Rikers Island

“Visitor for Dawkins,” shouts the corrections officer.
I am at the edge of my metal chair, but in my nervousness, fail to recognize the name.
“Dawkins?” he repeats.

I leap up, nod at him and enter. I sit at another metal chair, arranged in a row next to mostly African American women. Everyone’s removed his or her footwear. I do the same, unzipping my boots. I have already been subjected to an ionic scan for narcotics. Now I get called for frisking. A female officer ensures I’m not smuggling in any contraband. I have a tiny metal hair clip in my pocket. The officer asks me to pin it in my hair. I am waved through.

I walk through double doors into a large cafeteria-like hall. It is filled with plastic furniture in bright, primary colors. Child-sized green, yellow, blue, and red chairs and tables fill the linoleum floors. African American men at an average height of six feet occupy them, their long legs squeezed uncomfortably in the tiny space between the tables and chairs.

I walk to table 66. It is a bright yellow. I sit on a plastic chair and wait for Dawkins. I don’t remember how he looked in court. He had been in a gray sweatshirt, but usually had his back turned to me. I have never seen him from close quarters.

Men stream in and hug and kiss their women. They are young. The women are even more so, and many have babies. Their grittiness belies their age. It is touching to see young fathers reuniting with their sons and daughters, but I remember the young boy sitting next to me on the bus to Rikers Island.

Crossing the bridge into the prison, a young boy, probably all of five, sat next to me. His gray hoodie was drawn over his head, his blue eyes partly shaded. His grandmother accompanied him. Rikers is no place for a child on a Sunday morning, I thought. What drives men to commit crimes even when knowing their responsibilities, knowing that they have their sons and daughters to care for?

Dawkins arrives. He looks like his dad, but younger and taller. I pump his hand nervously thinking, ‘the same hands that killed twice.’ He sits opposite me, and I introduce myself. He wears a gray jumpsuit, torn at the crotch. He has seven tattoos, none from prison, he assures me. Tattoos acquired in prison are a sign of gang affiliation. We talk.

I ask him at one point why he was carrying a steak knife in his pocket at the age of 14? Dawkins stabbed a boy in the neck, severing a major artery and killing him—his first murder. It is a silly question. Growing up in Jamaica, Queens at the height of the crack epidemic, it would be silly not to.

He smiles, his first smile. It lights up his face, revealing for an instant something deeper, a shade of the personality he has been hiding. His lightly bearded cheek dimples.
Then it closes up. He launches into his lie, repeating it again and again with increasing pitch and crescendo. He touches my knee to reinforce his point. My body strains against the light touch.

I am disappointed. I expected an ideal character for my narrative, but the perfect is often the exception rather than the rule. He is what he is, perfectly human.

Excerpt from Uptown Sinclair “The Jungle”

Written in 1905, “The Jungle” provided a stunning look at the meatpacking industry in Chicago and was an important contributor to the Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Act (1906).  Sinclair went undercover and lived with Lithuanian immigrant workers for two months for this story:

” There were the men in the pickle-rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,—they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking-rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o’clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling-rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time-limit that a man could work in the chilling-rooms was said to be five years. There were the woolpluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle-men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned-meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood-poisoning. Some worked at the stamping-machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself, and have a part of his hand chopped off. There were the “hoisters,” as they were called, whose task it was to press the lever which lifted the dead cattle off the floor. They ran along upon a rafter, peering down through the damp and the steam; and as old Durham’s architects had not built the killing-room for the convenience of the hoisters, at every few feet they would have to stoop under a beam, say four feet above the one they ran on; which got them into the habit of stooping, so that in a few years they would be walking like chimpanzees. Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer-men, and those who served in the cooking-rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer-man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank-rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard!”

Source: Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1905), Chapter Nine.

Scavenger

Two deaths in the past week.  As a journalist, are you a recorder of history, or a scavenger?

You wait for the moment the widow breaks down.  Your frame is perfectly set up, adjusted for light, and you lie in waiting for that human element of misery.

Like the vulture waiting for the Sudanese child to die in Kevin Carter’s Pulitzer winning photograph.

–

The first death was on Saturday, a B/M/27 stabbed multiple times on his torso:

Bernard “A’jah” Wannamaker was not a perfect man, but his story fits in well with the “just another black guy knifed in the hood” narrative.  At his wake, his family said that he was talented – he was a barber, a DJ, and “so fine” that girls dropped at his feet.  He fixed bikes, and got his GED in prison.  He was a month out of prison. People called him a thug, but he was so much more, his family members said.

He had a dispute with his ex-wife over a baby daughter – people in the area call it “baby’s mamma’s drama”.  He got stabbed multiple times at a block party by the ex-wife’s boyfriend.  Simple.  He was 27 years old, a month away from 28.  He died two blocks from the house he grew up in.  He hadn’t gotten very far in life.

Does his story deserve more than two sentences in the New York Post?  Or does it not?  Can you tell everything about this man because you have heard about him already, so many times, in so many places?  It is the same narrative.  It harkens to so much more – the poverty, the lack of opportunities in this land of opportunities and white picket fences.

–

The second death was on September 11.  A construction worker fell five stories to his death.  He was was wearing a safety harness but had not tethered it to the building.  There were no nets:

Miguel Rodriguez, 38, was an undocumented worker from Ecuador.  He was a day laborer like so many in Jackson Heights who linger under the El on Roosevelt avenue.  They are picked up by contractors and taken to construction sites where they work, often without proper O.S.H.A. training (which requires documentation). Rodriguez is survived by his widow Berta and two children: 17-year-old Luis and seven-year-old Kevin.

Since January, 21 day laborers have died in New York from construction accidents; 17 of them were Latinos.

This morning, the assemblyman for the area (Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Corona) called a press conference about a new bill he is going to introduce to improve Occupational Health and Safety (OSHA) legislation.  The media showed up in full force.  Fox news was there, HDTV and a few spanish language channels, 4 newspaper guys and a couple of photographers.  And me.

Berta and Kevin Rodriguez. Photo courtesy New York Post.

I’m not judging but it’s so easy to judge.  The boy has just lost his father; the widow her husband.  While the politicos and officials pontificate about OSHA, Berta stares off into space.  She grips her son tightly.  She is a tiny woman, hardly five feet, dressed in black – a weary, faded black as though she threw on whatever she could find.  Kevin is handed a photo of his father as soon as they arrive – a newspaper cut-out of Rodriguez hastily thrust into a frame. They are made to pose for the TV crews and photographers, precisely.  Berta never relinquishes her hold on Kevin, and Kevin never relinquishes his hold on the photograph of his father.

The journalists are taking notes.  One perfectly dressed guy in a brown suit asks the widow to say a few words.  She doesn’t want to really but finally agrees.  The photographer hovers around finding the perfect angle.  He clicks when Kevin finally moves his head in a motion of grief.

I feel like a vulture by association.

–

Kevin Carter killed himself eventually.