Reports CNN and bloggers, the body of 5-year-old Shaniya Davis of Fayetteville, NC, has been found. Earlier today 200 people searched for the child's body after police received a tip that she was dead, say news sources.
Police have charged the girl's mother, Antoinette Nicole Davis, with trafficking and other offenses, authorities said. Davis was "prostituting her child" ...
... The mother told police last week that the child vanished from their mobile home in Fayetteville.
Hotel surveillance video taken around the same time Shaniya was reported missing showed the girl with a man identified as Mario Andrette McNeill. He was charged with first-degree kidnapping.(CNN)
The Hinterland Gazette, a blog of black political thought, also posted on this sad story. Shaniya, a biracial child, black mother/white father, had been missing since November 10.
That's her mother's mugshot there. McNeill, her boyfriend, who is
also black with
a similar look. He's confessed to kidnapping Shaniya, per CBS News. Janet Shan at The Hinterland Gazette would like to have the mother and boyfriend
waterboarded, and that was before her body was found.
From the
Charlotte Observer:
Shaniya's father, Bradley Lockhart, told The Associated Press that he raised his daughter for several years but last month decided to let her stay with her mother.
... Shaniya had only been living with her mother since last month. Davis reported the girl missing Tuesday morning from a mobile home community in Fayetteville, and authorities began searching nearby wooded areas. The following day a man described as Davis' boyfriend was charged in the kidnapping, but the charges were later dropped and he was released. Charlotte Observer/Associated Press.
At BlogHer.com last week I posted
my review of Sapphire's novel Push on which the movie
Precious is based. It's in part the story of a black girl being sexually abused and more by her parents, both her mother and her father. With the release of the movie, some black folks are up in arms that black people would be portrayed this way, as though amongst black people are only angels and no demons at all. Both
Laina Dawes and
Megan Smith have covered how black people respond to negative images, bickering down to the finest points even such as why Ms. Rain, the savior school teacher, becomes light-skinned in the movie when she was dark-skinned with dreadlocks in the novel.
Oh, how I wish more than ever director Lee Daniels had made Ms. Rain dark with dreadlocks in the movie Precious as Sapphire makes her in the novel. Seeing the picture of Shaniya's mother, I wish she could have been a Ms. Rain and not what seems like a type of Mary Jones, the abusive mother of
Precious fiction.
Megan, who is African-American, saw the movie and was honest enough in her post to share that as she watched it, she grew angry at men in general, black men in particular, despite knowing intellectually that child abuse is an equal opportunity destroyer across ethnic groups. And she despised Mary Jones, the mother in the book and movie.
At this moment, so soon after seeing the movie, I hate men so much I can barely stand it. I especially hate black men because I'm black and feel ashamed to share even a tiny bit of the same heritage of a man who would do this.
You see, I've met Mary. I've met Precious. Maybe we weren't close, maybe we weren't related but I know that in my life, I've met them both.
Sitting in that crowded theatre, watching the fictional Mary do her dirty work, all I could think was that I hated her. (Megan Smith)
Laina in particular made the point in her discussion of people's reactions to the movie Precious that indicate we may be more concerned about white people's impression of black people and the black image than cruelty to children and addressing our own dysfunction:
And instead of being ashamed when a story, a difficult, harrowing story in which I believe (despite my concerns about Daniels) is a story that could potentially start some frank and honest discussions - not about Sidibe's weight or how dark she is or how attractive she is - but about what we are going to do about the real boys and girls who are facing these issues. In our communities. Everyday. Are we going to stop being bourgeoisie and do something about it? (Lainad)
I'm looking at this current news story in which a white father pleads for the safe return of his half-black child while the mother shoves the child into prostitution, turning her in to a sex slave. I don't know what this Davis's story is. Was she abused herself? Is she a crackhead who'd do anything for money?
All I know is that this is a true story not a novel, and
I wonder if some black people, seeing how this true story of little Shaniya Davis's death is told--seeing the black mother's mug shot, her dead-eyed look and dreadlocked hair--will be more angry at the factual storytellers than they are at the people who abused and killed Shaniya Davis. Will some deflect from the tragedy and say the media's only covering this story because Shaniya was light-skinned? Will we feel CNN, Fox, the Associated Press, CBS and others are going overboard because the facts of the case are steamy like a cheap novel?
Let's wait and watch. As I said in my review,
Push is fiction and yet non-fiction. Is that what makes us so outraged at these tales, that through them people can look into our closets and see we, African-Americans, are as imperfect as other humans? Are we then ashamed and afraid because we know some ignorant people will paint us all with a broad, ugly brush, ignoring that these kinds of crime stories are not a black tragedy but tragedies in which some of Americans happen to be black?
But what's more important to us in our enlightened age of increased opportunity? How much of our accumulated baggage from being told and sometimes fearing we are inferior prevents us from seeing past our own skin when we hear stories like these? Will it be our image or the plight of abused children in our own communities that calls us to take effective action that surpasses crimes against our children and our intractable fears?
Here's video of Lockharts's plea for someone to return his daughter before the child's body was found. I don't present him as any type of angel because I don't know why he returned Shaniya to her mother after years of taking care of her. All I know is that he wasn't the one who killed her, and unless something comes to light to say otherwise, he didn't farm her out as a sexual slave. Her mother did that. Unless I learn my sympathies are misplaced, I feel for this man, however, because his guilt at giving Shaniya back, possibly against better instincts, is probably unbearable.
Watch CBS News Videos OnlineCBS also has other
still shot photos related to this case.
This, readers, is a Greek tragedy retold for a multi-cultural, modern, scandal-addicted America, but unlike
Medea from Greek literature, who murders her children to spite her husband, we may never know the depth of psychological garbage that caused Antoinette Davis to allegedly murder her daughter's spirit by making her a sex slave, subject her to abuse that probably led to her death. We don't know her specific demons, but we should know ours.
This post is cross-posted at BlogHer.com with edits.
Vivian Simone strode into Writers' Alley Coffee House as though she owned it plus the bar next door. Heads turned. Neither the men nor the women could stop themselves from watching her. Their eyes traveled from her dark chestnut waves to the soft lines of her collar bone down to her shapely legs and beautiful feet. She wore black stilettos well, and her firm breasts, narrow waist and ample hips made the emerald green draped jersey top with belted waist and matching knee-length, snug skirt speak exactly the language their designer wanted them to speak, but Vivian spoke a less friendly word to writers in the room.
