THIS CLIPPING FROM THE SOUTH NIAGARA UNION JOURNAL I saved until it became so dry it fell into pieces in my fingers. An obituary beneath a photograph of a shyly smiling black boy with a gap between two prominent front teeth. Seventeen when he’d died but in the photo he looks as if he could be fifteen, even fourteen.

Hadrien Johnson, 17. Resident of 29 Howard Street, South Niagara. Varsity softball and basketball at South Niagara High School. Honor roll 1, 2, 3. Youth Choir, African Methodist Episcopal Church. Died in South Niagara General Hospital, November 11, 1991, of severe head wounds following an attack in the late evening of November 2 by yet-unidentified assailants as he was bicycling to his home. Survived by his mother, Ethel, his sisters, Louise and Ida, and his brothers, Tyrone, Medrick, and Herman. Services Monday at African Methodist Episcopal Church.

People would ask if I’d known Hadrian Johnson. (The name was misspelled in the newspaper obituary but corrected in subsequent articles.) No! I had not known him—he was a junior at the high school, I was in seventh grade. His sister Louise was a year older than me, at the middle school, but I did not know Louise either.

There were no African American classmates I knew well. All of my friends were white like me and all of them lived within a few blocks of our house on Black Rock Street.

It was only after his death that I came to know Hadrian Johnson. It was only after his death that we came to be associated in people’s minds. Hadrian Johnson. Violet Rue Kerrigan.

Not that it did any good for Hadrian Johnson, who was dead. And it was the worst thing that could have happened to Violet Rue Kerrigan.

“Boys Will Be Boys”

WAS IT WONDERFUL TO HAVE BROTHERS WHEN YOU WERE growing up? Older brothers? Who could look out for you?

Girls lacking older brothers would ask me. How wistful they were! Having to fend on their own.

I didn’t just adore my brothers, I was proud of them. Just the fact—My big brothers! Mine.

For girls are keenly sensitive of needing to be looked after. In certain circumstances, like school. Not to be alone, exposed, unprotected. Vulnerable.

Not measurable but very real—the power of older brothers to forestall teasing, bullying, harassment, threats from other boys made against girls. The protective power of older brothers by their mere existence.

The sexual threat of boys is greatly diminished, by the (mere) existence of a girl’s brothers.

Unless of course the girl’s brothers are themselves the (sexual) threat.

Parents have not a clue. Cannot guess. The (secret) lives of children, adolescents. Thinking that, because we are quiet, or docile (seeming), because we smile on cue and seem happy, because we are no trouble, that our inner lives are placid, and not churning and choppy and terrifying as the Niagara River as it gathers momentum rushing to the Falls.