Notes from the Morgue

The body on the slab was no different from the hundreds of other dead bodies I’d encountered over the course of my career: tall, muscular, twenty-two years old, with close-cropped hair and a slight scar across the bridge of his nose. Had I met him on the street, I would have assumed he was an athlete.  

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         Now he was just another black man, dead from multiple gunshot wounds to the face and torso.  To the world, he was invisible and instantly forgotten.  For me, he was a symbol of all the hate and violence and prejudice that crawls through the underbelly of our nation.  I had no doubt that he had a family and people who loved him.  Had he wanted to repay their love, to marry, carve out a career, to succeed and make them proud?   We would never know because he was gone before his life had truly begun.

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         I decided he deserved more.  While I could not give him back his life, I could at least afford him a modicum of dignity before he was lowered into the ground. And so, I spent that entire night memorizing the forensic particulars of the young man’s gunshot wounds so that I could remember them in detail without the aid of an autopsy report. 

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         The following morning, I walked into the small Georgia courtroom where I would appear as Medical Examiner. There were only three other black people in the entire room, and I’m sure they’d never before seen a black man called upon to give expert testimony.  I then proceeded to explain my findings with the same precision and articulation as would be expected from a white doctor of similar position.  When I was done, I was certain that I had achieved my goal:  to present the young man’s death not as just another murder but as a tragedy all too common in our society.     

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          As I walked out of the courtroom, a voice called out to me, “You sounded like a preacher.”  Turning, I saw an elderly black woman sitting on the courthouse porch in a wooden rocking chair large enough to accommodate a small family.  As I sat down beside her, she hugged me and said, “That was my son you were talking about in there.”  It was only then that I realized that in my quest for objectivity, I had never once mentioned her son’s name during my testimony. Was it my way of blocking out the anger? 

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         I was born in Centreville, a sleepy Mississippi town approximately 118 miles southwest of Jackson, the state capital.  When I graduated high school in 1960, we had only 1300 residents.  Over the last sixty years, a scant 300 people have been added to the rolls.  

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         Neither of my parents graduated high school. Yet they were not dropouts.  Rather, I would classify them as “force outs,” there being in their time no schools for colored children beyond the eighth grade. To redress his lack of schooling, my father served a short stint in the United States Marine Corps.  Upon returning home he went to night school and obtained his high school diploma. After raising seven children, my mother also fulfilled her GED requirements then was off to Alcorn State University at Natchez, Mississippi where she obtained an Associate Degree and taught in the local Head Start program for the next 20 years.  

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      In Mississippi, education is held in low esteem, particularly for people of color.  Approximately 50 percent of my classmates did not finish high school while those who did complete the curriculum quickly left for the steel mills and automotive plants of the Midwest.        

         When I graduated, I followed their lead and left Centreville for New Orleans and life in the “Big Easy.” Once there, I lived with my ex-brother-in-law and found a job with the International Longshoremen Association unloading large stalks of bananas.  The job was backbreaking.  After only two weeks, I was on a Greyhound bus headed home.