By Mansfield Frazier
“…and as the police and military are the instruments by which the rich rob and oppress the poor (on legal and moral principles made for the purpose) it is not possible to be on the side of the poor and the police at the same time.” —Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Miss Constance has been a loyal — if at times a tad cantankerous — reader of my work for over a decade now, and at age 89 her mind is still as sharp as a razor; indeed, just as sharp as her tongue occasionally is. She feels that as an octogenarian she’s earned the right to say whatever she damn well pleases, which she does — and I’m not about to disagree with her on that point. We, however, occasionally disagree on others though.
When I once asked if I could quote her for an article she promptly said, “If you do I’ll never speak to you again.” She highly prizes her privacy, but since I’ve been assisting her in editing her memoirs for the last year or so she’s become a bit less reclusive about her life and times. Although I volunteered to assist her, she insisted I accept compensation, stating in her sometimes droll manner, “You can’t boss volunteers around.”
Her only condition for this interview is that I don’t use her last name, or the names of any of her family … to which I readily agreed.
Born in 1924 to Mississippi sharecroppers who took advantage of the Great Migration to move to California, her father found work on the railroad, while her mother worked as a domestic. They insisted that all three of their children finish college, and somehow they managed to scrape together the money for all of them to do so. Her older brother became a physician, and her twin sister became a post-secondary educator. Miss Constance wanted to study philosophy but her mother said to her, “Girl, I ain’t cleaning white folks’ toilets so you can be unemployed!” Graduating from high school at age 15, she entered college and trained as a surgical nurse.
World War II was finishing up when she finished school and thousands of wounded soldiers were returning home. Miss Constance enlisted and served in a segregated unit of the Army Nurse Corps. She credits (or blames) her time in the military for her occasional salty and direct language. At times she sounds like the highly educated woman she is, and at other times she goes “straight street.”
After the war she went back to Stanford to obtain a doctorate in philosophy, and still later yet earned one of the first degrees awarded in the country to a black female in the field of mass communications — a field she worked in for decades at a high-end West Coast marketing company.
She would eventually marry a fellow philosopher, who just happened to be white. “This was in 1950, and my parents were fit to be tied, but I stuck to my guns … I had to marry the brightest man I could find, black or white, or otherwise I knew I’d be unhappy. Men don’t care for their wives to be smarter than them, and I didn’t want to go through life pretending I was dumb just to keep from bruising some man’s ego. He was very smart and together we learned a lot, especially from each other.”
About a dozen years ago, upon the death of her husband, she reluctantly moved to Northeast Ohio to be close to her daughter and grandchildren. I first met her when she sent me an email, taking me to task for misusing a word … while subtly implying that any further such lapses would diminish my work in her eyes. I duly took note. We’ve been close ever since and she constantly challenges me to be thoughtful and precise in my writing, and I feel honored and humbled that she shows such patience with me.
I once accused her of being a mental bully, and after a pause she simply chuckled and said, “You’re right, I guess I am.” Her logic can be sometimes brutal, and she readily admits she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
Her wisdom and opinions are completely unaffected by the nonce; she takes the long, philosophical view of matters of import. She’ll sometimes bring up an issue long after it has faded from the headlines … only after turning it over again and again in her keen mind.
Years ago she “learned me” — not “taught me” mind you, but “learned me” … she says there is a difference as her mother taught her — to tread carefully whenever I elect to debate her on an issue; she’s thought it through and doesn’t take any mental prisoners, and while Miss Constance is not always right … Miss Constance is rarely wrong.
The other morning she had a real bee in her bonnet (a term she uses to describe me when I call her all agitated by some event or another).
“Did you see that trumped-up charade they called a news conference the other Sunday, that dog and pony show they staged for those three women?” she virtually demanded. When I informed her that I had indeed watched the brief proceedings, she, in an accusatory tone, then asked me if I’d picked up on what the spokesperson, Jones Day lawyer and former federal prosecutor Jim Wooley, was attempting to do.
Reluctant to be wrong, I hesitated to answer.
Miss Constance charged ahead: “He was putting words in the mouths of those women,” she said. “He knows no one can contradict him, so he can stand there and say whatever he wants and attribute it to them. No one is going to refute him.”
“Which words do you mean, and why do you think that?” I queried.
“Didn’t you hear him when he ticked off the names of who the women wanted to thank? According to him, they only wanted to thank law enforcement — from the FBI on down to the local police,” she said. “If he was truly speaking the words of those women and their families, he would have also thanked all of the people who held vigils for them year after year. In fact he would have thanked them first. Those women wouldn’t have slapped everyone in the face who kept the faith all of these years. Only a downtown lawyer would omit those folks. So I can’t trust anything else he ever says about them.”
Somewhat dumbfounded, I asked, “Do you think it was maybe an oversight, an unintended mistake?”
“They don’t make mistakes at the level he functions at. It was intentional; they want all of the common folks out of the picture. Period. This is all about them now.”
Knowing that both her son and grandson are members of law enforcement in other parts of the country, I simply responded, “Well, that’s an interesting point of view, coming from you. What’s wrong with thanking law enforcement?” I then asked if I could turn on my recorder and she surprised me by saying yes, as long as I deleted her words afterwards. I quickly did and put my phone on speaker. “So, one more time, tell me what’s wrong with thanking law enforcement?”
“Nothing, I guess, just as long as we realize that spokesman was thanking them for doing what they get paid to do … while all of those everyday folks did what they did out of compassion, out of the goodness of their hearts, and not because it was their job, and they didn’t get thanked at all,” she said.
“That’s kind of harsh, isn’t it?” I asked, egging her on a bit.
“No, it’s not,” Miss Constance said. “The police in this case want to be thanked when they didn’t do nothing but blow off lead after lead for over a decade. They can’t find their own asses with both hands and a flashlight, and now you guys in the media want to turn them into some kind of heroes?”
I wanted to yell, “Hey, don’t blame me, my name is Wes, I ain’t in that mess,” but I thought better of it. She doesn’t much care for flippancy when she’s being serious.
She plowed on. “That Berry girl and that trash-talking Charles Ramsey are the heroes, with his help she got out with her daughter, and then told the police where to go. How are they heroes for just walking through a door? Just doing your job doesn’t make you a hero; they weren’t facing any kind of danger, and they’d already been told that Castro wasn’t in the house. I don’t get it.”
“There still could have been some kind of danger inside that house,” I countered. “It could have been booby-trapped or something. There could have been risks.”
“Of course there could have been, but that’s what we’re paying them for … to take risks. Risks are part of the job that nobody forced them to take. I faced danger as a nurse on those troop transports, but that’s what I signed on for. I wasn’t drafted.
“I know our country has never drafted women,” I said, seeking to say something intelligent, but coming off sounding really stupid, as I could tell from her audible response. She makes these little noises of frustration as if to say, “Try to keep up with me, you dimwit!”
Miss Constance was on a roll: “I’m just tired of the police, my son and grandson included, acting like we owe them so much for what they’re doing for us … if the job is all that tough they need to quit pissing and moaning and just find another job. I’m sure someone will take their places. They weren’t drafted, and we’ve never drafted other first responders either, they sign on for dangerous jobs. But they need to understand their roles in society… especially the police. They’re a necessary evil.”
“You really mean that, an evil?” I asked.
“Of course, I always mean what I say young man. Look, in a utopian society we wouldn’t need anyone to enforce the laws, but in the real world people are going to do all manner of things to hurt other people — rob, assault, kidnap and murder. So we need someone to maintain law and order, just like we need firemen and people to respond to natural and manmade disasters and such. But the problem is, because these folks are protecting society from what we are afraid of, they begin to think they are somehow special and that’s what leads to situations like those 13 firemen getting indicted last week for stealing money. They begin to think they’re privileged, that they’re entitled to game the system because they’re willing to put their lives on the line, but it don’t work that way. They really want to keep us fearful, keep us in need of them protecting us from something or another.”
She continued: “It’s kind of like blackmailing us … ‘let us screw you or we won’t protect you.’ Just like insurance companies do, overcharge you and then get short-armed when you try to collect on a policy. People think bankers run the world, but it’s really the insurance companies … that’s where banks go when they need money. And their wealth is based on fear … all they sell is protection against some kind of loss. But when law enforcement is left unchecked for too long it always results in a fear that’s a form of creeping totalitarianism … they create a construct that we somehow need the government to protect us, and, while to a certain extent we do, the problem is, in this country, we don’t have enough checks and balances in place at the local level against the police. That’s why you get situations where the feds occasionally have to go into cities, just like they came into Cleveland, and clean things up. Otherwise police departments will run amok … totally out of control, like when that one officer, a few years ago, used that man’s head for a football. Every society throughout history has struggled with how much power to allow police officers to have, and in this country, in the last half-century, things have gotten out of balance. Instead of us, through our elected officials, telling the police what to do, they tell us what they will or won’t do through their police unions and lawyers. The tail is wagging the dog all over America.”
“You’re not saying all law enforcement is bad, are you Miss Constance?”
“Oh no, oh no, of course not … it’s just like in the military, there’s only a few bad apples, but just like the military, there are others in uniform who will protect those they know are wrongdoers, rather than reporting them so they can be weeded out. Look at all of the rape cases in our military branches; that only happens because the bastards know they can get away with it, just like the police,” she said. “The selection process isn’t perfect, and sometimes bad apples slip though, people who are not mentally fit to have that much power. You know, not everyone is fit to wear a uniform and have a sidearm on their hip, and when we find someone that’s like that we need to remove them for the good of the public. But in this country we don’t … once they’re in they’re in, no matter how bad they are. Everything is about protecting the department from criticism and the city from lawsuits … it’s all about circling the wagons and protecting them, not the citizenry.”
“You really believe that?” I asked.
“Just take this case … the feds are breathing down the local cops’ necks, and they know the women are not going to step up and be acknowledged as heroes, so they’re stepping up instead, glomming onto the situation in hopes of improving their image, when they really didn’t do anything extraordinary. And the dark side of all of this is that some people will, consciously or unconsciously, impede these women from healing because they want to wring as much mileage out of the case as possible. Instead of seeing how quickly they can help these women heal so they can go to Disneyland and get on with their lives, they’ll be telling them what victims they are, thereby increasing their own stature as heroes and prolonging their own time in the spotlight.”
“You really think they’re that diabolical?” I asked.
“The problem is, they don’t see it as diabolical at all, they couch it in the language of the ‘greater good’ … assuming what’s good for them is what’s best for the body politic. Just like when they cover for bad cops. By now they probably have a team of PR professionals in place teaching these women how to play their appointed roles,” she said. “Law enforcement wants the story controlled and tightly scripted so instead of allowing them to hire someone to negotiate a good media deal right now while publishers and producers are really interested and willing to pay top price, they instead make them into mendicants, charity cases, and allow the public to feel good by donating to this Courage Fund. I do have to admit the name has a nice ring to it, but while they’re collecting maybe a half million dollars this way, they’re having these women pass up five to seven million from media sources.”
I couldn’t help but to ask … “Why?”
“Control,” she replied. “It’s always about control. They want law enforcement to come out as the heroes of this story, so they’re afraid of Hollywood getting hold of it, since they might tell another version, maybe a truer version where the police don’t come off looking quite so good.”
I had to admit she was making sense, but still I queried, “What about him saying they don’t want the women to say or do anything that will jeopardize the case?”
“I used to think you were pretty bright, Frazier,” Miss Constance said, “but now I’m not so sure. You’re buying into that claptrap? Do they really think we’ve all got oatmeal for brains? This creep admitted everything to the police just as soon as he waived his Miranda rights, and besides, they’ve got three live witnesses. There’s absolutely nothing they can say to hurt this case, short of admitting they volunteered to be held in captivity for all of those years, and I don’t think they’d say that, do you? I don’t care if Castro has Jesus H. Christ for his lawyer, there’s no way he can get off, no matter what. He’s never getting out of prison, not while he’s alive, never.”
She said, “This case is a slam-dunk [I’ve always appreciated the fact Miss Constance, in spite of her advanced years, stays up on current vernacular] if there ever was one. In fact, this really isn’t a legal case anymore it’s actually a media matter now and those women have become just pawns in a very elaborate game. Just listen carefully to that spokesperson the next time he opens his mouth — if he ever does again on this matter. They’re going to treat us like mushrooms … keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit. You tell me what’s wrong with those girls making one public appearance, not answering any questions for the media, but simply waving to the folks who stood by them all these years from the stage of Public Auditorium. It would take all of five minutes, but you can bet it’ll never happen. The suits are not going to allow it.”
All I could say was, “Hush, truth!”
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Miss Constance Speaks Truth to Power”
Peter Lawson Jones
As much as I loved the blunt, truth-laden offerings of the “Fruitcake Lady” on the Tonight Show, she has more than met her match in Ms. Constance. Thank you, Mansfield.