The Silence and the Fury

The Day after a jury exonerated the officers who shot Amadou Diallo, a group of women got together to make 100 black veils. Their quiet vigils have haunted the streets of New York ever since.

Managing to be at once ingenious and eerily metaphoric, two women escaped the living death of slavery by draping their skin in the true blackness of mourning. Layers of black skirts inches deep. Veils so thick midnight swirled around them. Massa tracked them to the railway platform, mere moments before their freedom train. He even lifted their bonnets. But years of loss had given them strength, and they did not crumble. He did not recognize them. Such is the power of pain, the fury of mourning that transmutes bereaved women into implacable creatures of pure portent. Beware the woman who's lost everything that matters. Beware the woman in basic black.

Those brave fugitives would be desolate to know that their great-great-granddaughters have yet to shed the mourning clothes. A century and a half later, Amadou Diallo's killing at the hands of New York City's police has driven the black community, and in particular its women, mad with grief. Not that police violence against blacks is new. In fact, the problem is its very lack of novelty. We have "overcome," or so we are told, yet the death count rises. Those humiliated, harassed, and hospitalized at police hands are too ubiquitous to enumerate, through Abner Louima, Tyisha Miller, and Rodney King stand out. The simple act of driving becomes an act of courage.

Something must be done, but what? Praying for justice has failed. Shame and the nail-gun gaze of bereft black women are all that's left. So in widow's weeds, Women in Mourning and Outrage bear solemn witness to their people's unearned suffering. They appear at police brutality rallies in New York, holding aloft happy-faced photos of the martyred, the wry international symbol of a mother's broken heart.

Women who did not even know Amadou Diallo mourn because it could have been their son. It might yet be their son. Pain that cannot be assuaged hardens to a dagger's point as they solemnly count off the 41 gunshots it took for four police officers to feel safe against one unarmed black man.

A young man, one they may yet have to weep over, rollerblades past their haunting phalanx and yawns, "Another day, another protest." He doesn't know what they know: When your loved one's heart stops, so does the clock. Let the politicians move on to other business. Mother's know that the strong-backed refusal to get over it is their final weapon. They rightfully have no faces because they are living ghosts. They are the nagging regrets that fuel insomnia, the ache that will not cease. They are everyone's unfinished business.

Throughout history, in every language living or now dead, outraged women in mourning have moaned, wailed, shaken angry fists, and demanded to be heard. They may be most dangerous, however, when silent. Like death. With a mother's patience and a hanging judge's lack of mercy, they hold the scales of justice.