As the Wicked Watch
Tamron Hall
Dedication
To the countless children missing or taken by the darkness of the world.
You are more than a story. You are more than words on a page. You are loved, you are missed, and you are not forgotten.
1
November 2007
Top-of-the-afternoon broadcast
“Jordan, we’re live in sixty,” said Tracy Klein, my favorite field producer, nudging me to get into place.
“Okay, hang on,” I said, distracted by a rush of butterflies and the sudden urge to pee, which happened every single time I was about to go on the air. I guess it was my body’s way of preparing me for the moment that never got old, but soon panic struck. My earpiece was in, but the anchors’ voices sounded like Charlie Brown’s parents.
“Hey, you guys. I can’t hear. You’re not coming through very clearly. The echo is killing me,” I said.
I looked up.
Please, not today.
In an instant, the sky darkened over historic Bronzeville on Chicago’s South Side, a sign of the dip in temperatures I recalled hearing on this morning’s weather forecast. Chicagoans and people all across this state have to deal with one inescapable fact, and that’s the cold. Sure, I’d heard people who claimed to love the change of seasons. But to a person from Austin, Texas, that sounded like a case of Stockholm syndrome. Or at least that’s what I told my friends from the Midwest when they tried to convince me otherwise.
“Guys, are you trying to blow my ears out?” I shouted at the men a few feet away in the news van. Clearly, whatever they did had fixed the problem. The sound coming out of my earpiece could now be heard in the next county. I stretched as far as my arms could go in this super cute, single-button fitted jacket that looked tailored but wasn’t—I’d bought it off the rack—and turned down the literal voices in my head.
“Tracy, when are we getting new equipment? This earpiece was around when . . .”
“Jordan, focus,” she interrupted. I could tell Tracy wasn’t in the mood for my climbing up on my soapbox today. I glanced down and noticed the heels of my most expensive pair of pumps had slowly disappeared into the soft soil beneath the “L” train track. The lowlying area was prone to flashflooding, and my poor shoes were the latest casualty.
What was I thinking?
“Scott, how’s your sound?”
Scott Newell hoisted the camera off the static tripod and steadied it against his right shoulder. He signaled all good with a left-handed thumbs-up.
So long as Scott’s sound is working, I’ll be okay.
Scott is my steady hand and the antidote to my impulsive nature. My voice of reason out in these streets. The irony of us falling into stereotypical gender roles was particularly strange in a business where independent, successful women still kept secrets about gender bias and sexual harassment while reporting on these very matters. But I guess it didn’t hurt that he had a smile that had melted a few women and, heck, some men, too, when I’d tried to negotiate a longer interview with an unwilling participant.
For that, Scott is my favorite cameraman, but also because he has steady hands and one of the best points of view behind a lens I’ve ever seen. And he’s reliable—probably one of the most reliable men in my life right now, to tell the truth. In television, allies are everything, and for reporters, the natural first ally when you arrive at a new station is the cameraperson. A unique trust developed quickly with long hours on the road, especially on those occasions when we had to chase down some guy accused of foul play in his wife’s disappearance—in my case in heels. You need someone willing to drag you along like those poor women in the campy horror films who’d break a heel and fall just as the killer closed in on them with a chainsaw. Leave no screaming injured woman behind due to her poor choice of footwear. That’s Scott.
“Thirty seconds, Jordan.” The voice in the earpiece had reverted back to a whisper.
“I don’t know what it is, Scott, but my sound is terrible. Can you hear me?”
Scott shrugged his shoulders, not worried that I was seconds from being one of those reporters pressing against their ear, yelling, “Can you repeat the question?”
“Tracy, I still can’t hear you guys.”
“Hold on, Jordan,” Tracy said. “Hold on, we are trying to fix it.”
If the sound issues weren’t enough to make me want to run into the liquor store a few yards away and drown my nerves, the clouds had assumed the starting position and were waiting for a checkered flag. Hanging low and dense like an alien invader, they made Bronzeville appear more sinister than necessary. “Sketchy,” as my mother would say: with vacant lots, boarded-up retail shops and liquor lounges, and potholes the size of a kiddie pool.
The wind gusts this city is famous for sprayed a mix of prickly dirt, gravel, and rock against my bare legs. I could feel a few of the pebbles land inside the arches of my black Stuart Weitzman pumps, a splurge I permitted myself for my twenty-eighth birthday, now likely the dumbest purchase of my life but still one of the cutest. I could hear the words of assistant news editor and my newsroom BFF Ellen Holbrook come back to haunt me.
“I’m just saying, if it were me, I wouldn’t wear my four-hundred-dollar Stuart’s—not today, not where you’re going. Oh, that’s right, I don’t own any,” Ellen quipped, exposing a hint of the East Coast accent she picked up during summers spent with her grandparents in Menemsha, Massachusetts, a small fishing village on Martha’s Vineyard where everybody sounds like a Kennedy.