LaMichael Shawn Carter was gunned down in Asheville on April 12, 2022
So here is my story of knowing Shawn
Jason and I moved to Asheville in 2005. We bought a house on Fairfax Ave. I had gotten a job as an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University. We’d been living in Staten Island for a year prior, and I’d been working in a visiting assistant professor line at Wagner College, and I’d loved that job, but I hated Staten Island. Jason existed in perpetual thrall of Manhattan, which was a quick ferry ride from our home on Richmond Terrace, the front porch from which we could see the Statue of Liberty, that liar.
He enrolled in culinary school at the Natural Gourmet. I taught Modernism, a field about which I knew next to nothing upon getting my PhD but about which I learned much after, given that this job depended on it, postcolonial literature, and a seminar called “Art and the City,” which I taught with a woman, an artist who graduated from Yale, who I still consider my soul mate.
I loved teaching at Wagner. I loved Wagner. It was a small, private, beautiful liberal arts school on Staten Island, the ugly stepsister borough most recently made famous by Pete Davidson, a place I knew for its infamous dump, the place to which the remnants of the twin towers were taken after 9/11. The memorial Postcards was created in St. George, where we lived in the now historic landmark that is maritime artist John A. Noble’s house, Possum Terrace, less than a quarter-mile from it, in 2004, the year we lived there. Everyone around us identified as a “survivor” and knew someone who hadn’t been as lucky.
Before I arrived, much of the marketing material for Wagner included images of Wagner’s crumbling Main Hall, built in 1929, and proudly displaying two spires photographically juxtaposed alongside the towers. I can’t find any of those extant images, but when I interviewed for the job in 2004, they were everywhere.
If you want to see Main Hall, just watch Mike White’s School of Rock, which used the building as its backdrop; my students were extras in the movie. I interviewed Mike White some years later, after he directed Beatriz at Dinner.
All of this is a digression and a diversion and a bunch of nostalgia. I felt that if I stayed on Staten Island I would kill myself. I had to apply for the tenure track position, which I was ultimately offered, but I applied elsewhere and hoped that I’d land a job anywhere other than New York City. Jason threatened to leave me if I got another job. He loved it there, loved everything about the city, all the people, the places to go, music and theater to experience, food to eat. I wanted outside — any outside. There is no outside of the city unless you’re willing to fight and pay for it. I wanted trees. I wanted green. He wanted culture. He wanted subways. I wanted space. I thought I would choke to death there.
Flash forward to me getting another job at Western Carolina University and moving to Asheville, where my sister/best friend had been living for years, where my father’s family is from since the late 18th century, a place I vowed I’d never inhabit after leaving the south in 1999. Jason stayed in New York to finish his culinary degree. I moved without him and freaked out that he might not come with me. We fought, He resented my choice. He moved here anyway. We had a bad few years, culminating in him leaving me for someone else in 2007. The leaving was brief. But that’s another story.
Again, all of this is a digression.
Shawn
My first memory of Shawn is of an angry looking scrawny kid with cornrows, his chin turned up, standing at the curve at the end of Fairfax Ave. in Asheville, always with some other kid, someone I think might have been his younger brother. He scowled at me when I drove past. We noticed each other right away, but we just ignored each other. Or pretended to. I don’t think Shawn ignored anything.
I ran in the neighborhood. I’m a runner. I ran past him all the time. His house was on the other side of the street from mine, a few doors down. We ignored each other. Or pretended to. Neither one of us ignored anything, I think. Once he said something, and I thought he was talking to me. “Excuse me?” I said. “I’m not talking to you!” he yelled. OK, then. Fuck that kid. A woman up the street called him “thug life,” a kid pretending to be a gangster. I laughed because I thought he was an asshole. Everyone thinks everyone else is an asshole, until we actually talk to each other.
I think the house where he lived belonged to his mother’s mother. I’m still not sure. I know that they moved there the same year we did, but I only know that now, after looking at the property records, after trying to piece together some narrative about Shawn after. He was angry. I didn’t know why, but I tried to laugh it off and ignore it. He was so close all the time; his pain was a thing that I could feel in my bones whenever I saw him. His pain was a thing that would show up in my dreams about him, years after I’d moved away, dreams in which he was there again and so was I, and the two of us were friends, taking care of our dogs together. Those dreams happened for years. They’ve stopped now. They stopped two weeks before he died.
There were dogs at Shawn’s house. Two of them. Some too-small German Shepard mix and some other even smaller black dog. They got loose and ran all over the neighborhood. I have no idea what year this was. Maybe 2011? 2012? He would have been, what, 15 or 16? He’d dropped out of school, which was clear because he was always outside his house, always down the street during the hours that school was in session. I would go out running and then catch the dogs by their collars and bring them home. There were other kids there now, with Shawn. Two little boys. I would give them the dogs back and then resume running.
The third time, maybe, I got frustrated. I confronted Shawn, “you need to take care of your dogs. They are going to get hit by a car!” It was the second time we’d ever spoken after the time I said “excuse me” and he let me know he wasn’t talking to me. He exploded: “don’t you fucking tell me to take care of my dogs! I take care of my dogs better than anyone on this street! Get the fuck out of my yard! Get the fuck off my property!”
I raised my hands and walked away. I burst into tears because that’s what white women do, right? I said to him, “I’m out.”
Can we back the reel up from here?
The relationship that we had existed in the subtext for years. Maybe there’s more than just being reduced to a Karen, if you’re a white lady. And maybe not. His mom Wendy is a white lady. Shawn was a mixed-race kid, living with his white family — he told me all of this later — who identified more, perhaps, with his Black family, one member of which was the infamous Anthony B. “T.C.” Carter, who was gunned down in 2011 at the age of 32. He was proud of that legacy. He told me at one point, “I will die in prison, or I will be shot in the street.”
The day that I saw the news story about a 27-year-old man being shot to death on Fairfax, I knew it was him. Immediately. Several people sent me the initial news stories, the ones in which he wasn’t named. I obsessively checked WLOS for hours until he was finally identified.
On a stranger’s Facebook feed I found while searching for information about Shawn, I saw someone refer to him as T.C. 2. He knew. What does that mean?
After he told me to get the fuck off his property, I went home and just sat on my sofa, pissed. Ten minutes later, a knock on my door. Of course it was him. I opened it. “Shawn?” He looked down. “I’m sorry.” And that was it. There’s so much more that I could say, but I said, first, “get the fuck in here and let’s talk.” And we did. And we talked from there on out. For years and years. For someone who is still mostly a stranger, I know a lot about Shawn. I know that he’s been in love. And I know that he went to prison on weapons and drug charges in 2014. I know that he was self-admittedly bipolar and probably needed more care than he could figure out how to get, in a system designed to make sure he didn’t get it.
I know that he was an empath, or we never would have been friends. I know that he wanted to connect and that he was smart, so, so smart. I know that he had a knack for playing this game with the hand that he was given. I know that I am grieving for him and that that grief feels disproportionate to my knowledge of him. I can’t imagine how his mother and the rest of his family must feel.
Because, of course, I know much less about Shawn than I know.
I know that back in 2013 or so, he told me how he would die.
And I know that he deserves to have his murder solved. I know that his mother loved him. I know that a lot of people loved him.
I know that I loved him. Why is his killer free, Chief Zack?
We’ll wait.