My slow-motion memoir project had accelerated in the closing months of 2014. A Toronto editor had completed an exhaustive evaluation of my manuscript; he had gracefully led me to the conclusion that I needed to do a complete re-write. In spite of the distractions posed by the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays I finished the task by the end of December. I would go into the New Year ready to shift my focus from the actual writing to the publishing aspect of the undertaking. Then it happened; a new distraction announced its arrival, this time by means of a subpoena issued by the county circuit court. I was called to serve a four-month term on the Grand Jury that would take me from early January to the end of April.
Truth be told, I knew little about the Grand Jury process, but the subpoena came on the heels of decisions by other Grand Juries in the country not to indict police officers involved in the arrests of black men who died during the process, Ferguson, Missouri and New York city being cases at point. Previously, I had witnessed police brutality. Shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union I spent five weeks in Moscow to arrange the adoption of our son. My host warned me before my daily walk to the orphanage that, if I found myself in danger, I should by no means involve the police. More than once, on arriving at the entrance to subway stations, I witnessed police arriving in vans and brutally beating men loitering nearby, no questions asked. I still remember the awful sensation of realizing I was in a place where I could not rely on the police in a time of need.
Privately, jurors voiced their concerns that we might face a case similar to the Ferguson or New York cases. It came close. Just outside county jurisdiction, members of the Baltimore City Police Department chased down and subdued a young black man who ran from them. The man suffered severe damage to his spine during the arrest and transport; he died a week later from his injuries. During our jury training we had attended a presentation on the use of deadly force at the police training facility that focused on gun use in confrontations. Guns were not used in this case, but it seemed very clear that some form of deadly force ended this man’s life. From my short but powerful experience of police misconduct in Moscow I understood the anger and despair the black community was experiencing. When you cannot rely on such a fundamental cornerstone as the police, you feel alone, vulnerable, always in danger. I was wrong when I treated my jury duty as a distraction from the work I needed to do. It was in fact the work I had to do if I was ever to feel a sense of identity with the people who call Baltimore home.
