After the death of Darnell Byrd, Jr, Part 1: between rumor and knowing

Between Rumor and Knowing

It always begins with rumor and disbelief. Phones ring and it's the Street on the line. The Street, notoriously unreliable, is saying your son has been shot. But the Street always knows things before you do. Most often, it is the last thing he touches, the last thing he feels, and as if the concrete has sensed his last heartbeat, it begins broadcasting the news.

Despite what early reports said, Darnell, 24, was shot once.

Ultra Humphries was at work on a Saturday morning. On her way in that day she'd felt compelled to pray for her children. Now she was in a meeting but her cellphone kept lighting up and she kept ignoring it. She could see who was calling: her daughter, her daughter's cousin, a family friend. It was annoying; they all knew she was at work. Finally her meeting was over so she called her daughter back. "Somebody says Darnell's been shot," she said, "he's dead."

No, you're lying, thought Ultra. Not that her daughter was lying, but life was lying, the world, time was lying.

Then came those long hours between rumor and knowing, the last, strange, painful hours between a normal life and the void, hours like a slow breaking of your bones, as you search for the truth, for something solid, some authority to tell you he is alive or dead. Sometimes the only real authority is your own eyes.

It was only the beginning of a journey similar to one thousands of Oaklanders have taken in the last 40 years, as the city's homicide rate has remained stubbornly high. There have been years when homicide numbers go down and years when they rise to frightful highs, but the bottom line is that for four decades Oakland, today a city of about 400,000 people, has averaged 108 homicides per year, consistently one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Even as other troubled cities across the country have brought violence down, Oakland has failed to do so. Perhaps until now. We seem prepared to have our second consecutive year where homicides have fallen significantly, and we can only hope that this trend continues, that it is in fact more than a trend, but a new normal. It will take years and constant vigilance to know if we have succeeded. It will take generations to bring real peace and healing to our hardest hit neighborhoods, where children develop PTSD from witnessing violence, from losing relatives and classmates to the gun. Where many residents of all ages suffer in an ongoing way from the trauma.

Ultra Humphries had tried to escape that trauma, she had tried to shield her children from it, raising them in Suisun, far to the east of Oakland. But, eventually, Ultra, who'd grown up in Oakland, and her new husband, Akim, had moved back. For a brief time they'd lived near crime-ridden 79th Avenue in East Oakland. Then the family had moved to a charming old house on a quiet street far from 79th.

But something drew Darnell back there. His mother had warned him a way more than once.

"When you're in an environment where you think that type of lifestyle is cool," says Ultra, "even though your immediate family doesn't do that, you try to fit in"

But he had friends and family over there. Then he got arrested there, for selling weed, spent time at Santa Rita for that. Darnell was not one of those stoic kids who pretends he's unaffected by incarceration..

"When my son went to jail, he cried like a baby," Ultra says. "He wasn't a bad kid, you're trying to be hard, but you're really not. He cried. 'I'm not gonna do this anymore, Mom, get me out of here.'"

Since then, things had been going well for Darnell. His mom had worked hard to get him into a program for young men, to help them find discipline and to establish a path forward. Ultra worries that she did too much for her son, was perhaps too protective, but really she just sounds like an active and caring mother.

"I always came to his rescue," she says. "That's why he probably thought everything was so easy. Because I always came to his rescue. I'm always doing things for him to make sure he's okay." Note the present tense.

Darnell wanted to be a barber. He had plans to begin looking and dressing in a more professional manner. He and his mom were supposed to go shopping for nice clothes, new shoes and button-down shirts that Saturday when she got off work. On Friday night before a friend picked him up, Akim asked Darnell if he'd be home later or if he was spending the night with a friend.

"I liked to be up and to let him in when he would get home," says Akim.

He remembers Darnell thought about it a moment and said, Yes, he would be home that night.

Then a strange thing happened, something that Ultra can't recall having happened before. At 2 o'clock in the morning, she was awakened by a phone call.

"I don't even know why I answered," she says. "I usually don't."

It was Darnell. Just calling to say Hi. He was happy, excited, he'd only recently learned that the family was planning a trip to Vegas for his 25th birthday that coming January. He wanted to talk about it, wanted his mom to tell his friend that it was true. He put the friend on the phone. Ultra confirmed the story and told the friend to bring her son home, it was so late.

In the morning before heading to work she asked Akim if he'd let Darnell in, but he'd not come home. They didn't think much about it. He was 24, he sometimes didn't come home. Then, around 10 o'clock that morning, the calls started coming in. As soon as she heard the rumor, Ultra started looking for information. She called Darnell's friends, who said he'd ended the night at an apartment near 79th.

"I tried to keep him away from that area," says Ultra.

She tracked down the number of a girl he'd been with that night, who said only that he had been on the phone with someone, that he had been pacing the floor. She called relatives who lived over near 79th. No one knew much.

She called the coroner, but no one answered. It was a Saturday, the office was short-staffed. Not until the end of the day did she finally talk to someone there. They had a young man who fit her son's description, down to a particular and unique tattoo. It was true. It was over. And something else had begun.

Darnell was shot one time in the head, at 6 o'clock in the morning, in front of a store on 78th. It was November and still dark out.

"Some people tell me a lady near where he got shot heard him say 'Somebody help me,'" Ultra tells me, then says it again, "Somebody help me," but swallows the last word, or rather gasps it instead of saying it.

Again she gathers her strength and continues. "That's all I know that my son said, he didn't have a gun, but he did call for help."

See Part 2: "A story that is killing my heart"

"If I looked like my story, I'd probably be missing all my hair, all my teeth, one leg, no hands, because I've been through a lot. I want them to know even though I've been through the death of my son, you are still able to make it, you can do it. And that's what Marilyn Harris has given me strength to do."

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

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13

Part 1: Chapel Light

Just ahead of me in line at the funeral of Jimon Clark, the last of six homicides to occur in Oakland between August 18th and August 25th, a group of kids in their early teens has reached the coffin. They look like they are not quite sure what to do. In line, all but two of them have been fairly upbeat, nonchalant, possibly faking their cool, or possibly they have done this so many times that it feels about the same as standing in line at a taco truck. I want to think they are faking, that their hearts are beating faster than usual, that they are at least a little freaked to confront the dead body of their friend and schoolmate, that maybe they are hiding secret worries that his gunshot wounds are visible.

(The wounds aren’t visible. The 13-year-old was shot in the back, a double violation of the old Code of the West, which held, among other things, that you do not shoot children and you do not shoot anybody in the back. The new Code of the West, as it exists in Oakland, has rejected those tenets, thoroughly.)

I want to think that for these baby-faced, rather slight, early teenage kids from Oakland, neither the day nor the event is routine.

Only two of them are showing, or allowing to show, any signs of confusion or mourning. They are boys, a little taller than the rest of their group. One breathes heavily in and out, says quietly, “I don’t know what to do.” The other rests a hand on his shoulder.

A pastor helping to keep the line moving tells them it’s okay to cry. But none of the kids cries as he or she stares, through the thin, white gauze that stretches from the edge of the open lid to the casket’s rim at the brown, lifeless, glistening face of Jimon, his taught lips stretched horizontally in an expression of wry acceptance of his task today to lie still all the long afternoon. His face looks unnaturally wide.

The body has been lying on its back in freezers and coffins for a week now and so it has settled and spread. I remember noticing the width of the dead face of the 15-year-old, Kelow Colson, at rest in the coroner’s freezer for a month before his open-casket funeral. Surely to the kids he must look, as all cadavers of friends and family do, simultaneously familiar and alien, a combination which approaches the precise definition of surreal.

The Mystery
I’d like to think the moment is surreal for these kids, but possibly it’s just real. Jimon was shot in the back, at 9:30 at night, while walking with his brother down Bancroft Avenue near his home in East Oakland. Bancroft Avenue is a street that hosts more than its share of violence. It’s a street I tend to pass only when I am out reporting these stories.

Officially, no one knows why Jimon was killed. There have been rumors of him receiving a strange phone call that evening, being asked by the caller to run an errand, that that is what he was doing when he was killed, that it was some kind of set-up.

I’m told the streets say he was not the intended victim of the bullet, that neither was his brother, that it was a case of mistaken identity. I know it’s hard to imagine a 13-year-old, who hadn’t even started high school yet, being involved in the kind of business that can lead to his murder. And probably Jimon wasn’t involved in anything like that. But sometimes in Oakland things seem one way and turn out to be the other way, the way you couldn’t imagine. So who knows.

Maybe it was a simple robbery. Reportedly, the killer took $2 from Jimon’s pocket.

Innocence Invasion
One week after his killing, one day after what would have been his 14th birthday, and the 14th birthday of his twin brother, Javon, they hold a funeral for Jimon in an unadorned chapel on the tiny, pristine campus of a bible college on 105th Street, in the often violent, ganged-up neighborhood called Sobrante Park. The School of Urban Missions sits near the end of a long residential street off International Boulevard. It’s one of those streets where you have to weave among the double-parked black SUV’s, out of which there is always a conversation taking place with someone standing on the street, leaning in at the car window. I try to give them a wide berth.

At the campus gates, which appear to be more for security than for purposes of a grand and decorative entryway, there are two young white boys directing traffic. I think they are expecting a lot of press, but in the end, although the chapel is packed with people, I see only a couple of reporters, and in the days following, only one or two stories about the funeral.

Usually, depending on the circumstances, the death of anyone 16 or under attracts a great deal of attention. Kelow Colson was 15, and his killing back in March got some press, but mostly because he was killed while trying to steal dope, and so the media could call it a “home invasion,” which is an exciting, energetic, war-like term they like to apply to any burglary they can. But because he was engaging in a criminal act -- with two of his brothers, by the way -- Kelow’s killing elicited less of the lasting general sympathy it might have had he been what they like to call an innocent victim.

This reminds me of one of the interesting things about the work of Marilyn Harris and the Khadafy Foundation for Non-Violence: Marilyn does not distinguish between innocent victims and guilty victims. She does not believe in guilty victims. When you die, your record dies, she says. And anyway, Your mama didn’t kill anybody. Your grandmother didn’t kill anybody. Didn’t hurt anybody. Now they need help. I did hear her say once, speaking to the ghost of a young man killed in a gunfight, whose father she had been helping through a very sad and difficult day, “Oh _____, look what you did to your father.” She has told me that often she doesn’t want to know too much about the victim, because she admits it might affect her efforts to help their survivors navigate the manic hell of the aftermath of a murder.

Jimon seems to have been an innocent victim and a nice kid. The media decided to refer to him as a track star, although it turns out that might have been a stretch. He was about to start at Oakland’s Skyline High, a school not for troubled kids, but for the general population, so there was little to cause anyone to turn of the sympathy spigot until he was buried. And so I was expecting more press.

Marilyn, who had gone out on the night of the killing to provide comfort and support to Jimon’s mother, anticipated a lot of media at the funeral, too. She’d suggested I get there an hour and a half early. I was probably more like 45 minutes early, and while there was a lot of activity underway, very few mourners had arrived, and no press that I could detect.

I had never heard of the little bible college and so when I saw a very young photographer observing the preparations with great attentiveness, I asked if she was a student there, and she said she was. She told me that it is not just a local school, although Oakland is the flagship campus, and that people come from out of town to attend. Oakland has about 152 students, but there are campuses all across the country, including in Brooklyn and New Orleans. The staff and students making preparation for the funeral were a mix of Latino, white, black and Asian, the latter possibly Samoan and Filipino.

There was a guest book to sign, over which floated a Mylar balloon that read
Happy
Birthday
Jimon
(Later on a sports field they released red and white balloons.)

The English Civil Wars
I take up a seat to the far right, in the back row of pews, all of which fan out from a platform too low to call a stage and too multi-purpose to call an altar, although for purposes of this description that’s what I’ll call it. There are musical instruments up there, including a set of bongo drums. There is also is a plain wooden cross about six-feet high standing at the back of the platform. Not a crucifix, but a cross. Later it will be thoroughly obscured by a video screen. But for now it is the only nod to religion I can detect in the chapel, and I find myself thinking about the English Civil Wars, and how I am probably not the right person to be doing this story, but as Padraic Column wrote in the foreword to his book The Hidden Ireland, it doesn’t look like anybody else is going to do it, and it ought to be done.

Underlying the English Civil Wars was a free-for-all of religious hatred between Christians. On one side were the Anglicans, who were practically Catholic, even though they despised and killed the actual Catholics, who would later despise and kill them, it always depended on whom was in power. The Anglicans rejected the Pope, of course, but still had a hierarchy full of fat, wealthy bishops and cardinals telling everyone what to think about God. They had statues and saints and they even on occasion prayed to the Virgin Mary. They had beautiful churches, formerly Catholic churches, where they celebrated very precise and formal liturgies of the Mass. On another side were the Puritans and the Presbyterians, who believed in Jesus, but not in having church fathers or anyone to tell you how to communicate with God. You could tell people which God to worship, just not how to do it. They believed in employing no liturgy at their services. They held truck with no Book of Common Prayer. And they certainly didn’t prettify their churches with stained glass or images of God or his Apostles. Both sides hated the Catholics.

Not that this is a Presbyterian or Calvinist school or chapel. I think they are more Methodists, but that is what this unadorned church causes me to think about, as do many of these services, in that they seem random in their elements and procedures, are usually a collection of sermons with songs and short readings, and there are no sacraments. It’s anarchy.

I start thinking that it would be just like me to try to begin a book about death in Oakland with a long explanation of the roots of the English Civil Wars. And that I should just give up and declare myself psychologically disabled and go on Social Security. I glance down at some literature I’ve picked up about the School of Urban Missions and immediately see a reference to John Wesley, who was somewhat in between the two extremes of the war. He was an Anglican priest, but an evangelical who urged people to strike up a personal relationship with Jesus.

I like that the school might not be extreme, and that it might be sincere about training young religious people of all races for urban missions. I like the one student I’ve spoken to, who looked cool. Some of the staff also look cool, although some look like they are trying to look cool, cool for the kids, cool to the kids, and sure enough I note in the literature, along with that mention of Wesley, a bit too frequent use of the word “awesome” by adults. Always a bad sign.

Gauze
I get in line to view the body. I’m finding that bodies of strangers in caskets mean nothing to me anymore. The body of a murder victim on a gurney, covered by a sheet, with the coroner’s invasion on the back of his skull covered by another sheet, moved me. But these kids in caskets are out of my range at the moment.

The kids in front of me in line might be having a similar problem. I watch them up there trying to wrap their minds around what this means, this body of their classmate and friend lying in a coffin like this. They stare, comfort each other with a touch, one of them, the smallest, looks a little frightened. The girls tear up, but don’t cry, and move on. I step up. Jimon is wearing a red baseball cap with A’s insignias stamped across it. He’s wearing a jacket and tie. There is an image of a football on the inside of the coffin lid and tiny Raiders figurines placed along the coffin’s rim. Chapel lights reflect off some moisture rising on his skin on a very hot day in early September.

The chapel is full. I would guess there are 400 people here. The family is large. It seems confident and composed. It takes up the entire middle section of the room. It’s clear they have a lot of support. They are church people. It makes a difference. Marilyn tells me that when the victim is so young, financial support tends to flow a little more freely, quickly, and from more varied sources. So she has not had to find any money for them. Funerals are not free.

The funeral is being held here because Jimon and his twin brother Javon were part of a Christian youth group called Points of Light that gathered here on Friday nights. The organizers must have thought, if they are here on Friday nights, the most violent of Oakland nights, they will be the safer for it. One of their youngest has been killed anyway.

Next: Part 2: The Presence of My Enemy

The Spirit of the Bus

In April we gathered outside a library across from DeFreemery Park, where, back in 1972, the Black Panthers would hand out free food to throngs of ever more desperate West Oaklanders. By then, what a mere decade earlier had been a thriving African-American community, was desperate.* Four decades on it still is.

We were there to board a bus for a political rally in the state capitol. As Marilyn Harris herded everyone toward their seats, I began to see her as rather like Moses -- prettier than Moses would have been, shorter, and black, and without a Moses-like beard, of course -- but similarly intrepid, similarly determined to lead this ad-hoc community of the wounded, not to any promised milk or honey, but out of the land of death and back to living.

Just about everyone on the bus had suffered a shocking loss, but it was an upbeat group. After a prayer led by a local pastor, as the bus pulled away from West Oakland, laughter and joking settled into chatter about skin care products or how quickly the grandkids grow up. Occasionally, words like "homicide" or "investigator" or "coroner" would rise above the din, as might be expected.

In front of me sat a young woman whose twin brother had been murdered back in October. Seated next to her, her mother, in her late sixties, wore a beautiful blue blouse. The daughter kept trying to smooth a stray, stubborn curl of her mother's gray hair.

Across from me sat a woman whose mentally challenged son had been murdered on his way to the store; none of his money had been taken. His murderer was never found.

Marilyn sat near the front. Her son, Khadafy, had been shot on a summer night in 2000, on the grounds of the West Oakland high school he had graduated from two months earlier. There were six homicides in Oakland that weekend.

There were eighty homicides that year, but six in one weekend shocked even Oakland. It was one of those events that politicians can't ignore. Something had to be done. And so they formed commissions.

Here in 2010, twice in March we had four homicides in 48 hours. But no new commissions that I’m aware of. Marilyn and the Crisis Response team (See August 5th post, "Ministry of Presence) answer call after call to begin each rebuilding project one family at a time. As far as I can tell, there is no one else doing anything precisely like this in any other city in America.

In Sacramento that afternoon, as anonymous state politicians blathered at a podium, the passengers on the bus proved far more interested in, even mesmerized by, the hundreds of posters on stands along the boarders of a big white tent pitched before the west steps of the beautiful Capitol building. Each stand held large portraits of four murdered Californians on each side. The first thing everyone did was to find the portraits of the loved ones of the passengers on the bus.

There were hundreds of people mulling under and out of the tent, many wearing t-shirts with images of the dead from all over California, usually with the words "In loving memory of..." or "Always in our hearts..." And, of course, there were plenty of shirts and posters influenced by Marilyn’s original phrase, conceived for billboards in the weeks after her son's murder: Do You Know Who Killed Me?

All through the afternoon, Marilyn kept introducing me to the mothers of the dead, all with incredible stories of loss and rebirth. One woman’s only son had been killed in a carjacking while on his way to work. After the rally, as she was climbing onto the bus, she turned to me and said, "Jim, do you want to hear something really strange? The father of one of the people who killed my son is on this bus. He's the pastor. He must know who I am, after all that time we spent in court. It's strange. But it's okay. He can be here."

* Many of West Oakland's beautiful Victorian and Italianate homes (there are some that survived the "renewal") were owned by middle-class, African American canning factory workers, longshoremen, and sleeping car porters based at the nearby train station. By '72, most had been razed and replaced with the crushing blandness of beige row houses. Today it can be hard to tell one street from another. Those not replaced by public housing were seized through eminent domain, demolished, and replaced by three major freeways creating choking pollution and a choking isolation from the rest of the city. The final insult came in the form of the towering concrete pillars of an above-ground BART line running down the middle of 7th Street. Last stop in Oakland. Just before the tracks plunge into the Bay, if you look down from your train car you can see in the shadows the ruined facade of a legendary jazz club called Esther's Orbit Room. Billy Holiday played there. So did Etta James, back when 7th Street was the commercial heart of West Oakland.

(New) Code of the West

Back in 1986 the city of Oakland closed off several streets and a thousand citizens watched the funeral procession of Felix Mitchell, drug dealer,gang leader, and the man who helped establish the violent image of modern Oakland. His glass and brass cortege was followed by a long line of Rolls Royces.
The two Oakland funerals I’ve attended in 2010 have been bleak, uninspiring affairs. The preachers are ineffectual and of the wrong generation. The churches and chapels themselves are homely, even tawdry, but they are what people can afford. In June I sat in a mortuary meeting room and listened to the dazed, angry mother of a killed boy request balloons and a dove to release at her son's funeral. When the funeral director asked how she would pay, the mother was stumped, surprised even. She hadn’t a clue. It had taken the family a month just to raise the $650 necessary to have the 15-year-old’s body transported 12 blocks from the county coroner's downtown morgue to a shabby funeral home in West Oakland.
At the sparsely attended service there were no balloons or doves, just a few flower bouquets, and canned music on a sound system that repeatedly failed. During the time in the service when anyone can get up and talk about the dead, a brother of the deceased, I believe his only one not currently incarcerated, took the pulpit and delivered a brief, curse-laden goodbye to his younger brother, all the while curtaining is face with his long, loose braids.
A funeral I went to in April was different. It was for a kid, man, young man, I don’t know what to call a person killed on his 18th birthday. The Baptist church in deep East Oakland seemed homely to me. Blue chairs. Fluorescent lights. But maybe I am overly accustomed to candles. I’ve taken to referring to certain part of East Oakland as “deep East,” partly because of the catchy internal rhyme, partly to indicate that when you go there you are in another city not your city. I’ve heard it used many times. But every time I use the term I question my intentions. Is it a racist term? Is it overly-dramatic?
This funeral was well-attended. Arriving ten minutes early, I’d had to wedge and excuse my way through until finally I got stuck in the steamy, noisome vestibule in the back, between teenagers, some tearing up, some wailing, some chatting idly, most, of course checking and sending messages with their phones. Young men in hoods kept coming and going, excusing their way through the throng, coming and going, into the church and out, in and out of the nearby door to the parking lot. As they brushed past me I could smell the grease from their fast food breakfasts (my experienced nose identified it as McDonald’s grease). As is common in Oakland, the scent of marijuana hung in the air. Smoke drifted in through the doorway along with the sound of chatter and laughter from the parking lot.
At the funeral there had been one spine-tingling musical performance and one emotionally affecting moment when the principal of the deceased’s high school had announced that, as far as the school was concerned, he had completed his requirements. "Davante has graduated," he said, as he held aloft a diploma.
Then the preacher gave his bland sermon. Maybe I was expecting too much, but I had come with some small hope he might give me small hope just by being wise or kind or by having the kind of message or charisma I could imagine just maybe might give some troubled kid even the smallest doubt about his path. Something that might cause a weakening in the wall, something that might create from nothing a vulnerability in the kid that someone sensible -- a friend or girlfriend or uncle or teacher or mother or father -- might exploit, might aggravate until it wore to an opening. And maybe that kid would get out, rise up, become a leader willing to love and lead this lost, shunned generation. Maybe I was expecting too much.
In the end, the preacher, while dignified, and sincere, had nothing. After he established his own youthful credentials as a hard partier, now too old for such things, he said, "You can party with Jesus, kids,” and nothing against Jesus, but I wasn’t buying it and I doubt any of the kids were either, and the ceremony ground to its unceremonious halt with “Okay, now, everyone but the family, I’d like to ask you to go to your car.” For a moment I wondered what we were supposed to do in our cars. Then I realized he was planning a kinder, private, more spiritual closing prayer for the family. I was grateful for permission to escape the hot, packed church and to separate myself from the teenage girl I had been crushed up against intimately for well over an hour.
I headed for the side exit, out toward the skunky weed. I turned up the block and just as I was passing the crowded main entrance to the church I heard a kid yell that there was a gun, that there was shooting inside, and suddenly the whole scrum of bodies exploded into individuals running and screaming up the street.
I thought maybe it was a pathetic joke -- as shout of “fire” in a crowded theater -- perpetrated by an immature kid excited by the strangeness of death and the joy of a morning away from school, but I was wrong. Just after the pastor asked all but the family to leave the church in preparation for a final benediction, two hooded men had marched to the front of the congregation and started firing. No one was hit in the melee.
In genuine disbelief, I turned and walked back against the tide and stood across from the church entry way to watch, as more and more people staggered out. Soon I heard sirens but only gradually realized they were for us. Within twenty minutes there were dozens of cops from numerous forces -- OPD, CHP, Alameda Sheriffs, Parole, Corrections. Lots of collegiality between them. Hugs and handshaking and "Where you been lately?!?" There were guys in riot gear. That erie modern sight of helicopters hovering over you. Most of the cops had tear gas guns, but at one point a tall, white officer (I'd say 80 to 90% were white) took something that looked like a guitar case out of a van, snapped it open, pulled out a machine gun, clicked the cartridges in, slung it around his shoulders and headed up the street. He looked thrilled. I counted nearly a hundred cops in half a dozen picket lines across at least two streets.
Over a loudspeaker an officer ordered the young, hostile, broken-hive-like crowd to move away: "Citizens, move forward now." I happened to be wearing a black suit, so even as the police began to cordon off the neighborhood and shoo the media, no one asked me to move, until after about an hour, a riot-gear-clad OPD officer named Garcia asked me, politely, from behind his visor, if I was "one of the preachers." I had to admit I wasn't, so he moved me back, but just a bit. I stood there for a couple of hours watching, asking questions, thinking about Oakland. I'd never seen anything like it. God speed, Davante.

A few weeks later I saw his mother, young, pretty, a look in her eyes like someone lost in a tunnel, who can hear voices urging her on but can't tell where they come from, or if they’re friendly. I wanted to approach her, to ask her questions for my work, but I lacked the heart. I'll talk to her eventually.
Reportedly, Davante's young killer was facing him when she pulled the trigger, but there's a new Code of the West. The old Code only half survives, only the uncivilized part, the part that says any insult must be met with violence, and any perceived wrong must be avenged privately, with violence. The other tenets of the old code -- spare all women and children, never shoot an unarmed man, never shoot a man in the back -- are history. Shooters sneak up on you now. Not that they didn't in the old west, only there was a certain shame to it. Nowadays they fire into crowds from speeding cars, seemingly without discrimination, although often it turns out that the shooters knew what they were doing; usually they get who they wanted.
Often one or two bystanders as well. The killers show up at wakes and funerals seeking trophies: a cell-phone snapshot of their quarry in his casket, a lock of his hair. "You just know they're there," a friend whose been to hundreds of funerals told me. "You can just feel their presence."