchings” they could expect once their children were bused into South Boston come Friday. A prominent community organizer asked if there was any end to the hate, and a spokesperson for the Roxbury Crossing Small Business Cooperative drew up a petition to rename Columbia Station Augustus Williamson Station or, at the very least, put up a plaque in his honor by the station doors.

The church continues to fill, and a lot of the folks look solidly working-class or lower-middle, dressed in clothes they bought at Sears or Zayre, not Filene’s or Jordan Marsh. Mary Pat has chosen the last pew on the right in case she needs to make a quick, unnoticed exit, but a group approaches and asks with their eyes for her to move down the pew, as an elderly woman with a walker takes up their rear. Mary Pat does so, and almost immediately, another five people enter the pew from the other side, and she’s stuck in the middle. When she looks around again, the entire church is full. Some folks even stand in the back, fanning themselves with hymnals or the program for today’s funeral.

Right before the service starts, Detective Bobby Coyne makes his way up the left side and takes a place against the wall between two stained-glass windows. He catches her eye and blinks in surprised acknowledgment, throws her that kindly smile of his, his eyes narrowing at her — a look that says, Don’t go anywhere when this is over.

The family enters with the coffin. Mary Pat pictures the boy in that coffin and her daughter at the morgue, and she feels awash in loss and grief but also in sin she can’t name or even fully define. But it’s sin all the same. For a moment she fears she might pass out. The air has somehow grown too thin and too dense at the same time. She grips the back of the pew in front of her and steadies herself until the light-headedness passes.

In the Catholic church, funerals are second only to weddings and Christmas when it comes to the length of the mass, but even with that exposure, Mary Pat is unprepared for just how long a Baptist funeral can go. There’re four spirituals before they even get to the readings. And after the readers, the minister, a Reverend Thibodaux Josiah Hartstone III, reminds the congregation that he was named after the town of Thibodaux, Louisiana, where, less than a hundred years ago, white militias descended on the homes of Negro sugarcane workers (including Reverend Hartstone’s grandfather and grandmother) who were striking for a fair wage, and those white militiamen killed upward of a hundred and fifty Negro men, women, children, and elders (including Reverend Hartstone’s grandfather and grandmother) for the sin of asking for fair treatment and a living wage. Mary Pat hears a chorus of “Amen” and a smattering of loud moans and “Help us, Jesus!” and “Help us, Lord!”