Last week, on Tuesday afternoon, Linda Deah stood in a crowd in front of the federal courthouse in downtown Kansas City to protest the shooting of Ralph Yarl. It was an unseasonably warm day, and a nearby row of budding oak trees weren’t much help against the strong spring sun. Linda, who is thirty-three, wore fashionably torn jeans, a black NASA T-shirt, and big silver hoop earrings. With her were her twelve-year-old daughter, Monae, her nine-year-old son, Alphonso, her younger sister Denise, and Denise’s two daughters, Aaliyah and Amira. Linda kept them all in her sight. “I’m scared,” she told me. “I’m paranoid. I’m, like, Oh, my God, is my son going to ring the wrong doorbell and be in the hospital or dead?”
Linda put her arm around Monae’s shoulder. To her left, a young white woman with butterflies tattooed on her right hand and wrist held a handwritten sign that said “If ringing a doorbell is a crime . . . then shoot me too!” Linda and Denise said that they were still trying to process what had happened. They knew what everyone else knew: that Ralph, who is sixteen years old, had accidentally gone to the wrong house one night the week before to pick up his younger twin brothers; that, after he rang the doorbell, an eighty-four-year-old white man named Andrew Lester answered the door with a revolver in his hand; that Lester shot Ralph first in the head and then in the arm; that Ralph got up and ran away and is lucky to be alive; that Lester had been released from police custody and then charged with first-degree assault three days later; that, hours before they arrived at the courthouse, Lester had been released on bond. It’s just that so little of it made sense to them. “This is not the America that we fled our country to come to,” Denise said.
Linda and Denise, like Ralph’s mother, Cleo Nagbe, are from Liberia. The two sisters moved to the United States in 2004, first to Houston, and then, three years later, to Kansas City. They know Ralph and his family through church. Like many Liberians in the area, they attend Revival of Hope Ministries, in the city’s immigrant-heavy northeast. The church is a hub for the tight-knit Liberian community. Linda told me that she had been to racial-justice protests before, but that this time was different. “It’s not close to home anymore,” she said. “It’s home.”
While she spoke, people started chanting, “Justice for Ralph! Justice for Ralph!” The oak trees swayed in the breeze, casting long, spindly shadows over the crowd. “It’s just too much,” Linda said. “At church we’re being killed. In supermarkets we’re being killed.”
“We’re being hunted down like animals,” Denise said.
At the edge of the crowd, Alpha Bahway, another Liberian immigrant, stood filming on his cell phone. Bahway wore black jeans and a short-sleeved button-down, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He had moved to the U.S. in November of 2019, six months before the death of George Floyd. When he heard about what had happened, about how Floyd had been killed by a police officer kneeling on his neck, his initial reaction was disbelief. Now, in the days since Ralph was shot, that disbelief had given way to disillusionment. Bahway told me that he has a four-year-old daughter who, along with his wife, lives in Liberia. I asked him if he wanted his daughter to move here. “No,” he said. “Until things can really improve, I prefer she stay there.” He went back to filming the protest, and I imagined him posting the footage on Facebook or sharing it in a WhatsApp group. I wondered how his family and friends back home would react when they saw it.
On Thursday morning, shortly after a brief but intense thunderstorm, I went to visit Linda and her family at their home in Kansas City, Kansas. It was a twenty-minute drive from where I live in Kansas City, Missouri—a frequently confusing distinction. Linda and her children live with her parents and youngest sister in a two-story apartment in Argentine, a working-class neighborhood just south of one of the largest rail yards in the country. The walls of the living room were covered in family portraits, a 2018-19 calendar with pictures of Liberian Presidents, and a framed painting of what looked to be the old Penn Station. Above a black leather couch hung a picture of flowers in the shape of a heart with the quote “When there is love in the home, there is joy in the heart.”
Linda is a medical aide at an assisted-living facility in a mostly white, middle-class suburb. She works the overnight shift and had just got off when I arrived. (She also works a second job, at a tax-prep center, more than fifty miles away, in St. Joseph. Most of her clients are African immigrants who work at a local meatpacking plant.) Still dressed in green scrubs, she sat down in a black leather chair that matched the couch. Alphonso, shirtless, ran down the stairs to greet her. “Go put some clothes on,” Linda told him. She had decided to let him and Monae stay home from school for the day. “It’s been a lot for them with all that’s happened,” she said. “I just wanted to give them a day to de-stress.” Alphonso came back down wearing a black zip-up hoodie over a tank top. He grabbed his mother’s iPhone and climbed onto a nearby chair to play a video game. Monae was slouched on a love seat next to the front door, scrolling through her phone.
Linda’s father, Shad, came out from the kitchen and took a seat at the end of the couch. He was a quiet, serious man with a bald head and glasses. “We have a full house,” Linda said. “That’s how I grew up.” The conversation turned to her work. “Nursing homes aren’t a thing in Africa,” she said. “There, when you get to be older, your children take care of you.”
Shad nodded in agreement.
“Sometimes I’ll know a resident for a year or two and never see their family,” Linda said. “They’ll only show up when they’re dying. It’s sad.”
“It’s not right,” Shad said, now shaking his head.
They both wondered whether Lester would have shot Ralph if someone had been home with him that night. “I’m not trying to excuse what happened,” Linda said. “But I’ve been thinking about that.”
After a while, Shad stood up from the couch and returned to the kitchen to listen to a Liberian radio broadcast on his phone. He explained that Liberia’s Ministry of Information, Cultural Affairs, and Tourism held a press briefing every Thursday. He was listening to a recording of the one from earlier that day. It had been about water and sanitation issues. “It’s how I get my news,” he said.
Linda took her phone back from Alphonso and got up to pull a collage of family photos off the wall. Monae retrieved a photo album from a cluttered shelf by the TV. They wanted me to see them. “I look the best out of everyone in these pictures,” Alphonso said. He lingered on one of him in a black three-piece suit with a bright-pink shirt. It was taken when he turned three. “Nobody dresses better than me,” he said. “Now I have even nicer suits.” Monae rolled her eyes.
At around 10 A.M., Denise walked in the front door and sat next to me on the couch. She had the day off from her main job at a call center and her side job as a cosmetologist. Her dream was to open her own salon. “This summer, by the grace of God,” she said. Alphonso and Monae were getting hungry, and Linda asked Denise if they could go to her house for lunch. Denise invited me to join them. She gave me her address. “Make sure it’s the one in Overland Park,” she said. “There’s the same address in Prairie Village. Sometimes my mail gets delivered there.” I plugged it into Google Maps as we walked outside to our cars. “That’s the one,” Denise said, looking at my phone. The sun was beginning to peek through the clouds. By the early afternoon, it would be a beautiful spring day.
Revival of Hope Ministries, which is painted white and has a short steeple, sits at the far eastern end of northeast Kansas City, in a neighborhood of modest single-family homes. A few blocks southeast is a Jewish cemetery that was founded in 1901. To the north is a commercial street lined with Mexican restaurants, auto-repair shops, and a flea market. A sign nailed to a utility pole in front of the church advertises a neighborhood crime watch with the warning “We call police!”
On Sunday, there were about forty people in attendance. Many of the older men were dressed in suits and ties, and the young girls wore colorful dresses. Linda arrived just as the Bible study, which happens before the service, was wrapping up. The topic was courage in the face of fear. She slid into the fifth row of pews, tired from another night of work. She had come by herself.
For all of the pain and anger that Linda and her fellow-worshippers were still feeling, the mood inside the church was largely celebratory. Ralph had survived—he had been released from the hospital and was recovering at home—and for that they were thankful. “If you don’t believe in miracles, go home,” the Reverend Nicholas Nicol said from the pulpit. “Because I believe in miracles, and I know the power of God and what power diverted those two bullets.”
After the service, almost everyone gathered in the basement of the church for a birthday lunch. It was for a girl in a lavender dress named Anaiah Wreh, who had just turned eight. A buffet was set up in the corner of the room, with beef stew, fried fish, chicken Alfredo, meatballs, and steamed rice. For dessert, there was vanilla sheet cake and kala, a kind of Liberian doughnut. While people ate, Philip Barrolle, a former president of the Liberian Community Organization of Kansas and Missouri, went around the room collecting shirt sizes. The organization was planning to order T-shirts that say something along the lines of “Ringing a doorbell is not a crime. Justice for Ralph.” Barrolle told me that he was still working on the design.
Linda, while waiting in line for food, ran into a man who plays drums in the church band. Last Wednesday, his thirty-one-year-old brother had been shot during a dispute at a convenience store in Hayti, a small town in southeast Missouri, and airlifted to a hospital in Memphis in critical condition.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” Linda said.
“Thank you,” he said. “We’re just praying for him to be O.K.” ♦
