The Mosquito in Your Ear

Backwards graffiti, Oakland

Oakland's reputation isn't going to change if it has seven killings and a dozen shootings in one week, as it did in early July. A 15-year-old boy was killed. A 19-year-old woman found dead in a sleazy motel. An 84-year-old man found beaten to death in a car. An 18-year-old man killed, allegedly, by another 15-year-old boy. (No doubt the educators and intervention specialists at Youth Alive and the Khadafy Washington Project have their hands full these days.) It is all in the news if you wish to become aware of it. 

Reading about Oakland in old books and magazines, you begin to understand how old and deeply woven into its fabric is the city's other reputation, for hopeless poverty and political stagnation. Originally, much of it was described by outsiders of limited local experience. In one old piece, a long article from a 1966 issue of Ramparts (much thanks to the Project Oakland blog for making it available), the author describes downtown as a wasteland, with no place to eat lunch, unless you belonged to a gentleman's club. (That has changed dramatically. There's plenty of good eating downtown now, and even the outsider New York Times has proclaimed modern-day Oakland as a world-class culinary destination.)

But some of it came from Oaklanders themselves. In a book from 1968, a resident calls Oakland the "shitbox of the west." Apparently it was a common reference, as I have encountered it several times now, including in some of the historical background in Thomas Peele's fascinating book about the assassination of Chauncy Bailey, Killing the Messenger.

I'm reading things mostly from the Sixties and Seventies, written before the wound of the gun and cheap drugs had opened wide in East and West Oakland. In those days, critics saw the city not as violent, but as hemorrhaging figuratively, rapidly losing some apparent economic richness it had possessed, across races and neighborhoods, prior to WW II.

Not that people weren't worried about urban violence in the Sixties, about rioting in particular, as poor, minority neighborhoods in cities across the country burned. Oakland is poor, they said, it's unemployed, its minorities are powerless. Oakland will be next, they said. It wasn't. Oakland avoided riots, while producing instead the politically antagonistic Black Panthers and, later, the socially destructive Black Muslims. And, of course, finally, a propensity for killing, usually one person at a time.

 

Still, the views of some outsiders are slowly shifting. Sometimes you find that their perceptions depend on whether they have ever been to Oakland. That is, if you tell someone who has never been here that you are from Oakland, they seem a little shocked, or else indicate a concern for your safety. It's exasperating. On the other hand, if they have spent any time here lately, often they are impressed to learn you live here. They might even think to live in Oakland is cool. 

An Oakland council member from the hills told me she encountered this latter reaction recently in a conference call with officials of the city of Philadelphia, to whom Oakland was hip, the Brooklyn of the West, as people have been trying to call it for years now. Better than "shitbox," I guess. 

The council member tells me that crime is up a bit up there, but not as much as residents might think. She says that ready access to information these days makes things seem worse than they actually are. Still, she tells me, what crime there is has become more brazen: doors are kicked down, guns are pulled and sometimes fired. She does not begrudge her constituents their fears. She holds well-attended community meetings, where police officers give advice on how to discourage crime and salesmen of video surveillance systems make presentations. Old men email out to anyone who wants them notices of all crimes in the hills. But elsewhere might or might not exist.

Hills and wires, Oakland

 

Talking to residents of the hills today, you encounter sometimes a cynical acceptance, even an embrace, of the gritty reputation of the city, of that "Oakland" that began to be articulated in print in the Sixties. It's easier to accept when you view it from afar, from a place where you can imagine it however you want, instead of live in it against your will, where you can block it out or acknowledge it, depending on your mood. 

 

You can choose not to look. Shade the eyes of your children from the blood of the Deep. You can live a great life in Oakland and never encounter the violence. But what does that mean? Perhaps the only effect the violence has on you is that your house will sell for slightly less someday because it is in Oakland. Perhaps the only effect the violence will have on you is when the sound of another siren sails up from the flatlands, and you feel a momentary nagging, like a stubborn fly, or a mosquito in your ear as you are trying to fall asleep at night.

More on my reading upcoming, and more on my current interviews with politicians and hills residents.

The Bright Side

As I have said many times, I love Oakland, and many specific things about it, especially its wild spaces, its history, and all the good eating you can do here. I know people in Oakland get frustrated with the attention the violence gets at the expense of the wild spaces, the history and the food. Editors ask me to work some of that stuff in to my reporting on the violence. They are looking for balance and context and that is a good thing. I do believe there are some publications that refuse to publish articles on the violence because the editors live in Oakland and are tired of hearing about it and are interested in boosting the city's reputation. I guess that's their prerogative, if that is how they wish to keep the literary or journalistic gates they've been hired to guard. We'll see how long they last in their positions. Maybe a long time, maybe not. Yesterday afternoon after painting my backdoor I raced to Chop Bar, down near Jack London Square, or the Warehouse District, or the Jack London Square Warehouse District, whatever we are wanting to call it these days, to order up my favorite breakfast in town, the Tri-Tip Scramble, but they had removed it from the menu. "Just trying to change things up," said the bartender. Essentially, it had been replaced with a pork chop, which might be good, but I'd had pork chops for dinner the night before, good ones, so I ordered the almond french toast, which I'd been curious about anyway. It was too sweet for my taste, but what else would it be? It's supposed to be sweet. Do you really want me to keep writing about this stuff? Later that night I went to a dance in San Leandro. Most of the attendees were residents of half-way houses for parolees and people with alcohol and other substance abuse problems. Men had tattoos on their faces and necks. I saw a woman who was clearly on the bright side of addiction, the pink color in her cheeks seemed new and fresh, the weight on her bones looked healthy and welcome. Among some of the hardest people I'd seen in a long time, there was a lot of laughing and dancing, and some looked lost, looked like they were dying for a beer at the sober event. Literally sober, that is, not in any other way was it sober, but lighthearted and fun. Kevin Grant's band played. The event was one of Grant's creations, one of his attempts to fill the void while these men and women attempt to build new lives for themselves. Later, no doubt, he went back out to the streets of Oakland to keep the peace there. I'll write more about the event later, and maybe about the calzone I had for dinner from Marzano, or the great cocktail I had there while I waited.

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

Rash/Wave/String: Homicide Update

We’re having our first heat wave of the summer. The marine layer is taking a long weekend.

Marilyn Harris, of the Khadafy Foundation for Non-Violence, has told me she considers August to be the city’s deadliest month. But this particular August had been, while not peaceful -- there were many shootings -- not deadly. We had no homicides for the first three weeks of the month. It was the longest stretch without a death since I began paying close attention. I’m happy to credit good police work, community policing, Measure Y, whatever you want. I like a hopeful view.

But I kept telling my wife it was the weather, here in the coldest, grayest summer in memory. And sure enough, record breaking heat has coincided with a rash/wave/string of killings. Five in one week. Each apparently unrelated to the next. There have been two stabbing deaths and three shooting deaths. There have been killings in East Oakland, West Oakland, and Downtown.

Meanwhile, federal and local law enforcement agencies are meeting to discuss Oakland’s gang problem. On Monday, at Oakland’s Laney College, two alleged gang members were arrested leaving class. Each was carrying a weapon.