Will Someone Say A Little Prayer For Hardy John?

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he shooting deaths of Botham Shem Jean and Hardy John will forever be linked for what they say about Saint Lucians. Jean was killed last month by an off-duty white female police officer in his own apartment in Dallas Texas; John was killed in the line of duty as a security guard in Marchand, Castries. The homicides have elicited significantly different local reactions—reactions that drove home to me that it wasn’t so much how or why a human being was killed as who was the human being killed.

From the moment word reached us that a Saint Lucian had been killed in Texas, all local reports concentrated on his family roots, the bright future that had been denied him by a police officer’s bullet, that his mother and uncle were from the higher echelons of Saint Lucian society. If most of Saint Lucia had never heard of Botham before his untimely death, they soon learned enough to fill a small book. Suddenly they were hearing more than many cared to know. It seemed there was a concerted effort to fan the flames of outrage. Sometimes, it was hard to tell whether the publicity was associated with the sudden death of a young man with the world at his feet, or with one of our beach fetes.

Jean’s family must’ve recognized what was going on, perhaps inadvertently. His mother eventually went public with her plea that people tone down the tempo. Meanwhile there were the cries for justice, imitative of Black Lives Matter—if only in America. It seemed black lives didn’t count for much here in Saint Lucia, keeping in mind the hundreds of unresolved homicides and no outrage.

There were calls for our government to intervene, to get Trump to do for Botham what no organized group has required our prime minister to do for countless homicide victims at home. But Hardy John was not killed by a white police officer in an American city. He was gunned down, we may be certain, by someone as black as Hardy John himself. To date there have been no arrests, let alone connected charges. No vigils either. No threats as in the case of the other Saint Lucian. Perhaps even more horrifying is that Hardy John’s death has already been forgotten by everyone save his closest relatives, who’ll be expecting no better treatment than had been dished out to the relatives of scores of other homicide victims.

There is something sordid in the echoed put-downs of the American justice system when here at home we’ve long learned to live without justice.  At least Botham’s killer was charged within days of the shooting. Then again, in our glass surroundings, is there anything we do better than throw stones?  Hardy John had a mother, too. And a father. He left behind children and other loved ones. His life mattered, at least to them. So, there’ll be no cries of Justice for Hardy, no one will organise a candlelit vigil on the Marchand Grounds near where he was killed, no one will line the streets in the blazing hot sun to see his funeral cortege, no one has demanded that police find and charge his killer in less than three days; none of his eulogies will air on the radio. Yet I am sure, his family cares and remembers, even though most Saint Lucians do not.

By Janice Lawrence