Dad raised a glass of iced tea for a toast, his stark white beard catching the dim, flickering light of the candle on the table of the bar in Beaufort, South Carolina, where we were celebrating the publication of my first book. The front of the bar looked out onto Bay Street downtown and down to the water. Through the window, over Dad’s shoulder, I could just see the red light on the bridge spanning the bay separating the town of Beaufort from the Sea Islands to the south.
Mom sipped her Diet Coke next to Dad, and on his other side were my uncle Richard and aunt Susan, who raised their glasses of red wine. Larry, Dad’s old Coast Guard buddy, occupied the other end of the table.
“To the White Prince,” Dad said.
Everyone laughed.
“The Witchdoctor Sheriff,” Richard added.
These were names given to Sheriff Ed McTeer, the county’s highest elected official from 1926 to 1963 and the subject of my book. The greatest challenge to his power had rested in Black root doctors like the famous Dr. Buzzard. After years of being bested by the root doctor, the sheriff started a rumor that he was a powerful witch doctor who could counteract Dr. Buzzard’s spells. I wrote about the battle between these two men—but the fight between the tradition of Anglo-Saxon law enforcement and Gullah-Geechee spiritual practices lay at the heart of the book.
We had just come from the county council chambers, where there had been a packed room for my presentation about the book. Looking out over the crowd, I saw so many familiar faces who had helped in my reporting, which included my family.
When I’d first come across the sheriff’s story, Richard had started introducing me around and let me stay at his house anytime I needed to research. He mailed me copies of the sheriff’s books. And when I was on reporting trips, Dad would come down and share my motel room, driving around or visiting with family and friends as I pored over old issues of the Beaufort Gazette in the library before feasting on seafood each night.
“I am so proud of you,” Dad said. I took a gulp of beer. He’d told me he was proud of me before, it was just that I’d never believed him. His previous professions of pride had never really been credible. This time I could tell he meant it.
“It was standing room only,” Mom said. “People were crowding in the back. I couldn’t believe it.”
I had escaped my repressive home state, ignored all familial advice, and now I was welcomed back here, honored as some sort of hero in the family, because I had brought their world, the world of South Carolina, back to them in a way they’d never seen it before. They felt proud of me, but I also felt proud of myself. I was, in some small sense at least, victorious.
Though I was flush with a feeling of success, something kept bothering me. I’d interviewed quite a few Black people in the area for the book, but only one or two had been at the talk, which was sponsored by the public library. Gullah-Geechee culture was essential to the story that the book told, and I had tried to do it justice, and I was struck with a momentary fear that maybe I had not.
“Your grandmother would be so proud too,” Dad said as the server brought the check.
“Yes, she would,” Richard said.
“We’d better be getting back home,” Dad said. “Long drive.”
“Same here,” Larry said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I am on the radio early tomorrow morning.”
We stood out on Bay Street in front of the bar and said goodbye in the cold December wind, and I felt that for the first time I had finally reconciled all the jangling, contradictory pieces of my identity. I had told everyone I was going to be a writer and now I was, even if it was a very minor publication. And though I had rejected my family’s advice and the scholarship to USC, I had over recent years become a journalist, or at least a nonfiction writer.
As I watched their taillights disappear, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Then I walked back to my motel room.
The next morning I was up early. After a continental breakfast at the motel, I pulled up the address for the small radio station I was going to. It was a Black religious station located in a small house out on the outskirts of town. When I walked in, there were crosses and lambs and other religious iconography scattered about on nearly every surface, in both two and three dimensions. It was dusty, and light eased in through the blinds, strips of black glowing in gold lines. Gospel music was playing softly. The room smelled of incense or perfume. A red sign above a door at the back of that front room read, “ON AIR.”
At a commercial break, I entered the studio, which felt extremely hot. I was sweating.
“Ready?” asked the host, a middle-aged Black woman with a silk scarf around her neck.
Sitting in the small radio booth, with a microphone to my mouth, I was vain enough to feel proud to be the one revealing these aspects of Black history, to be telling the story of Dr. Buzzard and all the others. But I also felt a certain sense of uneasiness creeping up under my skin. I figured it was just the typical hesitation or uneasiness that white people have when talking about race. It was as if I was violating some strict taboo.
I proceeded to discuss all the ways that the sheriff had been a friend of the Gullah people until the end, after he’d been voted out of office, and how he’d found meaning in his own life through his practice of hoodoo. The host seemed fascinated, smiling and nodding and going a bit beyond the questions she’d asked me to send.
When it was over, I walked back out again into the bright, cool morning. The sun glanced off the grass, flaxen with winter, glowing gold. The gravel driveway sparkled. I got into my rental and drove back to my motel, which I had not checked out of yet. I stood in the parking lot smoking a cigarette and looking at the giant oak across the street bent down over the bay.
I walked down the familiar block toward the commercial strip of town until I reached Prince Street and turned. Behind a gate was the former home of Robert Smalls, the great figure of Reconstruction in Beaufort. He had been a five-term congressman, owned multiple newspapers, and wielded a wide-ranging power in the postwar South Carolina Lowcountry, where there was suddenly a large Black voting majority after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
As I looked at the white mansion and its black shutters and wrought-iron gate, I realized what had been nagging at me about the book. I hadn’t really taken into account the end of Reconstruction there. I didn’t know how it had come about. But when I made the case that Dr. Buzzard, the root doctor, had been the major political power for the local Black community, I was missing something else, something that felt too big to ignore, even if it wasn’t directly in the time frame I was covering. This was, after all, where Sherman’s field order had freed the enslaved people in 1863. There was a long history of Black politics that had nothing to do with conjure. How could the book fail to take the legacy of Smalls and the Reconstruction era into account altogether?
I recalled the vague story about my great-grandfather helping to redeem the state. By now I knew that “redemption” just meant the overthrow of Reconstruction. I turned and looked down the street, leaflessly stark against the taut skin of the winter sky. No one was out on foot, though the occasional car tooled by, belching small clouds of gray smoke against the cold.
I turned to see Smalls’s house again. The great magnolia tree had not yet dropped its leaves, and the ferns crawling up the sandy brick wall around the property were still green. Maybe I would write something about Smalls, I thought, and fill in the pieces that I’d missed. That vague plan helped me minimize the questions I had about my work.
As I strolled Beaufort’s wide streets back to the motel, I thought about my student Aaron, who had left high school to deal drugs. He had come from here—or at least his family had, and they had migrated to Baltimore. From teaching the Great Migration, I knew that it was not just economic conditions that had inspired Black southerners to leave and move up North. It was also the terror that white people in the South had inflicted through both Jim Crow laws and vigilante enforcement of extralegal social codes.
I understood then that one man’s redemption is another’s damnation. But I did not dwell on it.
Back in Baltimore, a website I wrote for helped throw me a big book release party at the Midtown Yacht Club. Lafayette, who was still coming over almost every Sunday for long interviews, played music. People dressed up as witch doctors and in various other wild costumes. A beatboxer performed. I played the banjo and read, attempting to cast a kind of spell.
And all of that led to more work.
I’d published enough stories with the Baltimore City Paper that I was invited to the meeting where the editorial staff and some freelancers determined the “Best of Baltimore” and assigned blurbs to various writers. It was the biggest issue of the year, and people took it seriously. All around the city, I saw the yellow-and-black awards hanging proudly on establishment walls.
I was thrilled to be invited. I’d done a couple of cover stories, and the paper liked my work, and I wanted to get a job there more than anything else.
The paper was housed in an old mansion not far from my apartment, but I was disappointed to learn that the meeting was in a nearby art gallery. I wanted to see what it was like at the office. But the firewall between editorial content and the advertising salespeople required that a meeting of this import be held away from the office so the salespeople wouldn’t try to influence or snoop on the picks. I loved that seriousness even more than I would have loved going to the office. I rode the creaky, graffitied old elevator up to the gallery. There was a big table in the center of the room and a cooler of beer and bottled water.
“OK, Best Shoes, any ideas?” the white middle-aged editor asked, rushing through the boring categories.
“We did Downtown Locker Room last year, I think,” said the white middle-aged art director with a gray ponytail.
“How about Ted’s, by the Lexington Market?” I asked, cracking open a beer.
“I’ve never heard of that,” said the dude to my left, the tall white middle-aged staff writer. “What street is it on? Eutaw?”
“No,” I said. “Paca.”
“Sold,” the editor said. “What else do we need for goods and services? Or can we move on to nightlife?”
In addition to the staff writer, the art director, and the editor, the paper’s editorial staff boasted a few more Gen X white people. There were, I knew from reading the paper, several Black freelancers, but none of them were in the art gallery that day as we went through the countless categories of superlatives the paper would dish out in September, including those that were backhanded at best, such as “Best Politician in Need of a Slap Upside the Head.”
I left the meeting that day with somewhere around a dozen blurbs to write at fifty dollars a pop.
Each of the blurbs was about a hundred words. The week before that issue came out, the Washington Post used about the same number of words—ninety-nine, to be exact—to report that my former student Aaron had been murdered.
“A man’s body was discovered in the street in the 8100 block of Manson Street at about 9 p.m. Monday. Police said that when officers arrived on the scene, they found the man had suffered trauma to the body.”
The story went on to say that Aaron, whose death I’d blithely predicted, had been pronounced dead at the hospital and that police believed he had been shot. There were no leads.
I eventually got a job at the Baltimore City Paper. I’d been an editor there for three years when the Baltimore police killed a young Black man named Freddie Gray. He was twenty-five years old—the same age Aaron would have been in 2015, had he lived that long. I had been reporting at the center of the protests for a week, on the front lines, covering skirmishes between cops and residents, and I had never felt so alive.
My eyes were still burning from the flames engulfing police cars and the pepper spray and tear gas filling the air only a few blocks away from where Joe, the paper’s photographer, and I stood at his car waiting for our phones to charge at a media staging area where news stations had satellite vans on that explosive spring day.
We’d been in the middle of the mayhem when I got a call from an MSNBC producer asking if I would go on air to talk about what was happening with the riot following Freddie Gray’s funeral. Over the past two weeks of covering the growing protests, I’d seen so many waves of parachute reporters coming in from the networks and mischaracterizing things that it felt nice to finally get a chance to share the perspective of someone who had been living here.
Two nights earlier the big protest downtown had gotten intense as a fight started between Boston baseball fans and Black Lives Matter protesters and windows got smashed. The protest finally dispersed, but Joe and I had driven over to the Western District, where we’d found hundreds of cops in riot formation staring down a couple of dozen residents at the edge of Gilmore Homes.
“The empire strikes back,” said Joe as we walked up. Like me and most of the paper’s staff, he was a middle-aged white guy. He’d grown up in Dundalk, the working-class, conservative white suburb just outside the city, which had been devastated by the closing of the steel mills. Joe was a bulky blue-collar guy, an army veteran who wore a green flak jacket and a black-and-orange Orioles hat.
We were there for about an hour before the cops charged the crowd and, in the process, started stomping Joe as I filmed, screaming, “He’s a photographer! He’s press!”
Even though I was trying to distinguish Joe from the average resident—who is also protected by the First Amendment—as if it is OK to stomp them, the Black residents rushed to our aid. The video of the attack went viral. We were providing vital information to the city that no one else was getting, I thought. And we were willing to put ourselves in harm’s way for it.
After that, we knew it would get worse. The cops were being questioned, and they wanted revenge.
The storm had come a few hours earlier that Monday, after the funeral, when the city closed schools and shut off all public transportation. When kids arrived at the transit hub of Mondawmin Mall, they were met by hundreds of riot cops who began using pepper spray and rubber bullets almost immediately. The kids fought back with rocks and water bottles. That fracas migrated down to the corner of Penn and North, which was now on fire. And Joe and I had been there for all of it. We had witnessed it.
My phone rang. It was the MSNBC producer.
“We’re ready to go live,” she said.
“Let me bring in Baynard Woods. He’s a reporter with the Baltimore City Paper,” the familiar voice said. I hadn’t thought to ask who would be interviewing me, and I knew the voice but couldn’t place it.
“Baynard, you were right in the middle of the clashes today, what’s the scene now?” the voice asked, and I realized that it was Al Sharpton, the reverend and civil rights activist, interviewing me. I almost laughed at the absurdity of the situation, but instead I hit him with a barrage of language, pouring out the adrenaline that had been building all week.
“We ran over from the office to the mall today. It was a war. It was tactical, with the riot police shooting gas, shooting rubber bullets at the protesters, and the protesters throwing rocks and bricks at them and everyone trying to maneuver, and when we got to the corner right about where Freddie Gray was initially picked up, or spotted by the police when he ran, people were really, really angry and serious. They were flaming police transit vehicles and vans,” I said in the middle of a long monologue.
I told Sharpton how the protests had been building for the past week as Baltimore’s Black residents decided to rise up against the way police treated them.
“We got a sense, two white guys, what it’s like for them in this area every day,” I said. “I walked around the neighborhood asking people—everyone said, ‘I can’t go to the store without being hassled or searched or having to sit on the curb and sit there for an hour while people come by and you’re humiliated.’ So we saw that. So I wasn’t really surprised.”
I’d been focusing my attention on West Baltimore for barely two weeks, since police had arrested Freddie Gray and thrown him into the back of a van, severing his spine, on April 12, and already, in my passion, I was an expert, not surprised at the plight of poor Black people living in and around Gilmore Homes.
But I was also starting to think of myself specifically as a white guy now, and recognizing the limitations of that reality. I understood that the facts of my gender and my race would change the way I saw certain issues. But I could go only so far in seeing exactly what was affected or how it was changed. I knew that my whiteness and my masculinity were my own blind spots, and I couldn’t know what I couldn’t see. That was the problem.
That perspective was at odds, though, with my deeply held view that I needed to be out here covering this. That it was my duty to tell these stories, regardless of my race or my sex. My white skin and press pass afforded me some extra protection against these cops, and I wanted to use it to document what they were doing to poor Black people when they thought no one was watching.
When I finished the interview, I told Joe I needed to get back to the office. It was a Monday night, the night we put the paper to bed so it could be printed on Tuesday and in the bright-yellow boxes on the street on Wednesday morning. I was managing editor by this point, and normally I would have been there all day on a Monday, especially since we had scrapped the entire issue in order to devote it to Freddie Gray coverage, and I felt lucky to have spent so much time out in the field.
When the protests broke out, I was already training my colleague Brandon to take over my role when I left the paper two months later. I’d been working with a production company to develop the story about the sheriff and Dr. Buzzard for TV, and when Will Smith’s production company signed on as a partner, I figured it was a good time to get out of the paper before it failed. It had been bought by the Baltimore Sun, and I couldn’t imagine it even existing two years in the future. Besides, I was burned out.
As I found myself standing there in the middle of the biggest story in the country, a story about the white policing of Black communities, I felt again as if I’d really missed something in my presentation of the sheriff in that book. I’d relied so much on the accounts of the Beaufort Gazette, and yet the coverage of Baltimore was showing me how racist and pro-cop the mainstream press was, even today, and I knew that the early-twentieth-century Gazette would not have told the truth about race and policing.
But I countered this thought with the idea that the Black Lives Matter movement would make the show we were planning both more relevant and more useful, and I figured that there I could correct my error. And if Will Smith didn’t think it was racist, well, who was I to say?
Dad texted me as Joe and I drove back to the newsroom through smoky streets.
Good job, Dad wrote. When you talk so much that Sharpton can’t get a word in, that’s really something.
Windows all around the paper, in my neighborhood, had been smashed. Downtown was now empty, locked down; the city had an eerie feel. The front door of the Sun building was locked, and the security guard came to let us in. When we made it up to the third floor, our small office was full of people. The writers D. Watkins and Lawrence Burney, Black native Baltimoreans, were using the office as a space to work, and to be with other writers, in the craziness of the night. There were some reporters from the Guardian using our Wi-Fi in another room, and our staff was all hands on deck trying to pull a new issue together.
My phone rang, and it was a friend who worked as an editor at the New York Times. He asked if I knew anyone who could write a story about what was happening. As much as I wanted to be in the Times again—I’d had a piece a year earlier when the Sun bought the City Paper—and as much as seeming like an authority on the city, a frontliner at the protests, mattered to me, I knew it wasn’t a job for me, and I said, “Hold on” and handed the phone to D, who actually had a firsthand understanding of the way Baltimore police treated Black men in the city.
I’d been living in the city for five years, and I had never been stopped and frisked. I had never been searched. I had not been pulled over, and I had not been threatened by police. But all of that was an everyday occurrence in East and West Baltimore, where the city’s Black majority lives.
I was starting to think of the segregation in the city as apartheid. And I finally understood that my teenage drug arrests did not mean I understood the nature of oppression in America. I knew that I had gotten off easy because I was white. At one point I’d thought that those laws benefited me as a white person because I got off easier than a Black guy. But the racist drug war hurts white people too, whether they get arrested themselves, as I did, or simply share in the loss of resources—social services, transportation, sanitation, and education—sucked up by ballooning police budgets when they could be used for bettering their cities and our nation. White people had it better than Black people when it came to criminalization in the drug war, but we also lost more than we know. Without Baltimore’s apartheid system, our city would be so much richer and we all would benefit. One of the great things about the uprising was that it got many white people to take lives of Black people in the city seriously for the first time and that got us out in the streets advocating in solidarity with Black people.
Other than D and Lawrence, everyone in the room was white—our whole staff, including interns, the Guardian reporters, everyone. And for the first time, as I handed the phone to D, I realized how much of a problem that was, even as I continued to be praised on social media, essentially for being a white guy who would go into the Black neighborhoods where things were happening.
There would have been no protests if a Black man named Kevin Moore had not filmed and published the video of the police dragging Gray into the back of the van screaming, but still, white people wanted a white filter to reflect and interpret what was happening in Black Baltimore. And I was happy to play that role, if that was what was necessary, but I also knew when to step away. As small as it was, the awareness that I was not at the center of the story, that it was not about me, felt to me like an advance in character.
We worked on the issue of the paper until sunup, when we finally sent it to the printer. Our third-floor office overlooked I-83 as it came into downtown. I walked over to watch the sky turn pink, a celebratory beer in my exhausted hand, as I waited for the final word from the editor that we were good to go.
I saw a caravan of military vehicles rolling into town on I-83, the sky glowing pink behind their khaki desert camo. “Holy fuck, look at this,” I said.
The skeleton crew still in the office stood there gawking at what looked like an invasion.
“National Guard coming to enforce the curfew,” Brandon said.
“I guess we won’t get any sleep tonight,” I said.
We were issued official papers that allowed us to be out after the new curfew, but that night, when we were told the media had to remain in a pen, taped off, behind the cops, Joe and I balked. Fuck that. We got heavy doses of tear gas as we stood with the protesters defying the curfew. But there were so many cameras that we left and drove around the neighborhood, where we saw armies of police from other jurisdictions rounding up Black citizens on the street.
We were standing on a dark sidewalk as a unit of armed police from New Jersey ran toward their requisitioned transit bus with a hog-tied Black man. It was horrifying. We photographed and tweeted it.
Wherever shit was popping off, Joe and I were there. But Nicole noticed what was happening. I had already lost the self-awareness I had gained in the office that night when I passed the phone.
“It is not about you,” she said on one of the rare occasions we ate together that week.
“I know it’s not,” I protested, glancing at Twitter on my phone.
“I don’t know if you do, sometimes,” she said. “I know what you’re doing is important, but you can’t let it go to your head.”
During one of the early protests, I’d ordered her to go home, and she’d gotten pissed off, and she was angry that I had a pass that allowed me to ignore the curfew, which she had to abide by. I thought it was natural: because I was a reporter and because I was covering the city, I should be able to be there and witness what was happening in the streets.
But I knew what she meant. I loved this story, even if it was a story that, at its heart, was about Black suffering. The fact that I saw it as “a story” to love was the problem, and I knew that Nicole was right and that I needed to make sure I didn’t enjoy myself too much. But I also knew I needed to report on this important movement that felt like the start of a revolution.
That feeling came to a head the day that the state’s attorney announced charges against six officers who had been involved in Gray’s death.
There was a march that afternoon, heading uptown. Thousands of people crowded the streets. Joe and I had both gotten good at maneuvering through crowds, but we knew we would not be able to make it to Penn North before the march arrived. We wanted to be there to capture that moment. Joe disappeared into a crowd. I started talking to a guy with a sign reading, “No Justice, No Peace.”
An old pickup truck pulled up to the corner on a side street; Joe was standing in its bed, his hat on backward, snapping photos.
“Hop on,” he said.
“I’ll get y’all there,” said the driver, who I suddenly realized was an artist I’d once written about.
I hopped on. We cut through some side streets and at North Avenue met back up with the march and got in the middle of it so that the bed of the truck, where Joe snapped pictures and I tweeted words about the scene, felt like a parade float. Or, even more, like a triumphant military procession.
“All night, all day, we will fight for Freddie Gray,” people chanted as the truck eased along North Avenue, in the Arts District where we both caroused and which we covered. A few white people standing along the side of the road cheered us.
We passed a bar where I hung out. I saw Nicole amid the crowd, just as she was walking in the door.
“Be right back,” I said. I hopped off the back of the truck and dashed through the thick crowd. I opened the door. The bar was cool, dark, and chaotic with an overflow of people from the march looking for a bathroom or a quick beer. I saw Nicole with a group of our friends at the bar. I walked up to her, grabbed her shoulder, turned her, and kissed her. Then I took a gulp of her beer, ran back out the door—to a few more cheers, this time for the kiss—and ran behind the truck, hopping up into the bed as it lurched forward.
It was one of the most glorious moments in my life, the closest thing I’d ever experience to something like the liberation of Paris, but even as I felt it, the spring sun against my cheeks, the wind in my beard, I knew I would never tell anyone that. As Nicole kept reminding me, none of this was about me. I was just bearing witness to what was really important. A man had been murdered by the police. This was not about my career or my Twitter followers. It was about telling the truth, sacrificing my ego and my comfort for something greater.
That’s what I would tell people, at least. And it was true, for the better part of me. But it was also true that my ego gloried in the front-row view of history and the feeling of importance it bestowed upon me.
All my life I’d seen myself as the hero, with everyone else playing supporting roles, and that was what I did in that moment, even though I knew a real hero would not see the world that way, so I resolved not to see myself as a hero in order to be more heroic.
I knew I’d made the right decision when I read D’s story in the Times. It was so much more insightful, more powerful, than anything I could have done.
As I covered the horrible conditions in Baltimore, I was freed from the responsibility of truly implicating myself in the apartheid system I saw around me because I cast the cops as the bad guys and I was against the cops. I was not like them. I was innocent, I thought, even as I recognized my guilt.
I couldn’t square what I’d written about the “Witchdoctor Sheriff” with what I saw as the reality of the white policing of Black communities. I wasn’t certain if my book was racist, but I was sure that I had been naive.
I had painted the sheriff in the same way I saw myself, with a mixture of heroism and innocence. In this, after a Black uprising against racist policing, I could see the contours of my whiteness clearly—but the focus would not last. Still, I realized, however briefly, that whiteness was a compilation of the stories we tell about ourselves and to ourselves. Whiteness brought together all the stories that cast us as innocent heroes. This made me think that maybe we could tell different stories, changing the meaning of our whiteness for the future. And we can start by sometimes passing the phone.