Murky Waters
To make things more unreal, there was the subtle racial slight attached to every mention, every news story-that these were good kids." It didn’t quite go without saying, as if without the qualification it was fair to assume that these black boys were tangled up in drugs, street crime and the kinds of characters capable of forcing them into the water. Who had ever made that qualification when Eddie Polec-the white Cardinal Dougherty High School student-was killed in the Northeast? "The press was just the tail end of it," Chanel Ruffin says. "Those kids in South Carolina, that Polly [Klaas] thing. They got the dogs, the helicopters. They searched. We had to get our own people, our own dogs."
Two months and rwo weeks after the deaths, District II99C of the Hospital and Health Care Employees Union-of which Willie Mae and Jamie’s mother, Sharon Broadnax, are members-and the Frederick Douglass Society Foundation each posted a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction. No one has come forward. The police have taken this as further evidence that their interpretation is correct-that there is no motive and there is no crime.
IN NOVEMBER JUSTIN Bovell had his third dream. In it, he ran into Kenny at the Kentucky Fried Chicken at 51st and Woodland. It is in reality what it was in the dream: a place of separations, where one can see but not touch. The serving counter is separated from the eating area by three-inch, bulletproof Plexiglas. Orders are taken through a speaker system. Cash is placed in a turnstile, then flipped around in exchange for food and change. When Justin dreamed of Kenny, his friend was skulking in a corner, trying to be scarce. "Come over here, Kenny," Justin said. "Tell me what happened to you."
"Can’t talk to you," Kenny whispered, slipping out the door.
It seemed the most unlikely of scenarios: Kenny untalkative and afraid. Justin wondering what there was to fear.
ON ITS FACE the increasingly hostile battle between the police and the survivors is over the facts. Yet in this case the definition of a "fact" has become as elusive as mercury on a top. Pearlie says black boys are inordinately afraid of cold water, and that river swimming cuts against the grain of their heritage and upbringing. A police detective elicits a statement from a 12-year-old witness who says Kenny once led three others into the Schuylkill’s dirty waters up to their necks. To his family, aquaphobia from character, as indelible as genes. To the police, a witness is money in the bank. Which weighs more? Which is factual?
Though the battle is layered, with the familiar faults of race and class, most of the conflict isn’t even being articulated. It is a clash over ways of knowing things-between thought and feeling, proof and intuition, the power of dreams and the clinical certainties of a medical examiner. The police, as they should, conclude only what they can prove. Yet in this case, the net they cast-capturing the hard, chunky facts, sifting out the softer stuff of suggestion and belief-seems somehow to imprison, rather than free, the truth. Capt. Quinn is not unaware of this, and it puts him in an alien and awkward position. It is a terrible responsibility, having to tell what happened, especially when Quinn’s is the vocabulary of evidence and witnesses, and the story is about how the absence of those things can be as physical and real as their presence. As a result, Quinn tends to restate-many times, obsessively-the facts as he knows them. The families find him defiant and territorial, but Quinn isn’t the type to get jumpy when challenged. In fact, the tone of his telling bears striking resemblance to that of the survivors when they ruminate. Both take on an odd, inquiring lilt, as well as a struck-dumb quality. "There’s nothing, nothing we have that says this was any-thing other than an accident," Quinn will say for the tenth time, and the statement isn’t as important as the sense of puzzlement and inspection it imparts.
