John Woodrow Cox - Children Under Fire: An American Crisis

CHILDREN UNDER FIRE . Copyright 2021 by John Woodrow Cox. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

Cover design by Allison Saltzman

Cover photograph: Lockdown Drill Amanda Field

Digital Edition MARCH 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-288395-7

Version 01292021

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-288393-3

For the children who told me their stories,

and for the ones who could not.

And to Mom and Dad, to Gram

and to Ed, and, of course, to Jenn.

The boy had come to the end of another bad week, and now the girl he adored wanted to know how he was doing. He hated when people thought of him as a troublemaker, one of those kids who frustrated his teachers and disappointed his mother, but more and more often, he feared thats how they all felt. He had struggled to keep buried what was inside him, a swirling, combustible blend of emotion that the tiniest spark could ignite. It had started as disbelief, even denial, before turning into grief and then, at last, this simmering rage that had clung to him for months. It had erupted again a few days prior, so the true answer to the girls question would have been that he wasnt doing well, but the boy didnt want her to know the truth.

Good, Tyshaun McPhatter, age nine, told her instead as he stared through the screen of his mothers cell phone at Ava Olsen, age eight. It was, for late spring, an unusually brisk afternoon in his neighborhood, just fifteen minutes from the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Dressed in black sweatpants and a gray hoodie pulled low over his head, Tyshaun stood barefoot as he slumped over the side of an armchair in his mothers modest living room, the cell phone in one hand and a chocolate chip granola bar in the other. Ava, who was 520 miles away in South Carolina that afternoon, told him her week had been hard.

Why? he asked.

Ive just been mad and sad and stuff, said Ava, her hair honey blonde, brown eyes serious, and accent tinged with the South. She wore a blue T-shirt and pink SpongeBob SquarePants bottoms as she sat atop her bed beside a half-dozen stuffed animals and a fat brown cat named Charlie.

Why? Tyshaun repeated, between bites of the granola bar.

Ava didnt know what to say. She also didnt want her friend to know the truth, both because it pained her to discuss it and because she dreaded what he might think of her if he knew. For seven seconds, she didnt answer. I dont know, just she said, then stopped and changed the subject.

Ava had first heard about Tyshaun nearly a year earlier, when she walked into her living room and noticed her mother, Mary, crying on the couch. Why are you upset? asked Ava, who suspected that, yet again, she was why. No, Mary assured the girl. It wasnt her fault. Her mother explained that she had just read a story Id written for the Washington Post about a child named Tyshaun who was a lot like Ava. The boy also felt angry and confused and unhappy sometimes because he, too, had lost someone he loved.

His dad is where Jacob is, Mary said, and Ava understood. Mary hadnt let her read my story, but she showed her daughter pictures of Tyshaunposing next to his dad and flashing the deuces sign in a family photo; playing with a toy, alone, on his fathers couch; staring out a window, his dark eyes empty.

The boy looked like he needed a friend, Ava announced, so she got a pencil and a sheet of paper and sat down at her kitchen table. Dear Tyshaun, she began to write, in neat block letters.

Before their lives came apart, the two kids had little in common, other than their ages. Ava, who is white, was a Daisy Scout and wanted nothing more than to become a cheerleader. Day after day, she practiced cartwheels in the dirt and grass behind her home, which overlooked a neighbors bucolic horse farm. She had lived almost all her life in Townville, a quiet, four-thousand-person swath of countryside in the northwest corner of South Carolina known as the Upstate. Her dad had always worked in security or law enforcement, and he had always carried a gun, which shed never thought much about, if at all. In a community with a single stoplight, at least six churches, and an abundance of backyard shooting ranges, most people believed in God and, just slightly less, in their right to bear arms. Townville sat on the eastern edge of a county in which seven in ten voters supported Donald Trump in 2016. Gable-roofed chicken houses stood among cow pastures and rolling fields of hay, wheat, corn, and soybeans, and everyone shopped at Dollar General, nicknamed the Townville Target. It was a world that, in Avas mind, had always been safe and always would be.

That changed one afternoon in late September 2016, when she walked outside her school for recess just as a teenager drove up to the playground in a Dodge Ram, jumped out of the pickup, and pointed a gun. One of the bullets he fired struck six-year-old Jacob Hall, a classmate whom Ava loved dearly. Three days later, Jacob died.

She was so overwhelmed by the loss, and the terror of what shed witnessed, that a pediatrician later diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and recommended that the girl be home-schooled. Ava, who was prescribed both antipsychotics and antidepressants, began hitting herself and yanking out her eyelashes. In the months that followed, she detailed her torment in journals: I cant stop feeling mad. No one ever listens to me. I hate guns.

By then, Tyshaun, who is black, had known since as far back as his memory stretched about the bad things people could do with guns. On his dads dresser in Southeast Washington was a reminder: a three-inch button inscribed with REST IN PEACE that honored a family friend shot two blocks away. Tyshaun was growing up in a time of rapid gentrification across the seven-hundred-thousand-person city, but the change had yet to reach his side of the Anacostia River, where more than half the Districts homicides occurred and nearly every other child grew up in poverty. It was amid this chaos that the boy lived part time with his father, Andrew McPhatter, in a row of seventy-year-old duplexes around the corner from a liquor store. The vast majority of his overwhelmingly black section of the city rejected Trump in 2016, as did the rest of Washington, which cast just 1 in 25 votes for him. Parents in Tyshauns neighborhood viewed firearms less like sacred objects than like carriers of an infectious disease, but they were everywhere, despite the Districts strict gun laws, thanks to the demand from drug dealers and gang members and a supply from surrounding states with much looser laws. The impact was perpetually devastating on the community, where many boys and girls learned to navigate peril before they learned to read. For kids in Tyshauns neighborhood, the unrelenting threat of gun violence informed almost every aspect of their lives: the streets they walked down, the parks they visited, the pictures they drew, the nightmares they had, the number of parents they came home to.

Tyshauns mom, Donna Johnson, had fretted since he was born about how that environment would affect her son, so she decided that the best way to keep him safe was to keep him busy. He made smores at Cub Scout gatherings and took lessons for hockey, swimming, and software coding. He liked football and decided, at a wiry four foot four, that he would play linebacker in the NFL for his hometown team when he grew up. Donna, a thirty-year-old State Department security officer, was desperate to protect his goofy innocence, the quality that led him once to secretly record himself rapping an original song she discovered later. What are thooose on your toooes, they cant be Doritooos, he rhymed, then nodded to the camera, feeling good about his track. Thats the new one.