ASHES
A Study of Juvenile Violence in America
My photographic journey into the lives of juveniles began in an “accidental ” way.
The newspaper I worked for sent me to photograph a young women for a weekly column called “candid closet”. She was know throughout Baltimore for her fashion-conscious, stunning Sunday Best church hats. She had also inherited part ownership of her family's successful funeral business. As I began to photograph her, I was having a difficult time finding a good location within the building with great natural daylight. I eventually backed into a large room filled with light, bumped into something, turned and found myself staring into the cold face of a dead 13 year old black child. He was dressed in an off-white suit and his tiny frame squeezed tightly into a narrow casket. He appeared to be in a deep sleep, ready to open his eyes at any moment. Sweat rolled down the inside of my armpit, and after a moment of silence, which seemed to extend, rolling forever, I heard her voice say, “this is nothing new. It’s happening all the time.” She began to tell me about all the death. All the young people being killed and killing each other. She said that the youngsters had grown accustomed to death, to seeing its face up close, to visiting their departed friends in funeral homes and talking about it as if they were at a social occasion. It was merely one more party to dress up for, another social event in which you wore black.
It woke me up.
“Kids killing kids is nothing new”
I took the story idea to the editors of my newspaper who said: “Kids killing kids is nothing new” – and the apathy pushed me, pushed inside me and woke up my own inner child. I began simply by scouring over the newspaper daily for instances of youths being involved in violence of any sort. Shooting, stabbings, protests, arrests, drugs dealings, gang activities, deaths. When I found an obituary involving a young person, I would show up at the funeral, or body viewing. Some families wanted no part of me, other looked deeply through their haze of grief and desperation and wanted me there to bear witness to their unbearable pain.
One mother, unable to cope with the loss of her 12-year-old son, dove headfirst into the casket knocking herself and the body to the floor. Another man, who had lost his entire family to an accident, literally tried to come out of his skin when his two-year old daughter was rolled in front of him for the body’s final viewing. He vomited from the grief he could no longer swallow.
One steely-eyed rigid young man who had lost his best friend to a stray drive-by shooting that was meant for himself, refused to let go of the corpse as the director attempted to close the casket for the last time. His face which had been a cold, dry mask of pride, apathy and anger, was now bust loose, transfixed by unimaginable anguish, pain, and an unending cascade of tears. I rode the early morning hours with paramedics, often arrived on crime scenes before the police.
One morning I witnessed a father and son stoned and overdosing, near death on heroin together, come out of their delirium when a paramedic applied an adrenaline. “You ruined my high,” one mumbled weakly, refusing to go to the hospital. Together they stumbled blindly down the alleyway, chasing their next hit.
I heard a sound I will never forget, in the throat of a weary mother returning from work at 4:00 in the morning to learn of the drive-by shooting of her son, who lay stone cold on the stoop of their home. That moan came from deep within the hearts of all the mothers who outlive their young, who bury their children.
The wail was long and deep and went out endless into the night.
I have examined juvenile violence and traveled to places like the Lakeview Shock Incarceration bootcamp in upstate NY, to various housing projects from Cabrini-Green in Chicago, to Boston's Roxbury streets to the Desire Housing project in New Orleans, and projects in Bedford-Stuyvesant, The Bronx and Baltimore. I have met young mothers who have lost their children, spent immense time with funeral directors who bury the young, ridden with community cops and paramedics from across the country. I have photographed shock trauma wards in Baltimore and Durham, NC and spent time in hospices where the young died of AIDS.
I had assumed that all this death was about gang violence and drug trafficking, but came to quickly realize that living in these neighborhoods, certain laws simply did not apply. It was another country. That violence was senseless, random and vicious. Life moved fast in these communities and each generation was promised more than it would get. Survival and defeat left a furious, bewildered rage in people who could not find solid ground beneath their feet. Children were growing into a stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand, and many were growing up facing, individually and alone, the unendurable frustration of being always, everywhere inferior. Many of these youth were attempting to shield themselves from an environment and world they found profoundly threatening, and beneath their stony exterior was often inherited disappointment, and the lost dreams of a parent.
By looking into these youth eyes, I was looking at a reflection of myself, and what I could have become. I was looking at my own disempowerment, and my search for light, change and clarity.
The project took me from the streets of Baltimore, to places like Chicago, Boston, Louisiana, New Orleans, Brooklyn, and Harlem. Everywhere I saw the same dramas being played out, dancing in rural communities, on city streets. I saw lost generations, and lost potential. Children lost in these shadows. The violence among the young was going on at a time when a generation of children was born to young women, teenage mothers, coming in neighborhoods weakened by unemployment, poverty, the addictive lure of a thriving underground economy, with the destructive force of gangs and drugs.
Many men were returning from longs stints in prison, having done 20–30 year sentences. The neighborhoods the children grew up amid were tenements, housing projects, torched buildings, and abandoned factories. Role models for these youths were often older friends, sometime gang members, who were a kind of family. These people took the place of fathers they barely knew. These role models have often been adults who use the city and state primarily in terms for different types of welfare checks. The neighborhoods were places where 13-year olds knew by heart the visiting hours at the local prison.
But all were not children of welfare-dependent, drug-abusing underclass. Half had parents or guardians who worked. In fact the majority of killings were the results of robberies or disputes. Race was not as chief as I had assumed. Most single parent families or the aunts and grandparents that raised these kids lived below the poverty line. This was an economic and American problem as well. The weakened bonds of family and the community bonds that had traditionally kept these youths in line appeared to have contributed to the violence in these urban areas. Schools had failed, institutions had failed, church had failed and families were failing. These children were robbed of their childhoods.
The most common assumption on these streets was that there was no future.
On my journey, there would be occasional glimpses of hope, resilience, of defiance and love, but mostly, invariably I witnessed time and time again the impassive faces, the wasted potential of children and the moral conflict they face. At the time I began the project, I had hoped to shed light on the harsh realities of these children. I wanted to bear witness to their darkness, lost innocence and opportunities. I wanted to honor their lives, to look for answers to the chaos.
I thanked god for my life and blessings. I traveled through my own dark night of the soul. Being adopted, I was granted choices, some of these youths never had. In the bright moments I felt witness to the revival of the delivery of promise, faith, trust and hope.
Our generation seems condemned to live with guns, but I hope my projects will enhance the understanding of crime and violence by focusing a great deal on programs and people that take children at-risk and show their moral, economic and social struggles.
Most recently I have spent time with alternative programs like Street-squash and Friends of Island Academy where I have witnessed transformation and growth. I have walked the streets with men fresh from jail with the hunger for a new life on their breath. I have sat beside people, teachers, guides, healers whose open hearts make space for these young facing innumerable challenges in their painful lives.
From the inside out they change.
“In the most private chamber of his heart always, the black American finds himself facing the terrible roster of his lost: the dead, black junkie; the defeated, black father; the unutterably weary, black mother; the unutterably ruined black girl. And one begins to suspect an awful thing: that people believe that they deserve their history, and that when they operate on this belief, they perish.”
– James Baldwin