What’s Prayer Got to Do With It?
From Tarka Journal, by LeTonia Jones
This article is taken from Tarka Journal Volume 6, On Spiritual Citizenship.
My cousin Sophia was murdered on April 10th, 2007. She died almost 6 months before her 21st birthday. The last time I saw her in the flesh was during the Christmas holiday of 2006. We were gathered as immediate and extended family at Sophia’s urging in my childhood home. She asked my parents to host a gathering because it had been a long time since we were together without the rituals that accompany a funeral.
I remember Sophia as filled with light. She was housed in beautiful brown skin and a smile that filled her entire face. When she walked through the door at our house, I knew she was an adult, but all I could see was a baby face. She looked even younger to me than she looked just a few years prior, after our grandmother died. My mind could only see her as a baby. At 14 years old, she was indeed the first baby I was allowed to care for as babysitter. To me, she was evidence of my own maturity and responsibility. While I used to babysit my younger brothers, caring for Sophia was different. To me, especially in her infancy, she symbolized that I was trusted to care and to love on my own. I took care of her right up until I left on my own journey into higher education and young adulthood. I charted out to find my own way, just as she was now doing.
By the time Sophia called us together as a family in 2006, she was the college student. It was her time to explore a new world. On her journey, it was also her who found herself longing for time with the people who loved her first. I didn’t know how much I needed it too. It is amazing how love holds memories that bind and call us back together over space and time.
I can still hear her voice as my brother and I began our departure that Christmas in 2006. She motioned to us in the car from the front door of our childhood home to lower the car door window. I was in the passenger seat closest to her and so I lowered mine. She said, “Big cousins! Don’t forget me down in Louisiana. I’ll be 21 in October, and I want to celebrate with y’all!” My brother leaned across me, and we both beamed back at her. I looked at him as if in disbelief that she was actually a young woman. He glanced at me in kind. I then turned back to her and yelled, “We won’t! We can’t wait to celebrate you, baby cousin!” We waved and blew kisses. I elevated the car door window. My brother put the car in reverse. We turned around in our driveway and began our journey back into our respective adult lives.
Just as my brother’s rear tires spun up the last bits of gravel, I turned around for one more glance. She was still waving. I lowered the car window again, held my arm out and waved back. Love made me turn around one more time. I am so grateful it did because it would be that image, the one of her waving and smiling on a cold winter’s day that I would need to call upon after the news that would reach me less than 4 months later, on April 13th, 2007. It would be a call from my mother, and she would say, “They found Sophia.” I would need this image of Sophia and I bundled in love when I would come to know that a 13-year-old boy hoping to fish with his grandfather would first mistake Sophia’s lifeless body for a mannequin found near a levy in Port Allen, Louisiana.
