Emanuel Lutchman (Part 4)

Fragments of a future narrative

It came in three envelopes, postmarked July and October last year and arriving at my PO Box in the fall. The introduction begins with a lament for Rochester, “a city that will forever be replayed over and over again in my inner-mind.”

I wasn’t expecting this window into Emanuel’s inner-mind; this autobiography. The press coverage and court documents detail his deviance—his crimes; his mental health aberrations—and disappear his identity.

Emanuel reemerges through his writing. “I lefted a part of me on the way out of the courtroom,” he recalls, looking back to his sentencing hearing. “Next thing I remembered was 6 U.S. Marshmallows (marshalls) rammed my face straight into the wall”; “on the carpet in the hallway drops of my blood left it’s Mark….”

It’s a document testifying to Emanuel’s introspection and lack of formal education; he never finished high school. But he’s learned, still. Quotations from Che Guevara, Hillel the Elder, and Haile Selassie punctuate the work, signaling his political beliefs and philosophical concerns.

Much of the writing is—little surprise—anguished, given his status (his take: “a sufferer of this new jim crow”) and trauma-ridden life. He is, he explains, in unceasing combat with his “inner self—a war til My burial,” and overwhelmed by “the sense of the uncertainty of my future.”

But there was brightness in his childhood: the loving home his grandmother, a member of the Nyahbinghi Order, created; flights to Jamaica to see extended family.

Then tragedy—in the same form that took his mother’s life—visited.