— Sorry, I said to the priest. I don’t have any influence.
I pulled away from him and hurried toward the elevator as it was closing. The Irishman put his hand in the gap and pulled the door open for me, and then we were gone. The Spanish woman gave me a guarded smile and said she was sorry she couldn’t go to the girl’s funeral, she had to go home and look after her own children, but she was glad that Ciaran had someone to go with.
I offered him a lift without thinking, but he said no, that he had been asked to travel in the funeral cortege, he didn’t know why.
He wrung his hands nervously as he stepped out into the sunlight.
— I didn’t even know the girl, he said.
— What was her name?
— I don’t know. Her mother’s Tillie.
He said it with a downward finality, but then he added: I think it’s Jazzlyn, or something.
I PARKED THE CAR outside St. Raymond’s cemetery in Throgs Neck, far enough away that nobody could see it. A hum came from the expressway, but the closer I got to the graveyard the more the smell of fresh-cut grass filled the air. A faint whiff of the Long Island Sound.
The trees were tall and the light fell in shafts among them. It was hard to believe that this was the Bronx, although I saw the graffiti scrawled on the side of a few mausoleums, and some of the headstones near the gate had been vandalized. There were a few funerals in progress, mostly in the new cemetery, but it was easy enough to tell which group was the girl’s. They were carrying the coffin down the tree-lined road toward the old cemetery. The children were dressed in perfect white, but the women’s clothes looked like they had been cobbled together, the skirts too short, the heels too high, their cleavage covered with wraparound scarves. It was like they had gone to a strange garage sale: the bright expensive clothes hidden with bits and pieces of dark. The Irishman looked so pale among them, so very white.
A man in a gaudy suit, wearing a hat with a purple feather, followed at the back of the procession. He looked drugged-up and malevolent. Under his suit jacket he wore a tight black turtleneck and a gold chain on his neck, a spoon hanging from it.
A boy who was no more than eight played a saxophone, beautifully, like some strange drummer boy from the Civil War. The music rang out in punctuated bursts over the graveyard.
I stayed in the background, near the road in a patch of overgrown grass, but as the service began, John A. Corrigan’s brother caught my eye and beckoned me forward. There were no more than twenty people gathered around the graveside but a few young women wailed deeply.
— Ciaran, he said again, extending his hand, as if I might have forgotten. He gave me a thin, embarrassed smile. We were the only white people there. I wanted to reach up and adjust his tie, fix his scattered hair, primp him.
A woman — she could only have been the dead girl’s mother — stood sobbing beside two men in suits. Another, younger woman stepped up to her. She took off a beautiful black shawl and draped it on the mother’s shoulders.
— Thanks, Ange.
The preacher — a thin, elegant black man — coughed and the crowd fell silent. He talked about the spirit being triumphant in the body’s fall, and how we must learn to recognize the absence of the body and praise the presence of what is left behind. Jazzlyn had a hard life, he said. Death could not justify or explain it. A grave does not equal what we have had in our lifetime. It was maybe not the time or the place, he said, but he was going to talk about justice anyway. Justice, he repeated. Only candor and truth win out in the end. The house of justice had been vandalized, he said. Young girls like Jazzlyn were forced to do horrific things. As they grew older the world had demanded terrible things of them. This was a vile world. It forced her into vile things. She had not asked for it. It had become vile for her, he said. She was under the yoke of tyranny. Slavery may be over and gone, he said, but it was still apparent. The only way to fight it was with charity, justice, and goodness. It was not a simple plea, he said, not at all. Goodness was more difficult than evil. Evil men knew that more than good men. That’s why they became evil. That’s why it stuck with them. Evil was for those who could never reach the truth. It was a mask for stupidity and lack of love. Even if people laughed at the notion of goodness, if they found it sentimental, or nostalgic, it didn’t matter — it was none of those things, he said, and it had to be fought for.
— Justice, said Jazzlyn’s mother.
The preacher nodded, then looked up toward the high trees. Jazzlyn had been a child who grew up in Cleveland and New York City, he said, and she had seen those distant hills of goodness and she knew that one day she was going to get there. It was always going to be a difficult journey. She had seen too much evil on the way, he said. She had some friends and confidants, like John A. Corrigan, who had perished with her, but mostly the world had tried her and sentenced her and taken advantage of her kindness. But life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty, he said, and now she was on her way to a place where there were no governments to chain her or enslave her, no miscreants to demand the wrong thing, and none of her own people who were going to turn her flesh to profit. He stood tall then and said: Let it be said that she was not ashamed.
A wave of nods went around the crowd.
— Shame on those who wanted to shame her.
— Yes, came the reply.
— Let this be a lesson to us all, said the preacher. You will be walking someday in the dark and the truth will come shining through, and behind you will be a life that you never want to see again.
— Yes.
— That bad life. That vile life. In front of you will stretch goodness. You will follow the path and it will be good. Not easy, but good. Full of terror and difficulty maybe, but the windows will open to the sky and your heart will be purified and you will take wing.
I had a sudden, terrible vision of Jazzlyn flying through the windshield. I felt dizzy. The preacher’s lips moved, but for a moment I couldn’t hear. He was looking at a single place in the crowd, his vision fixed on the man in the purple hat behind me. I glanced over my shoulder. The man was biting his upper lip in anger and his body seemed to curl into itself, coiling and getting ready to strike. The hat shadowed him but he looked to have a glass eye.
— The snakes will perish with the snakes, said the preacher.
— Yessir, came a woman’s voice.
— They’ll be gone.
— Yes they will.
— Be they out of here.
The man in the purple hat didn’t move. Nobody moved.
— Go on! shouted Jazzlyn’s mother, contorting herself. She looked like she was strapped down but she was wriggling and squirming out of it. One of the men in suits touched her arm. Her shoulders were going from side to side and her voice was raw with rage.
— Get the fuck out of here!
I wondered for a horrific moment if she was shouting at me, but she was staring beyond me, at the man in the feathered hat. The chorus of shouts rose higher. The preacher held his hands out and asked for calm. It was only then I realized that Jazzlyn’s mother had kept her arms behind her back the whole time, shackled with handcuffs. The two black men in suits beside her were city cops.
— Get the fuck out, Birdhouse, she said.
The man in the hat waited a moment, stretched upward, gave a smile that showed all his teeth. He touched the brim, tilted it, turned, and walked away. A small cheer went up from the mourners. They watched the pimp disappear down the road. He raised his hat one time, without turning around, waved it in the air, like a man who was not really saying good-bye.