That post was going to be my first post at metafilter. I stumbled across it and said "holy shit!" and ran to mefi and (being a process oriented fella, even if I don't always give that impression) checked to see if it had been posted already, of course it was...


That story is so bizzare and amazing that it really puts paid to the idea that the true weirdness rests in the minds of fiction writers. Nothing is weirder than this life we are living.

Still love fiction though.

Man, that was interesting stuff. I'm surprised no one has turned it into a novel!

tough life. tough read. It is amazing to think what these kids grow up from and to (if they manage to grow up at all). Although I appreciate the article and the work the "folklorist" researchers are doing, I cannot imagine how they manage to navigate among children in such desperation and destitution.

That stuff is really cool, and I don't doubt that it could exist. This author probably did encounter this community legend and collected some cool information about it. But I'm a little...suspicious. Or just unsatisfied. A lot more investigation and substatiation is needed before I'd accept it as a meaningful phenomenon.

The tricky bit is that this isn't an example of academic fieldwork -- it's some anecdotes. Sure, they're strung together with some quotes by authorities like Coles and Hamilton. The problem is that Coles and Hamilton are being quoted in a general way, and the author is using their ideas to support her theories. They clearly aren't commenting directly on the data.

I can't find too much info about Lynda Edwards, the reporter, online, except for some other pieces (similar in their dramatic style) has written for alternative newsweeklies.

If this story is true, it's very very interesting, but I need to see that there's been some more thorough work done before I believe it's not just a couple wacky conversations with kids blown out of proportion. Certainly, it's not unheard of for complex myth-cycles to emerge among socially or geographically isolated groups - I'm just way surprised never to have heard of this. I've looked through the archives of my public folklore list, and the next step would be to do a JSTOR search, which I can't do here today. Anyone up for it? Independent folklorists, to the barricades!

Wow, very interesting. I'm now thinking about Bloody Mary, who was very real for me and my friends as a child (this must have been in the early 90s). I refused to keep a mirror in my room at night, and my brother would terrorize me by locking me in the hall closet (which had no interior light switch and had a mirror on the back of the door).

The Wikipedia article on children's street culture has a bit about "Myth over Miami" at the very end.

Miko--One of the things that set me wondering about how much structure the reporter imposed on the stories was the invocation of Robert Sandifer's murder as a sacrifice to Bloody Mary. Sandifer, at the age of 11, had--as I recall--over 23 juvenile adjudications for all sorts of crimes, not merely the shooting of a bystander while attempting to kill rival gang members. The Black Disciples were in the habit of using Sandifer as a fall guy and to deflect attention from themselves, but when he shot that girl (and wounded two others), he was no longer a safe decoy and the higher-ups in the gang killed him (he was, in fact, found under the viaduct in a pile of broken glass, but broken glass is pretty common under viaducts). I vaguely remember the trials of the boys who killed him (I worked for a short time with one of their attorney, which is neither here nor there, actually).

I've been trying to articulate this thought all morning and I'm not sure I'm going to be able to, but here goes. The reporter writes the tale "told in Chicago shelters" as an exact parrallel to the actual sad story of Sandifer's life. He was used by the gang-because he was so young--as a decoy until he did something so heinous, he became a liability instead of a handy diversion, then, he was murdered. That *was* the gang strategy; and it seems a demonic strategy. That the children in the shelters *recognize* it as a demonic strategy and then impute it to the evil Bloody Mary seems off to me. Not that children can't be that sophisticated in ordering their world--after all the gang members who used and killed Sandifer were that sophisticated, but that the metaphor is more orderly in the Sandifer story than it is in the rest of the tales she relates.

Anyway. Like you, I'm unsatisfied, although I find that article to be a great piece of writing, and also find the underlying stories of kids in lives completely devoid of hope, promise or order horrific.