Last December, some FBI investigators Barbara Massey Mapps has grown to know as friends showed up at her door on Cherry Street in Buffalo. They handed her a mobile phone that had belonged to Barbara’s sister Kat, a gesture that to Barbara and her close relatives arrived at exactly the right moment.
“We listen to it,” Barbara said of messages and recordings Kat never erased, “and there’s Kat’s voice, and Warren’s voice.”
She found solace in clicking on that phone on Wednesday — the third anniversary of a May 14 of horrific loss in Buffalo — after her family attended an emotional ceremony of remembrance at the Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue.
Three years ago, on a spring afternoon, an armor-wearing gunman – fueled by racist hatred – murdered 10 Black women and men and wounded three other people inside that store and in the adjacent parking lot. Those who died represented lives of bedrock meaning, in Buffalo:
Kat Massey. Ruth Whitfield. Pearl Young. Andre Mackneil. Aaron Salter. Heyward Patterson. Celestine Chaney. Geraldine Talley. Roberta Drury. Margus Morrison.
They included revered grandmothers, and school workers, and a church deacon. They included devoted mothers, and a father buying a birthday cake for his young son, and a sister who settled in Buffalo to care for her brother during a serious illness, and a security guard who died protecting the staff and shoppers behind him.
And they included Kat, Barbara’s older sister and a tireless community activist who was the founding heart and soul of the Cherry Street block club. Tops was only a few blocks from her home, and she often stopped there on Saturdays. Her brother Warren drove her to a nearby convenience store in his beloved Buick Ultra on that blue sky afternoon, and he told her he would be happy to wait, though Kat insisted it was fine to “go on home.”
Warren — his siblings affectionately referred to him as “Juice” — died last January, at 69, of heart trouble compounded by prostate cancer. “Ever since Kat, he’s blamed himself for taking her,” said Barbara, 67, who expresses no doubt that the shock and grief of May 14 accelerated her brother’s death.
He’s buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery, near the graves of Warren’s parents and three of his siblings, Robert Jr., Kat and Patti. Barbara went there Sunday, for Mother’s Day, and did what’s a precious ritual for the entire Massey family: They planted flowers, pulled weeds and trimmed the grass, which is exactly what the Masseys have done collectively for generations along the blocks surrounding their home, on Cherry Street.
They could have left the neighborhood, long ago. They could have gotten out when the Kensington Expressway was being constructed 60 years ago or more, when that high-speed freeway fell like a state-hurled meteor just across the street and beyond a little wall, by their front yard.
Instead, they chose to stay and resist the neighborhood despair that often grew within the expressway’s shadow. Kat founded the Block Club — only one of her many initiatives, including a fierce effort to curb gun violence — and the Masseys turned Cherry Street into a kind of linear park, complete with a sequence of ornamental West African sayings and artwork the state Department of Transportation pressed into new retaining walls.
In the heart of the city, for decades, the Masseys led efforts to maintain that block — particularly an “inspiration garden” Kat loved near the place where Cherry and Virginia streets meet, a little triangle of land that in the sorrow after May 14 became a civic memorial to Kat.
The siblings were always tight. “Patti and I were so close that if we both had a headache, only one of us needed to take an aspirin,” said Barbara, who recalls the loss of each of her siblings with grief, and sees the deaths of Kat and Warren as intertwined — a rolling tragedy set loose by the heartbreak at Tops.
“I can’t wrap my head around it,” Barbara said of being the last of the five Massey sisters and brothers. “I don’t think about it, my brain won’t process it. There’s not even a word. My job is to make sure the rest of them are all good before I leave.”
She refers to her own children, and her many nieces and nephews.
Barbara had a scare of her own this spring. She suffered a heart attack that led to the surgical insertion of a stent. She chooses not to discuss the ongoing court cases — criminal and civil — still involving the Tops massacre, but she has little doubt the stress and anxiety they touch off every day played a major role in her own cardiac trouble.
Still, as she emphasized: She’s already strong enough to be outside again, cutting grass. She helps care for the expansive family lawns, and her son Damone has been mowing Kat’s triangle. The other day some people Barbara had never met stopped by and offered to plant more flowers in Kat’s memory on May 14, and Barbara replied:
To be honest, what we really need is mulch.
They said they’d be happy to put it down. She was looking for them when I spoke to her Wednesday evening, after Barbara and her family returned from the remembrance at Tops.
“I think it’s wonderful. I don’t want anyone to forget,” she said of the ceremonies and all the related community outpourings of love. Even so, her family doesn’t linger once the formal events are over. “This is something bigger of any of us,” she said of the raw hatred that created the bloodshed on May 14, “and it’s not healthy for the young ones” to dwell too much on the obscene nature of what happened.
For the Masseys, the family statement becomes flowers and strong young trees, on Cherry Street.
Warren’s death, Barbara said, is tied directly to what he lost at Tops. “Kat was Warren’s baby,” Barbara said, and her brother never forgave himself for that Saturday moment when she stepped out of his car and he went home – even if Kat was one of the most independent human beings on planet Earth, and even if they had followed that exact routine, in total safety, 1,000 times before.
The Masseys, Kat said, share this belief: “They come back,” she said of those who die. Keep your eyes open, keep listening, and you’ll feel those who are gone. She’s convinced that’s happened with her parents and her siblings — that they send messages, even now — and she hoped Warren might find some solace in that belief.
But he couldn’t shake the idea that he was somehow responsible, and she knows it created intense physical strain that compromised his health. “You could look in his eyes and see the sadness,” Barbara said of Warren, who kept Kat’s photo dangling from the rear-view mirror of his car.
Sunday, as the family does on every Mother’s Day, the Masseys went to Forest Lawn — where Warren is now buried near his folks and siblings — and tended to the graves. Barbara also learned the other day that Warren’s tombstone will be ready soon: It’s a stone memorial cut in the shape of a tow truck, modeled on the one he drove for years with skill and passion.
Barbara is grateful her brother made it to one last family celebration on Christmas, before the Masseys lost him in early January. That absence only elevates the keen meaning of the FBI agents showing up with Kat’s phone, which the bureau no longer needed as evidence. Barbara often listens to the voices stored on it, underlining her point:
In some way, those you love come back.
That has not helped her process Warren’s death, still all too fresh. On warm spring days, brother and sister used to sit together on Barbara’s porch, drinking coffee and figuring out family bills. “Me and my Juice,” Barbara said, calling him by his family nickname. “I’d write the checks, and he’d mail them.”
Now, she said “I have coffee with nobody but myself,” and there are days when the sadness rises up like an overwhelming wall, and it would be easy to just stop pushing herself every morning, when she wakes up.
She keeps going. She knows exactly what her four siblings still want her to do, and there’s no way to pretend she doesn’t hear.
Barbara’s life has ascended into an ongoing tribute to Kat and everyone the family has lost. Aided by Damone, Warren’s longtime partner Cookie, her nephew Demetrius, a friend named Wanda Willis who’s “like a sister” and by a devoted legion of younger Masseys, Barbara mows, plants flowers, bags trash, looks out for ailing neighbors and digs in to protect Cherry Street against all struggles, intent on sustaining this small piece of loving community.
It’s her best response, her living counterpoint, to what happened at Tops.
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