Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [3]
Mapmakers, loath to tease apart the six cities, identify the area collectively as Hampton Roads, the name of the shipping channel that links the James River with Chesapeake Bay and the ocean beyond. The Roads, as local disc jockeys call the region, no doubt ranked high on the former Soviet Union’s list of American targets most worthy of nuclear obliteration. The region in and around Hampton Roads comprises a good chunk of America’s military-industrial complex, including Langley Air Force Base, Fort Eustis, the U.S. Naval Station at Norfolk, the Newport News shipyard, and the U.S. Naval Weapons Station on the York River. Virginia Beach, which occupies the eastern rim of Hampton Roads, is itself home to the Army’s Fort Story, the Camp Pendleton Naval Amphibious Base, and the Oceana Naval Air Station. Life here is textured by the roar of fighter planes and the thumping applause of giant helicopters. Where there is water, there are fighting ships, pale gray in the noon sun, spiky black in backlit silhouette.
The second most influential force here is the Baptist Church. Branches seem to sprout every few blocks or so in simple frame houses and soaring concrete towers. As in many cities now around the country and particularly in the South, the churches in Hampton Roads provide more than spiritual solace. They offer parents a sheltered alternative to the harsh and at times profoundly dangerous conditions that exist now in so many urban public schools. The Atlantic Shores Baptist Church in the Kempsville Road district of Virginia Beach, a suburban expanse of closely packed tract homes, is one of the largest churches in Hampton Roads, with four thousand official members and seventeen hundred who show up at church each Sunday. By the church’s own estimate it has the third-largest congregation in the Roads.
The church itself is a sturdy if austere structure, with a concrete spire that each evening casts a long swordlike shadow deep into the shopping plaza across the street. The church school, the Atlantic Shores Christian School, offers fully accredited elementary, middle, and high-school programs and draws many children of the faculty of Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network University, located nearby on the Centerville Turnpike. The school consists of permanent and portable classrooms arrayed around a courtyard. As of December 16, 1988, it had five hundred students, of whom only twenty-three were black, and seemed as sheltered a place as one could possibly find. Shakedowns, beatings, gunplay, the stuff of a contemporary urban public-school education—all this occurred elsewhere. “As far as I know, we’d never even had a fistfight before,” said George Sweet, senior pastor of the church and president of the school.
Every school, of course, has its tensions and petty rivalries among students. Every school has its loners and outcasts who don’t fit the woof and weave of school culture. One such student at Atlantic Shores was Nicholas Elliot—to be exact, Nicholas Walden Herman Elliot—a lean, gangly boy who lived in Norfolk’s Campostella neighborhood. Campostella is a black community of neat, tree-lined streets separated from the bulk of Norfolk by the Elizabeth River. He lived with his mother in a small, green frame house in a block of similarly styled houses.
The fact Nicholas was black would by itself have kept him from readily blending in with the other students at Atlantic Shores, although school officials and students insist the school did its best to make its black students feel welcome. In Nicholas’s case, his color amplified a gulf that would have existed anyway. He had dyslexia, a learning disability that is difficult to diagnose yet terribly efficient at undermining the self-esteem of children,