FALLING FORWARD INEXORABLY
novelist and independent scholar
December 8, 2014Eleanor Bumpers - #ICantForgetHer
On December 3, 2014, The New York Times ran an article focused on the death of black men killed by police officers in New York City. The compilation is startling even for a person who is under no illusions about equal justice. A few days later, I realized that there had emerged a theme — a meme - of white police officers preying upon black men only. Absolutely invisible were the many women and girls killed by police.
The website Bougie Black Girl addressed this picture with a grid of the faces of black women and girls killed by the police.
Check out the unforgettable photos on Bougie Black Girl:
http://bougieblackgirl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/BW-girls.png
I felt like I’d taken a punch to the stomach when I saw the photographs. And there among them was the brooding black and white photograph of Eleanor Bumpers, an emotionally disturbed, elderly, poor, African American woman who was shot to death in her Bronx apartment on October 29,1984!
The website features twenty-six faces of African American women and girls killed by the police. They list four victims for whom no photo was available. Mostly they look like school photos - smiling. We’re exhorted to see their faces and note their names and remember their stories. Eleanor Bumpers’ photo is much different. We glimpse the haunted, harried, elderly, mentally disturbed woman she was.
I carried the details of the murder of Eleanor Bumpers — I do believe it was murder by police - with me for a very long time. Eleanor Bumpers’ death changed a way I had previously thought of myself and the police and my public behavior. I used to think — an idea not supported by any real evidence, but a kind of personal, unexamined assumption - that black women fared better than black men when confronted by white police officers.
Eleanor Bumpers was shot twice by Officer Stephen Sullivan, once in the chest and once in the hand. Her finger was blown away by a shot (the first? the second?) and left behind on the floor of the apartment according to her daughter’s account. Mrs. Bumpers was removed from the apartment without a sheet to cover her body and lay on a gurney in the hall uncovered - according to the neighbor across the way. Does this humiliating treatment sound familiar?
Eleanor Bumpers’ expression in the photo is too frighteningly like an image I carry of my own maternal grandmother when she was in a nursing home.There, without her wigs and hair pieces and pomades, her hair, too, was styled in similar small plaits. The part that began to disturb me thirty years ago in connection to Eleanor Bumpers was that, if I saw some part of myself in her, then when Sullivan viewed her as a “beast to bring down” he’d almost certainly see me in just that way. In a business suit, a pair of jeans or an apron, I was/We were a big, brown animal who was fodder for his shotgun.
Mrs. Bumpers was a dangerously troubled woman when she encountered the NYC police officers who came to evict her. Methods for subduing mentally ill people have been improved in the thirty years since as a result of the circumstances of the Eleanor Bumpers death. However, denigrating, hostile depictions of Black people still contribute to the visceral reactions of the police. If a person is armed and must make split second decisions, it’s likely they’ll depend on gut reactions. I think the problem is in the gut. It is in the visceral reactions of people who have trained themselves and been trained to view the words and actions of black women and men with suspicion and hostility. When incidents like the deaths of Eleanor Bumpers or Mike Brown or Eric Garner at the hands of the police occur, African Americans get a glimpse of the way we are viewed by white society - we get the dubious gift of seeing ourselves as our neighbors see us. It is chilling to consider that your son’s warm heart or big, old, asthmatic chest mean little to that man with the gun who encounters him. You realize that a woman you might recognize as funky and troubled and maybe even dangerous, is seen as a raging beast to be stopped with lethal force.
That photograph of Eleanor Bumpers has a haunting quality that is nearly indescribable. I have never forgotten her and the manner in which she was killed. I still have that thirty-year-old tin, old school protest button.
Other voices are articulating their push back against the meme that this violence in the public sphere is visited only upon black men.
“It is understandable, though not acceptable, that Black women often find ourselves on the fringes of these conversations. Even when we are front and center it is usually to prove our fidelity to Black men and their unique struggles. Very seldom is the violence inflicted upon Black, female bodies by law enforcement positioned as pivotal to justice movements; rather our lived experiences as victims of the state tend to be peripheral and anecdotal.” KIRSTEN WEST SAVALI, DAME - http://www.salon.com/2014/08/24/black_women_are_killed_by_police_too_partner/
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