"All I wanted them to do was pick up my baby"

Excerpt from The Condition of Black Life is One of Mourning, by Claudia Rankine. From Rebellious Mournings, edited by Cindy Mustein (2018).

Dylann Storm Roof's unmediated hatred of black people; Black Lives Matter; citizens' videotapping the killing of blacks; the Ferguson Police Department leaving Brown's body in the street - all these actions support Mamie Till Mobley's belief that we need to see or hear the truth. We need the truth of how the bodies died to interupt the course of normal life. But if keeping the dead at the forefront of our conciousness is cricual for our body politics, what of the families of the dead? How must it feel to a family member of the deceased to be more important as evidence than as an individual to be buried and laid to rest?

Michael Brown's mother, Lesley McSpadden, was kept away from her son's body because it was evidence. She was denied the rights of a mother, a sad fact reminiscent of pre-Civil War times, when as a slave she would have had no legal claim to her offspring. McSpadden learned of her son from bystanders: "There were some girls down there had recorded the whole thing," she told reporters. One girl, she said, "showed me a picture on her phone. She said, 'Isn't that your son?' I just bawled even harder. Just to see that, my son lying there lifeless, for no apparent reason." Circling the perimeter around her son's body, McSpadden tried to disperse the crowd: "All I wanted them to do was pick up my baby."