One year after Buffalo: ‘There’s no forgiveness for that.’ Ever.’

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Adrienne hadn’t been apart from Barbara for the past 10 days and Dawn, after working 16-hour nursing shifts, was always reaching out to see how she could help. One of the victim resource advocates seemed particularly understanding, so a few days earlier, Barbara asked when she could take a vacation.

“I have to go,” she said. Just two days. “I just have to go. I have to go because it’s too much.” It wasn’t that she wanted a vacation or that she had something urgent to do; it was about taking a break from home, from her house a few doors down from her sister’s, the same street they grew up on, with the garden where her parents planted vegetables, the corners where she and her siblings they played, the house that raised their family. Cherry Street was not just the place where she lived, it was she who she was, the place of her whole life. This was the first time she had wanted to leave.

A sudden pain can grab you by the ankles. Everything that goes up must come down. At the restaurant, Barbara, Adrienne, and Dawn tried to make sense of it all, forcing their minds to accept that Kat could leave so suddenly when she wasn’t even sick, that people could have so much hatred in their hearts for complete strangers. . Adrienne wondered if much of the hatred white people felt was really discomfort over her story, but she, she said, how can you hope to get over it if people want you to ignore it? “Nobody cares a [expletive] that white people came and took us and took over everything, and then you act like you own everything,” he said. Her voice began to crack.

Barbara said that she regretted the past: the loss of human decency, the inability of parents to confidently send their children to play safely. “It’s a sad world,” she told Adrienne and Dawn. “At least, when we were kids, even though it was ugly, we didn’t know it.”

mostly black A crowd of 100 gathered a few weeks later on a comfortable triangle of grass owned by the city. It was a sweaty July morning and their faces shone like bronze. They had gathered for a street naming ceremony: Katherine “Kat” Massey Way now runs alongside Inspiration Garden. The garden is just a few steps from the house where Kat grew up. It had been neglected until the Cherry Street Block Club, basically Kat and a fancy-looking letterhead, wrote to the city in protest. Kat’s neighborhood on Buffalo’s east side, known as the Fruit Belt, has long been a black neighborhood, which likely explains why, when the city needed to build a new highway in the 1950s, it was designed to cut on the right. down cherry street. Warren, Kat, and Barbara all lived in Cherry, its manicured gardens and wide porches overlooking a sunken highway.