There is a brief memorial ceremony, held with an empty chair covered by a black star quilt, for the recently deceased Webster Poor Bear, a Vietnam veteran wounded in the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. A crowd that includes most of those in his large family, including two sons, five daughters, seven brothers, and four sisters, clusters around the chair. The family administers the traditional “giveaway,” a Lakota tradition in which gifts are given to the deceased’s closest friends in a public forum. It is an old ritual, which, like the Sun Dance, had been outlawed for nearly a century. Family members call out the names of Poor Bear’s closest friends, several of whom were with him in the Wounded Knee siege, and, as the friends come up, give them a star quilt. One, Bill, is a white veteran who served with Webster in Vietnam. He is a stocky man with a white beard and a baseball hat that reads “Purple Heart.” He walks up and silently takes a blanket. He and Charlie Abourezk are the only white friends honored by the family.
Poor Bear’s daughter reads from a letter he wrote to her shortly before his death:
The white male hurries because of money. Do not allow that influence of the male inside your heart because they have already influenced your mind. The male-influenced world is based on money. Our world is not. We come from the other side. That world is not based on money. There are two senses. One is in this dimension. That one is your flesh. The one in our dimension is our heart. It gives life in a different way. That is the real strength. The absolute gift is the warming of the heart not of the flesh. I give you that gift. That is the way, my girl, we are going to live as a people—not as individuals, but as a people, the people of earth. We all come from our great mother and she is the earth, a child of Tunkasila [Our Grandfather].”
2
DAYS OF SIEGE
Camden, New Jersey
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband—I see the treacherous seducer of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid—I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny—I see martyrs and prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea—I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these—All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
—WALT WHITMAN, “I SIT AND LOOK OUT”
For twelve years I, and others like me, held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about the not too distant day when they would have freedom, “all here and now.” I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted turn into a frustrating nightmare.
—DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, “WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?”
Again I say that each and every Negro, during the last 300 years, possesses from that heritage a greater burden of hate for America than they themselves know. Perhaps it is well that Negroes try to be as unintellectual as possible, for if they ever started really thinking about what happened to them they’d go wild. And perhaps that is the secret of whites who want to believe that Negros really have no memory; for if they thought that Negroes remembered, they would start out to shoot them all in sheer self-defense.
—RICHARD WRIGHT, JOURNALS, 1945–47
SILVIA RAMOS WATCHED A TEENAGE GIRL OPEN THE DOOR AND ENTER her bakery. The girl nervously scanned the room with its colored figurines of saints and papier-mâché piñatas hanging from the ceiling.
“I want a piece of that cake,” the girl told Ramos’s husband, Oscar Medina Hernandez, pointing into a refrigerated glass case of cakes and Mexican pastries.
Hernandez, in broken English, told her the tres leches cake, with glazed strawberries and white frosting, was not sold by the slice. The peach and pineapple cakes were sold by the slice.
“I don’t want that,” the girl answered. She left the store, disappearing into the darkness, past the faint red neon rays of the “OPEN” sign over the door and the two picnic tables in front of the bakery.
It was 8:40 P.M. and the store was closing in twenty minutes. Ramos and her husband discussed which of them would leave early to be with their two children, ages six and four, who were being cared for by Ramos’s sister. Hernandez said he would stay and watch the Mexican soccer match and close the store.
The girl was soon back. She again went up to the case. She again asked for a slice of the tres leches. Hernandez again told her he did not sell it by the slice. He showed her other cakes.
“I don’t like that,” she said.
As she walked out, two men, one brandishing a pistol, burst through the door.
Hernandez, when he saw the pistol, turned to open the wooden swing door to the kitchen. His wife pushed a silent alarm, calling the police.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the man with the gun shouted.
He shot Hernandez in the back. The bullet went through his heart. He crumpled in a heap behind the counter, his body a tangle of twisted limbs and blood. His breathing became raspy and labored.
“I couldn’t move,” Ramos says. “I was in shock.”
The gunman stepped over Oscar Hernandez’s body and tried to push his way into the kitchen, but Oscar’s body blocked the door.
“He told me to walk over to where he was,” Ramos said in Spanish. “I started walking towards him but I collapsed when I saw my husband’s body. I fell on top of Oscar and started weeping. The gunman screamed, ‘Come on! Come on!’ I ignored him. The other man, who was by the door, grabbed two women customers who were in the store and held them. The gunmen tried to open the cash register. He couldn’t do it. He yelled at the man holding the two customers to help him. And then a man, who was outside in the street, opened the door. He shouted that the police were coming. The three men and the girl, who had been waiting by the trash cans, ran down the street. Oscar died before we could get him to the hospital.”
The three men, two from Camden, New Jersey, and one from over the river in Philadelphia, were later arrested and sentenced.1 It was over in about fifteen minutes. Hernandez was twenty-nine. His wife was thirty.
The undocumented Mexican immigrants, who worked for several years as restaurant workers to buy Alex’s Bakery and Food Store, with its blue exterior and large painting of a wedding cake on the front wall, became another unheralded casualty in Camden, a city that, like most postindustrial landscapes in America, dooms its inhabitants to grinding poverty, violence, and despair. Lives and dreams, whether here, or in Pine Ridge, or in other expanding sacrifice zones, are broken and shattered.
A few weeks after Joe and I interviewed Ramos in the bakery, gang members from the Bloods in Camden murdered a young couple inside a dilapidated row house. Michael “Doc Money” Hawkins, twenty-three, was seized on the street by gang members from the Lueders Park Piru Bloods, named after the gang’s Los Angeles chapter. Hawkins was hustled into the abandoned building, bound, gagged, and savagely beaten until all the bones in his face were broken. He was pushed into a closet and finally shot. The process took several hours. Hawkins’s girlfriend, Muriah Ashley Huff, eighteen, was at the same time taken to the basement and beaten and choked to death by another group, including a fourteen-year-old girl.2
Aband
oned houses, Camden, New Jersey.
Hawkins was killed because the Bloods suspected him of being a member of the rival Crips gang. His girlfriend, a cosmetology student at Burlington County Institute of Technology, had no gang affiliation. A dozen gang members watched passively. They stood by as gang leader Kuasheim “Presto” Powell tortured Hawkins and then shot him five or six times. Powell then went to the basement to help beat and strangle Huff, who, witnesses said, “begged for her life.” Shatara “Feisty” Carter, fourteen, told police how after the killings, gang members scrubbed the blood off the walls, ripped out the blood-soaked carpet, and buried the two mutilated bodies in a shallow grave in a backyard on Berkeley Street.
Violence begets violence. It is as old as the Bible. The violence of the state—brute force, internal colonies from which the poor can rarely escape, and massive incarceration—is countered with the street violence of the enraged. These internal colonies funnel the dispossessed into prisons and out again in a circular system that ensures they never escape from the visible and invisible walls that hem them in like sheep. Brutalized on the street, sometimes brutalized at home and brutalized in prison, they strike out with a self-destructive fury. Since most lack education and a huge proportion are branded by the state as convicted felons, there is no place for them to go other than where they came from.
Slavery. Segregation. Sharecropping. Convict leasing. Jim Crow. Lynching. Urban squalor. Poverty. Racism. Prison. It is a continuum.
“You got to fight to make it [freedom] mean something,” Solly Two Kings says in August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean. “All it mean is you got a long row to hoe and ain’t got no plow. Ain’t got no seed. Ain’t got no mule. What good is freedom if you can’t do nothing with it?”3
The United States is home to almost twenty-five percent of the world’s prison inmates.4 One out of every three African American males go to prison. More African Americans today are subject to the coercive forces of correctional control through prisons, probation, or parole than were enslaved a decade before the Civil War.5
The days of segregated buses and lunch counters may be over, but integration never became a reality except for a few middle class blacks. Integration would mean new taxes to lift African-Americans out of their internal colonies, new schools to educate the poor and give them a chance, and making sure there were jobs available with living wages. The civil rights movement was a legal victory, not an economic one. And the economic barriers remain rigid and impenetrable for the bottom two-thirds of African-Americans whose lives today are worse than when King marched in Selma. The violence of overt segregation ended. The violence of poverty remains. Wealth was never redistributed. And when cities were deserted by whites, who took with them the jobs and tax base to keep those cities alive, who made it plain by their departure that they would not live with or allow their children to be educated with blacks, city halls were turned over to compliant black elites whose loyalty rarely extended beyond their own corrupt inner circle. White power hid, as in any colony, behind black faces.
“And what we got here in this town?” Amiri Baraka’s fictional black mayor in Tales of the Out and Gone says. “Niggers in high places, black faces in high places, but the same rats and roaches, the same slums and garbage, the same police whippin’ your heads, the same unemployment and junkies in the hallways muggin’ your old lady.”6
Camden sits on the edge of the Delaware River facing the Philadelphia skyline. A multilane highway, a savage concrete laceration, slices through the heart of the city. It allows commuters to pass overhead, in and out of Philadelphia, without seeing the human misery below. We keep those trapped in our internal colonies, our national sacrifice zones, invisible.
Joe and I walk one morning into the homeless encampment in Camden. It is a collection of blue and gray tents, protected by tarps, set up next to the highway ramp behind the city’s police department and has a population of about sixty, ranging in age from eighteen to seventy-six. The tent city, or “Transitional Park,” is overseen by Lorenzo “Jamaica” Banks, fifty-seven, who buys damaged tents from Walmart and Kmart at reduced prices, repairs them, and provides them—police say for a $10 rental charge—to other homeless people. There are about fifty tents in Transitional Park, and Banks owns forty of them.
When we enter the tent encampment, Banks, with receding black hair and a beard, is chopping firewood. He wears carpenter’s jeans and a red and blue plaid shirt over a gray, hooded sweatshirt. Banks speaks in the drumbeat staccato of a man who seems at any moment about to snap. He claims to have been a Vietnam veteran, to have been a heroin addict now “clean for thirty-seven years,” to have ended up after the war in a mental institution, to have jumped in a suicide attempt off the Ben Franklin Bridge because of “a lot of flashbacks,” and to have spent “twenty-two years, six months, three hours and thirty-three seconds” in prison for shooting to death his best friend because he was “killing his baby in front of me.” He insists he provides his tents to fellow homeless people at no cost.
“I’m better now,” he assures me as the PATCO high-speed commuter train into Philadelphia rumbles along the tracks nearby. “I’m on medication. I live here because it reminds me of the jungle.”
Lorenzo “Jamaica” Banks at the “Transitional Park” tent camp.
Banks, who calls himself “the mayor,” runs Transitional Park with an iron fist. He has a second-in-command, his “CEO,” who takes over when Banks has to leave to buy supplies. There are weekly tent inspections on Saturday, weekly meetings every Tuesday night, and a list of sixteen rules written on plywood tacked to a tree. These include restrictions on fighting and arguing, admonishments to clean up the trash, an order not to sell food stamps, and several other blunt prohibitions, including: “Don’t Bring Your Tricks Here” and “No Borrowing Money or Sex from Anyone.” Residents receive two warnings for infractions before they are evicted. Drugs are banned. Alcohol is not. Banks has even set up a bank account for the enclave. At night there are shifts where someone—Banks says he prefers a vet—stands guard. There is a Dumpster filled with trash at the edge of the encampment, white plastic folding tables and chairs, as well as five-gallon plastic containers with water outside many tents. Firewood lies scattered about the site for fuel.
Camden officially has seven hundred and thirty-three homeless,7 but there are only two hundred and twenty beds for homeless in the county, so city officials tolerate Transitional Park despite its illegality. Those released from jail without a Camden address are often deposited here by corrections officers. Church groups bring food donations and blankets. The residents are allowed to shower and receive mail at the homeless shelter on 523 Stevenson Street. The tent city would be replicated, this time with the fire of political revolt, when Joe and I reached the Occupy Wall Street encampment. And like Banks, the organizers of the Occupy encampment would have to struggle to prevent those with addictions and mental illness, from bringing everyone down with them.
“Take a look at the American dream,” Banks says as he guides me through the tents, stepping among old bicycles and shopping carts. “In today’s society no one is exempt from Transitional Park. Everybody is one paycheck away from being here.”
“We have all nationalities, but nobody is a fugitive,” he says. “We don’t house fugitives, and we don’t tolerate rapists or child molesters.”
Banks shows me an E.T. plush toy with a rope around its neck hanging by a wire from a tree branch. “This is what will happen if you get hooked on heroin,” he says. “It will kill you. It will make you green.” He shows me another stuffed toy, an upside-down Tweety Bird, also suspended from a wire. “This one did crack and it turned his family upside down.” He walks with me to the entrance of the camp, where a soiled Cookie Monster, hanging over a boardwalk leading to the tents, looks as if it was put through a trash compactor. “This represents what will happen to you if you are not a man from this camp and someone from this camp comes here and their clothes are torn and they are crying.
If you get caught here doing a woman wrong, you will be hung by the neck. We will seek justice.”
A small collection of homeless are gathered this morning around a Weber grill warming their hands. Smoke rises from the grill. A man next to them rakes up leaves and trash on the dirt patch in front of his tent.
I ask a forty-six-year-old woman, who does not want to give her name, what the security is like.
“It’s all right,” she says. “It’s too all right.”
She says she has lived here a year after being evicted from her apartment. She is wearing a pair of blue corduroy pants and sneakers.
“I go to my brother’s house to eat,” she says. “I give him my food stamps. And I go to the Cathedral [Kitchen] dinner at four every day. My goal is to get my diploma and be a nurse’s aid.”
The decline of America is a story of gross injustices, declining standards of living, stagnant or falling wages, long-term unemployment and underemployment, and the curtailment of basic liberties, especially as we militarize our police. It is a story of the weakest forever being crushed by the strong. It is the story of unchecked and unfettered corporate power, which has taken our government hostage, overseen the dismantling of our manufacturing base, bankrupted the nation, and plundered and contaminated our natural resources. Once communities break down physically, they break down morally.
The corporations and industries that packed up and left Camden and cities across the United States seeking cheap and unprotected labor overseas are never coming back. And in moments of candor our corporate overlords admit this truth. When Barack Obama had dinner in February 2011 with business leaders in Silicon Valley, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president, according to a story in the New York Times.8 As Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. spoke, President Obama interrupted, the paper reported, with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Almost all of the seventy million iPhones, thirty million iPads, and fifty-nine million other products Apple sold in 2011 were manufactured overseas.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt Page 6