Bone to Pick

Of Forgiveness, Reconciliation, Reparation, and Revenge

Ellis Cose

• Publisher: Pocket Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780743488846
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Minority Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In a world riven by conflict, reconciliation is not always possible -- but it offers one of the few paths to peace for a troubled nation or a troubled soul. In Bone to Pick, bestselling author and Newsweek editor Ellis Cose offers a provocative and wide-ranging discussion of the power of reconciliation, the efficacy of revenge, and the possibility of forgiveness.
People increasingly are searching for ways to put the demons of the past to rest. That search has led parents to seek out the murderers of their children and torture victims to confront their former tormentors. In a narrative drawing on the personal and dramatic stories of people from Texas to East Timor, Cose explores the limits and the promise of those encounters.
Bone to Pick is not only the story of victims who have found peace through confronting the source of their pain; it is also a profound meditation on how the past shapes the present, and how history's wounds, left unattended, can fester for generations. Time does not heal all, Cose points out. Memories and anger can linger long beyond a human lifespan. The descendants of Holocaust survivors and African slaves alike feel the effects of their forebears' pain -- and in some cases are still demanding restitution.
What is behind the movement for reparations? Why are truth-and-reconciliation commissions sprouting all over the world? Why are old wars being refought and old wounds being reopened? In Bone to Pick, Ellis Cose provides a moving and nuanced guide to such questions as he points the way toward a more harmonious world.

1. DECIDING TO FORGIVE

TO FORGIVE THE TRULY HORRIBLE is to kiss the robe of God, to emulate no less a figure than the dying Jesus Christ. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do. Those words leapt into Colleen Kelly’s mind when she realized her brother was gone forever, buried in the smoldering graveyard that had once been the World Trade Center. The architectural pride of Wall Street, an icon of America’s power and beauty, was now a symbol of incomprehensible horror, an unlikely resting place for Bill.

Bill was in financial services, a salesman for Bloomberg L.P. He did not normally work at the World Trade Center. So the family initially had no idea he was there. But once the planes plowed into the towers, New Yorkers everywhere picked up phones, mostly to reassure one another life would go on.

Colleen learned that Bill had been attending a conference at Windows on the World, the restaurant on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center. And that September day it fell on her, a nurse and mother of three living in the Bronx, to make the trek into Manhattan. Sustained by the hope, the dream, that Bill had somehow made it out, she wandered from hospital to hospital, inquiring about her brother. Eventually she grew cognizant of an ominous fact: though doctors and nurses abounded, there was no one for them to treat—no one, at any rate, from the World Trade Center. “That’s when I knew Bill was dead.” And that’s when the words of Jesus Christ flashed through her mind. Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

She realized the words made absolutely no sense, not in the present context. The terrorists had clearly known, with horrifying precision, exactly what it was that they were doing. Her response, she later concluded, stemmed not from an urge to forgive but from an almost instinctive resolve not to hate. The leap to Jesus’ words on the cross was her mind’s way of reaffirming values that she had clung to all her life, values that embraced peace over war. In the face of the most wrenching provocation imaginable, she rejected vengeance. “These terrorists had taken my brother,” she told me over lunch many months later, “and I wasn’t going to let them take anything else.”

Colleen was among the founders of September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows. The families sought to honor their lost loved ones by condemning vengeance and violence—even if that meant visiting Iraq as America prepared to make war on Saddam Hussein, or meeting with the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called twentieth hijacker) in an effort at dialogue and reconciliation.

It is not my purpose here to consider the political effectiveness or appropriateness of such efforts. I am more interested in Kelly’s initial impulse, in the notion that forgiveness, albeit as a proxy for a larger set of values, could even be considered in the context of acts so vile as those perpetrated by the September 11 terrorists.

Are some things so awful they cannot be forgiven? Or does wisdom lie closer to Kelly’s instinctive response? Are some acts so horrifying, so incomprehensible, so beyond the scope of norḿal humanity, that they must be forgiven—or at least consigned to that section of the heart most open to mercy and compassion, most inclined to let go of the urge to revenge?

A developing school of psychology argues that forgiveness is a gift not only to the person forgiven but to those who grant the gift, those strong enough to forgive. Robert Enright, a leader in that school, sees forgiveness as a route to personal freedom, a way of rejecting the self-imposed, self-reinforcing label of victim and escaping an ultimately soul-destroying maze of anger and resentment. Indeed, practicing forgiveness may even lower your blood pressure, while relieving other ailments—physical and mental—traceable to the stress of chronic anger.

It is not just a handful of psychologists, but also holy men and philosophers, who trumpet the benefits of a forgiving soul, who see forgiveness as much of the answer to what is wrong with mankind. Like all true believers, they overreach; many would turn the whole world into the church of forgiveness. And they tend to seek converts where they cannot (and perhaps should not) be found. But I believe they are onto something important—at least for those capable of or willing to take on the challenge of living the attitude these particular believers promote.

In Forgiveness Is a Choice Enright tries to explain what forgiveness is and what it is not. It is not giving up the ability to hold people accountable or letting wrongdoers off the hook. It does not mean forgetting the wrong that they did, or becoming complicit in continued abuse. It does not mean turning your head as a pedophile abuses children or a violent husband batters his wife. Instead—and he borrows the definition from philosopher Joanna North—forgiveness means responding to unjust hurt with compassion, with benevolence, perhaps even with love. While it does not deny the right to resentment, it does not wallow in bitterness; nor does it necessarily demand that the perpetrator respond with gratitude or grace. Or as Enright and Richard Fitzgibbons spell it out in Helping Clients Forgive, “People, upon rationally determining that they have been unfairly treated, forgive when they willfully abandon resentment and related responses (to which they have a right), and endeavor to respond to the wrongdoer based on the moral principle of beneficence, which may include compassion, unconditional worth, generosity, and moral love (to which the wrongdoer, by nature of the harmful acts, has no right).” Michael McCullough, another psychologist and forgiveness researcher, defines the concept considerably less grandly—as ending estrangement and letting go of resentments and of the urge to revenge.

Granting the kind of forgiveness Enright endorses seems a tall order for a mere mortal—even one who hopes it will lower her blood pressure and otherwise make her a better, more healthy human specimen. Yet I have repeatedly found myself amazed at the capacity of and willingness of otherwise ordinary human beings to return injury with compassion.

Consider Azim Khamisa, an elegant, international investment financial consultant who is of Persian and Indian lineage. Khamisa was born in Kenya, educated in England, and immigrated to the United States in 1974. He was living in La Jolla, California, in January 1995 when tragedy shattered his theretofore peaceful existence.

After returning from a business trip to Mexico City, Khamisa had gone directly to a party. Having just endured a painful breakup with his then-girlfriend, Khamisa was soaking in the warmth and goodwill from a group of people particularly close to him. Khamisa and his friends left the party together and went to his home. Once they departed, an exhausted Khamisa collapsed in bed; he apparently slept through the knocks on the door later that night. The next morning, Sunday, his maid brought him a business card from a policeman—a homicide detective—that had been left in his door.

Khamisa called. It was then that he received the heart-stopping news that Tariq, his son, was dead. At first, Khamisa refused to believe it. The news was so shocking, so unexpected that he simply couldn’t accept it. He hung up, dialed Tariq’s number, and waited with every expectation that his son would come on the line. Instead, Tariq’s fiancée answered, sobbing.

At that moment, the truth sank in. It was as if a nuclear bomb had exploded inside, tearing him into a million pieces, recalled Khamisa. “Life drained out of me.” His soul left his body, ascending to another plane. “I felt the long arms of my Maker.”

In time, Khamisa’s soul returned, and he had no choice but to face facts. Tariq, then twenty and a student at San Diego State University, had been at his pizza delivery job that Saturday night when a woman ordered a pizza. Her call aroused no particular suspicions, nor did the delivery address—a building in a lower-middle-class community not far from the university. When Tariq arrived, however, he found that the given apartment number did not exist.

Four gang members lay in wait. They pounced as Tariq headed back to the car. He made it inside, but the eighteen-year-old gang leader was not about to let him go. “Bust him,” he ordered a fourteen-year-old soldier. The bullet passed through the window, through Tariq’s shoulder, underneath one arm and came out under the other. The youths fled. A priest in a nearby building heard the shot and rushed out of the shower and into the street. He tried CPR, but Tariq, his aorta ruptured, was already dead.

One of Khamisa’s close friends had also lost a son to murder. In an effort to comfort the grief-stricken Khamisa, the friend expressed the hope that Tariq’s killers would “fry in hell.” He also talked about his own lost son, and about how, if he could only get his hands on the murderer, he would execute not just the killer but “his whole clan.” To Khamisa, who harbored no lust for revenge, the confession brought no relief.

He buried his son that Thursday. “My rage came on Friday,” Khamisa recalled. “I was angry, but not at Tony [the shooter],” he told me. His anger singled out no particular individual; it was something more generalized, aimed at whatever it was in American society that had produced a fourteen-year-old kid who had killed a stranger on command. “My rage was mostly directed at society and my country.” For the eighth-grade murderer, he felt compassion.

Khamisa’s religious beliefs played a role in his reaction. A Shiite Muslim, Khamisa belongs to the Ismaili sect and extols Sufism—an “inner, mystical, or psycho-spiritual dimension of Islam,” in the words of Alan Godlas, a scholar at the University of Georgia. Khamisa’s faith is “more eastern, more Buddhist than fundamentalist.” It is about a quest for “the hidden meaning in the faith,” Khamisa explained.

That faith, as Khamisa practices it, embraces peace, forgiveness, love; and it doesn’t allow much time for mourning or for self-pity. “We mourn the first forty days. After forty days, excessive mourning will impede the soul’s journey,” Khamisa’s Ismaili spiritual adviser reminded him. The adviser also told him that his response to the death of his son would determine the quality of the rest of his life.

Those words spawned a great deal of solitary soul-searching, some of it spent on Mammoth Mountain, immersed in nature’s tranquility. Khamisa struggled with a dilemma. “I wanted to do something for my son; but how do you do something for somebody who’s not here?”

“This was a meaningless tragedy, very random. Tony and Tariq had never met. But for me to continue the rest of my life”—Khamisa paused as he gathered his thoughts—”how do you do this without taking it and making some meaning out of it?” He continued, “I had lost my will to live.”

The answer came that April; he would form a foundation in his son’s memory. The Tariq Khamisa Foundation tries to save people like the fourteen-year-old Tony Hicks, an alienated kid who committed murder for lack of something better to do. It holds forums in schools to teach kids the consequences of violence. The hope is that young people will learn how “to make the kind of choices that Tony did not make,” said Khamisa. “If he had gone through this program, he would have made different choices,” Khamisa added. As it was, Hicks ended up pleading guilty to first-degree murder and was given a sentence of twenty-five years to life. He was the first juvenile to be sentenced as an adult under a new law aimed at young offenders.

The foundation “may not bring my child back; but we’re going to stop other children from dying,” vowed Khamisa.

When we spoke in early 2003, Khamisa noted that the foundation had grown to the point where it had a six-person staff, including his daughter, who was twenty-two when Tariq was killed. Since launching the foundation, Khamisa has received grateful letters from thousands of young people. “They help to mitigate the loss,” he said. Khamisa had also noticed some changes in himself: “I’m a better person as a result of this tragedy… more compassionate, less self-indulgent.”

The killer, Tony Hicks, had also undergone a transformation. Initially Hicks, as Khamisa tells it, was unrepentant. “He thought the pizza delivery man was stupid.” But in the months leading up to his sentencing, Hicks’s feelings changed. He ultimately begged for Khamisa’s forgiveness.

Meanwhile, Khamisa developed a relationship with Hicks’s grandfather and guardian, Ples Felix, who was nearly as traumatized by his grandson’s choices as was Khamisa by the death of his son. The two men forged an alliance and they now appear onstage together, promoting nonviolence in Tariq’s name. Khamisa dreams of the day when he, the grandfather, and Hicks, who may be paroled in 2017, can appear together to tell the story of the events that have forever changed and connected their lives.

“Azim’s journey is a testament to the power of forgiveness. Through that power, we both rose up from the devastation that struck us down,” wrote Ples Felix in the afterword to From Murder to Forgiveness, the book Khamisa published about his son’s murder and its consequences. As for Tariq, the foundation was contributing to his spiritual life. It was building up “millions and millions of dollars of spiritual currency” in his name, said Khamisa. “Maybe Tariq will complete the rest of his journey in a Learjet.”

Khamisa is an exceptional man. And yet he is not all that different from Richard Nethercut, or from Marietta Jaeger, who managed to reach out, in a spirit of conciliation and forgiveness, to the man who had kidnapped her daughter.

That kidnapping took place during the summer of 1972. Jaeger was in Montana on a camping vacation with her family when her seven-year-old daughter, the youngest child of five, was taken from the tent. When family members finally awakened and realized she was missing, they knew that she had not wandered off. Susie was much too well schooled to do such a thing. And when they saw that the tent had been cut, they had no choice but to assume that she had been abducted.

The response from the authorities, and even from ordinary people, was amazing and overwhelming. Soldiers with tracking dogs, private pilots with their own planes, and countless others—most just ordinary people willing to search on foot—showed up and offered their help. Businesses also contributed by releasing employees for the search. But despite all the assistance and good wishes, nothing turned up.

A week or so after Susie disappeared, the killer called the FBI. To confirm his identity, he mentioned a detail—Susie’s deformed fingernail—that had not been publicly disclosed. He demanded $50,000 to be left in a bus depot in a locker; but he neglected to say exactly where or how the money should be delivered. The instructions were so maddeningly vague that Jaeger held a press conference to ask the kidnapper to please get in touch again.

It was around that time, said Jaeger, that she realized how much she had repressed her anger. She had simply not allowed it to surface. Suddenly, the damned-up rage crashed through. “Until that point,” she recalled, “it had not occurred to me to be angry.” That all changed. “I allowed myself to get in touch with my anger, and I realized I had every right to feel the way I did.… I was just ravaged with hatred and a desire for revenge.”

One night as she and her husband prepared for bed, Jaeger turned to him, consumed with anger, and said, “If the kidnapper were to bring Susie back alive and well, I could kill him.” “And I knew I could,” she said years later, “with my bare hands and a smile on my face.” She was shaken by her own reaction. A “wrestling match with God and my conscience” ensued.

Jaeger was raised a Catholic. Hatred was unholy. To give into rage, decided Jaeger, would be to diminish herself and her relationship with God. So she “made a decision to make a commitment to forgiveness, to work toward forgiveness.”

When the police and FBI came up empty, Jaeger returned to her home in Michigan. A few months later, the kidnapper called a second time, reaching Jaeger’s sixteen-year-old son. The kidnapper repeated the demand for ransom but again hung up without giving coherent instructions.

A period of intense frustration followed. Clues emerged that led nowhere. Hopes were raised only to come crashing to earth. Jaeger renewed her faith. She continued to reject hatred and revenge. However she felt about the kidnapper, “in God’s eyes, he was just as precious as my little girl,” she told herself. Also, as a Christian, she was called on to pray for her enemies. So she forced herself to say little prayers on the kidnapper’s behalf. If he is fishing, prayed Jaeger, let him have good weather, let him catch plenty of fish. All the while, she held on to the hope that her daughter was alive, and that the kidnapper would get in touch and that the nightmare would end. As the one-year anniversary of the kidnapping approached, a reporter from Montana called. She would “do anything,” Jaeger told the reporter, for the chance to talk to the kidnapper. The reporter published her statement.

In June 1974, a year to the date of the abduction, the kidnapper called a third time. He started out by taunting Jaeger, but she ignored his taunts. “My primary concern was to reach the man. Find out who he was, why he had done this. How to get her back.… I felt like I was standing outside, watching myself.… I just desperately wanted to make a human contact with him.”

“What can I do to help you?” she asked at one point. The kidnapper did not answer directly. Instead, he said something along the lines of “I wish this burden could be lifted from me.” Jaeger realized that her words had touched him; his mood was very different from what it had been when the conversation began. They ended up talking for nearly an hour, during which the man made increasingly self-incriminating statements.

The clues he dropped led her to realize that he was one of the suspects who had been picked up originally, a twenty-six-year-old with a troubled emotional past. After he had passed a lie detector test, the authorities had let him go for lack of evidence. They had kept him under surveillance, but he had managed to slip out of Montana and drive to Salt Lake City, from where he had called Jaeger, confident the call could never be traced back to him. Eventually she started to call him by his name, which so rattled him that he vowed, “You’ll never see your little girl alive again,” and slammed down the phone.

He reappeared in his hometown a short while later, insisting he had never left. But the conversation, which she had taped, was evidence enough for the cops to get search warrants. They combed through an abandoned ranch not far from where he...