As the Wicked Watch (Jordan Manning, #1)

by Tamron Hall

To the countless children missing or taken by the darkness of the world. You are more than a story. You are more than words on a page. You are loved, you are missed, and you are not forgotten.

It’s amazing where the mind travels at a crime scene. I’m convinced it’s how the brain copes with the sick reality of what humans are capable of.

I must constantly remind myself to turn away from other people’s despair and move toward the light that glows in my own life. It’s a fragile balance; it’s made me hard at times, but just as often, softer than I needed to be.

“When someone tells you their name for the first time, look them in the eyes and repeat it back to them. You won’t forget the name and they won’t forget you tried to make a connection. You never know who you will need.”

Outside the courtroom, most people would never hear violence against another person described in the horrific detail Dr. Chan had just shared with me privately. We shield them from it. We as in the media, police, and prosecutors. Sometimes I wish the public did know. Then maybe people would understand the true impact of violent crime and the destruction of human life.

In my experience, White people who weren’t raised around Black people can be more accepting of our differences than some who have lived around Black people their entire lives.

“Everything’s not about race, Jordan,” he said. No, he didn’t. “It is for those three young Black men. How people see them through the lens of race impacts how their teachers see them, how police interact with them. Will they see a suspect when he’s the victim or just a guy waiting on a bus? Black people have been killed for less.”

I’ve heard people say that when they die, let it be quick, not some lingering, debilitating illness. But sudden death scars those who are left behind to grieve. As human beings, we’re keenly aware of our mortality, but it’s not something we contemplate every day. So when we lose someone we love in a terrible accident, it forces us to focus on our fragility within that mortal coil. When the victim is young, we mourn the truncation of a life. But when someone you love is murdered, it instills in you a heightened sense of foreboding that never goes away.

Inevitably, every year a new string of interns dying to be reporters jump into this business with a skewed view of the job. No one values heart anymore. It’s the drama they’re after, the thirst for the high five from a colleague congratulating you for “owning someone” in an interview. I know I might sound like an old J-school dinosaur sometimes, but I think schools should require would-be reporters to take psychology classes, or at least some type of counseling curriculum to acquire the empathy they need for the day-to-day, so they’re forced to remember these are human beings, not just stories.

I laughed. “Grace, were you scared back there?” “A little,” she said. I guess I can respect the fact that such a scene felt different for her. But long before I became a reporter, I decided that I couldn’t go through life being afraid of people, especially not my own. How do you treat someone with dignity and respect in your reporting when you fear them or their circumstances? It’s one of my frustrations, and it’s not just White reporters. I see profiling in media cross racial and economic lines more than folks in my business would ever admit.

I know from the many stories that I’ve covered that the wicked watch, and they strike when they think nobody’s looking. In Masey’s case, that would’ve been the day she left Yvonne’s at dusk on her bicycle.

Not everybody recognizes their bias, and rubbing their noses in it doesn’t make it any better.

Self-preservation was the infinite barbed-wire fence between the truth and lies.

It was not what you were accustomed to that mattered, it was how well you could adapt to survive.