Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors “loved many things,” her novelist father wrote in a moving tribute 10 days after her fatal mugging just steps from campus — “but people mostly.”
She loved “rugged nature,” too, grieving dad Inman Majors wrote, and a succession of treasured family cats, and her own widening world, in which, he wrote, she “expected everyone to just get along.”
Majors, 18, was remembered Saturday in her hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, by 1,000 of those who loved her.
The mourners gathered at her former high school, while in New York police continued to seek the 14-year-old boy who allegedly stabbed her to death in Morningside Park on Dec. 11.
A 13-year-old boy is already in custody, and a third suspect was questioned by cops but ultimately released.
Saturday’s 90-minute memorial was filled, fittingly, with music, as Majors had been an accomplished bass player and songwriter.
One of Majors’ songs, “Prom Queen,” which she wrote for her band Patient Zero was played for the crowd, the teen’s high voice crying out this plaintive lyric: “Remember the night she rose from the sea/ Stood with arms open wide as she walked right past me/ I tried not to mind as she went by/ The freckles on her face, the stars in the sky.”
And, because there were writers present — not just her father, but also the editor of the Augusta Free Press, where she’d interned during her final spring — there were moving words.
“Tess Majors would conquer the world,” the editor, Chris Graham, wrote in his own tribute.
“I wasn’t sure how. Neither, it seemed to me, was she. Maybe it would be music. Maybe she’d write the great American novel.”
One of the most poignant written remembrances at the service was an unsigned piece on the back of the program.
“Tessa Rane Majors arrived on planet Earth on May 11, 2001, and was brought home to a small house in Tullahoma, TN,” it read. “Her family was very, very glad to have her.”
The unsigned piece noted that when Majors was still a baby, “a particular white onesie” made her look like a tiny astronaut.
“Her father would hold Tess in front of a mirror and sing: ‘Future baby, future baby/Goes so good with biscuits and gravy…’
“Then in a deep, mock serious voice like someone narrating Star Wars, he’d intone: ‘One day in the future all babies will be this good.’”
In her father’s tribute, he noted that Tessa’s family members “feel her presence currently more than her absence.”
He also wrote of her great promise, “Hers was a big umbrella, and getting bigger.”
