Portrait of Resilience

I spent the day with Donna Hayes. She had a (third) stroke on February 9, the sixth anniversary of the day her grandson was killed by Portland Police. This time she was hospitalized for a week, and as soon as she could walk ten steps with a walker/rollator and ascend two stairs without one, they sent her home. “Home” at present is a guest room in a friend’s house, so I brought her to my place for the day. She’s on the list for subsidized housing but has been waiting for nearly a year. This last stroke has left her cross-eyed, so she insisted I photograph her in profile, “so I don’t scare anybody.” 

We caught up on stories of grandchildren, ate Indian take-out, and she asked me to read something to her, since she has great difficulty reading, as she sees double images and doesn’t like to wear a patch over the wandering eye. My friend Devorah in Maryland recently sent me a beautiful book called The Trayvon Generation, by poet Elizabeth Alexander. Donna has not yet met Trayvon’s mother in person, but the two have become friends through the internet and have exchanged many emails and messages. The book is a series of essays by Alexander, including several that refer to Trayvon Martin, illustrated by twenty stunning artworks created by Black photographers and painters. I read Donna this part:

On a recent trip to New Haven, I drove as customary down Dixwell and came into abruptly halting traffic. I soon saw that hundreds of people were clustered outside and pouring into a Black church among so many on Dixwell. It was an arresting tableau because most of the crowd were wearing bright-goldenrod hoodies over or instead of formal funeral clothes. As I inched by, I saw that on the front of those hoodies was a picture of a smiling young Black man, fifteen or sixteen by my guess. That young man was the reason they were gathered. He was the boy who had died.

Black communities are full of people wearing T-shirts and hoodies with the faces of young Black people on them whom their communities mourn and remember…. We honor our beloved, who all too often live abbreviated lives and die for reasons related to race, by calling their names and wearing their faces on our bodies (pp. 49,51; p. 50 is a black and white photograph of black musicians in a New Orleans cemetery).


In family news, Juan will have THREE stents inserted tomorrow. Nerve-racking. The children have not been permitted to see him, as he's in Cardiac ICU.