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May 11th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
We humans need proof of death: we need corpses and explanations so that we can
make our closure rituals, so that we can move on. If we don’t have these, we
live a kind of half-life. We know what only doctors and nurses and soldiers
can know: that life is capricious, random.
The saga of the horror house on Seymour Avenue outside Cleveland, USA, from
which three young women, Amanda Berry, Michelle Knight and Georgina DeJesus,
escaped this week following a decade of harrowing imprisonment and repeated
rape at the hands of Ariel Castro, now grips the media, the Cleveland
police, the American criminal justice system. Damning questions are being
asked: Why did no one investigate a conspicuously boarded-up house belonging
to a neighbour? Why did no one report the rumoured sightings of a naked
woman crawling around the back yard; or respond to the alleged screams of a
woman coming from a top window?
And why didn’t the police go inside and search the house; link up the alleged
abductor/rapist’s record of spousal abuse? The three women all disappeared
over several years but from the same place nearby, so why wasn’t the area
comprehensively and repeatedly searched? Why didn’t a bell ring in
somebody’s head?
The first and least complex answer has to do with where the women disappeared.
And who they are.
The first reports of the site of their miraculous discovery use the phrase “a
house in the suburbs”. But when I heard the accent and mannerisms of the
heroic Charles Ramsey, the man who finally answered Amanda Berry’s cries for
help, whose courage – and I use that word deliberately – led to the end of a
decade of captivity and sexual abuse for three young women, I understood
everything. I understood how what had allegedly gone on in the house of
Ariel Castro could have been practically ignored.
Here in Britain, when we hear the word “suburb”, we think of leafy, quiet
streets, green and manicured lawns. But in America now, for almost two
decades, the word “suburb” more often means what it means in South America,
or what it means in France, in the banlieues of Paris. Many American suburbs
are indeed “banned places”, where those who do not fit into the American
Dream live and invariably die.
These suburbs, once the home of the Don Drapers of Mad Men, were created to be
havens of escape and refreshment from the travails of the city. Too many are
now deteriorating clusters filled with the poor and working poor, where
striving ethnic minorities try to make a life for themselves and hope for
escape; where those who cannot afford medical or psychiatric care, those
just out of jail and those who have made receiving state and Federal
assistance a way of life, go to live. Because they cannot live anywhere else.
It was the rapid “gentrification” of the major cities, the rebuilding of them
to make them desirable for the upper middle class and the rich, which
brought the Don Drapers back into town and drove those without money out.
The rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. And it is
defining everything.
In these suburbs, the police will come to your door, but the follow-up is
close to nonexistent. The missing person quickly becomes a file, a number,
lost in the system. The lack of resources is always given as the reason. But
it is also lack of will. To put it bluntly, the police don’t look for poor
folks.
Add to this reality the fundamental belief in the sanctity of the home, the
very house itself, and you have a recipe for the most dangerous form of
isolation. Home invasion is the chief fear of most Americans, the fount of
practically every defence. It is the chief raison d’être for being “locked
and loaded”; “strapped up”; ready at all times for violence, upfront and
personal violence.
To go next door uninvited almost anywhere, but particularly in a neighbourhood
like this one outside Cleveland, is to risk, quite simply, getting your head
blown open. Most American juries understand the homeowner who “got one off”
with an assault rifle in self-defence. This is why Charles Ramsey deserves
the highest praise. Answering the desperate cries of Amanda Berry could have
easily put him in what the police call: “box city” – the graveyard.
You don’t query your neighbour; you don’t ask where they come from; where
they’re going. You can have your suspicions, but so what? The police can
come out, but they go back again, never to return. You know this if you live
in Seymour Avenue.
The Cleveland press and television stations did remind people of the
anniversary of the date that Amanda Berry went missing. But her brave
mother, who did not live to see her daughter’s liberation, had to put her
own telephone number on the “Missing” poster. She knew that her child was
just grist for the mill of an America in search of itself, turned inward to
protect itself against what it believes are demons, foreign and domestic,
real and imagined.
Public services are low down the pecking order. The raging cultural wars have
brought Washington virtually to a standstill. Everything there is personal,
and the great national conversation, the continuous debate that the Republic
has with itself, has become toxic and hate-filled, threaded with a deep fear
of invasion and contagion both from within and without.
But America does happy endings like no one else, and the discovery of Amanda
Berry, Georgina DeJesus and Michelle Knight is a classic one. America is
still in search of its lost Dream, too. Yet even though I live far away in
England now, I can still see that dream sometimes.
I can hear it, too, as I did this week in the wavering voice of an overwhelmed
woman standing in front of a microphone, rejoicing in the return of Amanda,
her long‑lost sister.
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