![]() Generations later, Celestine fell victim to a similar hatred. The relative often kept a shotgun in his lap when he sat on his porch. In Philadelphia, Miss., where a relative on his father’s side lived decades ago, Ku Klux Klan members were known to ride by his home in hoods, the family lore goes. Wayne’s family was already familiar with racism’s physical threat. But they always had Celestine’s famous smile, one that made her deep eyes narrow in their corners and her cheeks perk up. They grabbed ingredients for her preferred dessert, strawberry shortcake. On the first day of many months, after government benefits arrived, she would bring her son on excursions to the market. She gave birth to Wayne as a teenager, and worked fashioning men’s suits and baseball caps at manufacturers for $110 weekly checks through the 1980s. The youngest of four sisters, she raised her son largely as a single mother in a modest home filled with sewing materials on the East Side. And now Celestine Chaney is one among them. Hundreds of lives have been claimed by these tragedies. Again, at a birthday celebration or outside a nightclub.Īgain, at church or an elementary school.Īgain, at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo where older Black neighbors congregate on slow weekend afternoons. Mass gun death is a signature American experience: shots after an argument at a party in the West, or within a single family in the South.
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