The Freedom of Forgiveness. Allen B. Jackson

in the driveway, looking distraught. As the police officer and I came closer to the house, it became hard for me to breathe. I got so nervous that my body began to shake. And as I walked up to the driveway where my stepfather and my aunt stood, I could see that they were both looking at me and crying. I couldn’t take it anymore; I quickened my steps to a

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      jog. “What happened?” I asked. They just looked at me, and it was as if things were moving in slow motion.

       I asked again and again what had happened. Getting no immediate answer from either one of them I started screaming and crying out, “Where is Mama? What happened to Mama?”

       Finally, my stepfather turned to me with tears running down his face and said these words to me, “Allen, Glo is dead, Glo is dead!” Glo was the name we sometimes used to call mom affectionately.

       At that moment, I was flooded with emotions. I was overwhelmed. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Noooooooooo, please God, noooooo!” I ran toward the walkway leading to the front door, but immediately a couple of police officers grabbed me and told me I couldn’t go in. I tried to pull away from them and go inside, but they continued to hold me and restrain me,

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      telling me I couldn’t go in. At some point my body went lifeless as I dropped to the ground, screaming, “Mama, Mama, Mama! Oh God, my mama! I want to see my mama! I want to see my mama!”

       The next thing I knew was that I woke up lying in the bed in the back of one of the paramedic trucks. I immediately jumped up, asking to see my mama. The paramedics tried to tell me in the most sensitive and thoughtful way that my mom was dead, I could see it in their faces, but there was no way to tell me that my mother was dead that would have been OK with me. I asked them to let me out of the truck and they did. I walked back over to my stepfather and my aunt standing in the drive way. By this time, my oldest brother had arrived and he was crying uncontrollably. I started to cry and scream again. But all of a sudden, it hit me: Why was my younger brother not there? Where was he? “Where is he?” I asked my aunt and my stepfather. “Has anyone called him?”

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       They told me they couldn’t reach him. And immediately, as though I had seen it myself, I screamed, “He did this!” My aunt and my step-father looked at me in disbelief. “He did this,” I said again. “He killed my mama.” I walked up to one of the police officers. “My brother did this,” I told him.

       The officer looked at me in disbelief, and tried to calm me down. “You’re upset,” he said. “We’ll find the person or persons that did this.” He told me my mom had been shot in the head at point-blank range as she slept. There was no evidence of a break-in, a robbery, or even a tussle. She was laying on her back as if asleep, with a pillow in her arms.

       “My brother did this,” I insisted. “I’m going to find him and kill him.” Something had shifted in me. In a moment, I had moved from crazy grief to rage such as I had never felt before. The detectives in plain clothes came over to me and told me to stop saying that I was going to kill him. But I couldn’t; I kept saying it.

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       Not only did I say it, but I really meant it. At that moment, my mission in life was to kill my younger brother, to make him pay for what he had done. I will probably never be able to explain why or how I knew he had done it. There was nothing strange about our family dynamic. Just like every other family, we had our issues, but nothing that I could point to that made me feel the way I felt. Even now looking back, it’s still surreal, and still unbelievable that he would have done this. But I just knew.

       I managed to calm myself down for a few moments though, and I again asked one of the officers to let me see my mama one last time. He pulled me over to the side and told me that the coroner had taken her body away while I was unconscious in the ambulance. “Trust me,” he gently said, “You didn’t need to see her the way she was. Just remember her the way you last saw her.”

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       I broke into tears again. All I could think about now was, “Why? Why would my younger brother do this?” I went back to the plain-clothes detective. “I know my brother did this.”

       “Why are you so sure?”

       I had no good answer. “I just know. That’s all I can tell you. I just know he did it.”

       He gave me his business card. “If you need me, call me,” he said. “If you find him—call me.”

       I looked around and realized darkness had set in. The day was over. It seemed like days had passed by, but it had only been hours. My stepfather, my aunt, and my older brother were still standing in the driveway. As I walked back over to them, another detective was

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      telling them that the house was now a crime scene and we could not go into it. My heart skipped a beat when I heard his words. The place that had been our home was now a crime scene. And my family, what was left of it, was displaced.

       My aunt told us that we could all come and spend the night at her home. Her invitation was open to us all, my stepfather, my brother and me. I’m not sure whether the rest of them went, but I didn’t. Even now I’m not sure where they stayed for the next few days, I went into my own world.

       As I stood there in the driveway, my fury returned tenfold. Anger and hate were taking over my entire being. “I’m going to go find him and kill him.” I said. My aunt pleaded with me. “No, Allen! That’s not the answer. Killing him won’t bring Glo back. And how do you even know for sure that he did it?” I could not explain it, but I told her repeatedly, “I just know that he did.”

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       But bringing my mom back was not my goal at this point. My goal in life was no longer to be a successful businessman, but to find and kill my younger brother, just as he had killed our mother. As the police cars drove off, I started walking to my car. Where was he? Where should I start looking? Who was he with? I knew nothing of his friends or where he hung out so I had no idea how I would find him. As I got into my car, I decided to go to a hotel room for the night and to try and sort things out.

       I drove until I came to the first hotel I found and I checked into a room. By this time it was after midnight. As I sat on the bed in the hotel room, my thoughts went wild. I started thinking about how he could have done such a terrible thing. I started wondering why. What had happened? And did my mom suffer? I lay back on the bed. How could I find my younger brother? For the next couple of hours my emotions vacillated between sadness and anger, hopelessness and fury. This was the longest night of my life. From time to time, in between

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      the thoughts and the fury and anger, I would doze off to sleep in fifteen-minute intervals. Every time I woke, I looked at the clock. Time moved slowly. I turned on the TV. The lead story for the late night local news was my mother’s murder. I shut the TV off and fell back into my rage.

       And all of a sudden, my beeper went off. I looked at it and didn’t recognize the number displayed. Who would be beeping me in the wee hours of the morning?

       I dialed the number back from the hotel room phone. When the phone stopped ringing, the voice of my younger brother came through the phone loud and clear. “Allen, Allen! This is Jeff.”

       For a second, I was speechless. Then I screamed into the phone, “Where are you? Where the hell are you?”

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       “I didn’t do it! I promise I didn’t do it!”

       I screamed louder. “You’re a liar! Yes, you did! I’m going to find you, and when I do, I’m going to kill you.”

       The phone went silent, and then all I could hear was a dial tone.

      Chapter