The Moment

We usually turn away from scenes like the one in Englewood, a fabled slum on the South Side of Chicago. On 70th Street and South Yale Avenue, a grandmother lay dead by the front door of her house; her adult son had been killed moments before by a shot through the kitchen window; her 7-year-old grandson was missing, his bullet-riddled body later recovered in an abandoned car. The boy's stepfather, on parole after years in prison for attempted murder and carjacking, has been taken in for questioning. "Because I chose to do what was natural to me and love someone," the child's mother, Julia Hudson, wrote on her MySpace page, "it cost me my beautiful family."

But the nation's eyes were on her loss not because it was especially horrific--in a spate of shootings this summer, Chicago had seen plenty of tragedy. It was because her story was attached to another that had enthralled America. Her sister Jennifer is not just famous; she is an emblem of pop-cultural redemption, an American Idol favorite who was eliminated in the finals but went on to greater triumph with an Oscar-winning role in the movie Dreamgirls. She had transcended her backstory and her roots as a reality star to become a real one.

The alternate realities of stardom and inner-city melodrama have coalesced into a nimbus of potential meaning for the rest of us. Poverty plus celebrity plus race plus bad choices plus crime add up to ... What? Should we compare the media coverage of the Hudsons unfavorably with that of white victims like JonBenét Ramsey and Chandra Levy? Must it take an Academy Award to make one family's trauma stand out against a drumbeat of urban crime?

The trouble with this story, like all senseless tragedies, is that it has no arc. We cannot realistically hope for some resulting parable of triumph over adversity. We can root for them. We can pray for them. But only Julia and Jennifer Hudson will know if redemption finally comes.

Drawing Room PAGE 24