Not just another dead black man

The Keith Stephens I knew was a joyful, charismatic kid working hard to become a responsible adult. Then he was murdered. He can't become just another statistic.

By Meredith Maran

Read more: Life

Photo by Mzima Scadeng

Keith Stephens

March 27, 2006 | I didn't want to see Keith in his casket. I promised myself I wouldn't, but then Pastor Peoples told the 500 mourners overflowing Liberty Hill Missionary Baptist Church in Berkeley, Calif., to form a line for the viewing. And my son Jesse walked ahead of me and took my left hand, and my wife, Katrine, walked behind me and took my right, and so I joined the slow, grieving shuffle around the church, and took my turn at the ornate white and gold coffin, and looked inside.

It wasn't Keith Stephens I saw in there. Not that waxy-faced, motionless, solemnly sleeping man. The Keith I loved was an eternal kid at 24, with glossy ebony skin that earned him his nickname "Black" and a flash of white teeth his oldest sister called "his Colgate smile." The Keith I loved could never have lain there so still. He could never have gone that long without laughing, without pulling some prank that made everyone around him crack up. The Keith I loved couldn't be what his father told reporters his son had become: "Just another statistic -- just another young black man getting killed in the Bay Area."

How could it be Keith in that casket? I'd written a book about him and two other Berkeley High School seniors precisely to keep this from happening -- to Keith, to kids like him.

My own sons had gone to Berkeley High, officially the nation's most diverse public high school, but in reality, a citadel of academic and social segregation. I wrote "Class Dismissed" during the 1999-2000 school year to explore the impact of that disparity on the lives of three kids: Jordan, an affluent white boy; Autumn, a biracial super-achiever; and Keith, a learning-disabled African-American football star. Each kid represented a stereotype. As I got to know them, each kid broke through it.

None so much as Keith. On paper he fit the profile. His teachers told me that Keith was enrolled in remedial classes, with grades barely good enough to qualify him for the football team. He came to school late and left early. He was occasionally in trouble with the law. But the bright, handsome kid who showed up for our first interview wasn't the sullen "product of a broken home" his bio had led me to expect. Keith met me at the door of the ramshackle West Berkeley house where his mom had grown up and his grandmother still lived, across the street from a corner liquor store where little boys stood with bikes propped between their legs and bags of Doritos in their hands, and teenage boys slouched against the graffiti-tagged wall. Inside, Keith's grandmother, mother, two older sisters and older brother sat on weary floral couches, surrounded by dozens of framed and thumbtacked photographs of Keith and several generations of his relatives, waiting to interview me.

Once they heard that I was Jesse's mom -- Jesse and Keith were a year apart; they'd played basketball together, and Keith's mom remembered Jesse as "a good eater" -- I was OK with Keith's family. Keith's mom told Keith that he'd have to be OK with me, too. "Keith needs to graduate," Patricia told me. "And you and I are going to make sure he does." Patricia didn't see me as a prying journalist, nor as the objective reporter I was supposed to be. She saw me as a stand-in mom with permission to do what she wished she could: follow her youngest son everywhere, and make sure he didn't sabotage his future.

Objective journalism be damned, I did what I was asked to do. When Keith lingered at Taco Bell too long, I nudged him back to campus before the fifth period bell. When I found him flirting in the halls, I walked by him pointedly on my way to his class -- until he started racing to class ahead of me, insisting that his teachers mark "Casper" (his pet name for me) tardy. In October and again in June, when the cops beat and arrested him, I showed up at the precinct waving my reporter's pad. And when Keith walked the stage at graduation, his eyes glued to his mom's and a Chevy's sombrero on his head, I snapped pictures madly, weeping nonobjective tears of joy. "I would like to thank you for being there for me this year," Keith signed my yearbook. "Iv just none you for a little time but it seems like for ever I have the up most respect for you. Stay cool and after the book don't try to bell out your with me forever. P.s. much love 6-06-00 Keith Stephens."

Next page: The death epidemic among young black men was no longer a faraway "issue" but a part of my life