Within days of the sentencing several black churches in South Niagara were vandalized including the African Methodist Episcopal Church which Hadrian Johnson had attended. Small fires were started along Howard Avenue in a predominantly black neighborhood and young black boys reported being threatened by older white boys on their way home from school.

No one would tell me of these developments—the white backlash. I would read of them, piecemeal, over a period of time—weeks, months.

Imagining a white backlash like something in the river—discolored, frothing water, thirty-foot-long snakes churning and writhing. Almost I could see this, the terrifying rush of the white backlash lapping against the rocky shore of the Niagara River . . .

By which time I was living in Port Oriskany. Eighty miles away. With Mom’s youngest sister Irma (who had always liked me, though she’d liked Miriam and Katie a little better) and her husband Oscar Allyn.

They’d always wanted children, it was said. It had been a mystery to me as a child, why.

For a long time waking confused and frightened in this new place, in this new bed. Not knowing where I was, or why. Desperate and hopeful thinking that I would contact the South Niagara police, the school principal, Ms. Micaela—The bat. I was wrong about the bat. I never saw the bat. The bat is lost, no one has ever found my brother’s bat.

Safe House

SAFE FROM NOW ON, VIOLET.

Very quickly it happens, an underage child can become a ward of the county.

For the protection of the child, the child must be removed from an unsafe home environment.

Officers for Children’s Protective Services are as empowered as law enforcement officers and can act as swiftly. It is their task to protect the endangered child. It is not their task to placate the wishes of any adult nor is it their task to determine if a child is telling the truth, or some degree of the truth. By the time truth is established a child might be severely injured or dead.

And so, without being allowed to return to my home and with just a single telephone call to my mother I was “removed” from my family and placed in a “safe house” for the time being—a foster home for traumatized children and adolescents of whom a number had been beaten and/or sexually abused by relatives predominantly fathers and older brothers.

(Though there were others who’d been beaten, abused, left to starve by their mothers.)

(And others who were retarded, or mentally ill, from households where adults were mentally ill and dangerous to the well-being of children.)

(And others who were runaways—a category that overlapped with the traumatized.)