her sweet-sixteen birthday party. She loved Chinese food and cheeseburgers and
going for ice cream with friends.
I learned these things several weeks later, at her funeral. Eight days after the
inauguration, Hadiya Pendleton was shot and killed in a public park in Chicago,
not far from her school. She and a group of friends had been standing under a
metal shelter next to a playground, waiting for a rainstorm to pass. They’d been
mistaken for gang members, sprayed with bullets by an eighteen-year-old
belonging to a different gang. Hadiya had been hit in the back as she tried to run
for cover. Two of her friends were injured. All this at 2:20 on a Tuesday
afternoon.
I wish I’d seen her alive, if only to have a memory to share with her mom,
now that the memories of her daughter were suddenly finite, things to be
collected and hung on to.
I went to Hadiya’s funeral because it felt like the right thing to do. I’d stayed
back when Barack went to the Newtown memorial, but now was my time to
step up. My hope was that my presence would help turn the gaze toward the
many innocent kids being gunned down in city streets almost every day—and
that this, coupled with the horror of Newtown, would help prompt Americans to
demand reasonable gun laws. Hadiya Pendleton came from a close-knit,
working-class South Side family, much like my own. Put simply, I could have
known her. I could have been her once, even. And had she taken a different
route home from school that day, or even moved six inches left instead of six
inches right when the gunfire started, she could have been me.
“I did everything I was supposed to,” her mother told me when we met just
before the funeral started, her brown eyes leaking tears. Cleopatra Cowley-
Pendleton was a warm woman with a soft voice and close-cropped hair who
worked in customer service at a credit rating company. On the day of her
daughter’s funeral, she wore a giant pink flower pinned to her lapel. She and her
husband, Nathaniel, had watched over Hadiya carefully, encouraging her to apply
to King, a selective public high school, and making sure she had little time to be
out on the streets, signing her up for volleyball, cheerleading, and a dance
ministry at church. As my parents had once done for me, they’d made sacrifices
so that she could be exposed to things outside her neighborhood. She was to have
gone to Europe with the marching band that spring, and she’d apparently loved
her visit to Washington.
“It’s so clean there, Mom,” she’d reported to Cleopatra after returning. “I