Near the close of a tumultuous year—one spent painfully separate from so many gathered rhythms that shape this Coalition—we’re pausing to report and reflect on all that’s drawn us together. In part to share some dispatches from RCND’s work of Vigil, Reentry, and Restorative Justice during Covid. But even more so, as a way to recall and renew our 28-year path toward all-of-us. In this first of three installments, we turn to the work of Vigil Ministry where RCND’s journey into boundless belonging began, and continually begins again.
What do you do in a year when 31 Durham neighbors’ lives have been snatched violently by other neighbors? When nearly ten times that many lives (over 280 to date) have been similarly threatened by gunshot wounds? In a year so marked by pandemic, elections, and racial uprising, the fierce urgency of these questions in Durham gives its own testament to just how violent 2020 has been.
To mark violent death in Durham, over decades, is to ride the wake of questions like these. Racing across the deep river of our profound and public pain, their stirring presence is never entirely unwelcome. And yet too often, the space between their passing seems very long indeed. For even the most mindful among us, the numbers troubling the water in 2020 (31 and 280) can feel somehow more pressing than those from 2018 (34 and 204) or 2017 (29 and 244). But year upon year, the river flows on. Dozens become hundreds, hundreds become thousands. With or without our notice, the water slowly saturates all it touches.
In this or any year, following our violence upstream leads inexorably toward the most enduring fractures in our common life. We are a nation with more guns than citizens, a people centuries delinquent on straightforward investments in racial equality, and well-acclimated to inequities that defy our common humanity. We are a city with an illicit economy neatly sequestered from our thriving civic life, a people bitterly divided over the policing entangled in that tension, and well-practiced in eliding such everyday realities. From all these truths our violence pours forth, and many righteous efforts arise in response. But the river flows on.
After so many years alongside neighbors flooded by grief, we remain grateful for all who see Durham’s inequitable violence as a place to begin. This and every year, each finger pointing urgently upstream is implicit resistance to the racist value gap dictating which lives matter less. And for many mired in turbulent waters downstream, these are subtle gestures aimed emphatically in an opposite direction. A reminder that even intractable root causes seem more actionable than community trauma. A demonstration of just how readily our desire for justice adopts the zero-sum binaries of our dehumanizing legal system. Twisting even our best impulses, violence sends us back to familiar corners while neighbors suffer alone.
For every last one of these reasons, our Coalition spent 2020 seeking out the river, pursuing steady response to its incalculable human toll. In leadership, that meant investments in new staff (Rev. Annette Love, Vigil & Community Minister; Marion Bailey, Victim Care Coordinator) whose stories embody where Durham hurts and how we might heal. In relationship, we moved grief circles online and built networks of material and immaterial support among dozens of families navigating grief during pandemic. In court, we persisted alongside victims as years-long journeys toward legal recourse grew longer and less certain. In vigil, we reimagined shared mourning in public places where the ragged space between us seems more palpable than ever before. In collaboration, we waded into new possibilities with a District Attorney’s office seeking new footing between upstream reform and downstream compassion. In witness, we continued to imagine a community that would call (and claim) every beloved one of ours as ours.
Over 28 years, remaining stable and steadfast in such violent waters has become a labor unto itself, and fuel for every last expression of this Coalition. It remains the center of our invitation to bodied practice, a work beyond ‘the work,’ and a spiritual tactics against all that robs us of who we might be together. Standing by the river in 2020, listening beneath the clamor of so many divergent beginnings, its most basic questions seem as clear as they’ve ever been. Were we to cherish drowning souls over hydrological data, to accept our profound responsibility for the watershed where we live, to reject the river as an immutable, eternal presence fixed in its present banks—were we to gaze deep in the water, find its suffering mirrored within the reflection staring back…might we still yet, all of us, find a common, sacred space to begin, and begin again, and again, and again?
Ben Haas (Director, RCND)
11/2020