A song for the weary
after a year of tragedies
and the loss of hope
It was so joyous and bold — and so far from anything you could call mournful — that I suddenly could not see. I dropped my notepad to make both hands available for the furtive wiping of tears. The women were singing a modern Gospel tune, “Every Praise,” by Hezekiah Walker. It is catchy and big as a Broadway show-stopper, yet some audacious person had decided to open the service with it.
“Every praise is to our God / Every word of worship with one accord / Every praise, every praise is to our God.”
The people in the church started standing and clapping in rhythm, and soon everyone was swaying and singing, and it became clear that, while her friends were there to mourn Jacqui Smith, they did not want a somber service. They wanted to celebrate her life — and her last act on Earth. “You know, we don’t call it a funeral,” said the pastor, Bishop Roger Tatuem.
It seems that everyone everywhere knew the story within a day or two. Jacqui Smith was killed while trying to give money to a panhandler on a rainy night in Baltimore. After the deaths of children caught in the insane crossfires of violence, Smith’s death marked the absolute nadir of our experiences with crime over the last four horrible years.
Smith, her husband and his daughter had gone to a dance; they were driving home, through East Baltimore, when Smith saw a woman with a baby and a cardboard sign. The woman was seeking a handout. Smith wanted to give her some money through the car window and, in the next moment, her husband said, a man tried to rob her. Then he stabbed her.
At the first report of these details, you reach for words, and there are none. You reach for outrage and wonder if there’s any left. You feel frustration — that the municipal leadership has been unable to get the violence under control. You feel confusion and unease about the city you love — that something is deeply wrong and bad, more so than in the past, though many things seem right and good.
You have a sense of foreboding — that there are more desperate people in our streets than previously understood, that opioids have ruined far more lives than we want to know. You experience feelings of hopelessness — that we have so much violence, including mass shootings, like the one at the Capital Gazette in June; that a country that pretends to greatness had close to 40,000 gun deaths in 2017, and you can’t imagine that 2018 was much better.
And so you start to feel weary. You start to feel numb. The
So now you’re sitting in this theater-like modern church in a rural area of Harford County, close to 40 miles from the scene of the crime, and suddenly there are those amazing voices: “Sing hallelujah to our God / Glory hallelujah is due our God / Every praise, every praise is to our God.” And you realize that some never give up, never run from adversity, never lose hope that there will be a better day — and maybe even in this life.
I commiserated several times again this year with Gilbert Sandler, the wonderful storyteller who died on Dec. 18 at the age of 95. Gil would be close to disconsolate whenever tragedies occurred in his beloved city. It was his informed worry that people outside Baltimore — former residents, and prospective future residents — regard the violence and dysfunction as a reflection of the city itself, rather than as a result of human weakness or social conditions that needed to be addressed.
If more people cared, he said, if there could be greater political and corporate will to see a big, generational turnaround, it would happen.
In May, Gil was despondent over the fatal shooting of