Undefined Hatred in Oakland and Ireland

Then: Irish party fight

In early 19th Century Ireland rural farmers and farm workers, generally referred to as "peasants" in those days, would form secret societies, or parties, which sometimes would turn to violence for the purpose of resisting abuse by Protestant landlords.  Sometimes they fought each other, sometimes for no apparent reason.  In some ways, they were like the gangs and turf groups of Oakland and other urban places in America today.

Here, a character in a contemporary story by Irish novelist William Carleton describes the problems with the parties, with the vagueness of their mutual hatreds, the senseless violence they commit, and how they passed their hatred from generation to generation.

The writing is a little old-fashioned, but clear, and the joke of the title of the story, "The Party Fight and Funeral," is that whenever there's a party fight, inevitably follows a funeral.

I read it last night, and it reminded me of what many thoughtful people in Oakland have told me about the nature and depth of our own troubles:

I believe you would find...difficulty in ascertaining the cause of the feuds from the factions themselves. I really am convinced they know not, nor, if I rightly understand them, do they much care. Their object is to fight, and the turning of a straw will at any time furnish them with sufficient grounds for that.  I do not think, after all, that the enmity between them is purely personal: they do not hate each other individually; but having originally had one quarrel upon some trifling occasion, the beaten party could not bear the stigma of defeat without another trial of strength.  Then if they succeed, the onus of retrieving lost credit is thrown upon the party that was formerly victorious.  If they fail a second time, the double triumph of their conquerors excites them to a greater determination to throw off the additional disgrace; and this species of alternation perpetuates the evil.

These habits, however, familiarize our peasantry to acts of outrage and violence -- the bad passions are cultivated and nourished, until crime, which peaceable men look upon with fear and horror, lose their real magnitude and deformity in the eyes of Irishmen.  I believe this kind of undefined hatred between either parties or nations is the most dangerous and fatal spirit which could pervade any portion of society.  If you hate a man for an obvious and palpable injury, it is likely that when he cancels that injury by an act of subsequent kindness, accompanied by an exhibition of sincere sorrow, you will cease to look upon him as your enemy; but where the hatred is such that, while feeling it, you cannot, on a sober examination of your heart, account for it, there is little hope that you will ever be able to stifle the enmity which you entertain against him.
                                          --William Carleton, The Party Fight and Funeral, 1852 

Now: Oakland crime scene

El Camino de Regreso

The bi-lingual newspaper Visión Hispana has published a (very) short version of our Caheri Gutierrez story en español:
El Camino de Regresso

Caheri in Her Own Words

Read about the life and ongoing recovery of Caheri Gutierrez, the subject of "I Might Have Some Hope Here," at her blog, Life.

Imaginary Pain

When the girl yelled “Gun!” I was skeptical.  Even though the last time I was at a funeral where someone yelled “gun” shots had indeed been fired, it seemed probable that this was a false alarm.   

The kids had been boisterous before the service began, and occasionally distracted as the morning and the mourning progressed. To the classmates of the dead, along with sadness and strangeness, there is that unavoidable buoyancy the pleasure of a day away from school brings; before the sobbing that comes when they view the body, often there is restlessness and laughter and showing off, gossip, groupings and groups dissolving, endless trips to the restroom, posing and flirting.  This morning there had been plenty of all this, and I thought this sudden panic might be only an offshoot of a hyper-stimulated imagination.  And so I was slow to react.   

As mourners all around me scattered, in astonishingly coordinated flocks, like a sky full of starlings sensing a predator, I stupidly scanned the rectangular church for evidence of a gun.  Kids were screaming as they ran for the doors.  People huddled on the floor.  Many, like the family I’d been sitting next to -- mom, dad, and two toddlers, a boy and girl -- had taken refuge behind pews.  Up on the altar I could see two preachers, standing tall, with their phones to their ears.  Soon the police would arrive.  

Suddenly, these thoughts passed through my mind, in something like this progression: If there is a gun he’s not looking for me.  Random.  If there is a gun I could be shot.  This could be it.  I crouched down, my face pressed against the back of a wooden pew.  Unlike most everyone else in the church this morning, all of whom had reacted to the threat with appropriate urgency, I wasn’t used to this kind of thing.

“I will not have to worry about him anymore”

At funerals of murdered people in Oakland, the older gentlemen always take off their hats when they enter the church, but unless one of the preachers tells them to, the young men never do.  They are usually wearing baseball caps, as are the deceased in their coffins, if they are particularly young.

This week I’d been to two services, each for an Oaklander killed on January 8^th.  Each was killed in a neighborhood maimed by generations of violence, and where residents live under a constant threat: Ishmael Knudsen was gunned-down in West Oakland, Lovell Hadnot in East Oakland. 

Ishmael was 29.  He was shot outside a store in Campbell Village and pronounced dead inside the store.  In November, I’d attended a kind-of summit at City Hall between Oakland law enforcement and a collection of the most violence-prone young men of Campbell Village, a 1960s, Oakland-style public housing project in the far west end of town, bordering the warehouses that border the port.  Erstwhile Police Chief Batts was there.  Over and over that afternoon the Campbell Villagers were warned that they were being closely watched, and that any act of violence would likely lead to federal time.  They were offered help getting out of the life of the gun: job placement and training, drug counseling, and spiritual guidance.  This is not to say that any of the eighteen young men at that meeting at City Hall killed Ishmael Knudsen.  Many credible sources believe that a series of these City Hall summits with men and women from neighborhoods across the city have had a positive impact on the violence here. 

But, Ishmael is dead, the first Campbell Village murder since November, and since his killing there's been another in the neighborhood.

Twice at the funeral at the Church of the Chimes, on Martin Luther King Day, relatives of Ishmael tried to read his obituary to the congregation, and twice they faltered.  One friend said, “We’re gonna miss him true enough.”  Ishmael’s sister said she’d asked him to stay off the streets.  She warned others to take a deep breath and think about it, to think, “Maybe I shouldn’t go.”  Finally, demonstrating another way in which death is mercy, she said, “I will not have to worry about him anymore.” 

The Myth of the Great Speech

When it comes to stemming violence, the preachers at the funerals of the killed are powerless, especially the older ones. 

In general, the young men the preachers think they’re speaking to don’t listen.  They clap when they’re supposed to, and they say “Amen,” but they shut down when the old preachers, usually the pastor of the church, start saying the same old things, the same things that didn’t change anything the last time.  They are unmoved by the preachers’ nostalgic litanies of the comparatively innocent transgressions of their own infinitely distant youths, unmoved by the supposedly relevant lyrics to songs the preachers often admit none of the young people ever will have heard, by the platitudes, by the straightforward begging for reason, by the earnest, plaintive appeals to black pride, to civic pride, to human feeling, to heed the peaceful urgings of Christ.

It’s not the preacher’s fault.  I sit there waiting, wondering what they could ever say that might make a difference.  Often they appear to labor under the myth of the great speech, the idea that they can inspire with their words and the scriptures a moment of mass, permanent transcendence that will change lives right then and there.  Deep down, they must know that what difference they can make will need to be on one young person at a time. 

And yet, at the funeral, they have to say something.  Some concentrate on lifting the spirit of the family.  It’s possible they have surrendered to the reality that a sermon about leaving behind the emptiness of the life of the gun will probably be ineffective, if not completely ignored by those living that life.  So they don’t dwell in the plaintive mode.  These preachers tend to put all of their substantial eloquence and energy into lifting the spirits of the family with the proposition, put forth at all the funerals of the killed in Oakland, that, if there is any, even scant, evidence that at some time in his life the deceased gave his soul to Jesus, then today is nothing but a celebration of his joyous home-going.  He or she, we are promised, is now in a better place than we are. 

In this way and others, the funerals of Ishmael and Lovell were contrasts.  On Monday at the Chapel of the Chimes, Pastor Robin Marshal, of the Book of the Covenant Ministries, fervently and openly urged Ishmael’s family to joy.  She wore a beautiful, white, brocaded gown.  She worked openly and hard to raise not only Ishmael’s spirit but the spirit of everyone there upward.  Even her hair was sculpted into spires.  I had to leave before the service ended, and so I missed her eulogy; she might have tried to talk about the violence then, but while I was there, the talk turned plaintive only when, briefly, Pastor Marshal gave way to Sister Denise Bell.

Sister Bell got closer than anyone else I’ve heard at a funeral to not only the brevity, but also the kind of content, tone, pace and anger that I could imagine making a difference, almost.  “When you kill,” she said, “you don’t just destroy one person, you destroy all of us.  Time is running out.  We’re frightened for you.  Parents, lay your hands on them, and pray for them.”  There was something about her that was genuine, spontaneous.  Her anger felt...fresh.

Two OPD cruisers were stationed a half a block on either side of the chapel entryway.  But it wasn’t until Wednesday that someone at a funeral would shout “Gun!”

Real and Imaginary Pain

On Wednesday morning, the sun was so bright, the sky so blue, the temperature so mild, that bloody Bancroft Avenue, Seminary Avenue and Foothill Boulevard seemed almost benign.  The blocks are clean.  The architecture where Seminary meets Foothill is simple, but the buildings do not look unloved.  Low-slung and functional, they are not beautiful, but there is a craft and an age to the structures that gives them dignity.  There are a number of storefront churches along these East Oakland streets. 

Outside busy Diego’s Power Alley Gym, I walk past a man sweeping the sidewalk. Lovell Hadnot was shot only a couple of blocks from here, on Bancroft.  He died at the scene. This morning, a little up the block, high school-aged kids are gathering outside the entrance to Good Hope Ministry Baptist Church.  Velly Hadnot was a sophomore at Fremont High; by the end of the service, there will be well over a hundred of his school mates here.

In the big, painted-cinderblock church, among a group of young men seated behind me near the back -- they are in their early twenties -- one wears, for some reason, a blue-gray washcloth on top of his head.  At each of the funerals of the killed I’ve attended there has been a blessed musical interval that gives me chills.  It’s not always a gospel song.  Once it was an a capella Our Father sung by a deeply grieving cousin.  Sometimes it is the pastor him or herself who breaks into song.  Today one of this group of young men, who had arrived well after the service began, is the singer.  He is dressed casually.  His deep voice overwhelms the sound system.  But I can make out that he says he did not really know Velly, but that he knows Velly’s cousin.  He proceeds to ad lib a low-key rap about Velly, about Velly’s cousin’s sorrow, while the organist tries to find a key in which to accompany him.  It’s spontaneous, but it doesn’t really fit the moment.

Programs are handed out at all the services of the killed in Oakland.  They feature photographs from the life of the dead, an obituary, maybe a poem, some thank-yous, and a step-by-step schedule for the funeral.  But there is nothing liturgical about the services; they proceed loosely, almost casually.  They can run for two hours, depending on the preacher, on whether or not a revival occurs and new church members are recruited, and on how many people participate in the Expressions.  Expressions are the time in the service when anyone who wants to can take the microphone and talk for up to two minutes about the deceased, or the family, or themselves.  Sometimes the Expressions are touching, sometimes funny in a way that brings everyone momentary comfort.  Often they end abruptly, with tears.  Sometimes they are completely incoherent.  Sometimes they just kill you, like when Velly’s dad, with Velly’s mom at his side, says, with a mix of pride and explanation, “We did the best we could.  He and I watched football together every Sunday.  We are a good family.”

During the Expressions at Lovell Hadnot’s funeral, I imagine someone rising and walking the long walk across the church's bright red carpet and up to the microphone at the foot of the altar and saying, slowly, I’m a friend of everyone.  Everyone, please close your eyes a moment.  I will keep mine open to protect you.  Now, everyone, please try to imagine you were Lovell, try to imagine you were Lovell, try to imagine you are Velly walking, that you are Velly, on a Saturday evening.  You’re walking.  Try to imagine what he thought, what was the thought he had at the moment when he first understood the bullet.  Try to imagine you are him, a kid, you’re walking on Bancroft, late in the day, then you are on the ground, and imagine what he thought about when he realized the blood was draining out of his body, and the life, what he thought when he knew that life was leaving him, and he grew weary, and his vision darkened, and try to imagine his pain, the fear, and then his sorrow, that he could not speak to his mother or to his father, to explain to them that they will be okay, what he thought about as he lay there waiting for something to happen, for help, or more pain, or more likely death, and it is likely he knew it.  Try, for just as long as you can, even if it is only for a second, try to imagine that feeling that you are Velly and you are going to die, and who is left behind without you.

Now try to imagine you have to make the call to Lovell’s mother.  Now imagine you are Lovell’s mother hearing for the first time out of nowhere the words that your son is dead, shot dead, shot down, gone.  Do this: picture before you an empty expanse with no light.  Pitch dark, no signs, no ground, no sky, nothing, nothing in front, above or beneath you.  Picture yourself there.  All there is before you is darkness.  Now feel the hands hit your back, and push you, without mercy, into the empty and dark expanse.

But, no one does, and it is time for the eulogy.

Some pastors, even if they understand the futility of their pleas, can’t help themselves: they are sick for their community and they have to try.  Here at Velly’s funeral there is a substantial audience of young people coming of age at the grim geographical nexus of our violence that is Bancroft, Seminary, and Foothill.  The pastor has before him a fairly large contingent of African American men just entering the age group of greatest peril: 17 to 34. 

Some pastors, they’ve got these young people in here, a semi-captive audience, and they are going to give it a go, they’re going to try to find what no one has found before: the words, the word, the one idea, the one tone, the one long-elusive volume, the one inarguable piece of logic, the one laugh line or soaring passage that will transform the psyches and souls of these young men, who are either cynical, or totally disaffected, or overwhelmed with anger, or overwhelmed with fear, young men restrained by the chains of an entire life in which they have seen killing used as, if not the only answer, then a common answer to common problems.    

Early on, while decrying the influence of the Devil, the old pastor recites a passage from the Bible, John 10:10, in which Jesus tells the Pharisees, “The thief cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come so that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.” 

And then he goes straight to the plaintive. 

Put down your guns, he says, and pick up the bible.  Be a good role model.  The Devil is the worst enemy you could ever know.  All this killing is motivated by the Devil.  Why is everybody drinking tequila?  Stop smoking pot.  I might expect this killing in Mississippi fifty years ago, by whites, but all this black on black killing is awful.  Children should bury parents, not the other way around.  

Remember what James Brown said: I’m black and proud.  

Finally, he tries to quote the 1982 Grandmaster Flash song “The Message,” but he can’t recall the name of the song, the precise lyrics, or who recorded it.  “A while back,” he says, “there was a song said it’s a jungle.  Something like, ‘It’s a jungle,’” he says, “’you wonder what keeps you from going under.’”  Despite the haphazard clues we’re given, everyone knows the song, and everyone seems glad to think about it.

In the neighborhood where these kids live and go to school, shootings and homicides occur with a desensitizing regularity.  Five days ago a man and a teenager were shot right here on Foothill Boulevard.  Last summer, Jimon Clark was killed on nearby Bancroft.  He was 13.  A few days before Jimon was shot in the back, Melvin Murphy was stabbed to death in an apartment complex on Bancroft.  Derrick Jones was killed on Bancroft by police back in November.  Alvaro Ayala was a student at the same high school as Lovell.  He was killed almost one year ago to the day. 

And yet, somehow, at least superficially, they remain, like all teens, conventional: self-conscious, social, periodically oblivious, ignorant of or uninterested in decorum.  They do tend to cooperate with the instructions of the preachers, to clap when they are asked to, to stand when they are asked to.  They know when they are expected to say “Amen” or to answer in unison a question about Jesus or the perils of smoking pot. 

But they don’t take any of the pastor’s words seriously.  Hopefully that’s because they assume they will never kill anyone anyway.  No doubt, being kids, and despite today's evidence to the contrary, some think they will never die.  And they don't seem gloomy.

Until it is time to see their schoolmate’s body.

Playtime is Over

As the sad service moves erratically toward its end, two dark-suited preachers open the gray, gleaming casket, drape white muslin down from the edge of the open lid and over the upper half of Velly, and without much order, we approach the altar.  In line, I smell weed, tobacco, last night’s beer.  

Most of us are going up to the body of Velly Hadnot to say goodbye.  In my case, I’m going because I want something solemn, I want more than imaginary pain, more than words, more than a news item, I want to pass by and see this stricken family gathered in the front pews. I want to look at this former kid from my city and be confronted with his dead body, his folded hands, his sewn-shut eyes, his eternally unmoving face, his utmost end.  I want to be confronted by the complexities of his life and death and the lives of all the children of Oakland I’ve been watching in this church this morning and other churches all across the city for the last year. I want to feel something like grace before I go.  

Sometimes the murdered look peaceful, but Velly looks pained.  There is no comfort to be found in his last grimace. The mortician has placed a blue Oakland A’s cap on his head.

I try to pray.  I think about how I am probably the only person here praying like a Catholic, an Our Father -- deliver us from evil -- a Hail Mary -- now and at the hour of our death.  Amen.  A moment staring at Velly’s face, a slight shake of my head, only the briefest pause over him.  We’d been instructed to keep the line moving.

I could walk out from here, but instead I decide to go to the very back of the church, and stay until the bitter end. 

Most of the kids who have passed the coffin are sobbing.  Now that they’ve seen Velly’s dead body, playtime is over.  Of course, in a way hard for me and my ilk to understand, for many of them, playtime ended long ago, or never existed.  What would this sorrow do to them tomorrow?  How will it inform who they become?  How will it manifest itself in the character of Oakland?  In a year, in five years?

It was just as I reached the back of the church that the first scream sounded.  From the middle of the church, from a girl, it came like a javelin hurled up and out of the wailing.  It was incoherent, but clearly urgent, followed by a momentary pause while the crowd gathered its senses, then another scream, and another, so we begin to understand -- a gun -- and then a chorus of screams and pointing, a mad scattering of groups for the exit, a bottleneck there, people dropping to the floor, hiding behind pews, I looked for the gun, a gleaming, for someone with an arm out, someone pointing.  I listened for a sound.  I saw and heard nothing threatening, but the realization came to me that this could be real, and so I crouched behind a pew, alone, waiting.

'chaos at end of funeral just like with davante'

By the time I stood back up and took a seat along the wall near the door, fear had turned to anger.  Cries, those terrible cries that hold everything, fear, frustration, grief and anger, had replaced the screams.  Apparently, there was no shooter; people were outraged that the solemn and dignified mourning of the Hadnots for their murdered 15-year-old had been cruelly interrupted.  His sister was at the pulpit insisting on order and respect for her family and her lost brother.  Soon, one of the preachers asked that everyone but the family leave the church. 

Out on sunny Foothill, police cars had begun to arrive.  The scene was not unlike at the funeral of Davante Riley, back in March of 2010, when a panic at the very end of the service was for real guns and real bullets flying.  That day, in a black suit, I’d been mistaken for a preacher.  

Today, tie-less, in a blue shirt and black blazer, I’m taken for a cop by an angry man with gold teeth.  

“You’re a cop,” he says to me, with outrage, “why didn’t you tell them the gun wasn’t inside the church!”  I’m not a cop, I say.  “Then what’s your business here?”  I don’t know exactly how to answer him.  I’m an ogler, a voyeur, a grief junkie, a friend, a mourner.  I represent the neighborhoods where no one gets shot, or goes to storefront churches, or proudly worships Jesus, the neighborhoods where, if kids die, it’s from car accidents or leukemia or defects they’ve had since birth, where few own handguns, or have seen a lifeless body in the street, or leftover police tape, or blood that’s gone brown, where few have had a brother or son gunned-down, or a father incarcerated, where a baseball cap is just a baseball cap, where, if people have watched a season or two of The Wire, then they think they know everything about your lives and why you die. 

I come from Oakland, but an Oakland where, if people were aware ten days ago that a 15-year-old boy from their town had been gunned down, they probably haven’t thought about it for nine days since.  I want to tell them about how the story continues.  I think they are missing out on something important. 

But I don’t say any of this, and before I can say anything, a woman in a blue sweatshirt emerges from the church and, having sensed our confrontation, steps in to tell the man that I am okay, and immediately he turns away.  I don’t know who she was.  More cops are arriving.  I had hung around after Davante’s funeral for hours, but today I head to my car, text Marilyn Harris, who works to help the families of the killed of Oakland, and who had had to leave Velly’s service early to meet another family at a mortuary:  

chaos at end of 
funeral just 
like with 
davante.

I think about something the pastor said during his eulogy.  “Somebody killed Lovell because they didn’t like him.” 

I don’t know if he was being specific, if he had heard this from the family or from the street.  He might just have been speaking generally, speaking to the truism that homicide is hateful.  But there is a trend in Oakland of young people killing young people over trifles.  Last year I went to funerals for a 13-year-old, a 15-year-old, and two 17-year-old kids.  Lovell was 15.  15.  What could you possibly do by 15 to get yourself killed?  Why was he killed?

Driving away, I try to stay focused. I think about what Ishmael Knudsen’s sister had said on Monday: I won’t have to worry about him anymore. I think about what Sister Bell had said, in the dim, cold, Gothic Chapel of the Chimes, where all through the service a downward slant of winter light bled through the windows, but failed to warm the tiles of the floor.  Lay your hands on them.   

The Dark Urges

Darryl Starks' little sister needs $20.  She needs it for a new tattoo, one that will commemorate his death, which is imminent.  Starks himself lies intubated and comatose in a narrow hospital bed, in ICU room #19, at the Alameda County Medical Center, a.k.a Highland Hospital.  He lies under bright lights.  His head is tilted back a little on the white pillow, skewed just slightly to his left, toward where his oxygen tube runs.  His eyelids are not completely closed. 

It’s Saturday night.  Starks was shot on Friday evening, at 78^th Avenue and Bancroft, while driving home from the store.  He was hit once in the shoulder and once in the back of the head.  Now an ICU nurse sits distractedly at a computer station just outside a picture window with a view onto Starks' unmoving body.  Occasionally the nurse checks his iPhone.

Claims

A social worker seeking Darryl’s organs hovers in the glare of the dingy hospital hallway.  The family is onboard for the harvesting of the organs of their twenty-six-year-old son.  But the process will not move swiftly.  Darryl’s violated body is evidence, and so the coroner must give its permission to pull the plug, as it were.  And this being a Saturday, the coroner’s office is closed.  So nothing will happen until Monday, at the earliest. 

A Seventh Day Adventist pastor stands over the body.  I see a number of pastors hovering around the ICU protecting their claims, their black, tattered bibles in hand.  (Later the Adventist clergyman will join hands with Darryl’s mom, out in the waiting room, and say a lucid and plaintive prayer for strength and peace.  She will bow her head and close her eyes tightly and hope for the best, even as five minutes earlier she’d been saying she did not want an Adventist service for her son.)

In twos and threes, Darryl’s sisters, his cousins, his aunt and mother, and his father, estranged from his mother, stand at his bedside, variously staring down at him, talking at him, or chatting amongst themselves.  They are remarkably poised.  His mother, Ella Thompson, tells me she’s been crying for two days, but of course, Darryl was shot only 24 hours ago.  Probably it just feels like two days.

Today is precisely one week before Christmas, 2010.  Three days ago, Starks had visited his little sister out in Antioch, where earlier this year she and her mother had moved.  He’d asked her what she wanted for Christmas, and once it had been decided that a car was out of the question, she’d suggested she’d settle for some jeans and shoes, which her big brother had said sounded more reasonable.  Now Danesha just wants that $20.

The Conveyor Belt of Grief

Danesha is 16, petite, with braces and beautiful, deep brown eyes.  Tonight, like the rest of her family, with the exception of her older sister’s little boy, maybe 3-years-old, who is bored and hungry, she is calm.  She’s also put-out with an ICU nurse who declined to indulge her talk of miracles.  In the room, staring at the lines moving across the monitor, she’d asked the nurse what they would look like if Darryl was to take a turn for the better.  The nurse, in impatient tones, according to Danesha, answered only that her brother would not be taking any good turns anymore, that he was going to die. 

           

“I looked at her,” she says, with disbelief in her voice, “and then I looked at him...”  Here she trails off.  But she doesn’t cry.

I can see both sides of the incident.  Probably, the ICU nurse felt it was best to nudge any lagging family members onto the conveyor belt of this reality and its unavoidable grief.  You have to get on the belt somewhere if you are ever going to get off.  It was something like an act of mercy.  Probably this is inconceivable to a sixteen-year-old.  And maybe the nurse could have been gentler while insisting on her realistic assessment.  Maybe Danesha misinterpreted her tone.  It’s a confusing time.  A painful time.  All the alien sights at the ICU, all the exhaustion and emotion, they tax the senses and the mind. 

Occasionally Danesha doesn’t quite know what to do.  Who would?  When her mother leaves the waiting room to speak to a reporter from a local paper, she asks me if she has to go with them.  I say No, but later, when I see a picture of her mother and older sister accompanying the article, I feel guilty.  I know she would have liked to be part of the public aspect of this event.

She’s already told me how, when she herself was shot, almost a year ago, on the day after Christmas, while at a gathering of kids at Rainbow Park, near the violent East Oakland intersection of Seminary and East 14^th, through her left thigh -- in one side and out the other, so now she has two scars -- they said her name on the TV news.  She seems proud of that, and then briefly disappointed when I tell her that the TV will probably not be coming tonight.  Her brother’s death is too demographically unspectacular for the TV.  1) He is 26, smack in the heart of the 17-to-34 year-old age range of African American men most likely to die by homicide.  2) He is a black man who lives in Oakland, and while most black men in Oakland will never get shot or killed, they do make up an absurd portion of this year’s 90-plus homicides, and nationally, their most recently calculated murder rate was 40.6/100,000, compared to 6.2 for white men.  3) Darryl was shot on a street in a neighborhood where violence is common.  I count within a few blocks of Bancroft at least six homicides this year, including that of 13-year-old Jimon Clark, back in August.  (See part 1 & part 2 of the September post called "13.")  4) Finally, Darryl had a gun in his car; people with guns are more likely to get killed than people without them.  Four and a half times more likely, according to some studies.

And so, although this event, the violent death of a young man, might hold cosmic heft, to the TV news, it holds little of interest.

Ella Thompson tells me that the fact that her son had a gun in the car with him seemed to be all the police were interested in when they’d questioned her at the hospital last night.  A very thin woman anyway, tonight she looks to be disappearing into nothing.  She’s only 44, but in the general frankness of the hospital lights she’s the color of a dry, fallen leaf.  Her hair is brushed back, her face is narrow, her speech is slow, but there is life in her eyes and they meet my gaze directly as we talk. 

“I’m mad at the investigators,” she says, “because they did not come out here to get evidence, his clothes, nothing; they came out here to find out why he had a gun in his car.  The gun was a registered gun, though.  And they didn’t ask anything else.  They didn’t want the bloody clothes.  They don’t even know where the clothes at.  I’m the only one knows where the clothes at.”

That might be why she was interested in talking to me tonight, and to a reporter from the Oakland Tribune.  Surely she knows how these stories get played here.  Ella was born and raised in East Oakland.  She grew up on 65^th Avenue.  She has one brother who is incarcerated and an uncle who was killed by the gun.  Darryl grew up in East Oakland, too.  He went to Castlemount High until his first daughter was born nine years ago.  He has two daughters.  The other is a two-year-old by a different woman.  Ella herself, in addition to Darryl and her two teenage daughters, has a five-year old girl. 

It is all so easy, so easy to sum up in a paragraph, the typical life of an East Oaklander.  Violence, out-of-wedlock children born to children, dropping out, more children by shifting combinations of parents.

Maybe that is why she wanted to have some say in this story, to lend it its proper complexity.  And so Marilyn Harris had called me earlier in the day to ask me to come to the hospital tonight. 

“Darryl Starks,” she’d said, “he’s about to die, and his mother wants his story told.”  Miss Marilyn is here now.  Ten years ago she lost her only son, Khadafy Washington, to the gun, and since then, through the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence, she has spent her days and nights guiding families of victims in Oakland through the poisonous aftermath.  Mostly Miss Marilyn comes into the picture immediately after someone dies, often at the crime scene, but wherever the family is, she goes.  More and more she seems to be joining the often long, trying hospital vigils of victims clinging to life.  No doubt word has gotten out that she is a confident, competent, knowledgeable, watchful presence.  Tonight she has one eye on the family of Darryl Starks and one eye on her iPhone, as her own daughter is in a hospital a few miles from here, with kidney problems.  I know she is anxious to get to her daughter, but she shows nothing but patience with the family, with their scattered emotions and uncertainty.  She keeps nearby, but always just beyond the inner circle, where she knows things have to be allowed to develop in their own way: there is no stopping the conveyor belt that will take this family on their tour of emptiness and loss.

Sitting next to each other, on yellow, plastic seats in a room around the corner and down the hall from where Darryl lies, I ask Ella Thompson to describe what she is feeling.  "Last night," she says, slowly, "I spent a horrible night crying in despair.  It’s just a shock, and knowing that your son was not out there selling drugs or hanging out on corners or nothing like that, and to know that he was a good son doing what he was supposed to do, it just don’t make no sense.

“I’m angry right now,” she says, “and the fact is, this was supposed to be a mistaken identity.  They was looking for a green Infinity, and my son drove a black Infinity."  When I ask her how she knows this, she says, "A couple of people done checked around for me and then they done found this out.”

The Best Year

The initial headline of the Tribune article, which hits the Internet just a few hours later, announces that Darryl’s organs will go to the saving of lives.  The story mentions that, after dropping out of high school at the birth of his first daughter nine years ago, he had recently been taking classes at Merritt College and preparing to transfer to a four-year school, that he had been working with his father at a hotel in San Francisco. 

“This year was supposed to be the best year,” says Ella.  “I done got myself back together.  Moved to Antioch, although it was the ghetto part of Antioch.  I didn’t know that before I moved there.”

           

She says she’s fallen asleep three times at Darryl’s bedside, holding Darryl’s hand.  At home again early this morning, she says she slept briefly, only to be awakened by a call of condolence, a call back into reality.  I think a lot about waking up after a sleep, in the early days of life after death.  How it dawns on you anew every time, sometimes in an instant, sometimes after a moment of confusion and later you wish you had clung to that confusion longer.  I remember going home the morning my father died, to a house full of relatives, and a mother in shock, how that afternoon, before we went to plan the funeral, I sat by my mother in an upstairs room.  She was lying on a sofa sleeping for probably the first time in two days.  I was in my dad’s blue recliner chair, vaguely scanning the day’s newspaper, but never turning the page, desperate not to wake her just yet, knowing that when she woke up on this day she’d lost her husband, she would have to re-live the first moments of this incomprehensible loss.  But also knowing I would have to do this cruel thing sooner or later.  That would have been eighteen years ago now.  Today my father lies under the snow, and Mom is well.

“Now it’s all bad”

It will probably be two weeks before Darryl Starks is buried.  While he was shot in mid-December, he was not destined to be our last 2010 homicide, and the coroner has been busy.  I saw Darryl in the ICU on Saturday night and by Sunday two more men were dead.  Then, all day on Monday a helicopter wove its way through the skies above my neighborhood in East Oakland.  Half a mile from my house, after a short car chase, the OPD shot to death a suspected murderer.  They say he was on his way to kill members of a rival gang.  They say he pointed a gun at them, that they found an assault rifle inside his car.  They say that two of his three associates escaped on foot.  Thus the helicopter vigilance.  Four days later, on the day before Christmas, the body of a woman was found floating in the estuary out near the airport.  Police have indicated that she was a homicide victim, stabbed to death.  She was from Fresno, but her family says she visited Oakland often.  When I characterized the story as “strange,” Marilyn said, “No, it’s not so strange.  A lot of girls come up to Oakland from places like Fresno to work as prostitutes.”  Of course, that might not be the case with this victim.  Or with the woman whose naked body was found on Christmas day, at the entry to a bike path in the Oakland hills.  Her name has not yet been released, or perhaps even determined.  By my count, she is our 95^th victim this year.  Each year since 2007 the number has dropped by a few souls.  A week from now 2010 will end and we will have had about ten fewer killings than in 2009, even as the dark urge ends the year with a bloody flourish. 

Ella Thompson summed things up as our conversation in the ICU waiting room closed and she prepared to return to Darryl’s bedside.  She was talking about her family, but she could have been speaking for 95 other families hit by violent death in Oakland in 2010:

“This was a good year, until the end of the year, now it’s all bad."

Oakland, with its lush hills, its great food, its radical political history, its integrated public spaces, will never be defined for me solely by its troubles.  But our troubles live on. 

                                                                                           Jim O'Brien

                                                                                           Oakland

                                                                                           Late December 2010

.

The Big Event

Death is an event.  The event.  And a homicide is a public event.  It tends to get noted to one degree or another, depending on the circumstances: on the place, the race, the method, the age of the victim or the suspect.  My interest in stories about the aftermath of the big event flows in part from a belief that, while the prelude to a homicide can be fascinating (it can also be depressingly banal), and the event itself monumental, it is in the aftermath that a killing wreaks havoc on a person, a family, a neighborhood, a community, a city, not to mention what it does to the psyche of a killer, assuming he has any trace of humanity.  Herein lies a story and the pulling of the trigger is only its middle.

That bullet that wounds or kills, it also ricochets.  As the news spreads through a family, through the streets, it continues to wound or kill; if one person has been taken from us body and soul, a dozen more are lost to us in lasting bitterness, subversive grief, debilitating fear, and, in the case of a child growing up on streets lorded over by the gun, a way of life they learn from repeated violence and loss. 

For some, the blood of their son on the sidewalk, that blood in the driver’s seat or in the grass, fertilizes certain long-buried seeds of profound courage, of kindness, of strength, of power, of creativity.  That’s what I see in Marilyn Harris, whose only son, Khadafy Washington, was killed in 2000.  Khadafy was 18.  Now, day after day Marilyn walks with the families of new survivors.  She walks with these initiates to the torment through the painful tasks that precede burial of a homicide victim.  A veteran of the walk, she knows how they are feeling, how they are thinking, that probably they are not thinking very clearly.  She enters their lives not morbidly or with sentimentality in her voice, but soberly, with seriousness; there's business to take care of.  She’s a rung to cling to that keeps these families from suffocating.  She protects them, begins their healing, even as they represent a never welcome reminder of herself ten years ago.  But there she is, a clerk for the federal government the day her son was killed, now a guide through a mine field.

People ought to be aware of the long path a bullet takes.

Despite the cynicism displayed by those who have the time and inclination to write flippant online comments to news articles about homicides in Oakland, normal residents of every neighborhood of the city are moved by each homicide they learn of.  They consider the pain, the horror and the grief.  For that moment of awareness, they become one with the city.  The whole city.  They also consider and usually lament the preponderance of violence here, most of it gang and drug-related.  To varying degrees and with varied alacrity, often privately, but not always, many then give in to the belief that the homicide victim chose an immoral path, or had a moral lapse and, to an extent, got what was coming to him.  And so they move on to the next item of news or of the business of their days. 

Some might take a moment to consider the pain of a young victim’s parents, but many are willing to blame the parents as much as the victims for whatever circumstances led to a killing.  They know about the black community, the Latino community: no fathers, no gumption, no work ethic, no birth control, 40% high school drop out rate.  What’s the point of spending too much time caring? 

Their dark, communal passage is over with.  Or so they think.  But each individual affected by this event carries this septic wound into the community, their community.  Because not everybody is like Marilyn Harris, sometimes the survivors become lost to us.  We are all diminished.

With the stories on this blog, I would like to elongate our municipal attention span, not in order to create a more wounded city, but instead to plumb a city’s compassion.  To do that, sometimes I have to describe the effects of our sickness. 

Fortunately, I can also write about how, out of the event, out of the grief and shock and tragedy, comes revelation, how some, like Miss Marilyn, like Darnetta Fluker, who have lost a loved one to the street, have gone on to find themselves, and to find in themselves real greatness.  Maybe the city can do the same thing.  Maybe that can be our big event.

I’m reminded of the closing lines of an early poem by Robert Hass:

I know that I know myself

no more than a seed,

curled in the dark of a winged pod,

knows flourishing.

Death is Mercy

Crucifix spotted in northern New Mexico, 2018

One of the things I'm reminded of frequently in my work covering homicide in Oakland is that death is mercy. This and Jesus are the most common comforts offered at funerals of the fallen. We are in pain, but we can be assured that he who is in that coffin is not, especially if at some time before his death he gave his soul to Jesus, publicly. 

Often I sit there in churches and chapels hoping this is true, while considering the other side of the promise of heavenly peace: that if there is a heaven, then there is probably a hell, too, and no matter how much we want to think our lost one was perfect, especially now that he or she is dead -- death being yeast to the reputations of those we’ve lost -- maybe he nevertheless got plopped into the fire. Unless, as often I try to convince myself, an infinitely loving God proves in the end all mercy and forgiveness. If you believe in salvation, in Christ and heaven, then you can be relieved for the dead.  You can believe he or she is

Where the soul hath the full measure and compliment of happiness; where the boundless appetite of that spirit remaines compleatly satisfied, that it can neither desire addition nor alteration...wherever God will thus manifest himself, there is heaven.  

                           -Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, 1634

Or, if you are an atheist, you can be relieved that the dead no longer suffer this bleak and uncertain life of the gun in Oakland. You can hope their violent deaths were quick and their physical pain short-lived. Mercy. 

It’s the living who suffer. Even if they believe their loved ones are in the warm embrace of God, the missing is suffering.

“The people who have lost children that lived with them,” says Miss Marilyn, of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence, “even if the child was 52 but lived in your house, you have to get used to missing them. The support groups we do ask, ‘Do you have a loss?’ And a loss is anything that you’ve gotten used to over the years, because a man that loved his wife, he grieves the same way as a man who was mad at his wife and didn’t want to be with her. Because he’s gotten used to her ways, he’s gotten used to seeing her every day, he might have gotten used to her in that same head rag. Good or bad, you’re grieving that. People losing jobs, people losing relationships they thought were going to work out. It’s not so much that person, it’s getting used to being without that person. It’s a hole.”

In November, listening to the mother of another homicide victim, I got some insight into the plight of the living dead, and witnessed another moment of righteous courage born from the blood of a gunned-down son. 

At a packed meeting in a small hearing room at City Hall, Darnetta Fluker was surrounded by 18 gang members from her neighborhood. These were not the people who had killed her son but, according to the Oakland Police Department, they were appropriate stand-ins, each having been identified as among the most violence-prone members of the community. Until she'd risen to speak, she'd been sitting at a table between two of them -- one thin, neatly pressed, probably in his very late teens; one obese, older, well into his twenties, his dark hair cropped to the scalp, rolls of fat stacked at the back of his neck -- while in quick, three-minute talks, DAs, federal prosecutors, police captains and parole officers threatened the gang with severe penalties if they continued to terrorize the far west of the city. 

These gang members were a confident crew, a formidable collective presence even in this peaceful, controlled and business-like atmosphere, even in City Hall at two in the afternoon.  Now this mother stood to speak. Probably 50-years-old, she looked younger because she was slight and so casually stylish in a dark, short-cut jacket and jeans. She wore no lawyerly power suit, no holstered gun.  I hoped she was a David, but what weapons she might possess were concealed. 

She placed on an easel a large photo of her dead son, shed a few tears, gathered herself, and told the room that he had been killed nine years ago, that he’d had five small children. 

Then, with only the width of a conference table between her and these men known for cold violence, she turned her gaze on them and began to make the point that, as far as she was concerned, they were cowards. They killed with guns because they were afraid to fight with fists.  They had no idea what they were doing. They were wrong, she said, to think that the person they target and kill is the one they hurt. 

She was well past her moment of tears now. Her voice grew, not louder, but stronger.  It had the power and authority of her grief and suffering, of the fact that she was right and expected to be listened to. It became a kind of gale.  And these men in this room in 2010, they had become her son’s killers. 

“You don’t know who you’re hurting,” she said. “You think you hurt him, but you didn't hurt him.  He's dead.  He’s fine.  It’s his 5 children you hurt. They live with this every day.  I live with this every day.  People talk about closure, but there is no closure. You didn’t hurt him,” she told them to their 18 faces, “I'm the one you hurt."

Here is a pretty good description of the everyday effects of grief. It is about 1,700 years old, but is a good reminder of what Darnetta Flucker had to master before she confronted the Campbell Village Gang:

At this grief my heart was utterly darkened; and whatever I beheld was death. My native country was a torment to me, and my father’s house a strange unhappiness; and whatever I had shared with him, wanting him, became a distracting torture. Mine eyes sought him everywhere, but he was not granted them; I hated all places, for that they had not him, nor could they now tell me, ‘he is coming’, as when he was alive and absent.  I became a great riddle to myself, and I asked my soul, 'why she was so sad, and why she disquieted me sorely': but she knew not what to answer me... Thus was I wretched....

                                       -St. Augustine, Confessions, circa AD 398

- Jim O'Brien
  Oakland

Coming Up: Morgue Tour, Oakland

The Alameda County Coroner's Bureau charges a family $321 for the transfer of a body from the morgue, near Jack London Square, to a funeral home. If the deceased is a homicide victim or a child, the cost is $67. After the fourth day, the fee for storage of a body is $85 per day. Survivors are not permitted to see the body at the coroner's bureau, but only at a funeral home. Funeral homes have various charges for picking up a body from the morgue. But, what happens when a family can't afford the cost of the transfer? The father of 23-year-old Hyman Taylor and the mother of 15-year-old Keylow Colston struggled with this issue over the summer. Next: their complex stories.

Against Nostalgia

Standing in the back of the mortuary chapel in downtown Richmond, California, squeezed in among the grieving friends, classmates and relatives of 17-year-old Raymen Justice, of Oakland, I can’t help but think many at this crowded funeral must know something about who killed him. 

It was a Tuesday evening, in front of a taqueria, right next to the three-story apartment building where Raymen lived with his father and brother, Rayven Sr and Jr.  Reports are that Raymen had been at a tutoring session, or visiting with a teacher at his former high-school, just down the street.  Out in front of the taco joint, there might have been an argument, an angry exit with a promise to return, a promise fulfilled, and an apparently much-loved very young man felled in a second or two of deadly violence. 

Despite Raymen’s association with Otha Side, a group whose nature I can’t quite pin down just yet, despite the verbose message I spot on the back of a memorial sweatshirt worn at the funeral by an Otha Side kid, otherwise in khaki shorts and with an Oakland A’s tattoo on his neck and a Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim cap on his head, that read, in part, “We going to mob up for you bra,” despite this message, this killing does not appear to have been gang related. 

A gang intervention specialist I’d spoken to the day after Raymen’s killing had told me what the street was saying: it had something to do with a girl.  The next day, I’d been talking to Anne Marks of Youth Alive!, an organization that works with victims of violent crimes in Oakland, whose specialists go to the hospital bedsides of people who’ve been shot, to help the victims cope and, more urgently, to convince them not to retaliate.  We had been talking about the homicide rate in Oakland, which is down from last year.  By my count, Rayven is the 65th homicide in 2010, compared to 80 by this time in ‘09.  Anne said it seemed to her that, more and more, shootings and homicides in Oakland are not over business, not over turf or drugs or money, but are the mortal culmination of interpersonal conflicts: perceived looks of disrespect; someone hitting on someone else’s girlfriend; someone looking at someone else’s girlfriend with appreciation.  If a young woman is killed, it might be the result of domestic abuse, it might be by a jealous boyfriend, or by a man she thought was her boyfriend but who was actually her pimp. 

In the case of Raymen, who knows?  Still, it would seem that if this was over a girl, then a lot of people in this close-knit community would have some idea where to look to find Raymen's killer.  By this I mean where the police could look.  But it also applies to the friends of Raymen Justice, if they are so inclined.

Again, I don’t know that Otha Side is a gang.  “Gang” is a funny word in Oakland; its definition is fluid.  I will find out more about it in the coming weeks.  But whatever its reason for being, it is made up of a large assemblage of young people touched by violence in Oakland, and it has lost three of its members this year to murder, three 17-year-old boys.  Some shirts at Raymen’s funeral commemorated “our three lost angels.”  A video on youtube, a rap in their honor by Lil Kayla, was posted just a day or so after Raymen’s gunning down.

 I only figured out that the three victims were related on the Friday morning after Raymen was killed, when I met Marilyn Harris, of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence, at the Justice family’s apartment.  I arrived before Marilyn, and spent some time reflecting over the memorial assembled near the driveway of the smallish apartment building on MacArthur Boulevard in East Oakland, a building I am pretty sure used to be a motel. 

A History of Highways, Freeways & Motels and Their Effect on the Environment

MacArthur Boulevard, before they gouged Highway 580 into the landscape right alongside it, was the highway, the thruway, the way Californians traveled by car east out of Oakland and into the Delta and the then-undeveloped countryside.  Many of the old motels remain along MacArthur.  Some are clean, with cropped shrubbery, bright flower beds and fresh paint.  Some are sleazy.  Some house transients or the chronically homeless.  With the rise of car travel having killed train travel, and before the birth of the wide freeways changed everything, these motels were popular stops for American travelers in Pontiacs, Fords and Chevrolets.  Indeed, the success of the roadside motels had killed off many grand old trunk hotels like the Lake Merritt in Oakland.  In the old days, you’d get off the train with your trunk full of suits or gowns and head to a luxurious full-service hotel, where you would dress for dinner.  But then cars usurped trains, and motels usurped hotels, and then, finally, freeways usurped blue highways like MacArthur, which became trails of urban and suburban blight, where people in poverty subsist under clouds of noise and air-pollution and literally in the shadows of freeways raised on concrete pillars to heights above the treetops. 

This morning the speeding trucks and cars of 580 create an uncertain breeze that causes the early autumn dust to rise, disperse, regroup and settle on the sad neglected bushes and cars and houses and formerly bustling motels below.  Traffic noise dominates the block and the air outside the Justice apartment building. 

Just Call My Name So I Can Be With You

Against a wall right next to first floor Apartment #3, not the Justice home, are the scattered remains of what had been brought in the hours and days after his killing, to signify the life of Raymen and the emotions his friends were feeling in the aftermath of his murder.  There are religious candles with images of Jesus on them, votive candles, none burning for now.  There is a large bottle of cheap gin with a swig or two remaining.  There is a small, pocket-sized bottle of Hennessey whiskey, the kind you request from the counter person at the liquor store, a swig or two remaining.  I think of the preserved booze as symbolic shots for the dead, to help him in his journey to the afterlife.  There is an empty McDonald’s french fry container.  I can’t tell whether it is in memoriam or just litter.  On the stucco walls of the building there are photos of Raymen smiling, printed from computers. 

There are messages of love and shock written with magic markers in emotional hands.  Some I find slightly morbid, even eerie: Raymen I am ready to/ come home so just/ call my name so I can/ be with you.  Some hold threats.  One reads, We put fear in you suckas heart/ We knocking down over/ this one I love you bby boy.  Another says, Raymen came through ready to kill for his brothers. 

           

There are also signs referring to “Tay.”  As in, “Raymen, I can’t believe it, both you and Tay gone.”  As we climb the outdoor stairway to the apartment I ask Marilyn if she knows who Tay is, but she doesn’t. 

There is a note, handwritten in black, taped to the apartment door, discouraging visitors from knocking.  It makes the point that the Justices will have nothing to give you, especially money, and don’t knock unless you have brought something for them. 

Marilyn of course brings, as always, the promise of help, hope, and healing.  She always enters even the tensest, most somber, most fraught rooms with the confidence and even the joy of the gifts she brings.

Years Numbering Fewer than 18

It’s 9:30 in the morning.  There are maybe seven people in the small, dimly lit, disheveled apartment.  Raymen’s sisters are here.  On the day after the killing, Raymen’s brother Rayven Jr collapsed and was taken to the hospital.  Rayven Jr is a composer and performer of sort-of hip hop love ballads.  He seems to be talented and is no doubt a sensitive person.  He is recuperating with the boys’ mother at her home in East Oakland.  A family friend named Miracle is here.  Two years ago her brother was taken from this very apartment building and murdered; his body was burned so severely that the police could not declare the death an official homicide.  There is a Tupac poster on the wall.  Over the couch there is a narrow, framed portrait in oils of Raymen’s father, Rayven, in his younger days in a suit and round hat with an upturned brim.  It was, I believe, a certain favored style in Oakland in the early 80s. 

Rayven Sr is a slight man, gray-haired, a Vietnam vet, angry as hell, righteous about having raised his two sons on his own, about their potential and their good grades.  Raymen had a 3.3 grade point average, he tells us several times. 

Rayven Sr is sitting next to me on a small sofa.  He’s drinking coffee with cream and sugar.  Man he is pissed.  He gets up a number of times and leans over the coffee table and into people’s faces to declare his independence from need of the money being offered him. 

Marilyn tells him she has been getting calls from people who want to help.  Some want to start scholarship funds in Raymen’s name.  This happens when someone under 18 gets killed.  She’s told me this before, that when a younger person gets killed, her practical help, her resourcefulness in finding monetary aid to pay for funerals and such, is less needed.  People are moved to contribute by years numbering fewer than 18. 

There have been a handful of articles in the newspapers about Raymen’s grade point average and his particular interest in bio-sciences, how for this school year he had transferred from Oakland High to the East Oakland charter school called Life Academy, in order to focus on this interest of his.  In the coming days I will read or hear several tributes, from teachers and other adults who’d encountered Raymen, to his commitment to education, his qualities of leadership, his determination to excel, his charisma.

But a brief review of Raymen’s public facebook wall indicates that he had missed school recently, perhaps more than once, that he had smoked five joints in one day recently.  At least he claimed to have.  At least that is how I interpret his entries.  It also indicates a young man feeling alienated from his friends, feeling a great deal of love and real emotion for others, but feeling also, perhaps, betrayed.  There are few specifics beyond this and it is impossible to tell what it all says about Raymen.  Probably nothing. I have already written about the myths we create for the dead.  Probably best to listen to those who knew him.

While Raymen’s dad talks about his personal connections to the music industry and professional sports figures, Marilyn finds someone else in the room with whom she can do business.  She needs to know what to tell people who want to give the Justices money.  She won’t take any of it without the family’s permission, and is advising them to use the money to pay off the Richmond funeral home out of which Raymen will be buried in one week.

Rayven Sr is saying that both the Oakland A’s and the principal of Life Academy have suggested a memorial scholarship.  He wants all the money to go to the principal, but says that nothing should be done about it until Raymen is buried and at peace.  This makes a lot of sense to me.  Better to deal with such business after the chaos of this week subsides.  Rayven is very concerned that no one in his family does anything to try to get any money for themselves out of this.  He is angry, and acting out, but I can’t blame him.  Less than 72 hours ago, only a few feet from their home, his young son was murdered.  He was given no chance to defend himself, under the New Code of the West. The father held his dying son in his arms.  He will be forced to pass by this death scene every day. 

17 X 3

When we come down the stairs and back to the memorial, we notice someone has lit a few of the candles.  Rhodesha, one of Marilyn’s volunteers, notices a bottle of Sippin’ Syrup among the items of the memorial.  30g of sugar per bottle.  I think usually it is mixed with a clear alcohol, vodka or gin, to make a potent cocktail.  Rhodesha knows some of the Otha Side people.  She tells me that the “Tay” mentioned in the memorial signs is Davante Riley, whose funeral I attended back in March.  He was killed by a 15-year-old girl.  At the very end of Davante’s service, two gunman stepped to the front of the church and started shooting up the congregation, but somehow no one was hit.

I remember seeing Otha Side shirts at Davante’s funeral, but had assumed they were referring to his being in heaven.  Rhodesha tells me that it actually refers to a group of friends in Oakland, and that Damon Williams, killed on June 21st, also was in the group.  At Damon’s impromptu memorial gathering, outside his family home in West Oakland, a block from the Khadafy Foundation offices, Rachael Green, 19, was gunned down in a drive-by, and five others shot, including a 13-year-old boy who is now blind for life.  He is still at Children’s Hospital recuperating. 

I think about the possibility that all this pain, physical and emotional pain, these repeated instigations of unbearable grief, perhaps lifelong grief, lost lives, lost sight, the enormous void all these killings and shootings leave, that possibly it’s all the result of teenage heartbreak.  I recall a comment I’d heard drop inside the apartment this morning: “That girl, she’s down in L.A. now.”

We are Adult and Clueless

On a sunny Friday morning one week later, the kids are out of school again for another funeral.  A hundred, more than that, high school kids, a few who look middle-school-age, most of the boys in baseball caps on which the style now, at least for this group, is to leave the peel-off size and brand sticker on the hat’s brim long after purchase.  As a group the kids are stoic, or inscrutable, but every few minutes one, usually a girl, but sometimes a boy, emits an audible sob and drops her head into her hands, is comforted, walked out of the chapel, out of the mortuary and onto the streets around Richmond’s Civic Center for some of that toxic Richmond air.  There’s a small farmer’s market going on in the parking lot across the street.

There are teachers here as well.  One will speak during the service about how Raymen changed her life, changed the way she taught, how she never gave up on him and is glad he never gave up on her.

Before the service, in the mortuary parlor, I run into the uncle of the blinded 13-year-old.  He says his nephew might be released from the hospital in another few weeks.  Last week a 6-year-old was shot, but is recovering, physically.  The chief of police had brought her a teddy bear.  This visit and gift had made the news.  But the chief has never visited the newly blind kid. 

I also meet the Green Party candidate for Oakland mayor.  He is the only politician I see at the funeral.

The chapel is woody, rectangular and dark.  It has a feel of the sacred, rare in these places.  There are ushers in white gloves from the Christian Body Life Fellowship, which is out of Vacaville. 

Before the service begins, I follow two women I assume are teachers up the long aisle to the coffin to pay my respects to Raymen.  We stair down at the corpse in emptiness.  We are adult and clueless.  Raymen was very thin.  He had a thin mustache and a small patch of hair on his chin.  The fingernail of his left index finger is dirty.  He’s wearing a bright, checkered shirt and a Kansas City Royals baseball cap askew on his head.  There are many strands of wooden beads laid across his chest.  I think one of them is a rosary, and indeed later, a close friend of his reads an impressive poem, written in the days after Raymen’s murder, in which he mentions the rosary he carried.  Or possibly wore. 

Impossible Notes Through Impossible Sadness

I see Rayven Sr as the family enters the chapel.  He is holding hands with Rayven Jr, a tall, thin young man, a year or so older than the victim.  The father looks dignified and strong in a navy suit.  There is a long, long procession of family young and very old, hail and infirm, stoic and openly grieving.  Near the end of the entry of the family I see two teenagers who look like they might be brothers, but they might be cousins, young men, standing tall, walking close together hand-in-hand.  It’s really beautiful.

Today’s preacher is younger than usual.  He looks to be in his thirties.  Before he preaches the usual call for an end to the killing, Raymen’s cousin, who tells us he is fifty years old, sings from the pulpit a beautiful, a capella Our Father.  He reaches impossible notes through impossible sadness.  His singing makes you feel the presence of holiness.

During the service, pictures of Raymen flash across a large screen over the coffin.  It is billed as a Wilson & Kratzer Production.  Wilson & Kratzer is the funeral home.  Lots of pictures of Raymen smiling, flexing, just being a kid.  Family pictures, baby pictures.  One, which seems to be on the screen every time I look up, appears to be Raymen and his brother Rayven Jr as toddlers, stepping out of a doorway, smiling and shirtless on a summer morning.  One of them, I imagine it is Raymen, has a small bandage on his forehead.

Against Nostalgia

Early in his sermon, the preacher makes a point that causes me to wonder if he doesn’t know for certain that this killing was over a girl.  “I want to be with a woman other guys are looking at,” he says.  “I take that as a compliment.”

He goes on to give a fine and lucid sermon.  He grew up in Richmond and talks about life on the rough streets of this oppressed, ganged-up, drugged-up little town on the bay, this microcosm of Oakland, with its own absurd homicide rate.  He says, “We used to fight with fists.  We would “knuckle-up.”  And sometimes, after a fight, we would end up best friends with the guy we fought.  But you’ll never have that experience.  You need to learn what it’s like to fight, to lose, to go home and lick your wounds and come back the next day and live.”

I agree with the preacher, but I have a strong sense that he is not moving these young people with the propensity to resort to violence over trifles.  I worry it is just more irrelevant nostalgia.  And so in the end I view it as just another failed plea.  I am against nostalgia, because nostalgia is false; it is not remembering, but a type of subversive wishing backwards.  In this case, the kids might be thinking, You may have fought instead of killed, but you were still violent, and now you are romanticizing your own violence, but we don’t really see much of a difference.

Always, at the point in each service when someone of an older generation starts begging for peace, I watch the faces and eyes of the children for something I might be able to call reflection or re-consideration or capitulation.  I never see anything, but I can’t see everybody and I could be wrong.  It wouldn’t take too many kids to make a difference.  In my optimistic daydreams I imagine some smart, courageous kid with leadership qualities deciding it is time to change, finally figuring out the beautiful simplicity of what we are all trying to tell them, that this way of the gun offers no exit.  I imagine him making a gesture of Christian forgiveness, that hardest thing of all, that forgiveness of a true enemy, one who hasn’t asked for it or done anything to even indicate they want your forgiveness, but who in fact expects you to continue the cycle, but you walk up to them and instead of firing back you say “I won’t.  I forgive you.”  Or “I want to forgive you.  I am going to try to do that, instead of trying to kill you.”  It’s a nice daydream.  I wonder if Raymen might have been that leader someday.

I’m standing in the back of the chapel and have a lot of time to read the backs of shirts and sweatshirts.  Many say “R.I.P Raymen.”  There is the one about mobbing up.  Also one that says “Raymen is Prezzent.”

When the service is over, the white-gloved ushers re-open the casket for a final viewing, which I forgo.  But all the kids file past the corpse once more.  Sitting in the mortuary parlor, I can hear them exiting a side door of the chapel, sounding as if they have been lining up to be punched, one-by-one, right in the gut. 

Postscript

Walking to my car after the service, I note that old familiar industrial smell of Richmond.  I lived here for three years, on the water, where the smell of the factories is less distinct.  Richmond is a fascinating city.  It was home to the Kaiser Ship Yards during World War II.  Here they constructed the small and nimble Liberty Ships.  During the war Richmond’s population grew four-fold, as people from all over the country came to find work.  Now it is depressed and largely under the thumb of drugs and gangs.  There are a dozen storefront churches in Richmond at any given time, and many years ago I spent months going to their services and meeting their preachers and congregants for a story I wanted to write.  I was going to call it “Storefront Salvation.”  No one picked it up, but I think I will post the pitch over at Theoretically Smelly, my blog for stories that never got published.  All this Oakland work may encounter the same fate, but I think it will feel less like failure. 

Insiders Contemplating Why

Below is a link to a collection of brief, thoughtful comments by members of the community that's re-forged every time someone is killed here.  In the aftermath of violence in Oakland, the old members of the community -- police, trauma docs, crisis responders, gang intervention specialists -- all re-unite to greet the newly initiated members, the survivors.

The article was published in 2007 in the Oakland Tribune as as a kind-of postscript to an excellent 5-part series by Brenda Payton on the death of Frederick ``Mar'' Layne, a 23-year-old African American man who was dealing drugs in West Oakland.  Payton used Layne's particular life, his death, and its wake to give readers a much broader view than they usually get of how one death hits a community, of how profoundly it impacts the people who knew and loved the victim, as well as those who come to pick up the pieces.  


For Part 5 (link below) she asked some of Mar Layne's friends and family, but also the police officers, hospital personnel, preachers and preachers of non-violence she'd encountered in her reporting why they think the violence in Oakland is happening and what can be done to stop it.  

It's not that their answers are particularly surprising or innovative.  In fact, I read the tone as bleak.  Always a realist, Marilyn Harris, of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence, whose son, Khadafy Washington, was murdered in Oakland in 2000, says, " We're getting a world of old people now. It's gotten to be a pleasure to go to a funeral when somebody is over 50."  

Still, these are the thoughts of people fighting against the allure and false comfort of cynicism, but who have seen too much blood and despair to bother with mincing words.  Again, it is a piece of good reporting by Brenda Payton, from the Oakland Tribune, March 3, 2007.

So, please read: 

Why the violence is happening and what can be done to stop it