Calm — not protests —fills neighborthood.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The glow of their phones lit up their faces in the night. Terrell White and his friends kept looking down at the updates, trying to separate rumor from conspiracy theory from actual fact. It was 9 o’clock — 24 hours after a suspected white gunman had killed nine black people at church two miles to the south — and here on King Street, the struggle to understand was underway.
“People at Bible study, hearing God’s word?” White said, shaking his head. “That’s no heart. That’s no fear.”
“That’s white America,” said Abdul Denmark, a barber at Fresh Cuts No. 2.
“Man, I wish we had some answers,” White said.
Up and down this low-income stretch of King Street are the footprints of the murdered — several pastors, a state senator, a librarian who spent 21 years at a library where bouquets of flowers were now jammed into the handles of the locked front doors.
King Street runs for several miles and connects the two recent tragedies that have come to define Charleston — the shooting death earlier this year of an unarmed black man by a white police officer several miles to the north and the tragedy Wednesday night at a historic black church in the heart of downtown.
But it’s this neighborhood in the middle known as the Neck where the chronic ache of poverty and racial disparity can always be found. Quiet instead of protests
Missing are the protests and public outrage that have accompanied racially charged killings in other cities across the United States. Instead, there has been a kind of quiet that lasted all night Thursday and continued into Friday, when the sun came up and the John L. Dart Branch Library on King Street did not open as usual.
The lights were off and the doors were locked in honor of one of the victims, Cynthia Hurd, the 54-year-old librarian everyone called Miss Cynthia. In 2011, Hurd was promoted to another library in a different part of the city, but she never really left the small branch on King Street, returning weekly and calling daily.
“Y’all closed today?” a man asked Kim Williams-Odom, the current librarian who was using her master keys to open the front doors. Williams-Odom was Hurd’s protégé.
Though the library was closed, the book deposit needed emptying and the returns processed. In the silence, Williams-Odom flipped on the lights and set her keys down. That’s when she saw the bouquets of flowers brought
A framed photograph bearing the note “I’ll miss you granny and I’ll continue to make you proud!” is left at the sidewalk memorial at the Emanuel AME Church on Saturday in Charleston, S.C. “This is our town, we’re all we have. If we tear it up, where do we go?”
Monique Holmes, Charleston resident
in by the cleaning crew. There was writing on the wrapping paper. “What is this?” Williams-Odom said, leaning down. She shut her eyes after reading the inscription.
“From the Romney Street Kids. Mike, Tigger, Talik, Jake.”
More knocks were at the front door as Williams-Odom told people they could try the library downtown.
“This is my library,” said a man with a book bag, unaware of the loss.
The news of Hurd’s death was slow to spread.
Not every household in the neighborhood had a TV or Internet connection. Plenty did, though, and before lunchtime, in barbershops and cramped living rooms, on TVs with flat screens and rabbit ears, reports were being read aloud of the killer’s racial epithets just before he shot the victims.
People wondered how the gunman had escaped to North Carolina so easily before his arrest.
“Because the police didn’t even put up roadblocks,” said one man, watching from a lawn chair inside a little market.
“Fleeing the city of Charleston, you have 17 South and 17 North and 26 West,” said another. “Why didn’t they shut ‘em down, automati- cally?”
“They’re baby-feeding us information,” said another.
Around 3 p.m., there was the sight of a crisp police uniform on the sidewalk. Deputy Chief of Police Jerome Taylor was dropping in on businesses to quell any rumors about conspiracy theories.
Taylor, who is black and a native of Charleston, was going on little sleep. On Wednesday night, he walked out of Bible study, turned on his phone, and learned that four blocks away a terrible thing had just happened at another church. Taylor raced over to see several of his lifelong friends dead.
Now on Friday afternoon, the deputy chief was in the bright hot sun of King Street, where buildings all around were being closed and demolished.
The fabulous Ellen Bright room, that for 33 years hosted wedding receptions, graduation parties and crab cracks, was shutting down in a week. Taylor was a familiar sight.
People in passing cars slowed down to yell hello. A yellow school bus stopped, and the driver opened the door. “Hey, Jerome, gimme a call!”
“I realize the magnitude of this event,” said Taylor, continuing on his rounds. Hate, hurt and healing
Still the afternoon was quiet, almost glazed by the heat. A printing business hung a small banner mourning the tragedy. Anger and heartbreak did not take to the streets.
“This is our town, we’re all we have,” said Monique Holmes, inside her cousin’s insurance agency on King Street. “If we tear it up, where do we go?”
Instead, Holmes was at the computer waiting for the video feed from the courtroom where the victims’ family members spoke at the accused killer’s bond hearing.
Hearing the broken voices offering forgiveness, she understood perfectly. “You can’t move on from hate or hurt without healing,” she said. “You need those three H’s.”
“At first, I thought it was like two black people and they probably shot at each other,” said Tony Harvey, a 12-year-old with a fade and a stick-on tattoo of a superhero on his chest. “I was watching ‘SportsCenter.’ They said it was a white man. Aman killed my people in church. I said, ‘Daddy, I’m scared. Would it be okay to go over there and kill him?’ ”
Harvey’s grandfather was the pastor at the church they were playing in front of, Gethsemane Baptist.
He said, “‘Just pray, and South Carolina will be OK.’ “
It was time to go inside. “I know God is protecting me,” the 12-year-old said.