Ruth Whitfield. It’s a name most people won't recognize.
Ruth Winfield was one of the 10 shoppers murdered in a mass shooting on May 14 at a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, New York.
Ten people were killed. Ten. In America, that's the way some of us have come to remember the latest mass shooting event — a tally of the dead.
Just over a week after the shooting in Buffalo, we had another tally — 21. In Uvalde, Texas, a mass shooting still difficult to wrap our heads around ended the lives of 21, including two school teachers and 19 of their fourth-grade students. They were children, some barely 10 years old. They were babies really, brutally murdered by a teenage gunman.
And then there were four. Just eight days after Uvalde, four people were shot dead in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, hospital of all places. We barely have time to mourn the loss of life in one mass shooting before we have news of yet another. Such is the state of life, and death, in today's America.
All other numbers aside, to those who lose a loved one in these killings, the only number that matters to them is one. Each number represents the life of one person loved by families and friends. It is the case of Ruth Whitfield. Among the 10 killed in Buffalo, she was one. She was murdered simply because she was Black. That’s tragic enough on its own, but Ruth Whitfield's life stood out for me.
An 86-year-old great-grandmother, Ruth, and her husband, Garnell Whitfield, were soulmates. They'd been married 68 years.
Garnell Whitfield came to live in a nursing home in his older years. But that didn't stop Ruth from being the same devoted partner to the love of her life. She visited daily, bringing him clean clothes, dressing him, and even cutting his hair. She wanted to make sure her husband always looked his best. She visited even on the days she might not be feeling so well herself.
On that Saturday, after seeing her husband, Ruth Whitfield had some grocery shopping to do. The Tops Friendly Market on Buffalo's east side was the only major supermarket in her overwhelmingly Black neighborhood. She shopped there regularly. But on this Saturday, her shopping was cut short. She fell into the line of fire of a barrage of bullets fired by an 18-year-old boy. His stated goal: Murder as many Black people as possible. He chose east Buffalo for its large population of Black residents.
Ruth Whitfield shared a name with my late mother, Della Ruth. It's easy to imagine what Ruth Whitfield might have looked like pushing her grocery cart down the aisle at Tops Friendly Market. I could picture my own mother doing the same at a Hattiesburg Walmart.
Ruth Whitfield was a member of Durham Memorial AME Zion Church. My mother was a member of Hattiesburg's Zion Chapel AME Church. I'm betting Ruth Whitfield sat on the same church bench every Sunday, just like my mother, on occasion nodding her head with an audible "amen" during the pastor's sermon. The parallel's between the two only make her story hit closer to home.
Ruth's son, Garnell Whitfield Jr., would grow up to become Buffalo's fire commissioner, retiring in 2017. He knew his mother had stopped by Tops after visiting his father. When he heard about the shooting, he tried to reach her. When she didn't answer her phone, Garnell Whitfield Jr. drove by her home and then to the store, where he spotted his mother's car in the parking lot. He spent the rest of the day at Tops until he received the news that would crush any of us. His mother was dead.
His words after losing his mother echo my own feelings. "What I remember most about my mom, what I loved most about my mom, is how she loved us. How she loved our family unconditionally. How she sacrificed everything for us as she gave of herself when she had nothing else to give."
Ruth Whitfield was an 86-year-old who was full of life. Her daughter, Robin, shared, ”She was my best friend. What am I supposed to do now? I keep seeing her face coming up everywhere but I can't hug her, okay? We were supposed to go see the Temptations play that night, and I have the tickets still on my table."
Those unused tickets will remain in her possession forever, a sad reminder of the fun night out with Mom that never happened and a pain that will never go away.
And that brings me back to Uvalde, Texas.
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, questioned by a reporter about his officers' response to the shooting, said on camera that more answers would be provided once "the families quit grieving." His statement was like a punch to the gut. Surely, many of us felt the pain of the parents of those 19 students, and the families of the two teachers. They had to cope not only with the death of their loved ones but with the nightmarish way in which their lives were ended. How will those families ever "quit grieving?" How will Ruth Whitfield's?
Joe Garcia's wife, Irma, was one of the two teachers murdered at Robb Elementary School. They were childhood sweethearts, married 24 years. After visiting the school to place flowers in his wife's memory, Joe died of a heart attack just two days after her death. Broken heart syndrome is real.
Garnell Whitfield Sr. will no longer have visits from Ruth. She won't be there to dress him in the clothes she'd brought from home or to cut his hair. Whose heart doesn't ache, imagining Ruth's son and daughter having to break the news about what happened to their mother, to the love of his life?
Numbers. On any given day in America, more numbers are added to the tally of lives lost in mass shooting events. And, sadly, we all know it is only a matter of time until the next time someone does it again.
It’s a tragedy also that some Americans have become desensitized to the ever-climbing number of casualties. And even while we process the waves of shootings crashing across the country, we must not become complacent. For if we do, we risk forgetting the most important number of all — one. You know, like one Ruth Whitfield.
Elijah Jones is a proud Hattiesburg native who enjoys writing. Email him at edjhubtown@aol.com.
