“It never was investigated but it isn’t unsolved,” she said matter-of-factly.
She invited us in and offered us some iced tea. We sat in her living room—Brad on an old upholstered chair with a lace doily, me uncomfortably on the edge of a rocker, and Mrs. Sampson on a dark red velvet settee. A small television sat in one corner, a simple kerosene heater in another. Three photographs hung on the wall: two eight-by-ten color pictures, unframed but protected by Saran Wrap, of Martin Luther King Jr. and of JFK, and a cardboard-framed school picture of a brightly smiling boy of twelve or thirteen in a red and white striped polo shirt, clearly the child of the woman to whom we were talking, despite his lighter skin.
If I ended up writing Wallace Sampson’s story for the Charlotte Times, I knew that Walker Burns would want that photo. I had learned that lesson when I’d neglected to get a photo for a front-page Sunday story about a teenager who’d accidentally been electrocuted at the state prison.
“Oh, don’t worry about a picture,” Walker had said sarcastically. “We’ll just let the readers imagine what the kid might have looked like.” A breakneck four-hundred-mile, six-hour roundtrip drive to the boy’s parents’ house in Morehead City produced the photo just in time for deadline. I’ve never forgotten the lesson.
“Wallace was twelve when that picture was made,” Mrs. Sampson said as she caught me staring at the photo. “I think about what he would look like now. Would he be tall, like his father? He was already pretty tall. He played on the church basketball team. Sometimes, I imagine that he’s all grown up and sometimes I see him in heaven and he’s my baby, with little angel wings. But every day, I think about what it would be like if none of this had ever happened and I came home and he was there, sitting there where you are, looking just like he is in that picture.”
“Do you have other children?” Brad asked.
“The twins. Praise and Rejoice. They’d grown up and both moved to D.C. by the time Wallace was born.”
Sometimes I think that what I get paid for is to ask the rude questions, the ones everyone else wants to ask but finds too difficult. “Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “tell me about the day that it happened.”
She closed her eyes, rocked back, and sat a long time before she spoke. “I told him not to be out late. There’d been trouble—a bunch of young hotheads in town. Wallace wasn’t part of that crowd. He was over visiting his girlfriend. It was Friday night and I said, ‘You be home before too late.’ He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ That was the last thing he ever said to me, ‘Yes, ma’am.’
“I stayed in bed waiting up for him, waiting for him to come home. It wasn’t like Wallace to be late. And then someone knocked on the door and I knew it wasn’t Wallace because he would never knock. I got my robe on and it was Reverend Grace and he told me Wallace had been shot.” She wrung her hands, exhaled, and leaned forward. “They took him to Charleston, to the university, but he had already passed. I never got to see him. By the time Reverend Grace and I got there, they had done an autopsy. I didn’t want them to but they said they had to and they’d already done it. They said because of where he was shot, in the head, that I wouldn’t want to see him. But I wanted to. No matter what. He was still my Wallace, even if someone put a hole in his head. He was still my baby.”
Softly, Wallace Sampson’s mother began to weep and I began to wonder what I loved so much about reporting.
“He didn’t have a suit,” she continued. “He was only thirteen. So I gave Mr. Short at the mortuary his best school pants and that shirt in the picture to bury him in. All his school friends came. They wanted to see him one last time. But we couldn’t have an open casket.”
She composed herself. “He’s buried up at the cemetery. You can go there. I go there every day.”
“Why do you think Wallace was killed?” Brad asked.
“Meanness,” she said, as if that explained everything. “The world is filled with so much meanness.”
“Mrs. Sampson,” I said, “when we first arrived you said Wallace’s killing wasn’t unsolved. I thought no one had ever been charged.”
“That doesn’t mean no one knows who did it. There are at least two who know for sure who did it.”
“Which two?”
“Whoever shot him. They know they did it. And God. I believe Wallace was God’s gift to me. God knows who killed Wallace. And God will make sure there is justice. Maybe not in my life. Maybe not on this earth. But God knows and He will have justice.”
“I, for one, would prefer to see justice now, on this earth, and not wait for God,” said Brad.
Mrs. Sampson looked him in the eye. “I know black folk that talk crazy like that. You’re the first white.”
“It’s not crazy and there are other people, black and white, who feel the same way.”
“Mary Pell said you were crazy. You got that article in The Reporter written, didn’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And him down here?” She nodded at me.
“Yes.”
“Well, you all do what you want,” she said. “It don’t matter to me. God will deliver the final judgment.”
I asked to see Wallace’s room. Two pairs of pants and two shirts hung on nails. A baseball bat, its broken handle nailed and taped back together, sat in a corner. A lump formed in my throat when I saw a basketball trophy inscribed “Wallace Sampson–Mr. Rebound” on the bedside table. A picture of twin girls was tucked into a corner of a small mirror above a dresser. A tiny school picture of another girl was pinned to the wall along with a poster of Hank Aaron.
“That’s his girlfriend, Vanessa Brown,” she said, pointing to the little picture. “I never changed anything in here since the night he didn’t come home.”
I picked up a framed picture of a younger Mrs. Sampson holding hands with a black man in an Army uniform. “My late husband,” she said. He didn’t look all that tall to me.
Mrs. Sampson sat on the edge of her dead son’s bed. “I’m okay during the day. But I have trouble at night. Sometimes I awake from my dreams and I am scared that I will forget him. So I come to this room and I lie on his bed and I pick up his shirt and I can smell him in it. Each child has their own smell. Did you know that? And my worst time is when I become afraid that I will forget what he looked like and what he smelled like. I think that no one will remember him. So I look at his picture and I smell his shirt and I hold the trophy and I think to myself, I am holding the very thing that he held. And then I am only just that far away from him. And I tell him, ‘You will never, ever, ever be forgotten.’”
As we said our good-byes I told Mrs. Sampson, “I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry to have to make you relive it.”
“Mr. Harper, I relive it every day. You can’t hurt me. I have already been hurt the worst that there is.”
We left, having dredged up a mother’s grief with no assurance that anything good would ever result from it. And without one of the things that we had come for. Because even though she had been hurt all she could, I just couldn’t bring myself to ask Mrs. Sampson for her dead son’s picture.
We met Reverend Grace later that afternoon after he returned from his jail ministry. He told us about the Friday night before the shooting when a group of about twenty young men threw stones at the Hirtsboro town police car near the wrong side of the tracks.
“The mayor called me down there to see what I could do,” Reverend Grace recalled. “I knew most of the crowd. Mostly they were boys. A few of them were troublemakers but most were good kids. Some had been drinking and they were full of themselves. There was all this stuff going on all over the country—protests at black colleges, marches