Nights in Tents

by Laura Love

  That night I ordered a ninety-eight dollar meal of calamari, porterhouse steak, and two Bombay Sapphire dry gin martinis—neat, with three olives each—at Flora’s Restaurant. I finished with Tiramisu and coffee. I ate like a sow as I Occupied Flora’s and looked insane in the process. My homemade cardboard sign saying, TAX THE RICH was taped on my backpack that I wore throughout my feast, since I had to carry my valuables with me wherever I went, for fear of losing them if left unguarded in the tent. After I gorged, I felt invigorated and ready for lots more Occupying.

  Later that night during the General Assembly (GA) there were speakers of color who’d been invited to share their stories about ongoing police brutality and the targeting of ethnic minorities that were hallmarks of the Oakland Police Department long before Occupy arrived. I found myself tearing up as one person after another testified how they had been systematically mistreated by the OPD. Many had been funneled into the prison industrial complex after their arrest and deprived of liberty for some period of time. Some of the OPD misconduct they detailed had caused either permanent injury or death to the speaker or a loved one. I gazed up at the beautifully designed City Hall Building, with its two brilliantly lit carved eagles flanking the American flag, and I wondered how we could ever have allowed ourselves to get to this point. A moonless night fell on the long line of black and brown people who were patiently queued up to speak. Each grievous tale saddened me more than the last, until the line finally dwindled down to one remaining speaker—an older, prosperous looking white woman who seemed out of place in the gathering. She toddled unsteadily up to the microphone with the aid of a young black man, who gave her his arm to lean on. The lighting was such that I strained to make out her delicate features as she spoke quietly and earnestly in the soft voice of a well-bred woman. She described, matter-of-factly, how her marriage to a black man had produced three lovely brown children, who often came home from school with troubling stories of racial profiling and unwarranted run-ins with law enforcement personnel who, they contended, had singled them out based solely on their race. She remembered listening to these stories with some degree of skepticism and wondering sometimes if, in fact, her children weren’t exaggerating the details of the incidents simply to shock or alarm her. She even admitted to, once or twice, having dismissed her kids’ perceptions of harassment by the police as an oversensitivity to well-meaning officers who, she confessed, she’d always seen as allies and protectors. She went on to classify herself as “not exactly the 1%, but at least in the top 10% of wealthy individuals in this country.” Then she said that, on the few occasions in her life that she’d had reason to call the police, they’d always treated her courteously and respectfully. Her genteel, refined presence clearly defined her as an educated member of the upper class as she explained how unfailingly she had always relied on them to protect her and serve her needs. She revealed that she never fully bought her interracial children’s assertions that their realities were far removed from hers, as a privileged white woman. That is, until she found herself helpless to defend her son from a grossly unjust, manufactured allegation leveled against him by the Oakland Police Department. The charge had landed him a considerable prison sentence, which only permitted her to visit once a month, for a short time, and then only through a bulletproof, plexiglass window. She was trembling visibly and on the verge of tears when she paused for a moment to gather herself. By that time I was weeping openly for her pain, as I waited for her to regain composure. She resumed her dissertation by saying that she would never again dismiss the stories of any minority person after the travesty her own family had endured at the hands of the police. Nor could she ever trust a country that trains and arms its officers to attack and jail its brown citizens in such disproportionate numbers to whites. She paused again and breathed in slowly as she prepared to deliver her closing remarks, which began with a weary admission that the painful lesson had almost destroyed her. As her voice trailed to a whisper she professed, “I am now intimately aware of how deeply flawed our criminal justice system is. And on this evening, I say to you, my dear brown and black brothers and sisters of Oakland …” She paused briefly, and in that split second, the disembodied spirit of Huey Newton leapt, unbidden, into her diminutive body and took full control of her faculties as she roared, “FUCK THE POH-LICE, FUCK THE POH-LICE, FUCK THE POH-LICE!” Over and again she repeated the phrase, like a boss, with the accent on the “POH.” She thrust her fists wildly into the air, apparently not ever intending to stop, until she was finally ushered, still screaming, away from the microphone. All of us, in the shock-paralyzed audience, sat in stunned silence for several unsure moments, before jumping to our feet and erupting into riotous applause. Mama brought the house down.

  Later, during that same week, I found my tolerance for bad behavior being challenged relentlessly. I had gotten my days and nights totally turned around as a result of being constantly awakened by drug fueled disturbances of one kind or another at Oscar Grant Plaza. The outbreaks of yelling and threats were not just annoying, they were scary as hell, as I wondered if anyone was going to pull out a gun or knife and kill somebody—hopefully not me. Somewhere toward the end of my stay, at the height of my irritation, I began to wonder if I might be viewing my brethren, in the encampment, with a jaundiced eye. What if I opened myself up to the possibility that I’d become inured to the daily injustices that had produced such miscreants? What if my intolerance was based on my own altered perceptions as a newly comfortable, middle-class, light-skinned African American woman living in the Pacific Northwest. Could it be that I had somehow turned into a republican? The very thought repulsed me. Certainly I had been born into poverty and had suffered greatly as a child, but my adult years had been relatively unblemished by the degrading occurrences that had been part of my daily life growing up in Nebraska. At that point I began to examine the unique set of circumstances that had allowed me to get where I am today. I thought about all the social programs that were in place when I was young, which served as my safety net, that no longer exist today. I thought about the fact that I am so light-complected that many people mistake me for white wherever I go, and treat me accordingly. More than once, I’ve been told racist jokes by people who had no idea I was black. In years past, a neighbor in my middle-class Seattle suburb said, “Hi Laura, I hope I wasn’t making too much noise. I was in my Back yard with my beebee gun shooting at cans … Af ri-cans … Mexi-cans, and Puerto Ri-cans.” I recoiled at the punchline and harkened back to times I’d seen my darker, kinky-haired sister being mistreated and called “Nigger” by other kids at the all-white school we attended in Lincoln, Nebraska until 1969. When I was in the fourth grade, we moved mid-year to an all-black school, sixty miles away, in a rough part of Omaha, where I suddenly wore a bullseye as, “the only honky in the whole school.” Then I recalled the day my sister and I rented our first apartment in 1976. I’d picked up the phone and made a call to the landlord, who’d listed it in the newspaper. She and her husband had been so charmed by our phone conversation, that she’d rented the apartment to us on the spot—sight unseen. I had told her truthfully that Lisa and I were students—that we were both employed, and that we got good grades. Mrs. Fahlberg had been kind and sympathetic—even motherly over the phone, and I knew that we’d be happy in our new home. When my sister and I took the necessary buses to her house to pick up the apartment key, she’d let out a horrified gasp. “Oh my goodness,” she had said, looking first at my sister, then me, “Why didn’t you tell us your were colored? We’ve never rented to coloreds before.” I remember her hastily excusing herself and leaving me and my sister standing on the porch while she disappeared inside the house to caucus with her husband. She reappeared at length, to frostily announce, “My husband and I have decided to rent to you only because we told you that we would, and we never go back on our word, but it was extremely dishonest of you not to tell us that you were colored. We just don’t know how this will work out with our other tenants.” I remember my
embarrassment and shame that day, and the feeling that my sister and I had done something deceitful and immoral, when it was in fact, her own prejudices that had allowed her to reach such faulty conclusions about our ethnicity. In her world, intelligence and proper speech were incongruous with being black.

  A few months later the Fahlbergs found the excuse they were looking for and gave us thirty days to leave after they said another tenant in the four-plex had complained about seeing a black man with a gun lurking around the property. My sister’s sixteen-year-old boyfriend had been playing with a plastic toy gun that belonged to one of his little brothers as he sat on the porch swing, in broad daylight, and waited for Lisa to come home from her after school job. She said her other tenants had been frightened, which jeopardized her rental income, so we had to go. I seriously doubted the veracity of the statement, since all of my brief encounters with the other renters had been pleasant and uneventful.

  My sister and I scrambled to find a new place to live, which we eventually accomplished, but the apartment was more expensive, less nice, and much farther away from school and work. We did get back on our feet, but the experience devastated both of us and left a lasting impression. We lived at “The Floral Court” until 1978 when I began to attend the University of Nebraska, free of charge because of the readily available Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, (BEOG) offered by the Carter Administration to minority and underprivileged high school graduates. Today’s college hopefuls can only dream about the ease and accessibility of this program, whose only requirement was to be a good citizen and maintain a grade point average above a C. That year, because of the grant and a work study job, I was able to work reasonable hours for decent pay, which created the environment for me to earn a 4.0 GPA and live in my own apartment for the duration, with relatively few financial worries. The self-sufficiency I was afforded paved the way for me to throw myself fully into my studies and eventually graduate with honors. Once I’d achieved this goal, I gave myself permission to delve more deeply into my artistic interests—songwriting and music. And in 1996, I signed on to a major label, which kickstarted my career as a singer/songwriter and recording artist for Mercury Records.

  When I look back, it’s undeniable that I was able to take tremendous advantage of a wealth of opportunities and safety nets which, for the most part, don’t exist any more. When I gave it some thought, I understood that these marginalized, disenfranchised people who caused so much commotion at night, didn’t have a ghost of a chance to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” They didn’t even have boots, let alone straps. The BEOG and work study programs had been my “boots” and my hard work had been the “straps.” How was someone born in poverty, to a poorly educated single mother, whose own opportunities were severely curtailed by her blackness, femaleness, and geographical location, ever going to provide her children with the tools needed to thrive in the modern era? How could she ever instill the virtues of hard work and dedication to her progeny, when she couldn’t pinpoint a single example of success in her own zip code? Yet here I was, all pissed off because folks weren’t “behaving” like I wanted them to, when such conduct would have virtually guaranteed banishment and ignominy in their home communities. Excelling in prostitution and drug careers were the only realistic pursuits in much of Oakland. Even if these ne’er-do-wells had somehow found it within themselves to remain unswayed by the pressure, they’d likely be pulled over, or stopped and frisked anyway, at the whim of big city police departments who’d populated mega-prison complexes with scores of young bloods who looked and sounded just like them.

  And yet, given all these strikes against them, almost every one of the bereft, wounded, disenfranchised people, joined, at one time or another, in conversations about the import of the Occupy Movement and its significance to them. Even the drunkest and druggiest among them were beginning to educate themselves on the issues, and provide glorious insights to the sources of their misery. Each day I allotted some time to eavesdropping on political discussions between stoned people, which yielded a wealth of precious memories.

  A hard-bodied black man with saggy jeans belted at the knees, and colorful red paisley cotton boxer shorts blooming from the top blew cigarette smoke from the side of his mouth to be polite, as he led a conversation with four other men. “Dawg, we need to end corporate personhood, ‘cause these corporations are turnin’ hella profits from all them negroes they be sendin’ off to the joint. I’m serious man, fuck the privatization of incarceration.”

  “Um hmmm … yup … you’re right,” agreed the others, one of whom stood out for being bony, slouchy, and white—wearing a dingy wife beater shirt that gripped his toneless torso as he hung out with them, completing the tight circle.

  The leader continued, “Man, that whole goddamn financial crisis was messed up from the git go. They was playin’ us. That shit was tore up from the floor up. You know them banks and investment companies, like Lehman Brothers and Enron and them—they caused all that bullshit by gambling with our money and losin’ it. And then we gave them thievin’ motherfuckers a bunch more money to bail them out, even though they still throwin’ us out on the street, like it ain’t nothin’.”

  The white man interjected, “Whoa, you just touched on somethin’ there. ‘Cause shit is seriously jacked up when I was gettin’ nine bucks an hour to work full-time, in the same factory my old man worked at for eighteen—twenty years ago. And I got no health care, while some joker at the top’s haulin’ in thirty-seven million to run it into the ground. Hey man, hook me up with a cigarette will ya?” he concluded, eyeing the first speaker’s fingers hungrily.

  Paisley shorts reached into his back pants pocket, which was at his calf, and produced one, extending it warmly to him.

  “Shit man, why you guys always gotta smoke these goddamn menthol cigarettes?” complained the pale receiver, smiling as he accepted it.

  “Cuz that’s what Newports is, fool!” shot back the giver, sending them all, including the beggar, into torrents of laughter.

  Pearls like these were dropping out of the air around me and landing in my tent every night as I sipped on whiskey, peeked occasionally through the flap, held my journal pen aloft, and waited for quotable moments. I even heard one man named Greg, who used a walker and lived on a bench in front of City Hall year round, say that he’d been a Black Panther back in the sixties and that “shit has gotten so fucked up since then that black folks are worse off now than ever.” “But,” he conjectured, “the Occupy is fo’ real, and we gonna git shit done now. This a revolution baby.” There were drunks talking about the Glass-Steagall act, hookers talking about the Prison Industrial Complex, meth addicts debating Citizen’s United, Cal professors and gangbangers discussing Keynesian economics, and famous people like Danny Glover and Yoko Ono dropping in to express their support for Occupiers. Remarkable things were happening all around me, and all I had to do was open my mind up a tiny bit to appreciate the enormity of the event.

  The improbability of surviving completely unharmed, amidst a population of hard-core frequent fliers in the criminal justice system, started to hit me and I began to understand the richness and rarity of the experience, as well as the grandness of scope. Not only had no one attempted to harm me, I even got a sense that people were looking out for me while I was there. A jagged looking white man, who was a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson in The Shining, gently tapped my elbow to tell me I’d inadvertently dropped a wad of bills out of my pocket when I reached for a tissue to blow my nose on a sleepless night at 3:30 a.m. After I thanked him, he’d said, “No, problem. We gotta look out for each other, sister.” On that Saturday night before Halloween, when arguments and physical fights were breaking out in every nook and cranny, someone or other had always intervened to reason with the combatants and remind them how vital the revolution was to all of us. During every single outbreak, the arguers had chosen to de-escalate for the good of all, and not draw the attention of the police to us. Everyone seemed to intuit that
we were making history. Many said as much, and no one—no matter how compromised or damaged—wanted to be the one that ruined the dream. No one wanted to kill the hope and promise that we all felt during that heady time. I have now had some time to read different statistics about what transpired during the weeks of the encampment, and it was reported by the Bay Area’s KTVU TV that, according to official correspondence between Police Chief Howard Jordan and Mayor Jean Quan, the crime rate in Oakland actually dropped by 19% during the first weeks of Occupy Oakland’s tent village.

  Between the celebrity drop-ins, scholarly teach-ins, and the night time drama, I also volunteered to help plan the entertainment for the day of the General Strike, November 2. The evening before was mercifully conflict free, thanks in large part to the delivery of a sound system that pumped out the jams until the wee small hours, on the steps in front of City Hall. The sound engineer was a young guy named Brian, who made it his job to provide us with free PA equipment at the nightly GAs. He chose the hours between 11:00 p.m. and 3:00 a.m. to troubleshoot his larger system, so that he’d be up and running by dawn for the next day’s events. It had served an unintentional purpose of soothing the savage breasts that yearned to break each other’s faces late at night.

  All night long Occupiers had danced to Rick James, The Jackson Five, James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, and a host of other hit makers, which had lowered the threat level from red to beige instantly. Though I still didn’t get much sleep, I enjoyed dancing, and then sleeping, to the joyous sounds that pierced the night. Just after sunrise, I lay awake in my tent for a few luxurious moments before getting up on my haunches to squat and pee into the festive container that served as my indoor commode. After transferring its contents to a widemouth water bottle, I unzipped my tentflap and walked over to the porta potties (thank you Bette Midler) to dump it. I thought myself cunning for having devised such a stealthy way to avoid sitting directly on the vile toilet seats while voiding my bladder in the morning. After tidying up my tent a bit, I headed on over to the amphitheater stage, which I was scheduled to manage throughout the day. Performers were beginning to arrive and check in with me, and from the stage I could see my neighbors, some with children and pets, forming a line at the kitchen area, which had expanded and improved throughout the week. I’d put out a Facebook SOS the day before, and we’d been gifted several large bags of premium dog food, which had been met with elation by our animal-loving residents. Two large solar panels powered the refrigerator that kept the perishables cold. Mounds of fresh donated bread and produce lay on one of the five stainless steel tables we now owned, and propane tanks fueled the burners which heated steam trays of scrambled eggs, tofu, oatmeal, sausages, and turkey bacon.