A steamy rain is causing Mary Wilson`s bad knee to act up. She is tall and not thin, and she has a hard time getting out of her 1983 Lincoln Continental.
She has a mission, however.
Mary Wilson straightens up and strides smartly, albeit with a slight limp, into Chuck White`s Buick dealership on the South Side. White has promised a contribution to the Simeon Vocational High School basketball banquet. She is here to collect.
Mary Wilson is ushered into White`s small, windowless office.
Chuck White is a bulldog–short and bald and chunky, a former high school football coach. He is asked by a visitor how he feels about Mary Wilson. His features soften. ”I think, to be perfectly honest,” he says, measuring his words carefully, ”I think about her and I think about Jacqueline Kennedy–two noble people able to handle stress in a fine fashion.”
”Oh, my,” Mary Wilson demurs, and changes the subject.
White leaves the office, and Mary turns introspective. She volunteers some extremely intimate details about her personal life to the visitor, a near-total stranger.
Later, in the car, Mary Wilson recalls that conversation in the office
–and the realization suddenly hits her that those personal details could be published. That possibility sends her into a flutter of distress.
”Please,” she pleads, ”please don`t print that. I don`t want people to know I`m human.”
What Mary Wilson means is that she sometimes feels compelled to live up to an image. It is the image of a strong, saintly woman who last November, just hours after the murder of her son Ben, one of the nation`s top high school basketball players, came to Simeon Vocational High School, where the students were wailing and pounding the walls . . . and she consoled them. ”I taught Benji to think positive in every situation,” she told them, her voice thin and trembling. ”I know that he would not want me to give energy to things I cannot change.” And, recalling her son, she said, ”(You must)
continue to set your goals high. And to know that the only way to lose in this life is when you do not set goals.”
In the following days she spoke at City Hall and in the Illinois legislature about her sorrow, about not surrendering to it. ”I`m beginning to feel,” she said in Springfield, ”that even in his death there`s something for me to do. We need to start thinking about what can be done to stop the killing. The killing has to stop.”
Mary Wilson has not stopped since the day her son died.
She now holds the title President and Managing Director of the Benji Wilson Youth Foundation. She is perhaps not the perfect candidate to be head of a nonprofit charitable foundation. First of all–and maybe this alone is reason enough–she trusts people. She simply doesn`t expect the worst of them. There is an innocence, more of a naivete, about her.
But she is learning. ”I`m in school, honey,” she says with a husky laugh. ”You hear me?”
Her first lesson came within days after her son`s death. Some neighborhood girls volunteered to help her. After a few weeks, she found that some of them were taking huge piles of her mail home–they told her they were logging it–and returning the opened envelopes. ”I didn`t even know, I hadn`t even thought about money,” she laments.
One of her most recent lessons came when she decided that the first Benji Wilson Scholarship should go to the 18-year-old mother of Brandon, Ben`s year- old child. The woman in question, a senior at Simeon, had made the honor roll, and Mary Wilson felt she deserved the award . . . until her lawyer informed her that the IRS would frown upon such dealings. Instead, she donated two $500 scholarships to students at Kennedy-King and Truman Colleges.
The transformation of Mary Wilson from registered nurse to foundation president has not been easy. She gets advice from almost everyone she meets. The guy at the sandwich shop on the corner counsels her on keeping good records and how she must account for every hour of her day. Her foundation executive director is in charge of correspondence, but until recently he had no telephone. She has prevailed upon friends to teach her the rudiments of writing grant proposals and finding office space.
The transformation of Mary Wilson began three days after her son was gunned down by reputed gang members near Simeon. She checked into the Hyde Park Hilton in order to be alone. ”I locked myself in that room,” she recalls, ”and I talked. I didn`t pray, I just talked to Him. I said, `Okay, where are You? I want to talk. I cannot ask a person, Father, because they`re human like I am. But I want your spirit to give me the answer of why.` And then I began to scream to Him to give me some answers to why . . . did . . . he . . . have . . . to . . . die?” Her voice rises with each word, the last one lost in a shriek.
” `Help me to understand that! I could see him being out of school or going without playing ball, but why did You take this beautiful person? What are You trying to say to me? Talk to me! Tell me something!` And I carried on this fight with the Lord for hours, until I was cold and not knowing.”
Mary Wilson puts no faith in the God that her Baptist-preacher father warned her about as a child, the vengeful God who punishes those who stray from the strictures of the Bible.
And she no longer prays for answers. Now all she says is: ”It was meant to be.” She assumes that there is a Greater Plan to all this, a plan that has not been revealed to her. ”I really wanted to be the one to go,” she says.
”That`s what I asked for. I asked in the name of Jesus that the transformation would take place and the miracle would happen in the hospital, the miracle being that my body would become Ben`s body, and his would become mine, and I would fall at his feet, as slain, dead. And he would get up and say, `What happened?`
”I had hoped something like this would be the miracle, and the newspaper the next day would say, `Mrs. Wilson has died and we don`t know why and she`s got all the wounds that he had.` And I thought that would have been just great, and I would have been happy to know that this young man could go on with a great life. But then as I talked about this to another friend of mine, she said, `Mary, I think a transformation did take place. Think about that. Ben was a star out there playing ball, everyone looking at him, and you`re becoming that. And the transformation is you`re standing for something strong and great and that`s what he was for. And so you see the transformation, it`s really taken place in a different way than you wanted, but it really is a transformation, isn`t it?` ”
Overnight, Mary Wilson, who had never sought the center stage except in the church choir, became a celebrity. She had no experience in public speaking, but she had something to say. People wondered where she found the strength, and she said it came from God.
On television she was a natural. She had that ineffable–and unteachable
–quality: presence. Richard Brennan, president of Evergreen Plaza Bank, saw her on television that first day and he recalls, ”It just hit me so hard. Everything she said meant something to me. She talked about nonviolence. She wasn`t mad, where she should have been, having just lost a son. I felt that I had to do something.”
He has since advised Mary about investments and supported her causes vigorously, even bailing her out in March when the Benji Wilson birthday banquet and testimonial at the Chicago Marriott Hotel Grand Ballroom was slipping into the red.
”I think she has potential to save a lot of kids,” Brennan says. ”I`ve seen kids react to her. The main thing is they listen to her. They think she`s something special. Someday some kids are going to walk in and give her a big kiss, and say, `You know, you saved my life, Mrs. Wilson, 20 years ago. That day on television, you were the one who changed my life, turned me around.` ” On March 18, which would have been Ben`s 18th birthday, hundreds of students from Simeon encircled City Hall and unraveled long rolls of petitions to stop the sale of handguns, 17,000 signatures in all. Between the signatures, at regular intervals, was a likeness of Ben Wilson.
In accepting the petitions, Mayor Washington said: ”If and when the problem of gangs and young people killing each other is solved, it will be due to a great extent to the work of people like Mary Wilson.”
It will also be due to the fact that Mary Wilson is no politician. She says what she thinks. Period. There is no guile to the woman, no pretense. It comes across in her speeches, and helps account for the fact that her engagement book is almost always full. ”I never have a `no` in my mouth,”
she says with a sigh. She is in demand for banquets and beauty pageants, luncheons and graduations, rallies and talk shows. In July she went to Washington, D.C., to speak at a rally before an important congressional vote on handgun control. In August she spoke in Miami, and there are plans for more speeches across the country. She also may be asked to do a television public- service announcement.
Now in her mid-40s, Mary Wilson`s time is split between two goals: the foundation and the raising of her two youngest sons, Jeffrey, 12, and Anthony, 8. The boys often complain they`re getting short shrift. Mary Wilson feels guilty about that, but the foundation at the moment is her new infant. To her it is more than simply a matter of raising funds and delivering speeches: It is a monument to her son.
”Five hours after I left the hospital that day, I knew that I wanted to keep his memory alive,” she says. ”I`m not trying to make anybody sad; I`m not sad. I just want to make what he stood for (known) to other young people, so they can do something great. I think that keeps me going.”
When she is asked about the aims of the foundation, she talks about job-training programs and showing young people ”a better route to take.” She talks about honesty and character. But these are all abstractions. Finally she gets to the core: ”I`m a mama,” she says. ”I mean, I think that there are women who give birth, and there are women who really give time and love. And I just want to be a good mama to some more young people.”
”Yeah, she`s really rolling now,” says Mary`s second son, Curtis Glenn, a Chicago firefighter. ”It seemed like she was kind of relaxing before, slowing down. But now she`s got something she can fight back with. She`s taking (her grief) out on running around and getting things done for the foundation.”
The foundation itself got off to a shaky start in January and is ”still a little short” of being totally organized and administered professionally, admits her lawyer, Konstantinos ”Dino” Armiros. But with tax-exempt status imminent, and the accounting firm of Laventhol & Horwath on board to look after the numbers, it seems that the Benji Wilson Youth Foundation will soon be on solid ground. There is a book and a made-for-television movie in the works, but in the end the success of the foundation will depend in large part on Mary Wilson–the money she can raise, the people she can inspire.
