A Sonnet for Sonya Massey
Reflections on a Senseless Murder
“Don’t hurt me.”
It was tragic enough that Sonya Massey had to greet the officers at her front door with these words, even though she had called them herself regarding a suspected home invasion. Her plea is a testament to the horrific history of police brutality against Black men and women, including those who, like Massey, struggle with mental illness. Massey was only the latest Black person forced to make that awful calculation in a dangerous situation: deciding whether calling the police will help or, God forbid, actually increase the risk of being killed. That Massey had to make this choice with trepidation is, by itself, worth lamenting.
But Sonya Massey’s most haunting words came later. While following white officer Sean Grayson’s instruction to tend to the boiling water on her stove, Massey noticed him backing away in fear, even though he was in her living room, already far away from her. When Massey asked Grayson why he was moving away, he revealed that he felt threatened by her, even though nothing in her demeanor suggested she was a threat.
It was at this point Massey calmly spoke the words: “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus.” When she repeated these words a second time at Grayson’s prompting, something evil seemed to awaken in the officer. He immediately flew into a profanity-laden fit of rage that ended with him shooting Massey in the head a few seconds later, killing her.
As I have lamented Massey’s senseless death over the past several days, I have found myself sitting with the significance of her final words, words which moved me to write the poem below. Theologian Wil Gafney writes of the phrase “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus” that “Every person raised in a certain kind of black church knows the power and gravity of those words. Those are the words to be said when facing the evil that has walked into your door and will soon take your life. It is not a prayer to save one’s life or for God to come down and prevent the flagrant act of violence to come. It is something between a benediction and a malediction, laying bare the wickedness of the soul encased in human skin standing before her.”
Furthermore, as Gafney notes elsewhere, Massey’s words were far more than a rebuke of the individual officer who killed her. Ben Crump, the lawyer who is representing Massey’s family (and who has represented many Black folks murdered by police), rightly drew out the systemic dimension of Massey’s words at a recent press conference when he said, “Until we get justice for Sonya Massey, we rebuke this discriminatory criminal justice system in the name of Jesus.”
The systemically racist nature of the American criminal justice system—from policing to sentencing to mass incarceration—is well documented. (See, for a start, Michelle Alexander’s excellent and disturbing The New Jim Crow). We know that modern day policing has its roots in slave patrols and, later, police forces which enforced Jim Crow laws. It goes without saying, but it needs to be said again: what killed Sonya Massey was not merely a rogue cop, but a nation that has failed to truly repent of the spiritual idols of racism and violence that have corrupted it since its earliest days.
In light of these reflections, I offer the following poem—painfully aware that poetry, like Sonya Massey’s final words, can neither solve these problems nor restore her priceless life. Yet there is a power in naming the evils among us, that we might lament and repent, and a power in naming the One whom Hagar called “the God who sees,” our Jesus who walks with us, who weeps with us, who even dies with us—and who will one day honor Sonya Massey’s final prayer by bringing perfect justice to our violent, racist world, that we might finally live together in shalom.
Read and listen to the poem below.
A Sonnet for Sonya Massey
It’s like she knew before the shots were fired,
like she could sense the demons in the air
as fear and white supremacy conspired
to take her life. Her prescient final prayer
was “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,”
strong words for when all worldly hope has fled,
declaring that the God of justice sees us
and weeps with us. Christ held her as she bled.
We say with Sonya Massey—say her name—
that in the name of Jesus we rebuke
the spirit of the slave patrols that came
for her that night, for this is not a fluke,
but Satan in our country’s living room,
enraged and scared for Christ is coming soon.
This article and poem were originally published at Red Letter Christians.
This is so powerful Michael, thank you for sharing these words.