Free The Michael Eric Dyson Reader by Michael Eric Dyson Page B

had been arrested for murder. The disbelief settled on me heavily. The thought that you might have shot another man to death emotionally choked me. I instantly knew what E. B. White meant when he said that the death of his pig caused him to cry internally. The tears didn’t flow down his cheeks. Instead, he cried “deep hemorrhagic tears.” So did I.
    Even so, a cold instinct to suspend my disbelief arose, an instinct I could hardly suppress. I was willing, had to be willing, to entertain the possibility that the news was true. Otherwise I couldn’t offer you the kind of support you needed. After all, if you really had killed someone, I didn’t want to rush in to express sorrow at your being wrongly accused of a crime you didn’t commit. Such a gesture would not only be morally noxious; it would desecrate the memory of the man who had lost his life.
    If I wasn’t able to face the reality that you might be a murderer, then I would have to surrender important Christian beliefs I preach and try to practice. I believe that all human beings are capable of good and evil. And regarding the latter, wishing it wasn’t the case won’t make it so. Too often we deny that our loved ones have the capacity or even inclination for wrongdoing, blinding us to the harm they may inflict on themselves and others.
    I eventually became convinced that you were innocent. Not simply because you told me so. As one lawyer succinctly summarized it: “To hear prisoners tell it, there are no are guilty prisoners.” After discerning the controlled anger in your voice (an anger that often haunts the wrongly accused) and after learning that the police had discovered no weapon, motive, or even circumstantial evidence, I believed you were telling me the truth. Plus, you had been candid with me about your past wrongdoing. And in the wake of your confessions of guilt, you repeatedly bore the sting of my heated reproach. For these reasons, I believed you were not guilty.
    I realized then, as I do now, that these are a brother’s reasons. They are the fruit of an intimacy to which the public has no access and in which they place little trust. Many of the reasons that led me to proclaim your innocence are not reasons that convince judges or juries. Still, I felt the bare, brutal facts of the case worked in your favor. A young black man with whom you were formerly acquainted was tied up in a chair on the second floor of a sparsely furnished house. He had tape tightly wrapped around his eyes. He was beaten on the head. He was shot twice in the chest at extremely close range, producing “contact wounds.”
    After breaking free of his constraints, he stumbled down the flight of stairs inside the house where he was shot. Once he made it down the stairs outside the house, he collapsed on the front lawn of the house next door. As he gasped for breath while bleeding profusely, he was asked, first by neighbors, then by relatives who had arrived on the scene, and later by a policeman, “Who did this to you?” Somethingsounding close enough to your name was uttered. The badly wounded man was pronounced dead a short time later after being rushed to an area hospital.
    In the absence of any evidence of your participation, except the dying man’s words, I thought you’d be set free. After all, he could be mistaken. Given the tragic conditions in which he lay dying, he might not have had full control of his faculties. Was his perception affected by his gunshots? Was his mind confused because of the large amounts of blood he had lost? Unfortunately, there was no way to be certain that he was right. There was no way to ask him if he was sure that you were one of the culprits (he said “they” a couple of times) who had so barbarically assaulted him. But without his ability to answer such questions, I believed there was no way you would be imprisoned. Surely, I thought, it took more than this to convict you, or anyone, of murder.
    I was wrong. The murdered man’s