Lawrence - And Still I Rise

T wo lives ended one chilly April night thirteen years ago. One was the life of my eldest son. You dont have to be a mother to understand what that means, but perhaps only the parents of children can truly imagine what the loss is like. My son did not die in a car accident or a plane crash. He was murdered by a gang of violent, racist boys, and they got away with it. They remain unpunished to this day.

The second life that ended was the life I thought was mine. Since my son Stephen was killed with such arrogance and contempt Ive had a different life, one that I can hardly recognise as my own.

You think that you know your place in the world and that youre safe there, in your part of it, that nothing can harm you except illness or old age. We all have this sense of security, this belief that the world will let us be as long as we do nothing to provoke it. I know I did until late at night that day in the spring of 1993. I wish I could not say so precisely when my life changed, but there it is. There was a knock on the door and voices in the hallway, and I heard my then husband speaking. I wish I had never heard what the voices were saying. After that night I was a different person.

For a long time, it was as if I had to put on armour every day just in order to survive. There were times when I did not want to continue, when I wanted to stop and to return to the security of being the private person I thought I was and maybe still am. There were times when I did not feel like speaking to anyone except my closest friends, and maybe never again to have to speak to more than a few people around a table while we shared food and spoke about ordinary things. Some days I still dont know how I manage to open the front door and go out into the world, and I can confess now that there were days, especially in the days and years immediately after my sons death, when I could not leave my bedroom. Then Id learn something new always that slow drip of information on the raw wound and I would have to decide, again and again, against my own instincts, that I must say something. It would have been easy, sometimes, to roll over and turn my face to the wall, but the voices that so angered me would not have stopped reassuring, patronising, and lying. And my son Stephen no longer had a voice of his own.

E. L. Doctorows novel Ragtime revolves around a black man in New York, Coalhouse Walker, who is attacked and humiliated by a group of racist white firemen. They cannot bear the fact that he is dignified and articulate. They ruin his car, which he has saved to buy, and cause the death of the woman he loves. He becomes obsessed with obtaining justice against them, and his campaign escalates. He turns to violence, so that in the end he causes a major crisis in the city and among its policemen and politicians. I never dreamed of using violence our campaign was completely peaceful but I have sometimes felt like that fictional character, ignored and derided for protesting too much, and going on until I brought the state to admit that terrible wrongs had been done to my son and to my family.

The campaign for justice for Stephen Lawrence changed the way the police in this country view racist crimes. In the course of it I had to get used to people always telling me how dignified I was, as though that were something unusual. There was an implication to my ears that other black people dont behave like this, but I know that they do. There have been hundreds of thousands of people like me, women who have lost what was most precious to them in the world and who have had to go on with their lives. Some are still waiting for justice.

I hope my book will show people that it is possible to come through even the darkest times. I often draw strength from one of my favourite poems, Maya Angelous Still I Rise, which begins:

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, Ill rise...

Before now, I had difficulty with the idea of writing about what happened to me and my family, because part of me saw it as selling my soul. Not enough time has passed to lessen the feelings that I first experienced when I walked downstairs to hear what was being said at my own front door thirteen years ago, there isnt enough time in any human life for that, but at least now I think that it might be useful to share my experience with other people. I want to describe what happened to me as truthfully as possible, mindful that in doing so it touches on the lives of others, especially members of my family. I have tried, nevertheless , to respect their privacy, and have only referred to their lives when it was essential to tell my own story.

When people say things like You changed policing in this country I feel a chill, because it sounds as though were all right now, and it is so easy to find reasons not to keep a close eye on what those with the power in our society do. It is easy to criminalise whole groups of people and not to take seriously what is done to them by others. This book for me is a warning as well as a reminder. May you never experience what I have experienced.