Project Diary: she organized the chaos

Mallie Latham knows how to use words and sound like few other people I’ve interviewed. He’d have to, as a minister and pastor. For years, Mallie was minister at a Baptist church in Berkeley. Now he is pastor of the Afrocentric Wo’se Community Church in East Oakland. I met up with him earlier this week to catch up. I'd interviewed Mallie over ten years ago, after meeting him through Miss Marilyn. He seemed to me then as now a kind and gentle man. He’s a big guy, in a colorful African kufi hat, with gold rings on his fingers, an earring, and a gold necklace which glistens with his daughter’s name: Shanika. He is patient with questions, open and eloquent about his years of addiction, his early failures as a father, his loving rebound motivated by his daughters, his years of closeness to them, about his loss and his healing. He has worked as a drug counselor, and nowadays works with un-housed veterans.

Mallie lost his youngest daughter to the gun in 2010. The perpetrator, hidden in a bush, was gunning for her boyfriend, who was shot but survived. Twenty-year-old Shanika was killed instead. She had been living with her mother then, in West Oakland, in Campbell Village, which can look very green, even bucolic, on a sunny spring afternoon, but which is in reality a place whose residents are thoroughly intimate with the effects of illegal drugs and violence. If you could hear him, the way he says of his daughter, “She was living in the West, in Campbell Village.” When he says “west” and “village,” I pick up rare but clear notes of disgust in his voice, however tinged with regret, with resignation, like someone who is forced to relay the worst possible news, but the news was not unexpected.

Words from the aftermath of her death haunt him. When the Highland Hospital chaplain said “’nobody’s been here to identify the body,’” Mallie recalls, “that was the first time I heard the words, ‘the body.’ I was stuck.”

He met Marilyn in the aftermath of Shanika’s killing. Mallie remembers that Marilyn wasn’t much at first but a presence, a calming presence. “You’ll have some things you’ll have to take care of,” she’d said, “but we’ll get to it when you’re ready.” She was good with his many nieces and nephews, who were angry, possibly considering retaliating. “Because she knew young people. And that was one of her gifts, when she came on these scenes, she was able to talk to young people, who she knew were going to be the ones that you had to really keep an eye on, because of their reaction, because of their temperament.”

Mallie and Marilyn bonded over their faith. “There were so many things that we ended up sharing, in our backgrounds, it was amazing. And the thing was, it was a God Call, it was very spiritual, that she came into my life and in that incident. And she didn’t just deal with the incident itself, but she was the one that took me to Victim of Crime (to apply for help and financial support), met with the DA.”

Marilyn helped him plan the funeral. When a mortuary staffer used the word “remains” to refer to his daughter, and Mallie had clearly had enough, Marilyn could see the toll it was taking. “She tapped me on the arm,” he told me, “we always had our cues, and I got up and I stepped out of the room, and she dealt with it, she dealt with it, she talked to them and they did some business and I came back in and signed.”

Here’s how Mallie puts it, finally: “She took it on herself, without looking overwhelmed, without reacting in ways like it was something, she took it on, she beared it and she understood these pieces, so that if you have the angry parent, that doesn’t bother her, disturb her, she’s expecting certain emotional actions. Marilyn organized what I believe is the chaos.”