The Crawford Case

 

1. Life Changing Event

Martha Crawford pauses in the doorway of her apartment building before going outside on a cold December morning. She wraps her royal blue scarf matching her winter coat tightly around her dark brown hair. She’s preparing for the blast of cold air she knows is coming when she opens the door. She pulls on her wool gloves as she peers out the tiny frost free corner of the window in the door. She’s excited to see there’s fresh snow. Her excitement drains away as she walks carefully down the snow covered steps. People and vehicles have already churned the half inch of snow into scattered dirty patches and piles. Looking around as she heads briskly to the bus stop she thinks snow in downtown Detroit isn’t beautiful like new snow in rural northern Michigan. There are no trees clothed in fluffy white sweaters here.  New snow quickly becomes ugly and slippery, demanding caution in walking or driving. Snow here doesn’t bring a peaceful silence by muffling sounds. And the city noise. Not the pleasant sounds of birds singing or a cow mooing; just the harsh noise of traffic at all hours. She can’t have her studio apartment windows open in nice weather; it’s too noisy to sleep. People tell her to keep her windows locked. She sees people she knows only at work or in church, never at the grocery or post office. People in the city don’t even look at each other when they pass on the sidewalk. She misses being recognized and greeted while shopping or doing errands. She feels no sense of belonging in this neighborhood. She misses the quiet, the green trees, the corn fields and the whitetail deer in the country where she grew up. Martha sees little beauty and experiences little joy in the city. During the bus ride she wonders if the path she chose leads to a fulfilling life. Maybe she’s not sure what she wants. She thinks about the past few years.

After high school Martha enrolls at Wayne State University majoring in Spanish. She wants a taste of life in the city she sees on TV. She finds college academically easy and socially challenging. Spanish comes naturally, leaving her time to try to overcome her country girl shyness and make new friends. Fortunately her roommate is outgoing and makes friends easily. She introduces her friends to Martha. Martha is attractive with dark eyes matching her hair and she’s naturally thoughtful and considerate. Classmates are happy to be her friend. Martha offers to help any complaining of difficulties in their coursework. Soon she learns she can make friends herself by offering to help students struggling with homework. Helping boys results in dates. Most of the homesickness she feels at first is gone by mid-semester.

She spends the summer between her junior and senior years in Mexico City immersing herself in Spanish. She rooms with a family near the city’s financial center. The husband works in a bank and enjoys chatting with his wife and Martha about his work. By the time she returns to Wayne State she knows most of the Spanish idioms peculiar to banking. 

She decides a career in banking would be exciting. Needing several electives to graduate she chooses courses in business and finance. She reads books on banking and finance in Spanish to enhance her knowledge of the language of bankers. At the beginning of second semester her senior year she reads help wanted ads in the Detroit Free Press and signs up for on-campus job interviews. She is having doubts of finding her dream job as graduation approaches. Two weeks before graduation she spots an ad exciting her. It’s for an entry level position at Mid West National Bank. It requires fluency in Spanish and a knowledge of banking and finance. She applies and gets the job of bank teller and interpreter. Her branch is in a mixed neighborhood of Spanish speaking immigrants from Central America and working class whites and blacks. 

The day she starts to wonder if she has chosen the best life path she goes to lunch alone at a nearby diner to think. On the way back to her bank a man rushing out of a door nearly slams into her. For a moment they are staring face to face. She sees a vivid white scar on his forehead above his nose. And his eyes. She can’t tell if it’s panic or hate in the eyes staring briefly into her eyes. He turns and runs down the street and jumps on a motorcycle. She hears it roar off as a black woman comes out of the same door screaming and grabbing at Martha’s arm, “Why didn’t you stop him? He shot my daughter and my husband.”

Martha is so shocked she doesn’t respond immediately. The woman stars helplessly at Martha, Martha says, “I didn’t know. Are they alright?” She sees the woman is about to collapse. She takes the woman’s hand and says, “Let’s check on them and call an ambulance.” 

Martha leads the woman into the store, takes out her cell phone and calls 911 when she sees the man and the girl lying on the floor bleeding.

Within minutes the police and an EMS ambulance arrive. A paramedic checks the man and his daughter. He shakes his head slowly; they are both dead. The policeman tell Martha to stay put as he tries to console the woman and find out what happened. Martha waits while the woman tells the policeman she came out of a back room when she heard gunshots. She sees a man running out the door and her husband and daughter lying on the floor. She can’t tell him anything about the man other than he is white and is wearing a dark coat.

The policeman turns to Martha and asks if she saw the man. Martha tells him what she saw. She says she’ll never forget the man’s eyes and the white scar. Her response leads to her spending the rest of the Friday afternoon at the police station looking at mugshots. She doesn’t find any photos of the man with the white scar.

The Sunday Free Press has a feature article about the robbery. There are photos of the check cashing store and the woman whose husband and daughter were brutally murdered. The robber took $25,000 the store owner had for people cashing their Friday paychecks. Martha is thankful she’s mentioned only as an unnamed witness unable to identify the murderer.

Martha drags herself to work on Monday. She finds her supervisor, explains why she didn’t return from lunch on Friday and asks her not to tell others. She doesn’t want to have to tell her story to her coworkers. The robbed check cashing store is on the same block as the bank branch. The robbery and murders are a topic of conversation for the next few days. Martha is disturbed at the prejudice she senses is underlying many of the comments she hears on the tragic event. It takes her thoughts back to her first weeks in Detroit.

The prejudice in Detroit shocks Martha at first. She has only one black classmate in school and he is treated no differently than any other boy, as far as she notices. A Hispanic family has lived in Pineville longer than she can remember. Her father says they came as migrant workers one summer to pick cucumbers and stayed. No one refers to the family as Hispanic or Mexican any longer. Martha shares a double desk with a daughter, Jaunita in the back row of her freshman Spanish class. Both ace every vocabulary test. If Martha doesn’t know the Spanish word, Jaunita whispers it to her. She whispers back how to spell the word. Getting an A in Spanish starts her love for the language. 

In Detroit, it seems to Martha everyone takes notice of each other’s color. Her first realization of the pervasive prejudice in the city comes when she finally asks a coworker why people look so carefully at her face every time she says her last name to someone new. The coworker says it’s because Crawford is a common name for blacks. She says when people hear your name is Crawford they look to see if they can tell how much black blood you have. Martha thinks that kind of thinking died out with the antebellum South. Martha knows her family name was originally Krawczak. Her grandfather changed it because so few people could spell it or even pronounce it correctly. Living in rural northern Michigan, he had no idea Crawford is a common name among black Americans.

The week after the murders, Martha overhears blacks angrily complaining to each other. They say the police won’t spend much effort trying to catch a robber who kills black people. Whites discuss the murders seemingly without feeling. Blacks didn’t mention the murders when talking to whites and whites didn’t mention it when talking to blacks. The immigrants from Central America seem to ignore the event as though it hadn’t happened, or is too commonplace to be worth mentioning. The revulsion toward prejudice Martha felt when she first encountered it in the city returns. It sickens her to realize she has gotten used to it.

The following Sunday after church Martha reaches a decision. The promise of opportunity in the city is not worth giving up a joyful life.

Monday morning she finds her supervisor and tells him she wants to talk about her job. It takes three days of negotiations before agreement is reached. Martha will continue to work for Mid West National Bank, but from Pineville. She will be available via telephone to translate for any teller or manager for the branch during banking hours. She will translate all of Mid West’s business literature into Spanish as new literature is produced for its’ hundred and five branches. If the remote translation via telephone works satisfactorily for the branch it will be extended to branches located in other neighborhoods with Hispanic customers.

Saturday morning Martha packs everything she owns into her backpack and the two suitcases her grandparents gave her for high school graduation. She takes a Greyhound bus back to Pineville.