It was late in February 1999 that I shared a memorable dinner with Kadiatou Diallo at her sprawling home in Conakry, Guinea, the seaside peninsula on the West African coast where her family settled years ago.
Mrs. Diallo had just buried her son Amadou a day earlier in the family's ancestral home in Hollande Bourou, a village high up in the lush green Fouta Djallon Mountains. Though still wracked with grief, she had taken the time to prepare a meal for me before I returned to New York. I had just spent two weeks there, in the land of baobab trees and bright red soil, writing a series of articles about her son, his burial and her family.
We were alone at the table, and Diallo's grief was palpable. Her 23-year-old son had been gunned down weeks earlier by four plainclothes NYPD officers at the doorstep of his Bronx home -- 41 shots fired, 19 striking him. The case had rocked New York and sparked weeks of protests and arrests, threatening to split the city along racial lines. All the while, her dead son was summed up in just two phrases: "unarmed black man" and "unarmed street vendor." Almost every news account, including mine, had used those lifeless phrases. Diallo knew then that she had to reclaim her son.
That was the goal of her memoir, My Heart Will Cross This Ocean: My Story, My Son, Amadou, co-written with author Craig Wolff. Quietly released last year, it's a funny and poetic, yet emotionally wrenching account of an immigrant family’s life.
"I want Amadou to be remembered for his humanity, for who he was," Diallo said recently. "Because when he was killed, it's like his story was stolen. And this book, I think, picked him up, dusted him off and gave him back his story."
| Continue Frankie Edozien's City Limits article "Crossing Oceans"
He was a loyal Chicago Bulls fan who wore Nike sneakers and Tommy Hilfiger shirts, who played Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." over and over. As the son of prosperous, globetrotting merchants, he could have arrived with well-lined pockets, but he refused his parents' offers of help. Proud and stubborn, he wanted to make it on his own. And he was becoming more American by the day.
Kadiatou Diallo has made this point herself. In her illuminating memoir, "My Heart Will Cross This Ocean," she chafed at the repetitive media descriptions of "Amadou Diallo, the unarmed West African street vendor."
"He had lived in three different West African countries," she wrote, "in five different towns or cities in Africa, with subtleties that made each one distinct. He lived in two different cities in Asia, had studied in the best schools in these places, and had been part of a neighborhood in New York for nearly two and a half years, selling, buying, eating, rooting for teams, kicking a ball in the playgrounds, going to the movies. Didn't that give him even the slightest claim to being not just a West African but a New Yorker, too?"
| That's the beating heart of Jabari Asim's Washington Post column "Diallo More Than a Symbol," from a few days before Edozien's article
posted in articles on January 16, 2004 12:44 AM | t (1)
« Previous phile: It's part of our ritual to cover the head.
» Next phile: The President remains focused on our nation's highest priorities.
Return to top of page