The 2015 mass murder at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Charleston, South Carolina, left a mark on America’s psyche. Images and sounds from the aftermath of the shooting, in which a young white man named Dylann Roof killed nine African-American worshippers at an evening Bible study, became emblems of recent history: Barack Obama departing from his spoken eulogy at the funeral of the Reverend Clementa Pinckney to perform a sonorous section of “Amazing Grace”; Nadine Collier declaring her radical forgiveness of Roof at his bond hearing, after he had killed her mother, Ethel Lee Lance; the removal of the Confederate flag that had flown over the South Carolina State House.
Beyond those shared memories, and often hidden from public view, are far more personal remembrances. In Eléonore Hamelin’s film “Quiet No More,” the Reverend Sharon Risher, Collier’s sister, whose mother and two cousins were killed in the attack, describes her loss. She remembers her mother’s personality (“formidable”), as well as her cooking and hospitality. She also shares the details of her mother’s adolescence, and the unearthing of a family secret that stunned her—and brought the two of them closer. Risher recalls the way that her mother used to gather her and her sisters together every Sunday before church and spritz them with perfume, saying, “God is sweet, just like y’all.”
Risher was working as a hospital chaplain in Texas at the time of the attack, and when she saw footage of Roof’s bond hearing, forgiveness was far from her mind. “I was angry,” she recalls. She did not want herself or her family to be rushed through their grief in order to arrive at reconciliation. “You never see newspeople ask white people after tragedies, ‘Do you forgive?’ ” she says. Because of her role as a pastor, Risher knew that people would look to her to set an example of forgiveness. But she felt that it couldn’t be automatic, or immediate. Facing the camera directly, she explains, “Forgiveness is a process where whoever has done something wrong to you, you could get to a point where that does not hold power over your life. And people like me need to have time to come out of the dark space.”
After Risher went through that process, she became an advocate for gun-violence prevention, and the documentary shows her meeting and working with activists around the country, including survivors of the Parkland school shooting. She calls herself an “accidental activist.” This work has helped lift her out of her grief, she says. “So now I don’t really carry that ache in my heart. . . . I had stuff to do.”
This month marks five years since the attack at Emanuel A.M.E. Protesters in the streets throughout the U.S. are demanding police reform and many other structural changes that together would move the country closer to racial justice. During demonstrations, they are invoking the name, especially, of George Floyd. Risher’s story is a reminder of the depth of loss behind the name of each person who is killed in an act of racist violence. She speaks of those from Emanuel A.M.E. with reverence: “My mother, Ms. Ethel Lee Lance; and my cousin, Mrs. Susie Jackson, who was eighty-seven years old. And then my cousin Tywanza, who was the youngest that got killed. He was twenty-six. And all the others, Reverend Pinckney and Cynthia Hurd, and the names, and the names.”
