*Urban Dictionary: The Police: 1) The thin blue line between law-abiding citizens and the murder, rape, and thievery that certain “historically disadvantaged” groups inflict upon said law-abiding white majority; 2) A national terrorist organization harboring numerous violent white nationalists, a reality in keeping with its origins in post–Civil War racist revanchism; 3) Failed football players—the consequences of traumatic brain injury are real.
✦Urban Dictionary: Stolz Jungs: 1) An offshoot of past militant Far Right movements, Stolz Jungs is an American far right–wing group heavily populated by law enforcement and ex–law enforcement, allegedly; 2) Let’s take the Fifth and live to define other things.
*64:8: 1) A common figure of speech and internet greeting that is meant to signal antipathy toward the *8:46 police reform movement and support of law enforcement and right-wing politics; 2) Some dumb shit that a depressed Caucasian came up with in 2020 that won’t go away, kind of like black dudes sagging their pants past their underwear—thanks, America.
*andrewjacksonslaststand010621: As a former member of the American military and a public and private sector security personnel/police officer based in a major metropolitan area, I laugh!! at shit like this. These news stories are about bad cops. They confuse their gun with their taser. They get scared if a black flinches at them. They bust guns at any opportunity. Real police don’t do that shit. When law enforcement decides to wage war and take this country back, trust me it will not be a matter of one black beaten up here, another shot over there on the other side of the country! We have the ability to coordinate and act tactically and massively!! We exercise restraint relative to our capacity for violence!!! But the Time is coming.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Copeland Cane remains a fugitive from justice. He has twenty-four hours to turn himself in.
*Insurgency Alert Desk, Third Bureau: Recent complaints made against Soclear Security police officers allege a conspiracy among a wide network of police officers to covertly menace people of color. The Insurgency Alert Desk’s investigation has found that these complaints are totally without merit.
✦andrewjacksonslaststand010621: I’d be honored to put a bullet in Copeland Cane’s head. He can take the .45th. *64:8. Stolz Jungs. Fourth Reich. God bless America.
Jacqueline
Cope?
Cope??
Where’d you go? What happened? What happened to Miguel?
Cope
I wanna believe the sidewalk outside our gates was all blinged out and glamoured up that night. That Miguel and them boasted lit-up display cases ten feet high with racks on racks of Jordan shoes and Lamelos and LeBrons and even them Dr. J Reeboks from when my old man was knee-high to his dreams. I like to imagine they had a DJ playin’ all the slaps and it was crowds of customers, a huge show with whatever me and him used to dream, and that that was what brought the cops all overaggressive to the scene that night. That they just couldn’t stand seeing my dude on flash like that and they just had to take him down a few. But it’s not true. It was a quiet night by all accounts. Miguel and DeMichael was posted no different’n most nights. Wadn’t no one out there but the two of them and the occasional customer dropping they number in Miguel’s hand. Maybe they expected to see me. Maybe if I had came by and we had smoked, or whatever, figured out a di-version, any di-version, we woulda been off the street sooner, ’fore nightfall. Then the po-lice wouldn’t be no problem—at least they wouldn’t be our problem. But that’s not how it went down. The only way to change your history is to lie about it, and it’s more lies in the next news bulletin than I’ve told in all these hours.
What happened to Miguel? Ain’t no story to tell ’bout how Miguel got got. It’s body cam footage of the altercation that’ll tell it for what it is. Footage that the po-lice won’t publish if they don’t have to. And they don’t have to unless arrests is made and charges is filed.
**✦
“What happened to Miguel?” Momma had asked me and I asked it to her right back, cuz that empty circle that our question formed told the en-tire story. Now I wrote her back the only truths I knew besides that emptiness: “Miguel got killed. By police I think. I wasnt there.”
We been seen it before, so many times, just wadn’t no camera phones for this one. Wadn’t no video of Alan Blueford, or Tyisha Miller, or the homeless dude over by the hospital who Free seen get shot dead for resisting arrest when she was five years old, or the boy po-lice shot in the back of the head while he ran past my auntie’s house on the same day that Oscar Grant got murdered. Hella people been murdered off camera, don’t mean they’re any less dead. Ain’t no video of Emmett Till gettin’ got. If you need to see it happen (I don’t), go peep everything that’s online going all the way back in time and walk it forward one black body at a time: Philando Castile. Eric Garner. Walter Scott. Laquan McDonald. George Floyd. It’s plenty more names I could name—I ain’t forgot a single one.
**✦
I woke ahead of daybreak. My body had clammed up cold on the cold floor of Keisha’s apartment. I had to shift around this way and that to warm up. I turnt onto my side and looked at the black outline of two bodies, Keisha and Free wrapped around each other like the swirls of an old-school barbershop pole if its colors was midnight black and honey brown. I looked at them for a long time. It’s hard for me not to hate my own midnight-black body, let alone love anyone else’s. Everything in America teaches you to love what you ain’t, Jacq, especially if you’re black. But Keisha was as beautiful as anyone on earth that morning.
The Avatar blue of first light spread over us, and after a while the girls awoke like one hurting body come alive to its pain. I let them rub the cold out they eyes and get theyselves cognizant ’fore I said what I felt, which was the only reason me and Free had come to Keisha’s place to begin with.
“It’s a crime,” I said. “That cop killed Miguel. That boy was way too smart and calm to fight a fuckin’ officer.”
“I know,” they said on the same beat.
(Jacq, law enforcement can claim that I instigated the protest. I cain’t even say they’re wrong for that. I spoke the first word and that counts for somethin’ in the Bible and in life. Everything came from that beginning, but everything afterward was all of us in movement together.)
Keisha and Free, being girls with a thousand pictures of theyselves and Instagram followers for days, got it poppin’ with the social media. Unlike me, they knew how to organize from following behind they older siblings and cousins back in the day when *8:46 was rollin’ deep at every protest action. They could bring people together quick as you comb your hair. And ’fore I knew it, ’fore lunch time, matter fact, Miguel’s murder became a movement. We had folks not just in Oakland but all around the Bay and beyond, that whole Oakland exodus network of folks, planning to meet that night at the biggest church in deep East Oakland.
*
That night, fireworks sounded out, not like God but like they own little protests, sounds the po-lice cain’t stop. The sky was smoky with it. We tasted it thick in the air and dry and sulfurous on our lips as we hopped the Allen Temple Baptist back fence and followed Keisha thru the church back door. We passed by church dressing rooms, restrooms, and storage closets. I could hear what sounded like the chatter of a thousand people up ahead. The noise grew louder and louder as we dipped thru the rooms. We turnt a corner and came thru some double doors and walked on to a wide, wood-floored room bathed in stage lighting. At the far end of the room was a black curtain.
A tall, broad-shouldered man in a gold-colored suit parted the curtains and we glimpsed beyond it: a pulpit and pews and balconies and folks, folks, folks, folks, folks.
“Pastor Jeremiah!” Keisha called out.
The pastor strode toward us. “Girl, I remember you when you were knee-high to a grasshopper. Look at you now—almost tall as me. I believe you’re eighteen now, youngster. Where you and your peoples went to? I don’t see hide nor hair of y’all.”
“S
ome went to Antioch, others back to Arkansas. Momma just found her a different church home, though.”
“Well, I’ll be.” The pastor sighed. I could tell he was more moved by the church home changing than the folks having to leave outta Oakland for the four corners of America, but he played it off solid. “It’s sad that the young brother’s death is what it takes to bring our community together in this House of the Lord, but the Lord works in mysterious ways. That’s why when I saw your social media posts, I knew that our church had been called to a great convening.”
“Thank you for calling the people, Pastor.”
“I was called, Keisha.”
He looked back at the curtain as it waved open and closed behind him. I caught glimpses of the crowd: it wadn’t one audience sitting in pews politely waiting on us. Everybody was up and moving around. Little cliques had formed. I could tell that this was already way beyond our control.
“But it wasn’t the Lord, Keisha. You called me,” the pastor said, turning back to us. “You called all this together.” He looked from Keish to me and Free. “The community is healing tonight because of you—all three of you.”
That was a lot to take in. Part of me was playing the wallpaper, just watching it all happen in front of me, while on the inside the rest of me rattled and shook with thoughts of Miguel. What happened? How did he get shot? What was the particulars? I split in two and admitted the obvious: “We cain’t organize all these people, Pastor.” He bucked his eyes at me, surprised that I had spoke. “I’m just sayin’,” I said.
“But you don’t need to,” Pastor Jeremiah assured. “There are more experienced organizers here, like myself. I was on the front lines of *8:46 along with my church brethren. You already did your biggest job. What I can do is come out onstage, make an announcement to introduce y’all to the whole church, and then y’all can introduce y’all selves to whomever you’d like to work with. Does that sound like a plan?”
It didn’t. But I didn’t know no better.
*
There was angry black folks in that church and curious white folks and bottom-line-eyed people of all colors, all of us sharing that same suddenly unspiritual space. My fellow student-athletes was there. There was Trey Marshall. There was the brother who used to be silhouetted on the billboards above Rockwood. There was your Creole father, lookin’ more’n a little like everybody on earth. There was DeVonte Baltimore and his crew of dancers from the train, each of them decked in they red, white, and blue. There was Guzzo. There was Deadrich. Principal Morgan and Sherrod St. James. The memories of the virus and the distancing still stuck with me, so to see this group of young and old people, people of different races, riches, and cultures, huddled close up and unafraid of each other was a very strange and beautiful thing. There was the groundskeeper from Treasure Island who saved my life, and Vista, who backhanded me into existence unofficially, and a couple of the brothers whose barbershop burnt to the ground. There was my grade school teacher Ms. MacDonald and my high school teacher Mrs. Greenberg. And there was DeMichael Quantavius Chesnutt Bradley, too, all by hisself, holding up the back wall of the church next to the exit doors. I knew that if anyone had witnessed the killing and could tell me how it had all went down, it would be him.
“DeMichael,” I called, and raised up a hand for him to see me, simultaneously dipping and slipping past people till I got to him. “What you here for, Cope?”
“What do you mean, what am I doing here? Me, Keisha, Free, we started this, blood.”
“Really?”
“Nah, Negro, it fell out the dang sky. You ain’t seen the social media we put together?”
“Nah. I don’t be on none of that shit.”
“Don’t be cussin’ inside the church, blood. How did you know this was happening if you ain’t on social media?”
“Blood, aye’body and they momma is in on this.”
I looked around the church at all the known and unknown faces, folks from as close as down the street and from well past Pied-montay. It still felt like I was hovering over the whole scene, watching this wild shit happen. I didn’t wanna organize none of it or be around for none of this setup. I needed to know what happened to Miguel. I reached past DeMichael and pushed open the door behind him.
“You kickin’ me out, family?”
“Not unless I’m kickin’ my own self out.”
I slipped past him and shouldered thru the swinging exit door. An automated buzzer sounded somewhere over our heads as he followed me out the church. We stood there in the parking lot for a second just lookin’ at each other, not ready to speak about anything so sad.
“Can you tell me what happened?” I finally asked.
DeMichael peeled his eyes in all di-rections and kept quiet. The exit door buzzer had already drawn attention to us where we stood. It didn’t make sense to play statue on the street side of a thin door and talk to Black Hercules, who had concert speakers for vocal cords. We needed an empty, quiet place.
“Let’s keep walkin’,” I said. “Did you see what happened to Miguel?” I asked him as we walked.
“Did I?”
“Did you?”
We came to Ravenscourt, its remains. What once was a whole city block of housing was nothin’ but stones and ce-ment lying loose on the ground, and screws and shingles and door hinges and the skeletons of showerheads and so much more. It was like if you turnt any house, or all the houses on any street, upside down or inside out and just let all the insides fall where they may and then let the scrappers come thru and snatch the metal outta anything that could be turnt around and resold. There were a few stacks of scrap and rubble that rose as high as we stood and some spaces of wall that wadn’t completely brought to the ground. In the dark, I couldn’t tell how high them things still rose, but it was clear that the demolition people wadn’t done.
“Family.” He shook his head.
“What happened, DeMichael?”
“Cope, you ever notice that these fools who shoot at cops never shoot nobody who actually killed someone? My parole mentor was breakin’ that shit down to me and it made sense. He said how it’s definitely killers on the force and shit, cops that need to get got. But it’s never those ones who get shot. It’s always some unsuspecting new guy, just got his badge, playin’ on his phone and shit—these cowards will blast a cat like that for no reason.”
“You ain’t lied yet.” I looked around the ruins. In the night, the vast space looked like a limitless graveyard, every fallen pillar and piece of rubble a tombstone. Thousands of tombstones. There was enough junk piled in Ravenscourt for a whole landfill, not to mention driven holes every few feet. It wouldn’t be hard to stash ten weapons in there. Standing in the ruins, I looked old boy up and down. “DeMichael, what happened to Miguel?”
He looked around like we was being watched. “Li’l bruh.” His big voice shrank to a plea. He shook his head again. “Can we keep walkin’?”
We walked across the street to the Rock, what was left of it, our one building and the Bradley apartment within it. DeMichael closed the door behind us. I could hear his granny snoring. DeMichael signaled for me to remain quiet. We slid into the narrow little kitchen and sat down at the table.
“Look, li’l bruh,” he whispered, “it was like this: Redwoods security rolled up on me, like usual. Them same two cats that always be out there. They was giving me all kinda static. Miguel started talkin’ yang to them, callin’ them fools out for not wearin’ they masks. He was, like, readin’ the city regulations to them off his phone and shit. (Family, I ain’t seen not a single officer wear a mask in years, but my dude was on one that night. Wadn’t tryna see them fools mess with me.) One of the cops starts jaw jackin’ right back at Miguel and totally loses interest in me. He goes and gets in Miguel’s face. I remember Miguel turnt off his phone and the street kinda went dark, and that’s when the second cop asked him what was that in his hand. He left me where I stood and rushed over and put paws on cousin. He got him on the ground and
he’s yellin’ about ‘don’t resist arrest’ and shit like that while he’s got bruh-bruh on his stomach, hands behind his back. He has his knee in Miguel’s back and he’s steady punching him in the side of his face and shit. It’s kinda hard to stay still when someone’s got you like that, na’mean? So Miguel’s squirming around, tryna cover up and whatever. I thought about jumpin’ in, family, I swear I did. I thought about fightin’ them fools on the spot. I thought about takin’ one of they guns. I took a step toward them where they was squabbin’, and the cop who was still standing seen me and turnt on me and yelled, ‘Don’t move!’ I could tell that he wanted to put that tool on me. I wadn’t tryna get shot, blood. I wadn’t even tryna get arrested. I backed up and that’s when the cop on the ground stopped yellin’ at Miguel and the shot rang out. Have you ever stood that close to someone when they shoot a gun? When you ain’t expecting them to shoot it and then it just goes off? I couldn’t hear nothin’ and I think I closed my eyes. I remember opening them and seeing again. He shot cousin in the face.”
I didn’t say anything and silence sat down between us.
“Cope?”
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t even see the man reach for that tool. Next thing I know, it’s blood everywhere.”
The only thing I could think to do was ask about the facts. Everything else was too much, too, too messy, too terrible. “He shot him in the face?”
“That’s what I said.”
“How do you—”
“Miguel was, like, halfway on his stomach, halfway on his side. The cop had him penned and shot him in the side of his face. Family, I’ve never seen no shit like that before. The blood. The body. That boy just laid out like that. I looked away real quick.”
“Where did you go after that? I came outside after the shooting. Didn’t see you.”
“I left out quick, blood. Went home. Po-lice wadn’t tryna question no witnesses.”
The Confession of Copeland Cane Page 29