After an extraordinary week, I'm officially tired. Or maybe tired of officials. Anyway, I'm headed over to see my friend, Mattie.

        Mattie Johnson lives in the West End on one of the meanest streets in the city, Derrick Turnbow Avenue. Ironic, really, because Derrick Turnbow was one of the sweetest boys who ever lived. Shot in the head in 1990 as he was leaving school, he had been standing in a crowd watching a fight across the street. A bullet fired by another youth hit Derrick, who was paralyzed from the neck down.

        A year later in a wheelchair and connected to a portable ventilator, he made his way across the stage at Music Hall to accept his diploma from Taft High School. He died a few months later.

Neighborhood fixture

        Mattie remembers him, “a nice boy, a good boy.”

        She would know.

        A fixture in this neighborhood, Mattie operates an informal after-school program called Grandma's Hands. Snacks. Plain talk. Maybe a button or two gets sewn on. A teen-age mother might get some advice. Like that.

        We've been friends for several years, and sometimes we just walk around her neighborhood. Once we passed a huddle of young men. They looked pretty tough to me, but they straightened up as she approached, called her “Miz Mattie,” and tossed their empty Big Gulp bottles in the trash as she ordered. Impressive, I said.

        She shrugged. “Sometimes they just need somebody to look them in the eye.” Wednesday, we sat in her basement shop and talked.

        I wonder what would have happened last week if a battalion of Grandma's Hands had been parachuted into the neighborhoods under siege. Instead of the sound of beanbags being shot into the crowd, maybe we'd have heard, “Hey, don't you sass me.”

        But Mattie did not get to be 74 years old by behaving foolishly. She watched the riots on television, even though she could have seen some of the worst of it right out her own window.

Hoops and jobs
        “These young boys don't have enough to do,” she says. She'd like to see more basketball hoops in the neighborhood. Even pool rooms. And jobs, of course.

        “The cops should get out of their cars more often,” she says. “Get to know these boys by name. We've got a lot of good kids here, but they're all lumped together.”

        Her little radio is tuned to WLW's Mike McConnell. “Even if you don't agree with people,” she says. “You like to know what they're saying.”

        We have heard very little from women over the past week. This appears to be one thing about which both black and white men can agree. And this is not unique to Cincinnati.

        Dorothy Height, who has advised every president since Dwight Eisenhower and was the architect of the Black Family Reunion, sat quietly on the stage in 1963 while the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. She had asked to speak at the rally, but was overruled.

        The only female voice heard at the march, she would say later, was gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

        So when the white men who run things are forming their panels and their committees, I hope they will include some young black men along with the older men of color. And I hope they won't forget the women who raised them all.

        If they do, it's not simply unfair. It's wasteful.

        E-mail Laura at lpulfer@enquirer.com or call 768-8393.

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