Waiting to die in West Oakland

It’s so strange how things work in the hood.

Last month at the medical meeting at Santa Rita jail, an old black doctor by the name of Benton, told me he had been called by the director of the Lowell community center in west Oakland to speak to a group of about 100 kids and parents. Another young black man was gunned down, this time in front of over 50 young children after school.

I offered my advice. The doctor seemed unsure, but he was determined. As an older Black man, with an MD degree, and a long time resident of Oakland, I knew that just the fact that he would show up, would be healing for the community.

This month we had another meeting. At the end, I asked him how the community meeting went. He said it went as well as could be expected. Almost 200 community members had shown up. I was a bit taken aback that so many people had shown up. Dr. Benton informed me that not only had this young man been gunned down in full view of dozens of young kids, but also a full 25 minutes had passed before the Oakland Police Department had arrived on the scene. I was angered, appalled, shocked, offended... I wanted to write a note to myself stating, "waiting to die in West Oakland" when I got home, but then, as I pulled onto my street I saw one of those street corner memorials at the closed park several doors down from my house. There were over 3 dozen candles burning. Three t-shirts hanging in the chain length fence with messages and signature and words of love and encouragement for the afterlife. I saw balloons, a stuffed animal and even empty pill bottles. I assumed it was the young man’s medications, placed on the corner in the tradition of North African antiquity, to serve him in the afterlife. This is the 5th person killed ON my block in the 6 years. I'll always remember the first. We had only been in the home a few weeks when a woman who was a well-known neighborhood crack addict was found dead on the other side of my backyard fence. She too had been shot to death.

I also had to think about the time a few months back when I first brought my children to the corner liquor store to get some lollipops. Shots rang out as we exited the store. People ran. The bullets landed in the back wall several feel from where we were standing. In my typical fashion I was cool and calm. The shots had BEEN fired. And we WERE alive. We had cheated death. It wasn't our time. There was in fact, absolutely nothing to be worried about. That's how my mind works. I had lived in Harlem, the Bronx, West Oakland, The Mission in Frisco, the central district in Seattle.... it wasn't my time. It had never been my time. In the hood, the difference between life and death is measured in millimeters and fractions of seconds. So to miss a bullet by several feet and several seconds was the same as having never been shot at.

I pulled out my cell phone and called my neighbor, "mike" who lives two doors down. A young black man answered, but it wasn't my Mike. I had dialed the wrong Mike. I accidentally dialed Mike Dixon in Seattle, co-founder (with his brother Aaron) of the Black Panthers in Seattle. I explained my error to his grown son "Che" who I counseled when he was 13 years old. "Tell your dad Damon in Oakland says 'hi'.". I hung up but before I dialed my neighbor Mike, I had to think about another Black Panther, Huey Newton, who was also gunned down in West Oakland. I thought of how easily and unquestionable Mike Dixon’s son, now grown, had taken the news that I was trying to call another "Mike" to ask about a young black man who had been dunned down a few yards from my house.... I finally got Mike on the line but first I had to ask him if he had any 9mm shells. "Naw man, I don't." he said. I told him about the dream I had the previous night that someone was trying to tear down my house with a bulldozer. In the dream I ran to get my Glock, but remembered that I didn't have any bullets. I hunkered down behind my dresser as the shots from the bulldozer pierced the carpet around my feet. In the dream I wasn't scared to die, but wondering what kind of idiot I was to purchase a gun for protection but to have neglected to buy bullets.... I explained the absurdity to Mike, he said, "yeah, you don't want to do that (pause), and naw man, I aint got no bullets. I need some… (pause) what do you want?" I said, "Hey, who got killed down the street? Do you know?" Mike sounded distracted, "Oh yeah, uh, can I call you right back, I’ll be home and call you in a minute."

I hung up and thought about how anecdotally I knew that a young man had gotten killed and the Oakland Police Department took 25 minutes to get there. Anecdotally, I also knew that a man had been killed on my block. I had no hard facts, but it made me realize that life in West Oakland is so silent and so anecdotal. Silent because the voices are being snuffed out one by one. Silent because the dreams are personal and the sounds do not escape your mind. Silent because there is no one who will be shocked for more than a few seconds when you share a tale of death, or near death. There is no one who cares to bother to discuss the fact that the cops don't give a damn. It’s a fact buttressed with thousands of untold anecdotal tales.

The inadequacy of the community, anecdotally, is absurd in that it has been a condition that has persisted unabated for generations. It gets a few lines in the paper. But the cries, the pain, the anger, the resignation is absorbed by the community, in their silently burning candles. The stuffed animals, incapable of speech and the balloons that only voice displeasure when the wind causes them to rub against one another. The dreams where you live, or die, and wake to hustle another day’s manna from someone, somewhere, for something.... and this silence dissipates as it is told from mouth to ear, to young and old.

It seemed like such a perfect example for a lesson in the power of the media, to make, or ignore stories. It seemed like such a perfect example for whatever it is to not be fact checked, to not be "mass communicated", to not be a "story".