A Prayer for the City (54 page)

Jerome Whitaker started firing in the blossom of the afternoon, as kids all over the neighborhood were walking home from school. He was shooting
at a car, as if that somehow made it all right, and he was shooting because he himself had been hit in a drive-by shooting the month before and probably felt like a victim too. But none of that mattered either because one of the bullets missed its mark or ricocheted off the car he was firing at, and a neighbor ran into the variety store and told Elizabeth Cutner that her six-year-old daughter had been shot, and she ran out of the store and saw her daughter on the sidewalk and said, “Oh God!” and “My baby!” and that didn’t matter either because the little girl was lying there with blood pouring out of her side and her eyes open, and Michelle knew, as much as a six-year-old girl can know about such things, that she was dying.

Neighbors wept, and reporters perceptively noted that right near the patch of blood where Michelle Cutner was killed were the familiar red and blue caps of crack vials. The police bemoaned the easy access to guns, and one resident, between sobs, said, “Why? That’s all you can say—why? It don’t make no sense.”

The night after the killing a neighborhood meeting was held at the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church at Nineteenth and Catharine Streets to grapple with the problems that had infected the neighborhood. It was pouring outside, and the falling rain only oppressed the streets even more, robbing them of what little crevices of life and light there might have been. It wasn’t refreshing, as a summer rainstorm could sometimes be, but cold and harsh to the touch, the sidewalks spotted with puddles almost instantly. The church inside was cavernous and slightly musty smelling. A chandelier with naked bulbs hung limply from the ceiling, and an American flag stood in the front in a tired salute. A coat of paint would have helped, but there was also an atmosphere of survival to the place, with beams of dark wood crisscrossing the ceiling in a sturdy patchwork, as well as a sense of delicate beauty, with feathery hues of browns and beiges and blues in the slender panels of the stained-glass windows. The beat of the rain against the roof seemed almost reassuring, and the two hundred people who were there, mostly blacks but also a smattering of whites, fanned themselves with little fans courtesy of the Andrew W. Nix Jr. funeral home. Since the meeting had been well publicized, a host of representatives of the city were there to give the appearance of concern, and at one point there were so many introductions that the meeting began to resemble a celebrity softball game.

A spirit of feeling left out and forgotten emanated from the rows of the pews, but there was no contentiousness. There was blame for the system, but there was also self-blame. There was a plea, not for handouts or magical
cures but for the simple tools to stay alive and have their children stay alive—without constant fear.

Someone in the audience wanted to know how a twenty-four-hour-a-day crack house could exist in the neighborhood in the shadow of a police station. The police captain present almost comically blamed the court system, as if the police played no role whatsoever in preventing crime, and he also noted that the seventeenth district had been rather busy, with a total of eight people shot over the last six days. But when he spoke of the need for curfews, many in the audience applauded. A woman asked what she should do outside the school when there were problems, and a representative of the city gave her his business card, as if that would be an effective antidote in the next round of drive-by shootings.

In the midst of it all, a man named Rotan Lee spoke. He was the head of the Philadelphia Board of Education, and he was there at the meeting because Michelle Cutner had been killed on her way home from school, and he wanted to announce to those gathered that the school would be kept open this summer so kids would have someplace to go. But he had more to say than just that, and the target of his passion was obvious.

This is more than about convention centers and Avenue of the Arts. This is more than riverboat gambling and Delaware Avenue. The question is, What good is the beautification of the city if the streets are not safe? What good is making Philadelphia the number-one city if young African American men and women have nothing to do in the summer but kill each other? Just as you have to step to a sixteen-year-old who is disrespectful of you, you have to step to a politician who is dissing you!

Lee’s comments received applause, the loudest applause that night. He had seized on something, and in the tired canvas of that church something fluttered and then came alive, the need palpable, the resilience palpable, and the strength palpable—if someone were only there to unleash it. It sounded like a campaign speech, the very speech that a challenger would use to cut away at the Achilles’ heel of the mayor, and its effectiveness was only heightened by the fact that the mayor was nowhere in sight.

After two hours or so, those who remained went outside and formed a vigil. They did not march. They did not chant. They just walked side by side in a slim line to the block where Michelle Cutner had died. The rain had let up, but the gloom of the neighborhood, its hermetic loneliness,
made the walk like a wade through the fog of a weird and faraway place that bore no link to anything around it, a Wild West outpost in various stages of disintegration. “I’ve been fightin’ this twenty-five years and nothin’,” said a man to the person next to him. “You know what I call that—a forgotten neighborhood.”

They walked over the shards of glass that had filled in the cracks of the sidewalk like pebbles. They walked past the corpses of houses that were as much a part of the landscape as the street signs. They walked past fences that were tilting under the weight of overgrown bushes. The procession went by the precise spot where Michelle Cutner had been shot, marked now by a small bouquet of flowers lying on a patch of red.

“The blood was so thick even the rain ain’t wash it away,” said a girl in the humble procession.

They came to the corner of Twentieth and Carpenter, near the little variety store where Michelle Cutner had bought the potato chips with her mother. The streetlamps cast an orange and sickly light that made everything seem infected, and as far as the eye could see, grim lines of row houses ran down the street until they disappeared in the darkness. They looked like tombstones, but it didn’t matter. A giant circle was formed, and the mourners held hands, and a prayer was uttered, and a plea was made. It came from Anthony Yates, whose five-year-old son, Marcus, had been killed six years earlier in the cross fire of a drug war.

“This is not Beirut,” he said.

“This is not Vietnam,” he said.

“This is Philadelphia.”

Rendell had known about the meeting at the church; he had elected not to go because of a belief that such meetings inevitably dissolved into accusations that he wasn’t doing enough. He also thought there was really nothing that could be done anyway, unless the social problems underlying such shootings were somehow solved. “If I had a thousand more police, don’t you think this would have happened? Of course it would have.

“The only thing that will prevent this is to execute some of these people. If they catch whoever did it, I hope we execute ’em,” he said, strangely unaware, despite the avalanche of media coverage, that the perpetrator had been arrested and that the shooting, as horrible as it was, most likely did not involve the kind of premeditation required for the death penalty. He said he had planned to send the police commissioner to the meeting (he
didn’t go either) and that the other problem he had, the real problem, was his schedule. The Welcome America! celebration that had been such a hit last year when the convention center opened was in its second season.

It was true that his schedule, as usual, was crammed to the brim. The Hoagie Day celebration, featuring a fifteen-hundred-foot hoagie courtesy of a convenience-store chain, was kicking off at 5:45
P.M.
And after that was a performance by Chubby Checker. And after that was the Summer Mummers Parade. And after that was the flick of the switch to light up a new thirteen-foot neon hot dog.

That night, Oxman, the mayor’s brilliant political strategist and adviser, turned on the local news. What he saw was coverage of the mayor joyfully attending Hoagie Day on the apron of City Hall juxtaposed with coverage of the community meeting at the Varick Memorial AME Zion Church, where humble blacks spoke of crime and drugs and the senseless death of a six-year-old. Oxman, like others in the administration, had been quietly concerned by the contrast between what he called the Good Ed, who had existed up until the opening of the convention center and was focused and sharp and responsive to the needs of everyone, and the Bad Ed of the period that followed, who was less focused and more susceptible to hubris. Oxman, of course, was intimately familiar with the poll that cited Rendell as a downtown mayor. As he watched the news, he imagined the type of ad that it would make in a political campaign—a mayor more interested in hoagies than black neighborhoods where six-year-olds were dying. He became convinced that with the right black candidate and a million dollars in the bank, he himself could fashion the right campaign to beat the mayor in next year’s primary. He wouldn’t do it, of course, because he was absolutely loyal to Rendell and knew his capacities for leadership better than anyone else. But he also knew this: for all the mayor’s popularity, he was not invincible.

Cohen also privately admitted that the juxtaposition of events on the news that night was horrendous. Acutely aware of the increasing chorus of complaints that the mayor was turning his back on entire swaths of the city, he did what he always had done. He buried himself in the facts. He conducted his own analysis of the mayor’s schedule for May and June. He determined that of the six hundred items on the mayor’s schedule, 34 percent were spent on “Center City” issues and 24 percent on “neighborhood” issues, and the vast majority of the rest, on government business. But based on his analysis, Cohen also concluded, with vintage precision, that many of the meetings in the Center City category really should have been in the
neighborhoods category since they involved neighborhood issues even though they took place in Center City. Even without these corrections, Cohen noted in a lengthy memo, Rendell’s neighborhood commitment was “hardly de minimis,” since he was still making almost two and a half neighborhood appearances a day.

Cohen concluded that the real problem lay not with the mayor’s spending too little time in the neighborhoods but with the way in which the television news media covered him, which was a result of their basic sloth. “I believe this perception is largely inaccurate and is primarily the product of the laziness of television,” Cohen wrote, noting that a television crew had an easier time covering the mayor in Center City than it had covering him out in the neighborhoods somewhere. The solution: begin to ration the number of Center City appearances on the mayor’s public schedule that were announced to the news media. “If the press wants to see EGR or talk to him, we should make them go to the neighborhoods.”

Six weeks after the death of Michelle Cutner, the phone rang in the home of Fifi Mazzccua on Huntingdon Street. She had just gotten home from work, and she picked it up and answered it. She listened for a little bit, and then she dropped the receiver and let it fall to the floor because she couldn’t believe what was happening—

In recent months, as she neared her sixty-second birthday, her eyes seemed more tired than ever and the weariness that had come from the cycle of taking care of children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren seized her with increasing frequency. She had begun to feel the edges of mortality in a way that she had never felt them before. She hoped that her grandson Posquale would stay in the community college and stick to his catering business and not fall into the trap of drugs and petty crime that had claimed the life of one grandson. She hoped that she would not die before her great-grandchildren were old enough to take care of themselves, for she was fearful that they would be split up and not looked after properly. But the prayer that had become the most fervent lately and the one she knew was the most distant and the most remote was to live to see her son Tony walk out of prison, not for the funeral of another son killed on the streets but because he was free.

One day together beyond the prison waiting room, with the green walls and the overbearing smells of grease from the hamburgers and hot dogs dispensed through the vending machines; one day when she didn’t have to hug him and cry on his shoulder under the naked lights while guards sat in high chairs like plantation owners and other inmates hugged and kissed and secretly groped their wives and girlfriends and little children played at their feet on the floor; one day when she didn’t have to empty her pockets and walk through the metal detector and have her body run over with some pronged device that tested for drug residue; one day, just like she told him whenever she saw him.

“One day, baby, you’ll see, one day.”

Was it too much to ask, dear Lord? Was it too much to ask to answer this one prayer, just this one. Please, dear Lord,
please
! For once, just for once, couldn’t you just say something and give an answer?

She felt that she was running out of time, and as the summer days of 1994 turned hot and thick and nasty, life in the desert of North Philadelphia wasn’t getting any easier. Robin had left the church, and the new reverend who was there, Donna Jones, had proved a wonderful replacement. But she was there only part-time, and something was always happening in Fifi’s life, something for which she always needed counseling and support. Tony’s remaining two sons, Gino and Cochise, the ones who were still alive after Keith had been shot down, were in jail, and she felt some relief about that because she at least knew where they were. Another grandson, Bundino, was hanging around with thugs who liked to snatch pocketbooks, and she had walloped him good for that one and was trying to get him locked up in the belief that he too would be safer in jail. Her granddaughter Fifi had been in an institute in Augusta, Georgia, since the end of May for treatment of incurable bronchial asthma. The great-grandchildren were the great-grandchildren, feral yet touching at times, like when they asked her to smell their breath so they could prove to her that they had brushed their teeth. She loved them to death, and she believed that taking care of them was what kept her going. But they could also be, as Fifi put it, “a pain in the keister—I’m not gonna lie about it.”