Bearing Witness
by June Driedger
I walked into the small Catholic chapel where all I noticed was red—carpets, pew cushions, and curtains. There were maybe twenty people in the chapel near the front, mostly Latino young men with tattooed necks, written in Old English script, and wearing blue bandanas wrapped around their heads. They wore sharply creased, baggy chino pants, and indigo-colored, long-sleeved oversized shirts with crisp white tee-shirts underneath. That was the uniform of the Crips gangs in Los Angeles, and these men were in a sub-group of the Crips, identified by their neighborhood. The men were milling around the open casket of the young man whose clothing matched theirs.
Everyone glanced at me as I moved toward the casket as I was the only white person present. I gazed at Manuel’s body and saw his hands clasped around his chest with a rosary intertwined through his fingers. I met him a month earlier at the alternative school where I worked through Catholic Charities. He was killed a few days earlier by a drive-by shooter and this was the third death of a student since I started at the school.
Manuel’s grandmother was sitting in the pew across from his body. She was small, wearing a dark-floral dress with a black lacy head covering that fell down to her shoulders. Her face, brown and wrinkled, was twisted in sorrow and she dabbed at her tears with a white handkerchief crumpled in her hand.
I turned to her and, in very broken Spanish, told her that I briefly knew Manuel, and that I was so sorry for his death. She didn’t look at me but nodded her head as if she understood. Sitting next to her was a younger woman who protectively placed her arms around the grandmother and