According to the family of Sonya Massey, the 36-year-old mother of two shot dead by an Illinois sheriff’s deputy July 6, she was a descendant of William K. Donnegan, who’d been a shoemaker and conductor on the Underground Railroad before he was lynched by a white mob during the Springfield Race Riot in 1908. Massey, they say, died at the same hospital, St. John’s, where Donnegan died after his white attackers slit his throat and hanged him from a tree outside his home.
Like Massey, I am the descendant of a Black man who was lynched. My great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, was hanged from a tree in Mississippi in 1904.
Like Massey, I am the descendant of a Black man who was lynched. My great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, was hanged from a tree in Mississippi in 1904. His son, Houston Buckley, whom I called Papa, never knew his father, as he was born after that murder. In the 1980s, when I was a child and Papa was in his early 80s, I saw him sitting in his old, green recliner in the living room, his head in his hands and sobbing: “Them white folks lynched my daddy.”
Grandmama couldn’t have known when she married the young Houston that he would be mourning his murdered father even in his final years. From the doorway of the kitchen that day, she urged him to pull himself together and to “leave the past in the past.”
Yet the past has an ugly way of refusing to stay in its place. It took 20 years for me to publish “We Are Bridges,” a memoir I wrote to examine how this violent part of our past had impacted my family through the generations, to attempt to heal the fractured parts of me and to pass on the stories of our ancestors — including their beauty, laughter and talents — to my son and generations not yet born. It is, admittedly, a lofty attempt at bridging the past, present and future. It is my personal contribution to an ongoing battle against racism and patriarchy. And yet, as I wrote and revised the manuscript over the years, the ugliest parts of the past kept trying to outpace whatever progress there was. With one eye on the news and one on my developing manuscript, I tried to make sense of the unjust killings of Black people — Sean Bell, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd — happening in real time.
On my way home from work last week, a craving for homemade nachos hit me like a head-on collision. It wasn’t until I was standing over my cutting board, chopping up onion and garlic for beans, that the source of the sudden longing dawned on me:
Sonya Massey.
I had watched Massey’s son, Malachi, tell a CBS News reporter how much he loved his mother’s food and describe her as a loving “ball of energy.” And I’d read an article that mentioned one of her cousins praising her shredded chicken nachos.
As I ate the food I made, I felt an ache that seemed to stretch across time and space. This craving, I realized, represented an insatiable demand for law enforcement to stop carrying out this country’s legacy of lynching.
After responding to Massey’s 911 call about a possible prowler outside her home in Springfield, Illinois, Sangamon County sheriff’s deputy Sean Grayson shot and killed Massey while she was in her kitchen. Her kitchen. That place from which she created culinary joy for herself and her loved ones.
Bodycam footage shows that Grayson, who has been fired and is charged with first-degree murder, sent her to the kitchen to turn off a pot of boiling water. My ears burned at his profanity-laced threats to shoot her in the face and the popping of his pistol as he did just that. He shot her as she held the pot. She was a 36-year-old Black mother whose family loved her, but Grayson killing her shows he could not see her humanity.
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that incidents such as these keep happening in presidential election years. George Floyd, 2020; Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, 2016. Trayvon Martin, 2012. Massey, 2024. Her ancestor, Donnegan, and my great-grandfather, Burt Bridges, were lynched in presidential election years, too. I’m not saying there is a connection — only that these are not unprecedented times and that these crimes have often happened in the years we’re spending the most time thinking about the future of our country. As a survivor of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow (we are here, after all), I am disgusted and dismayed, but never shocked by the domestic and racial terrorism that continues to pervade the “free world.”
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that incidents such as these keep happening in presidential election years.
I have grown weary of writing about and talking about these injustices, but with each fatal shooting, beating and chokehold, my great-grandfather’s name rings out to me. This problem is not one for Black people to fix. We are done. The work of understanding the complexities of systemic violence, and eradicating it, sits squarely on the shoulders of people like Grayson and the institutions that empower them.
After watching the footage of Massey being killed, the volcanic buildup of a deep, long and ugly cry surged from my belly to my chest. I planted my face down into a bath towel I was holding and howled as loud as I could.
My tears were not just my own. I was crying for and with Donna Massey, who broke down in tears in that CBS News interview, under the unbearable grief of losing her daughter.
I was crying with and for my papa, too.