No Mercy for Child Killers

Before today, I was opposed to the death penalty. I believed it to be a faulty cog in a flawed justice system meant to dispose of human beings like the garbage no one wants.

Then someone did that very same thing to a little girl in North Carolina named Shaniya Davis. Someone kidnapped her, killed her and threw her little body in the woods. What happened in the middle is--mercifully for those of us who grieve this child--still a mystery, though police are speculating that she was sold for prostitution. I didn't know her or her family and she is one of hundreds of children whose faces appear in news sources every week after having been abused or killed. Yet my heart breaks as if she had been one of my own family and there's no mercy to be found there for her mother or the killer to whom she sold her five year-old baby.

I used to be someone who looked for the reasons behind behavior, maybe to help people understand that sometimes it's not entirely their fault. We live in a cruel, unequal world that doesn't make sense. But we also live in a world with evil people with no sense of humanity and animalistic intentions who don't deserve to live among us. Those who abuse and kill children are those people.

There are several reasons why this case hits me particularly hard. The first is the haunting image of little Shaniya--the last of her alive--on a hotel surveillance camera being carried by her kidnapper, one of her arms naively holding to his neck. She is still breathing, still unaware. You want to reach in and snatch her back into safety, hold her close, rock her and tell her that she'll never be left alone again.

Then there's the fact that I'm a mother to a 19 month-old and due to have another baby in April. I probably speak for most parents when I say that I would kill anyone who tried to hurt my children in such a way.

If there's a flaw here, it's that my gut reaction is so powerful when it comes to this story; the mother in me--no, the human being in me-- sees no use in finding reasons to save those who threw away a beautiful little girl's life. I used to be among those who touted rehabilitation as an answer but I don't believe evil can be rehabilitated. And those who run child prostitution rings are evil, possessed by drug addiction or money. I don't care what motivates them, to be honest. What I care about it is swift and certain justice that suits their crimes.

Headaches

I suffered from a migraine for almost week before it subsided. It was a storm that raged in waves and lightning and thunder again and again just behind my left eye before slowly pulling away. It was a debilitating kind of pain that meant I could only go through the motions of living and working for five days, communicating from within a black fog of a mood that everyone around me could surely sense. It left me feeling bitter about being unproductive, depressed that I didn't have the energy to teach the way I wanted or to play with my toddler, sad that all I could do was lie down every spare minute as my husband became a single parent for two days.

I waited. Then there it was: the sweet, blessed release, the way a quiet shower will settle in after a storm, washing away pieces of shattered glass.

Headaches make me thankful. They make me think about people who live with pain daily, who may have no hope for release, who simply find ways to survive and maybe even thrive in spite of it.

I wonder if I could.

Family Reunion

On Sunday, my people gathered on a mountaintop called Ramsey Ridge, a place that is truly God's country.

The road to the top is long and winding, peppered with an occasional trailer or farm. It's a place so remote the dogs nap in the road and a man sitting on his porch will straighten up and stare to see a row of cars wagon-training by. Mostly, the mountain is untouched, edenic, with thick, lush woods that finally give way to wide, smooth pastures and a tiny family cemetery where our ancestors are buried.

The Four Sisters: Emma, Ethel, Grace, and Eva lived the longest of all the Stanley siblings and grew old together, telling stories, cooking, sewing, writing letters to tell of the weather and new grandchildren. Their children brought them together as often as they could until one by one they left for a place they had prepared their whole lives to see.

My great-grandmother, Ethel, told me a hundred stories about her life on Ramsey Ridge, where she and her sisters forged a romantic suicide pact to jump off the Raven Cliffs (they backed out), where her father hid moonshine stills that he confiscated as the county revenuer, where her mother was almost stabbed to death by Aunt Pop, where she met my great-grandfather on the croquet grounds her father built. It was a place where, she said, they "had it all," a plot of such unspoiled beauty I thought her memory must be romanticizing it until I went there for the first time and saw a flock of wild turkeys in the fields. On the horizon above those fields are mountaintops, first green then blue in the distance and reaching for miles and miles, the only sound is the wind that sweeps the air clean and turns the scarecrow to wave.

The old barn still stands under a grandfatherly tree that spreads his branches wide and deep. My great-great grandparents, uncles, aunts, babies who succombed to turn-of-the century sicknesses rest in the shaded cemetery beside the Raven Cliffs. Their spirits walk among us when we gather, still plowing the land, still tending the garden, still strolling to the one-room school where Mamaw's brother Roley was the teacher.

Sunday was a cusp-of-autumn day, too chilly for shade and too warm for full sun, but perfect for walking down dappled roads to the Caney Fork church where food was laid out the length of the building. We feasted on fried chicken, cowboy beans, potato salad, cornbread, blackberry cobbler and German chocolate pie. Behind the church, just beyond two outhouses with indoor carpet, is another cemetery with the most famous grave of all.

Rainwater Ramsey (my great-great-great grandfather) bought and settled that ridge during a Civil War that he tried his best to avoid. "Look for the Yankees," he told his son as he worked in the fields. "They're dressed in all blue." Lore holds that he is part Cherokee and though that's never been proven, oral history is stronger than oak to those who believe it.

On Discovering Something New Every Day

Author Silas House issued a challenge to writers: live James Still's advice to discover something new every day and write about it. So here I am.

My 16 month-old son is teaching me how to discover the newness of little things. He has the perfect vantage point, no further than a few feet from the ground where so much is taken for granted by those of us who have long forgotten that place except when we drop our keys or are told to watch our step. Our walk from the car to the library's door was especially slow today because he discovered so much along the way: the perfection of a poplar leaf dressed in autumn red, the glint of a silver cap bottle, a tiny green spider rappelling from the safety bar beside the steps. Every few feet he stopped, twisted his tiny hand from my grip, and squatted to inspect his treasure. "Ahh," he gasps, pointing, and I give him the word as I settled down alongside him because he's truly onto something here.

He notices what he can't reach and demands to be lifted so he can inspect it. The glittering crystals on a chandelier that dissect sunshine into a kaleidoscope of patterns on distant walls. The pull chain that magically puts a ceiling fan into motion. The smooth, cool sensation of a door knob. And a light switch, the most amazing discovery of all. He puts his thumb on the switch and turns expectantly toward the light before he pushes, waits with bated breath, then gasps in delight when light blooms. His smile outshines those lights because he's discovered how to make magic in one small move. Every time he flips the switch, it's as if a chorus of angels erupt in praise.