It wasn’t hard to find the gravesite of the woman who was almost my sister-in-law. It was roughly a 10-minute drive from my childhood home, past the closed, dilapidated high school I graduated from in 1991—when it was still segregated, nearly four decades after Brown v. Board of Education—past the decaying Georgia-Pacific paper mill that once provided several hundred well-paying jobs, including for my family, past a small, free clinic that was established in recent years, and down a dusty dirt road that left my Ford Taurus in need of an immediate cleaning.
It was Mother’s Day. My wife and two kids, my sister and my nephew and niece had just finished eating takeout from a small strip-mall Chinese restaurant. We unloaded from the cars and were led through a chain-link fence into the cemetery by the niece and nephew, both of them still in grade school. We were visiting their mother—my brother’s former girlfriend—who was murdered 10 years earlier in a drive-by shooting, becoming an accidental victim in drug-fueled violence that has roots reaching back to the 1990s crack epidemic. My niece and nephew barely escaped becoming accidental victims, too, as they were toddlers sleeping in the same apartment where their mother was killed. The shooting made bullet holes on the walls just above where they slept on bunk beds. The death of my would-be sister-in-law was one of countless others like it—the homicide rate for black men doubled from 1984 to 1989, and bystanders like her were common—and her death went largely unremarked on, like most of those others.
In that moment in the cemetery on Mother’s Day, I couldn’t help but think of a New York Times Magazinestory published in early May about children of the opioid epidemic—a some 9,000-word feature about an increase in the number of babies born with the opioid-withdrawal condition neonatal abstinence syndrome. The writer, Jennifer Egan, lingered on the addicted mothers' more likeable qualities: one’s “air of apologetic sweetness,” another’s “mellow, almost purring” voice, their dream jobs and college loans. But it was the cover photo that grabbed me most, a white child dressed in angelic white tulle, his wide-eyed, open face in contrast with that of his mother next to him: turned away and covered by her hair, an attempt to shield herself from the camera lens and the shame of addiction.
[For more on this story by ISSAC J. BAILEY, go to https://www.politico.com/magaz...-donald-trump-218602]
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