13

Part 2: The Presence of My Enemy

There is an abundance of suffering here in the cool of the chapel this

afternoon. Suffering is a thing we all share, and especially this crowd

of East Oaklanders who have lost a child to the gun. (See Pt. 1: Chapel Light.)
Usually you think of the mother as the queen of the sufferers, but 13-year-old
Jimon Clark had a twin, Javon, and all indications were that they were twined

together in life until now.

Among the speakers are friends and teachers of the twins from Frick

Middle School, all of whom seem to find it a little strange to refer to

one of them without the other, as if this dying is the first thing one

of them has ever done independently. They seem to have been regularly,

unselfconsciously, referred to as “Jimonjavon.” Juh-MON-juh-vawn. One

word.

And so you must think of Javon as having died a little, too.  Or that

the entity, JimonJavon, was murdered, along with Jimon himself. It’s a

double-homicide. Or at least a homicide and a half.

The service opens with a reading from St. Paul, from his second letter

to the Corinthians: For as the sufferings of Christ abound in us, so

our consolation also abounds through Christ. It elicits a great amen

from the congregation, from the adults in the congregation, whose faith

must get shaken, but it always appears very strong. Christ is one of

the two comforts they are repeatedly offered, or that they repeatedly

find for themselves. Christ shares your suffering, in Christ is peace

and hope. If there is no peace in the city, no peace in your

neighborhood, no hope of safety, if the police can’t protect you, if

those who run the city are helpless, if the schools can’t raise you up

toward hope, there is Christ in the end.

The other comfort is heaven. No less than six times from the pulpit,

teachers and friends and family and preachers reminds us that Jimon is

in a better place. Better than Oakland, better than earth, better than

this world of struggle and fear and death. What other comfort are you

going to find? And what will you do if there is no softer place to go

for healing than where the fact of this bare meaningless death and void

lie?

An Instigator of Dreams

Young people take the altar to talk about how funny Jimon was, that he

was a kind of leader, an instigator, usually of innocent hi-jinks,

although sometimes these hi-jinks led to suspensions from school, which

elicits some laughs, but suspensions always sound serious to me, and

never funny in real life. One of the kids says, “I’m gonna wear his

colors.” But I’m not quite sure what this means. Probably Jimon just

liked to wear certain colors. He seems to have had that kind of fun and

colorful personality.

A teacher from Frick Middle School, from which Jimon and Javon had

graduated in the spring, says that Jimon assembled the very first student relay track

team to beat the Frick teachers in their end-of-the-year race. He talks

about Jimon’s determination. Jimon encouraged his relay team practice

every day. When ever there was a spare moment, he had them on the track

honing their baton transferring skills. I think this is the source of

the track star designation some of the media have given the dead boy,

which might be a bit of a stretch, the kind of legend the press

invents, or that we sometimes invent about our newly dead, a posthumous

medal of honor we bestow to comfort the dead, to make the dead feel

better about themselves. One article referred to Jimon as a “standout

athlete,” which seems like it might have been more precise.

Maybe Jimon did run track. Or maybe he would have run track at Skyline

High, where he was set to begin only a few days after his murder. Maybe

he would have run track, loved it, excelled at it, won great victories

and suffered the great crushing defeats that are the stuff of life.

Maybe he would have gotten a scholarship to run track at USC, studied

physical education or economics, gotten a degree and become a teacher,

a leader, an instigator of the dreams of 13-year-old kids. But instead

he is in a better place.

On the later, a friend of Jimon’s tries to sing for the dead boy a song

called, according to the program, “His Eyes is on the Sparrow.” She is

thin, tall, but a child. She is wearing very high heels. She is

distraught, sings one verse, very off key, then breaks down and is

helped back to her seat just in front of mine by another child her age,

Jimon's age. That night the one TV channel that has shown up broadcasts

this on its Ten O’clock News.

The Failure

The member of the city council from Jimon’s neighborhood approaches the

pulpit. Larry Reid’s voice shakes as he utters the second-most-heard

phrase at funerals of the killed in Oakland. “This has to stop.”

My opinion of the council member rises and falls by the moment. Unless

it turns out he has a personal relationship with the family, I’m

inclined to hate him for being here, or at least for speaking.

But then, when he calls the Oakland killings “insane violence,” I like

the term.

 “When I got the news of Jimon’s killing,” says Reid, “I saw myself as a

failure.” I appreciate the starkness of the term and the taking of this

personally. When he announces that he is giving the family a check for

$5000, it is the announcement, not the gratuitousness, that bothers me.

When he asks if anyone in today’s congregation knows anything about

Jimon’s killing, I quickly scan the room, even as I feel a chill run up

my spine. I watch carefully as Reid offers $2500 for the information.

To my eyes, no one reacts in any way that might indicate they know

something.

“If you’re scared to go to the OPD,” he says, “come to me. Because this

has to stop. In this city, when your children leave the house, you

don’t know if they’re going to come back.”

I’m impressed by his honesty, by his quivering voice, but, finally,

when he presents the family with a resolution from the mayor and city

council, I feel exceedingly empty.

The Enemy

Until an old gospel singer seems to appear from nowhere, an old man

backed with an organ, and sings a long, slow, agonized song based on a

verse from the 23rd Psalm, the psalm that begins, The Lord is my

shepherd; I shall not want, the one that declares that, though I walk

through the valley of death, I shall fear no evil, the one that ends, I

shall dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life.

But it’s a neglected, middle verse the singer keeps repeating, an

enigmatic one I rarely note when I hear the psalm recited, that resonates: You prepare

a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Over and over in a

minor key, as the song comes to an intense climax, soulfully he sings

the words "in the presence of my enemy..."

I think the verse is about the abundance and joy of enduring life in

the midst of evil and death in the world, but sitting here this

afternoon, I can’t help but think about the funeral of Davante Riley,

which ended in gunfire. I can’t help but think about the trophies I’m

told the killers sometimes come to the funerals of their victims to

collect: a lock of hair, a cell-phone photo of the dead. I wonder if

the killer is with us today. Is the dead boy in the presence of his

enemy?

Or is it us? Are we in the presence of the enemy, or at least of the

enemy's quarry? And is the enemy, not death, but whatever it is in

Oakland that breeds the evil urge that lets a person kill like this.

Turn Out the Lights

Finally an old preacher speaks. He is short, and fat, full of energy,

with the worn, gravelly voice of a man with experience, and a man who

has done a lot of preaching.  He tells us he won’t talk for long, and

so he does. He talks about his past as a drug dealer. How he made a

hundred thousand dollars in one day. He makes it sound pretty good.

Then he says, proudly, that he now has a job where he makes $90,000 a

year, but he either forgets to include some kind of transition, the

part where he gets arrested or shot or loses his family or causes some

young person to become an addict or to overdose, or there just isn’t

any particular narrative lesson to be gained.

The preacher says that partying is fine, but that you “got to know when

to leave the party.” He has the congregation repeat this. He has us

turn to the person next to us and say it again. He tells bad jokes that

are likely lost on the kids. He ends with a recruitment drive, calling

up anyone who, right at this moment, has truly felt the call of Christ.

Forty, maybe 50 people, mostly the young ones, throng the altar. The

preacher tells us that there are pastors placed all around the room to

talk to anyone interested in joining his church.

The chapel service is ended. There is to be a balloon release now, out

in a field on the campus, but I head across the fuming blacktop to my

car. Inside, the thermometer reads 103 degrees. I drive the long way

down International Boulevard toward the lake. A hundred blocks, a

hundred stop lights. There are small gatherings of hookers on certain

corners, out in today’s bright blazing California sun. Most of them are

overweight. A couple of them are having a pretty good laugh over

something. I think about how I haven’t laughed like that in months.

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

More August Bloodshed

A 13-year-old boy was gunned down last night in East Oakland.  After 3 weeks with no homicides in Oakland, there have now been 6 in one week.

Here is today's SF Chronicle story of the killing of the child:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/26/BAVJ1F3Q13.DTL&type=newsbayarea

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.

Fifth Oakland Killing in One Week

Nearly three weeks into August we had had no killings for the month, but now, morbidly, August seems bent on catching up, with five killings in the past seven days.  By my count, this San Ramon man, known as Mississippi in the East Oakland neighborhood where he was stabbed to death, is 2010 homicide #57.  By this time last year we'd had 68.

The news of his death, from the SF Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/25/BACF1F34TK.DTL&tsp=1

Law Enforcement Gang Summit in Oakland

From today's SF Chronicle:
Law-enforcement officials from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and the state Department of Justice will meet with outreach workers, crisis response groups and re-entry service providers "with the intent of fostering sustainable partnerships focused on the fight against violence in Oakland," police officials said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/08/24/BAJS1F2FBV.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz0xXhcLbMn

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.

Ministry of Presence

In Oakland there is a group made up of volunteers and social workers, led by a woman whose son was murdered here ten years ago, who step into the immediate aftermath of each homicide, usually at the homes of survivors, but sometimes at fresh crime scenes, in order to give aid and comfort to the survivors.

"Aid and comfort" they define with a blessed looseness. Sometimes it is merely a gentle, clear-eyed presence. I have heard them refer to this work as their Ministry of Presence.

More often it means help planning funerals, help navigating the unfamiliar world of investigators and coroners, help doing dishes, grocery shopping, arranging rides or childcare, cleaning crime scenes, asking, simply, "Have you eaten?" Or, "Have you taken your meds?"

The leader of the group is an African American woman in her mid-fifties named Marilyn Harris Marilyn gained a small amount of notoriety here ten years ago, after her son, Khadafy Washington, was shot dead in the summer after he'd graduated high school. In the ensuing weeks, Marilyn arranged for the erection of billboards all over West Oakland, the neighborhood in which Khadafy was killed, and one of the most historically fascinating and relentlessly violent urban places in America.

I remember the stunning effect of coming upon one of the billboards, which featured a large photograph of Khadafy and the words, "Do You Know Who Killed Me?" We still don't, but in the years since, with their Khadafy Foundation for Non-Violence, Marilyn and her husband, James Harris, and a group of dedicated volunteers, and recently with funding through Measure Y and Catholic Charities, have dedicated their lives to guiding others through the toxic shock and blinding fog of just such a loss.

The Khadafy Foundation's offices are in the Acorn. The Crisis Response and Support Network is based at Catholic Charities of the East Bay.

I think of Marylin and the other members of the team like I might think of firefighters, in that every day they find the courage to run toward those things the rest of us would run away from. To spend time with anyone on the team, but particularly with Marilyn, is to have whatever shell of cynicism you might like to hide behind involuntarily torn away.

A Servant of the Desperate City

In June I went to a small Jean Quan meet-the-candidate event. It was at the old Bellevue Club on the lake.

Admittedly, 50-to-66% of my motivation for going was that I had long wanted to see the inside of the social club's big white building with the blue awning, which, finally, reminded me of someone else's rather tall grandmother, prim and thin, formerly elegant, who dressed fairly well back in her middle age, but continues to wear those same clothes now she’s in her eighties. She has stayed in fairly good shape, so they fit her well, but they are becoming worn, even threadbare, there’s a stain or two, which is gross, and although her suits are tasteful, they are, of course, out-of-date. But you admire her for once having been so classy. The ceilings were high, and I liked the view of the lake from the parlor.

There were maybe twenty urbanites at the meeting. Each remained aloof from the other. Quan seemed caffeined-up. No doubt she has some pretty long days as a council member and a candidate for mayor.

Quan tried hard to make her opening comments seem spontaneous, but you could tell by her accelerated delivery that they were canned. But it wasn’t just the caffeine causing the fast delivery; it was over-familiarity with the material, and even in exchanges with her guests Quan struck me as the best student in the class, but not necessarily the most creative, the kind of student with a fantastic memory and a large well-organized storage unit in her head full of facts ready to be delivered, boringly.

Mostly she was obsessing over an anti-Quan robocall that had gone out that evening dealing with the dispute between the police union and the financially-strapped city. Anyone who made eye-contact with her was asked, with no niceties, as if she already knew you, “Did you get the robocall?”

The unions are supporting Don Perrata, a well-connected, but term-limited, state assemblyman desperate to stay on the dole by, in the shameful tradition of Jerry Brown, becoming mayor of Oakland. The subtly pro-Perrata robocall had apparently questioned Quan’s commitment to law enforcement, and she felt it was inaccurate and unfair, and spent a lot of time expressing her grief over the use of these tactics so early in the campaign for mayor. It was difficult to tell if her grief was strongest over the content of the call or the financial disparity it portends between her campaign and Peratta’s.

Once the meeting started, the candidate asked us to call out things we “love” about Oakland and then things we believe should be a “priority” for the next mayor. Her diminutive, disheveled, committed, surgeon husband (they are an accomplished family) scribbled our answers in columns on flip chart.

I had just spent a day with the father of a man killed in a gunfight in the Ikea parking lot just over a week ago. The lot is in Emeryville, but the victim had staggered bleeding a block into Oakland before dying, and thus became an Oakland statistic, an Oakland case, instead of an Emeryville one. Oakland homicide #37.*

At the invitation of Marilyn Harris (see August 2 post "East is East"), and with the permission of the father, who on getting the news of his son’s death had driven here from Florida in three days, I accompanied him, a friend of his from Florida, the girlfriend of the deceased, and Marilyn, as they visited the DA’s office on Lake Merritt, the coroner’s near Jack London Square, the Downtown police headquarters, and a West Oakland funeral home, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

I’ll post a description of their difficult day, their quest to bring the body home to Florida, what it means in California to be killed in the act of committing a crime yourself, or to be the accomplice of someone killed while committing a crime, the wildly disparate paths individuals in Oakland take to their violent ends, and the lives we live that even those close to us don’t know about, soon.

The point is that having watched Miss Marilyn guide this family through their hellish day, having watched her comfort them with wisdom, truth, hope and great kindness, and knowing that she was in danger of losing her funding, I had death and violence on my mind when meeting Jean Quan. (I always have death on my mind, but violence had only recently shown up at the 24/7 anxiety party in my brain. He brought ice.) So when we got to the “priorities” discussion, after others had mentioned supporting public schools, attracting retail to downtown, cleaning up Chinatown, I offered, “the killing,” and it was the only subject over which the candidate became defensive.

“We’ve got the murder rate down 45%,” she said. “So what,” I said, “it’s only June.” Not to mention that I question her number, although I didn’t think of that until she had moved on. (Another sad frustrating case of Treppenwitz, or, as the French call it, esprit de l’escalier.)

“Some of the non-violence measures we did are working,” she said. She was referring at least in part to Measure Y, which had added 63 police officers, had funded community policing, as well as the programs run by Kevin Grant, Anne Marks, Catholic Charities and Marilyn Harris. It was due to become another casualty of the recession by the end of the month, collateral damage in the fiscal stand-off between the police and the city in which very few of the police actually live.

Then she asked the group to raise our hands if we thought crime was up in Oakland, which of course many did. I knew that recently the FBI had reported that overall crime rates were down in America, but that violent crime rates remained high. Quan was pleased to explain that crime in Oakland is down.

I absolutely agree with Quan that Measure Y is working. And its most profound effects on violent crime in Oakland will be felt only in the long-term. And even here in early August the murder rate remains behind where it was last year. That’s good news.

But the topic was to deal with things that ought to be a priority. I find it hard to believe that a candidate for whom being Oakland born and bred is a selling point would consider the city’s violent tendencies to be a problem of the past, or a secondary issue.

Even should not one white person gets killed this year, even if no homicides occur in Montclair or Rockridge, even if every citizen who lives in the hills finds a way to live his or her life without ever venturing to International Boulevard above Fruitvale Avenue, the killings affect them, their poisonous cloud spreads, no one is unaffected by the pulling of the trigger and its aftermath. I have to believe that, on some level, everyone feels the death, everyone feels more keenly the fear of death, you read about the killing and you picture the blood on the street, imagine a moment the emptiness in the face, you feel the fear just seeing an exit for MacArthur Boulevard or E 35th Avenue, or when you take a wrong turn into some unfamiliar neighborhood with crowded, free-market corners. Even if it is disdain you feel, for the killer or the killed, you have been affected.

And I don’t think Quan sees the killings as secondary. A month later I encountered her at the post-Mehserle-verdict rally downtown, which I will write about soon. She was very much in the fray, along with Rebecca Kaplan, being a good politician, being a leader out where a leader should be.

What was disappointing that night at the Bellevue was seeing a servant of the desperate city in disingenuous campaign mode instead of governing mode. (I should probably go to a council meeting and watch her work.) That night she was a politician sick of hearing about the killing in Oakland, who didn’t really care what we thought a new mayor should focus on, but was using our good will to convey her bland campaign message.

Her careful use of plural pronouns -- “We’ve got the murder rate down” -- brought back that sense of the best student in class, desperate to please the teacher and very determined to get credit for her contribution to some group project, which she’s convinced was better than anybody else’s. Those kids were hard to like back then, although some of them turned out to be okay, rather likeable adults.

A few weeks later, we received a letter summarizing the meeting and listing the things people had said they loved and the things they though should be priorities, one of which was “decreasing crime.” No sign of the killing.

East is East

Try as I might, I can’t disassociate myself from the pernicious Oakland, the one that seems so different from the green, peaceful Oakland I’ve lived in for the past ten years.



I identify as an Oaklander, and I had long been trying to define Oakland by its hills, its restaurants, its proximity to wild spaces, its public integration and its aura of counter-cultural romance; that has been an act of avoidance. The passion and pain of everyday life on Oakland’s bloody streets define Oakland as much as anything else, no matter how much I might succeed in arranging my own life here to deny this. You can’t write about Oakland without writing about the open, flowing wound of daily violence it cultivates.



Call it a feeling of guilt I’m reacting to, if you want to. I prefer to characterize it as neighborly concern, or civic alertness. Whatever it is, I can’t help it.



Fortunately, what I find as I orbit the outskirts of that other Oakland, which is my Oakland, is a strange, intrepid, human beauty that thrives amid the grief and pain and violence, a network of people willing to go shieldless into the wrecked lives and neighborhoods to pick up the pieces.



It is endlessly interesting to follow people like Marilyn Harris of the Khadafy Foundation, who arrives within 24 hours to help the families of the slain, or to visit with the Crisis Response team at Catholic Charities, who provide longer term help to the survivors, or to listen to gang-interventionist Kevin Grant, who takes his team to the most violent corners of the city at the most violence-prone hours of the night to preach calm, or parolee re-entry specialist Dan Simmons, who understands the temptation to re-enter your old life when you get out of jail, or Ann Marks, whose team at YouthAlive approach the literally wounded, the gunshot victims at Highland Hospital, to finally address the damage done by bullets to minds and souls. Daily these people challenge my own hard-fired cynicism.



This work arose from defensiveness about Oakland’s image across the country, and from the fact that invariably at restaurants in Oakland I encounter a common, unselfconscious mix of white and African-American and Latino and Asian, and smugly think, “You will never find a more integrated city than Oakland.”*



And yet every night from my bed in my house on a little green hill in East Oakland I can hear the gunfire in the flatlands. (I mark the time, anticipate the news report.) This part of Oakland, the Oakland of the killers and the dead, their nurturers and survivors, is hardly integrated. The killers and the dead are African-American and Latino, and very occasionally Asian. Of the 52 (by some counts, I count 54) homicides in 2010, not one victim has been white. It is as if to be white in Oakland is to be immortal.



You can’t define the things you love or hate solely on your own terms.** I can’t define Oakland by the beauty and the food, or even by the mixing-bowl crowds at its eating establishments. They are aspects of a complex civic personality.



Still, it is possible in Oakland to live a great, peaceful, safe, delicious life while giving only infrequent, passing attention to the other side. This is not to say that my neighbors don’t love all of Oakland, or that they are unmoved by the killing here. But only that, in real life, we read about the killings, or hear about them on the TV news, and we feel bad a moment, maybe more, but then we move on. We have to move on. What else are we supposed to do? It’s just that it seems possible that in the moving we forgo, we surrender the energy to make change.



And so, moving forward, this work will be dedicated to the stories of the people who, unlike me most of my life, refuse to move on.



But first, something about the relationship between the Oakland I live in, and the one where most of the killed lived in, the one most people outside of Oakland seem most aware of. It’s frustrating.



I’m not alone in my frustration with Oakland’s image problem. Indeed, some who live in these East Oakland foothills don’t like to hear this part of the city referred to as “East Oakland,” with all its violent connotations. Of our 52 homicides so far this year, far more than half have occurred on the low-lying streets of the larger section of town referred to as East Oakland.



These East Oakland killings usually take place somewhere along MacArthur Boulevard, International Boulevard, or in the high numbered avenues: 89th Avenue, 79th Avenue, 78th Avenue, 77th and Ney, 92nd and Bancroft. These last two intersections are where two teenagers were killed within 9 hours of each other on March 28th.



I live about five miles from where they were killed in the blandly, if accurately, named neighborhood called Glenview. (A future posting will consider the great neighborhood names of Oakland and give a go at orienting readers to the lay of the land of Oak.) Last month in our neighborhood newspaper, which we share with an adjacent, more upscale neighborhood called Montclair, some local wrote an op-ed suggesting that for the benefit of their property values, Montclair should secede from the troubled city, in just the way wealthy, racist Piedmont did 103 years ago. Piedmont is adjacent to Glenview and Montclair. From my front porch, I can see the mansions of Piedmont lording it in the hills to our north. A city of 1.8 square miles, Piedmont is entirely surrounded by Oakland.



Like an unimaginably wealthy municipal monk, the city of Piedmont is inside of Oakland but not of it. It’s a gilded civic island and we are the brackish waters circling. If we were a calzone, it would be the meat and sauce and we the dry dough. End of metaphors.



Unlike its complicated oakey crust, Piedmont has famously good public schools whose permanent records are uncorrupted by the necessity of educating poor kids who failed to attend pre-school, or who might have behavioral problems, or who might have only one, harried parent unable to or uninterested in monitoring their schoolwork.



Piedmont has awe-inspiring mansions lining its seemingly deserted streets. It is home to the biggest house in all of the ostentatiously wealthy Bay Area. It is owned by the guy who invented wireless microphones. There are houses in Piedmont that sell for $4, $5, $6 million. Some of these estates are less than 2 miles from my little house in view of the glen.



Over in Montclair, the mostly mid-century architecture never rises to the gloating-grandeur level of Piedmont’s. But Montclair does have more old, pretty trees. Montclair has very high priced houses. Not Piedmont-high, but some pretty amazing, woodsy, multi-million dollar hideaways. Nevertheless, economically and in terms of reputation, Montclair is Piedmont’s poor sister, the one who married the patent attorney instead of the inventor. It is Oakland to Piedmont’s San Francisco.



Just like the time when I was a kid and ran away from home, if Montclair should succeed from Oakland, probably no one would notice for awhile. We would of course eventually feel the pain in our pocketbooks, as I’m sure comparatively wealthy Montclair bears a good deal of the city’s tax burden. But in our everyday lives, no one would notice it was gone, because it is the least interesting neighborhood of Oakland. Most Oaklanders have never been there because, besides its two independent book stores (I give it credit for that), there is nothing in Montclair you couldn’t find elsewhere.



There is edible food in Montclair, but in a city growing ever richer with lively culinary gems, there is nothing interesting to eat there. If you’re looking for a great meal you go to Temescal, Uptown, Jack London, even Glenview.



Montclair’s streets can bustle, but the bustlers are pretty homogenous. If it’s a lively, Oakland street scene you seek, you either head to the Fruitvale section of International Boulevard or hipster Piedmont Avenue (which by the way is not in Piedmont, but Oakland).



While not necessarily criminal, the public architecture in Montclair isn’t noteworthy. If you want cool old architecture, you go to Uptown, or Old Oakland, or you check out the Victorian and Italianate beauties around Chestnut and Linden Streets, over behind the giant post office in West Oakland.

A saltbox style cottage in Oakland

Montclair does have its uses. Actually, I go there all the time. It has a post office, two pharmacies, two supermarkets, two coffee houses, a bar, a park, some banks, and the kind of moribund department store you emerge from with a crushing depression. But no purchased items.



The secessionist op-ed writer couched her proposal as an antidote to living in a city -- Oakland -- with incompetent leadership. Fair enough. To secede would free Montclairians from submitting their tax dollars to be mismanaged by Oakland’s city government. It would also free it from being tainted by Oakland’s crime statistics, which keep its real estate values down in the single-digit millions. Actually the median house price in Montclair is closer to $600,000. Seceding from Oakland would keep Montclair from being positioned technically east of Downtown Oakland, and the shame of occasionally being characterized as being in “East Oakland.”



Although I do not live there, I would like to start a petition drive in favor of the secession of Montclair from Oakland, and I would like to suggest that the people of Montclair perhaps broach the idea of annexation with the leaders of Piedmont. You could be called East Piedmont.



* Not that I spend that much time in other cities. Some time, though. I travel, and I pay attention. But I can’t really say with complete authority that I wouldn’t encounter the same ethnic and racial mix at public places in L.A. or Atlanta, or Newark. I wouldn’t in San Francisco, of course. San Francisco isn’t even chronologically mixed. Sometimes when I’m at restaurants in S.F. I wonder what they have done with all the people over 40. I start to feel a bit paranoid. Everyone is noticeably young, the boys carefully unkempt -- this in Oakland, too -- while the girls, who have clearly put some effort into how they look, seem perfectly fine with this. Anyway, public San Francisco never comes across as integrated, while public Oakland does.




** You can’t define yourself by yourself. Something unwanted will always insist you are not entirely who you have been trying to think you are. Working for months on this serious project about violence in Oakland, I’ve so far been unable to convince a magazine to agree to publish any related piece. I've gotten thoughtful responses, but no interest in assigning a story, yet. However, recently I did get an email from an editor asking me to write a feature about cupcakes. I need the money and I like the magazine so I said Yes, but, despite the crushing, frightening things I’ve witnessed or learned in six months on the death beat, the cupcake assignment forced me to adjust my view of myself as a serious person working on stories of consequence. Also I’m worried about my weight...