Tales of Two Americas Read online

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  San Francisco is now a cruel place and a divided one. A month before the trial, the city’s mayor, Ed Lee, decided to sweep the homeless off the streets for the Super Bowl, even though the game was played forty miles away, at the new 49ers stadium in Silicon Valley. Online rants about the city’s homeless population have become symptomatic of the city’s culture clash. The open letter to the mayor published in mid-February by Justin Keller, founder of a not very successful start-up, was typical in tone: “I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.” And like Evan Snow, who wanted to blow away Alejandro Nieto after their encounter, Keller got his wish in a way. Pushed out of other areas, hundreds of homeless people began to set up tents under the freeway overpass around Division Street on the edge of the Mission, a gritty industrial area with few residences. The mayor destroyed this rainy-season refuge too: city workers threw tents and belongings into dump trucks and hounded the newly property-less onward. One of the purges came before dawn the morning the Nieto trial began.

  When the trial ended with a verdict in favor of the police, 150 or so people gathered inside at the Mission Cultural Center and outside on rainy Mission Street. People were composed, resolute, disappointed, but far from shocked. It was clear that most of them had never counted on validation from the legal system that what happened to Alex Nieto was wrong. Their sense of principle and history was not going to be swayed by this verdict, even if they were saddened or angered by it. Bac Sierra, out of his courtroom suits and in a T-shirt and cap, spoke passionately, as did Oscar Salinas, who had just posted on Facebook the words “Alex you will never be forgotten, your parents will always be taken care of by us, the community. As I’ve always said, the unspoken word of La Mision is when someone is hurting, needs help, or passes we come together as a family and take care of them.”

  The Nietos spoke, with Adriana translating for those who did not understand Spanish. And Adriana spoke on her own behalf: “One of the most important changes in my path being involved in the Alex Nieto case has been to learn more about restorative practices, because as someone trained in legal systems, I know that the pain and fear that we are not safe from police in our communities will not go away until there is personal accountability by those who harm us.”

  Adriana, her historian husband, and their friends—including an AIDS activist and a queer choreographer—who live nearby in a ramshackle old building, had faced their own eviction battle last year, and won it. But the community that came together that night was still vulnerable to the economic forces tearing the city apart. Many of these people may have to move on soon; some already have.

  The death of Alex Nieto is a story of one young man torn apart by bullets, and of a community coming together to remember him. They pursued more than justice, as the case became a cause, as the expressions became an artistic outpouring in videos, posters, and memorials, and as friendships and alliances were forged and strengthened. On April 7, less than a month after the trial, the police shot longtime San Franciscan Luis Gongora to death, claiming he was rushing them with a knife. Eyewitnesses from the little homeless community he was part of and from surrounding buildings and a security video suggested otherwise. People became angrier about the police they saw as part of a city government wiping out the black and Latino communities.

  After the verdict and the killing of Gongora, five people went on a hunger strike in front of the Mission police station, fasting for eighteen days in their Hunger for Justice campaign to force the police chief to resign. Conventional wisdom dismissed their perspective and their effort, but on the afternoon of the day that police killed an unarmed mother—Jessica Nelson Williams—in her twenties, the police chief was forced to resign. At the demonstration that night at the industrial site where Williams died of a single bullet, two women held a banner that said WE ARE THE LAST 3%. The black population had plummeted since its peak in the mid-teens thirty years earlier. Down the block tucked under a freeway overpass, gentrifying homes were visible, styled in what you could call fortress modernism.

  That night in March, in the gathering for the anniversary of Nieto’s killing, Adriana Camarena told the crowd: “Our victory, as the Nietos said yesterday, is that we are still together.” That too is a fragile and insecure condition.

  i’m sick of pretending to give a shit about what whypeepo think

  on the best days, i don’t remember their skin

  the kingdom & doom of it, their coy relationship to sunlight

  band-aids are the color of the ones who make the wound

  & whats a band-aid to a bullet to the rent is sky high & we gotta move?

  i have no desire to desire what they apparently have

  i want quiet & peace & enough weed to last through Saturday

  so now that we’re done talking about them, do you think

  its appropriate to call that nigga Obama a nigga in public?

  i have accepted that they who is always they will always be

  looking so what’s the use in holding back my black cackle

  & juke? what’s the purpose in being black if you have to spend

  it trying to prove all the ways your not? i’m done with race

  hahahaha could you imagine if it was what easy? to just say

  i’m done & all the scars turn into ravens

  the trees forget their blood memory & the city

  lose all it’s teeth? when people say they’re post race

  i think they’re saying their done with black people

  done with immigrants, officially believing America

  began when the white people demanded their freedom

  from the other white people i’m post America in that case

  i’m so far in the future i’m on the beaches of Illinois

  southern coast of a has been empire

  telling my grandkids about the dust that use to rule us

  —Danez Smith

  NOTES OF A NATIVE DAUGHTER

  Sandra Cisneros

  HOW TO EXPLAIN, Chicago, why you and me split?

  Nelson Algren dubbed you a woman with a broken nose, albeit a lovely one, but you are guilty of breaking more than noses. Gwendolyn Brooks painted you as “grayed in, and gray,” and this is how I remember your bruised skies of October, November, December, January, February, March, April till May. Lorraine Hansberry fumigated your cockroaches. Richard Wright stalked your rats. Studs Terkel quoted a Chicagoan who said, “I always feel a chest-swelling when I drive along the lake. . . . Yet I know four blocks over is desperation.”

  So much desperation in our neighborhood. We thought we deserved what we got because we were willing to live in such flimsy buildings. What did you expect? Rent’s cheap. Just like my mother and father thought they’d been punished when the baby died from the flood of bronchial pneumonia. Blamed themselves. Not the cold apartments, not the city, never the landlords, nor the building inspectors.

  On the northwest corner of Western and Le Moyne, a Puerto Rican classmate drowned in a sea of fire; an open casket and the ugly wig terrible as a lie. On Twenty-First Street and Wolcott, a prizewinning poet and her daughters leaped from third-story flames and survived. But did not escape the aftermath of nightmares. Fire department blamed ladders too short for the buildings, not enough trucks, not enough equipment. Never enough of anything for a neighborhood not worth saving.

  Our neighborhoods were the ones earmarked for urban renewal, we were told, and told to move. They didn’t tell us someone else’s renewal, not our own.

  But I have you to thank, Chicago,
for my education. Slim luck enough to have been born when museums had free admission on Sundays so working folks were welcome. My teachers were Hokusai and Brancusi at the Art Institute; my schoolroom, the basement of the Field Museum in the Egyptian tombs; color I learned at the Shedd Aquarium; Yesterday’s Main Street was my lesson at the Museum of Science and Industry; the Chicago History Museum taught me about fire.

  In the neighborhoods we knew, booze was easier to find than books. On every block, liquor stores or taverns to mute the pain of dreams deferred. Few and far and rare, libraries to ignite aspirations. Before we learned to read and ever after, Mother took us to the library weekly.

  My immigrant father’s overdose of Mexico City pride gave us the self-esteem to survive you, Chicago. We were the border. Between black and white at war with one another and at war with us. We knew from visits to our father’s home, there was more than one story in “history.” Knew to distinguish what was said in textbooks from what we knew ourselves from traveling south.

  I discovered The Autobiography of Malcolm X and thereafter refused to serve the Master. I changed my name from sand-druh sis-narrows to sohn-druh seez-neh-ros, though I had to repeat and repeat it. And when my listener gave me back my name beautifully whole, it was a gift of respect and self-respect.

  Those days were sick-and-tired times of I-can’t-wait. The Democratic convention of ’68 camped in our backyard, Humboldt Park; the first time I’d seen white people come visit. Those days were the days dimmed with Dr. King’s death. The city consumed by fire that gave no light. Our relatives, the last of the Mexicans on their black block, fled their Lawndale home. Walked, abandoning family photos, all their personal things, though aunty, with her indigenous Guanajuato skin, was the hue of her neighbors, if not darker.

  Each night, sun hunkered in the West and gilded our rowdy village. I needed sunsets like I needed books. I needed an eternity of serene. Had to wait till Sunday to get my dose of lake. The blue coastline too expensive daily. I made do with what was affordable, within reach. When you least expected it, you might come upon an astonishing cloud, wild morning glories climbing an electric pole, the first green pips of spring breaking through the crust of winter. Something beautiful was necessary, needed to keep one nourished for the inevitable grief.

  One long, hot summer, Mayor Jane Byrne sent Tito Puente to Humboldt Park to drum on his garbage cans for us instead of sending the Department of Sanitation to empty our cans, trash collection halved from twice a week to once, even though population and trash had doubled. And with that, doubling the population of urban creatures. Mother and I avoided our garden after sunset. Our curfew—fear.

  What could a city girl like me do but major in human behavior? I knew since I was a teenager, a passenger grunting on the Armitage bus could take delight of himself in open day and force others to watch for added pleasure. For good measure, I sat thereafter next to the driver.

  The crash of a windshield with a baseball bat meant the disappearance of a purse. Gold about the neck attracted the only runners our neighborhood knew. When driving, I knew to lock all doors. Once, at a stoplight, Father was escorted by knife a few blocks, deposited curbside, and kindly divested of his van. At least he made it to his bed that night, unlike cousin’s husband found asleep at the wheel, a bullet and a this-can’t-be-happening-to-me look lodged to the head.

  To feed nine meant weekly visits to the local supermarket that stank of black fruit and sour beer. Nothing to transport the groceries home but me and Mother, a collapsible shopping cart, and our collapsible bones. Sweets meant another trek beyond the park and the Kedzie armory, to day-old vending machine doughnuts sold at half price to sugar the deal.

  Every place we ever lived never had enough bedrooms for seven kids. Nights, we camped where we could. Three or four together, head to feet. On La-Z-Boys, rollaways, couch cushions. In rooms not meant for beds.

  When I came home at night from work, I knew enough to avoid sidewalks and parked cars and sprinted the center runway of our street from bus stop to the safety of my door.

  I answered Ginsberg’s “Howl” with my own poetry for those who lived like me, afraid for themselves and of one another. “North Avenue.” “Roosevelt Road.” “South Sangamon.” A house on a street named Mango.

  I was all of twenty-two when on a car trip through Carolina’s Blue Ridge, I saw a country house with a swing dangling from a thick branch and a careless bike abandoned on the fenceless lawn. And thought, Kids grow up like this? I never knew.

  Chicago’s Magnificent Mile made others feel magnificent but only made me ashamed of my shoes. To us, Michigan Avenue shops meant: Do not enter if you have to ask, “How much?”

  Our downtown was South State Street. Smokey Joe’s for Super Fly wear. Ronny’s Steak House’s $2.95 T-bones. George Diamond’s, home of the original iceberg wedge salad. Three Sisters Dress Shop: Yes, we have layaway. Sears for boxes of popcorn. Van Buren Street temptation row—peep and burlesque shows where Harold’s library now stands.

  And Goldblatt’s. A carnival. Department store bells dinging nervously. Escalators filled to capacity in both directions. Chaos in enticing bins. A sea of pastel nylon undies. Mountains of mismatched socks. An explosion of double-D brassieres. Miniature Lincoln Log cabins spouting incense from chimneys. Queen-size pantyhose. Windmill cookies. Butter toffee peanuts. Candy in glass bins. All within reach. Gimme a quarter pound of orange slices, please.

  I was afraid for myself and of others. Tired of being on high alert, watching for the tiger in the grass from the corner of the eye. The walls at night that came alive with amber shimmering at the flick of a light. The scuttling and squeaking behind plaster.

  Father said, pointing around our home, “Why would you want to leave? You have everything here.”

  How could I tell him this was not the everything I’d asked for?

  What did I want? No one had ever thought to ask me.

  I longed for a space all my own to think. Quiet enough to hear my pen move across paper. Affordable but safe. Serene and clean. Peonies on the kitchen table. No mice, or rats, or crispy bugs allowed, ever. A lock on the door. A door, please.

  “A city should be a place to live.”

  The truth was, I was trying not to die.

  Mother said, Go to school. Study hard. And wear a bra.

  Father said, Go to college. And while you’re at it, bring back a husband.

  Chicago said, We need girls like you . . . to teach high school.

  I said to me, If you stick around, you’re everybody’s but your own.

  I ran off at twenty-eight with that wild boy—my pen.

  I’m sixty-one. My mother and father gone.

  Chicago, how do I explain? For home to be a home, you have to feel that you belong.

  DOSAS

  Edwidge Danticat

  ELSIE WAS WITH her live-in renal failure patient when her ex-husband called to inform her that his girlfriend, Olivia, had been kidnapped in Port-au-Prince. Elsie had just fed Gaspard, the renal patient, when her cell phone rang. Gaspard was lying in bed, his head carefully propped on two foam pillows, his bloated and pitted, and sometimes itchy, face angled toward the gray-tinted bedroom skylight, which allowed him a slanted view of a giant coconut palm that had been leaning over the lakeside house in Gaspard’s single-family development for years.

  Elsie removed the empty plate from Gaspard’s nightstand and wiped a lingering string of spinach from his chin. Waving both hands as though conducting an orchestra, Gaspard signaled to her not to leave the room, while motioning for her to carry on with her phone conversation. Quickly turning her attention from Gaspard to the phone, Elsie pressed it close to her lips and asked, “Ki lè?”

  “This morning.” Sounding hoarse and exhausted, Blaise, the ex-husband, jumbled his words. His singsong tone, which Elsie often attributed to his actually being a singer, was gone. It was replaced by
a nearly inaudible whisper. “She was leaving her mother’s house,” he continued. “Two men grabbed her, pushed her into a car, and drove off.”

  Elsie could imagine Blaise sitting, or standing, with the phone trapped between his neck and shoulders, while he used his hands to pick at his fingernails. It was one of his many obsessions, clean fingernails. Dirty fingers drive him crazy, she’d reasoned, because Blaise had been raised by a market woman and a mechanic and had barely missed having dirty fingers all his life.

  “You didn’t go with her?” Elsie asked.

  “You’re right,” he answered, loudly drawing an endless breath through what Elsie knew were grinding teeth. “I should have been with her.”

  Elsie’s patient’s eyes wandered down from the ceiling, where the blooming palm had sprinkled the skylight glass with a handful of tiny brown seeds. He’d been pretending not to hear, but was now looking directly at Elsie. Restlessly shifting his weight from one side of the bed to the next, he paused to catch his breath. He wanted her off the phone.

  Gaspard had turned seventy that day and before his lunch had requested a bottle of champagne from his daughter, champagne which he shouldn’t be having, but for which he’d pleaded so much that the daughter had given in on the condition that he would take only a few sips after the toast. The daughter, Mona, who was a decade younger than Elsie’s thirty-five years, was visiting from New York and had gone out to procure what was surely the most expensive bottle of champagne she could find. And suddenly she was back.

  “Elsie, I need you to hang up,” the daughter said in Creole as she laid out three crystal champagne flutes on a folding table by the bed.

  “Call me back,” Elsie told Blaise.

  After she hung up, Elsie moved closer to the sick man’s spindly daughter and watched as she gently slid a champagne flute between her father’s fingers.