Murky Waters

To the survivors, time itself has dissolved as a result of not knowing what happened to their boys. They confront the maze of possibilities, the many paths their boys may have taken once they neared the water, and all inevitably curl back to their points of departure, to that unknown moment. "On and on and on and on and on," says Willie Mae. "It tortures me, always winding up where I started." A dark hole opened up at their feet on the 10th of October; since then, as time has passed all around them, they’ve remained at the edge of that abyss, staring in. They can not resume their lives until they know what took their sons’.
This meaninglessness of time shows in their telling. What they know-their deep and convincing understanding of the characters and habits, and how that eliminates the possibility that their drowning was an accident-takes shape in collage forrn. Willie Mae and Chanel will sit for hours reminiscing, telling stories from when Sean and Kenny were eight, then 12, then three. They are pictorial, they are about character. Individually, the stories seem to have little to do with the matter at hand. And collectively they don’t exactly "prove" anything. But the stories-of the boys’ fear of water, their aversion to risk, their deference to elders-do add up to an enormous question mark. Why, the families ask, do the cops ignore their point of view? Why do they keep asking what the boys were doing rather than what they were like?

CHANEL RUFFIN SITS in her living room surrounded by her brother’s face. The photos cover every age and stage. is a round-faced boy, a katate kid with belts of advancing colors, a tough guy with a cool, predatory The most recent shows how very close he was to becoming a man, his face taking on shadow and shape and no longer soft, not even about the eyes. Chanel takes a picture from the wall and holds it sadly, steadily in view. The child in it can’t be more than three years old. He’s racing, his right leg slightly raised with the foot pointing out in one of those choppy, bow-legged steps babies take. The curled lip, the raised arm reaching for something out of sight-a mother or a toy-the round, inquisitive eyes; his body forms a question. The display feels like tribute, making him more than a boy; like many who die young he now seems a bearer of burdens, precocious and wise. His face-always the same but always slightly different-is mesmerizing. In this dark place of mourning, it is possible to believe that the faces contain an answer, and that if one sits long enough among all those Kenyattas, the truth will surface. "I sit here looking, hours sometimes," Chane I says. "I get bug-eyed. What happened to you? What happened to you?"

What if a police detective, a master of the factual and the here and now, were to witness a family member meditating on the many faces of Kenny? He would see a person in a mental deep focus, tuned to some alternative frequency abuzz with the faces of the He’d likely conclude that this was a person on the He would not consider the possibility that when Kenyatta’s mother, Joyce, returns from her cleaning houses each day to sit among the photos, occasionally asking her boy to explain to what became of him and his she is not imagining. She is removed to a different zone of time. She has gained entry into a different and reasoned world.