A Mother’s Privilege
In this time of outrage over the murder of another Black man, George Floyd, at the hands of white police, I find myself re-examining a time in my life thirty years ago.
In 1989 I became pregnant with our first child. I daydreamed about what they might be like. I hoped they’d be redheaded and freckled over their white cheeks like mine. I was excited. I could hardly think about anything else. My world was becoming smaller as I was getting bigger. I stocked up on all the pregnancy books and learned what to expect while expecting. But not everything can be anticipated.
By the end of September, we had started birthing classes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital where our baby would be delivered. Ten couples, all white, all due some time in December. Every woman’s belly was about the same size and we were all about the same age. Each week we would take the same spot around the conference table. I sat next to a handsome couple. She had dark hair that framed her peach-skinned face. He was tall and good-looking with dark features as well. The two of them seemed like the perfect couple. We went around the table to introduce ourselves. She was an attorney, he worked on Newbury Street in a high priced store. He was quiet. She was bubbly and friendly.
By the third week, we were used to the rhythm of the class-an hour of lecture and video and an hour of questions and answers before doing some exercises. There were so many questions. How will it feel when labor begins? When will we know it’s time to go the hospital? What should we bring with us? Back to my daydreaming, me in the rocking chair, baby in my arms. The class moved along.
On this night, our instructor had us couple off around the room. Like all the other mothers-to-be, I sat on the floor, in the arms and legs of my husband behind me. The lights were dimmed. I looked over at the handsome couple. They were so tender with one another. She with her eyes closed, he with his hands rubbing her shoulders. I breathed deeply. I was alone with my husband, imagining the moments like this that we could still enjoy before the baby came. I felt safe and calm. The lights came on when it was time to leave. We grabbed our pillows and pocketbooks. “See you next week.”
It was late when we left, about 8:30 in the evening. My husband commented that the handsome couple seemed nice and that we should get together with them after our babies were born. We got ready for bed and turned on the eleven o’clock news.
“Breaking story: A couple leaving their birthing class at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has been shot in their car. Doctors are performing an emergency C-section on the mother, the husband is also in serious condition.” WCVB, Boston’s CBS affiliate, played the 911 recording of the husband telling police “My wife’s been shot, I’ve been shot”.
I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed the phone and called my parents to tell them we were ok. I felt helpless and terrified. By morning it was clear, it was the handsome couple we had been sitting next to all this time. Carol Stuart was dead. Her baby, named Christopher, was on life support and her husband, Charles, was recovering from a gunshot wound through his abdomen.
The Boston Herald newspaper published a front-page photo of the couple, shot and wounded in their car. Carol is seen slumped over in her seat, her beautiful black hair fallen forward over her face, blood streamed down the front of her shirt. All the magic and optimism of this wondrous moment in our lives was shattered.
A manhunt was underway in Mission Hill for a Black man in a warm-up suit that Charles Stuart had described when police arrived. The African-American neighborhood was under siege; a white, pregnant woman was dead. And I didn’t question it.
How could this happen? How will I ever be able to protect my child if they could be harmed even now? I was haunted by the horror of it all. Police were asking anyone with information to contact them. I spent the day going in-and-out of lucidity. Holding it together for my company meeting and then breaking down, my hands shaking. The story was everywhere. I couldn’t escape it.
At our next class, reporters were all around the hospital building. We were ushered in a separate doorway. A counselor was in the room with us that night. Everyone was crying. We all understood that the only way we would be able to move forward was to focus on our pregnancies and heal through the birth of our babies. Baby Christopher died a week later. That month, news accounts said a suspect had been found. His name was William Bennett. Charles Stuart identified him in a line up. And I didn’t question it.
On December 23, 1989, two months to the day after Carol Stuart’s murder, my son came into the world. I spent five days in the hospital recovering from my C-section and singing to him whenever he was in my arms. All the while, there were murmurs from the nurse’s station. They knew we had been in the couple’s birthing class. I assumed they were whispering about the tragedy and avoiding saying anything to me so as not to upset me.
On January 4, nine days later, on our way home from a follow-up appointment with the baby, we stopped at a gift shop. My husband stayed in the car with the baby and listened to the radio. I returned to the car and jumped into the back seat to be near our newborn son. Mark turned around, his face was sullen. “What is it?”, I asked. “Tell me, tell me.” “Charles Stuart jumped from the Tobin Bridge”, he said. I slumped in my seat and started crying. “He must have been overcome with grief at the loss of his son and wife”, I said. “No,” Mark countered, “They were closing in on him. They think he killed his wife for insurance money. The whole time you were in the hospital recovering, the news was flooded with stories that Charles was now a lead suspect. None of the nurses wanted to tell you. You were so immersed in the baby and it was speculation at that point.”
And I questioned it. I questioned the wrong things. I was incredulous. It couldn’t be. We were in class together. They were so tender with each other. We had sat next to them that night. How was this possible? It was so easy to believe the story. So easy to assume a couple had been accosted by a Black man, randomly, after leaving a birthing class. So easy to assume the news accounts which legitimized Stuart’s claims, were accurate. I was awash in guilt, anger and sorrow.
The search was called off on January 3, when Matthew Stuart admitted that he was part of his brother’s scheme and that Charles had murdered Carol. He came forward when he realized William Bennett, had been identified for a crime he didn’t commit. But the city of Boston would spend years trying to repair the damage to race relations.
Shattered again, I looked at my newborn son, sleeping soundly in his car seat, oblivious to the perilous, devious and biased world around him, including me, his mother. I covered him with my body and sobbed.
Epilogue
My son is thirty years old now. I never had to teach him how to behave if he was pulled over by the police or how carry himself out in public, in stores, at a Starbucks. I never worried that an officer would point a gun at him or that he’d be asphyxiated while being arrested. I taught him to be respectful of everyone, regardless of race. But I also taught him to trust authority and that police would help him if he ever needed them. And for all his privileged life, that has been true. Even when he got into some trouble in college, he faced reasonable consequences and grew from the experience.
I can’t imagine the life Black mothers live every day. Thirty years ago, I easily believed that a Black man would randomly jump into a car, and shoot two white people while robbing them. And the consequences of my own racial bias and that of the institutions in the city with the power and authority to respond to a crime traumatized the entire African American community in Boston and most likely around the country.
In the days after the murder, from October 24 through 28, there were upward of 150 “stop and frisk” searches in Mission Hill per day. Black men and boys as young as 14 were caught up in the siege. They described public strip searches and repeated interrogations.
It’s been thirty years since the Stuart case reminded us of how women are used and abused and how easily our implicit racial bias can have tragic outcomes for Black and Brown people especially. The murder of George Floyd is just the latest in a long history of tragic outcomes of white privilege. And looking back, I can see precisely how my own bias made me a complicit bystander in the Stuart murder case. Today’s protests are a helpful and hopeful sign that more of us recognize our own failings and want to do something about it. The Black Lives Matter movement keeps us accountable. We are still fighting for justice and trying to heal.
