We went airborne like Steve McQueen in Bullitt. Except this wasn’t a ’68 Fastback, it was a tired old SUV that made funny noises and had too many miles on it. I was hauling ass uphill but didn’t know there was a steep drop-off in the road, which cut through the north end of town. We hit the hill’s peak at eighty miles an hour, maybe, and were launched airborne at an angle. We would either take out the light pole or plow through the vestibule of the church beyond it. The vestibule may have been the preferred outcome. First responders are usually busy during a riot. Plow through a church, and the carnage could prove so spectacular that an ambulance just might arrive in time to save your lives. But two reporters wrapped around a light pole? Take two aspirin and call me in the morning, son.
Ohhh fuuuck!! Matt and I squalled like duct-taped tomcats as we touched down, clipped the curb, bounced twice, and righted the truck, avoiding misadventure altogether. Getting off the accelerator, we crept up to the corner of Ferguson’s West Florissant Avenue, where we could see fresh flames erupt and masked figures dancing in the shadows.
We had been to this corner earlier in the day, when thousands came out to celebrate the police pullout after a long, ugly week of military-style occupation. The twisted remnants of the burned-out QuickTrip gas station were dark, banners still hanging on the chain-link fence now surrounding it: “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!”
The gas station had been a victim of innuendo and whisper, a rumor ricocheting through the apartment complex nearby that someone who worked there had called the police and said eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, a black man, had robbed the place.
Whether the rumor was true or not, the cops had arrived, setting in motion a series of disputed events that ended with the unarmed Brown lying dead in the street, plugged six times—in the head, chest, arm, and hand—by a white officer’s gun.
Burn the motherfucker to the ground! the chant went up. A bacchanalia of fire erupted. The looting of rims and tires by a couple assholes whetted the press’s appetite, and cable news started playing up that angle. The animals.
Then came the martial response, the tear gas and jackboots, the masked police officers dressed like SEAL Team Six. The curfews and the riot shields. The no-loitering rule and the arrests. It was a shitshow tailor-made for the ravenous and bottomless news maw.
In the days that followed, the QuickTrip had become a shrine, a sanctum, the Nicanor Gate of a movement. Ministers, gangsters, elderly curiosity seekers, politicians, and neighborhood children came to gather, pray, discuss, gossip, to exchange conspiracies, bits of news, and mutual affirmations, and to conduct interviews with the media.
Media, so much media. A spectacle! A big-top news circus broadcasting live from the scene 24/7, with reporters in the requisite makeup* and khaki, impromptu sets erected in the parking lots of storage garages and Chinese restaurants. No story too small. Come one, come all. A mime troupe came by to stage a silent play for the cameras’ benefit, and then a break-dancing company. And why not? This is a terrible tragedy, but one can’t turn down free publicity. Ferguson is part of America, don’t you know?
And yet serious things were discussed here. The outrage at Ferguson and St. Louis police. “Black while driving”—it was absolutely understood that four black men to a car is dangerous for your health if you’re one of the black men in the car. The backwardness of Missouri, the cracker land of all cracker lands, one of the last states to give up the institution of slavery, which, in the minds and daily experiences of those convened here, never fully went away. The man always had his boot on your head. The lockups and beatdowns, the court fines. A modern-day peonage. The county jail just a different version of the old convict lease system.
I’m proud of my people, a young, excitable man named Brian told me of the burning and pillaging. It was an anthem, he said. A black fist. A cry for attention. Payback for Trayvon Martin. (The unarmed seventeen-year-old black kid had been killed not by a cop but by a half-white, half-Latino dope working the neighborhood watch shift. Still, close enough.)
Then there was Eric Garner getting choked out by police just for trying to sell loose cigarettes for a buck in Staten Island, New York, a town where cigarettes go for fourteen dollars a pack. He was trying to feed six kids. Why not write him a ticket for loitering? Why you got to choke him out? An economic situation turned into a racial standoff turned into another corpse of a black man.
And then there’s Rodney. You can never forget Rodney King. Y’all saw it. The beatdown. Now, Brian explained, St. Louis gots Michael. This one’s ours, this shit goes back to slavery, and we’re gonna get our justice.
The eruption was a spontaneous, violent appeal for a stake in this thing called America. And if men like Brian and Charles and Kerwin and Delmont who were hanging out at the QuickTrip didn’t get it, then the whole of metropolitan St. Louis—white and black and Arab—would burn. That was a promise. As for the tires and rims that were looted last time around? Fuck it, Brian said. That’s beside the point. Just a little booty to go along with the justice, a tithing for the high priests of disobedience.
I wish I woulda been here . . . You wanna hit this here blunt?
There was an awakening here in outer St. Louis, and a dead eighteen-year-old who had his hands up was the deliverance. Whether Michael Brown really did have his hands up was still a matter of contention. It was clear he had no weapon. But if his friend was going to stand there in the hot summer sun and tell everybody on cable TV that he did have his hands up and cable TV was going to broadcast it unchecked? Then that’s the way it happened, at least to the black community here. Michael had his hands up. He was executed. That’s what Brian and his friends believed, anyway.
There were, of course, two versions: the black version and the white version. The cop shot the kid in the back, unprovoked, while he had his hands up; he’d been stopped in the middle of the street for no reason other than that he was black. That was one.
The second version—the white version—went that the imposing three-hundred-pound man, who had strong-armed the QuickTrip convenience store minutes earlier, attacked the cop. This version went that the officer had simply asked the young man and his friend to remove themselves from the middle of the street and kindly use the sidewalk. Brown freaked, punched the cop, and reached for the officer’s gun. Fearing for his life, the officer, naturally, had to use deadly force.
Either way, shamefully, Brown’s body lay for more than four hours in the street in front of the Canfield Green apartments under the August sun, the police not even bothering to cover him with a sheet. People looked on, whispered among themselves, whispered some more, and it began to brew.
Cops beating ass and dropping unarmed black men, that was nothing new here in Missouri, or anywhere in America. But something else was also afoot in Ferguson, another instigator, something unseen yet tangible and hard-fisted. A larger, more menacing enemy.
The Government.
Ferguson couldn’t afford itself. The bureaucracy was too big for the tax base. The city hall and the police department remained overwhelmingly white while the town, over the last decade, had changed color.
In order to balance its books, the city leaders did not slash their own jobs or significantly pare their budgets. Instead, they decided to shake down Ferguson’s residents. And they used the police to do it. Two-thirds of Ferguson was black, but 90 percent of the police force was white and 85 percent of police stops were of blacks; 90 percent of searches were of blacks and 95 percent of arrests were of blacks, even though studies by the state and federal governments showed that whites were more likely to be carrying contraband while driving.
In addition, a full 95 percent of citations for driving while distracted, failure to comply, or a strange offense until then unknown to me—“manner of walking”—were issued to blacks.
According to a Department of Justice report, when Ferguson’s courts collected more than $2 million in 2012, doubling the haul from the previous year, the city manager, who was white, fired off an email to the police chief, who was also white: “Awesome! Thanks!”
But you didn’t have to tell this to young black men like Brian. They lived it. The exorbitant court fees, the penalties for late payment, getting your ass beat by deputies in lockup and then being charged for the cost of cleaning your blood off the deputies’ uniforms were too much for any man to stand. Add in a dead teenager lying for four hours on a skillet-hot street and you’ve got yourself the makings of a civil disturbance.
The government isn’t for the people, Brian said, now sipping on a gin and juice. I don’t know where he got it. He just got it. Not just the cocktail, but the philosophy.
The government is the enemy of the people. The government is eating the people alive. Sip?
Shit, I thought. He sounded like Carrie Dann on the high-desert plateau. Or Lil Dog out on the Bundy ranch. Or the old girl in the Flint trailer park. The government is against me. Tyranny! Rage against the machine!
Caving to the nightly pressure of TV cameras showing military policing methods in Ferguson, the authorities not only released the name of the officer who had shot Michael Brown—Darren Wilson—they also backed off and backed away, and the weeklong state of emergency was lifted, emboldening black people with the feeling that they had driven out the occupying force, a street gang in blue, the army of the enemy.
Gone were the armored personnel vehicles, the cops in camouflage and body armor staring through their scopes that can target out to five hundred meters, pointing 5.56mm rifles at citizens for no worthwhile reason. The governor even put a black man in charge of the police, Captain Roland Johnson of the state highway patrol. Under the captain’s direction, officers allowed folks to stand on the sidewalk now as they pleased. And the people did. Gin and juice. Souped-up cars laying rubber in the road. Prayer circles. People wanting to show their children the moment it all happened. The victory. Cars backed up to the highway. The New Black Panthers directing traffic. A celebrity even showed up—but not as popular a figure around here as one might have thought.
Fuck Jesse. Why he coming now? Where the fuck he been? Shit, posing for the cameras.
Fuck it, I’m gonna get me a picture. Hey Jesse! Lemme get a selfie!
It was both peaceful and electric. For one brief, shining afternoon, it was a victory for the black side of St. Louis, a place short on wins.
And then darkness came.
We hung out on the corner until about eleven o’clock. All was peaceful, so we had gone back to the hotel to have something to eat and wash our faces. Then Matt called me in my room. He was watching looters on the local TV station. It was being broadcast by a camera far away with a powerful zoom lens. Not a cameraman worth his salt was willing to walk into the mayhem of Molotov cocktails and masked marauders swiping meat and hair extensions, liquor and premium-brand cigarettes.
We banged on Bob’s door. He was out cold, sleeping, and could not be woken above his snoring. We left him in bed and barreled for West Florissant Avenue.
We pulled up just past the gas station, at the strip mall, aptly named, as it was being stripped clean. A new government had arisen in the void. A new grouping of imposed values. The mob. Locusts. Anarchy. Selfish destruction with no binding morality.
And who comes walking by just then, humming and happy, like he’d just gotten kissed at the homecoming dance? Brian! Good old Brian, out for a night of sightseeing. The cops got in their cars and left, he told us. Just got up and got gone. Motherfuckers.
He was right. The police were nowhere to be found. It must be some sort of mistake. The place was burning. So I called 911. Local dispatch referred me to the county police, but did not connect me. I called the county police, who referred me to the state police. I called the state police, who referred me back to the local police. It was a big “fuck you” to Ferguson. You want to fuck with us? they seemed to be saying. You want to burn your own shit down? Have at it.
Matt grabbed his giant P2 camera and tripod out of the SUV and began filming. The camera is much too big for a riot and has an eyepiece that requires one to place his temple against the casing, which creates a blind spot for the cameraman since he has one eye closed while he films, the other stuffed in the viewfinder, robbing him of his vision. The mob that Matt could not see ebbed and flowed around him, some attracted by the flames, some by the camera. Matt was occupied by the explosion of an incendiary bomb, which had shattered the plate glass of Sam’s Meat Market & More. Flames started licking out of the window.
As Matt filmed, someone grabbed his camera by the lens.
Fuck off, Matt shouted.
It was a weasel of a little white guy. Masked. Dressed in black like a ninja. Except this was no Bruce Lee. He was a wisp, a ferret with a weak chin, a high-pitched nasal voice. He most likely belonged to one of those anarchist or anti-fascist left-wing groups that now seemed to jet into civil disturbances and break shit. A privileged white guy out for thrills, railing against a machine I suspected he was so much a part of.
Hey, man, stop filming, he squealed. That’s snitchin’. You’re snitchin’, man! That’s so uncool to be filming, man.
I shoved him in the chest. Don’t touch the fucking camera, I said. And what the fuck are you doing here? You’re a bucket of fucking chum. You’re somebody’s lunch if you don’t be careful.
The crowd around us seemed to enjoy the spectacle, and the white kid moved on, muttering: That’s snitchin’, man . . . that’s snitchin’, man. I wondered if Daddy gave him an allowance.
Sitting on the steps of Sam’s was another masked man, a large pistol stuffed in his waistband. This guy was the stereotypical Fear of a Black Planet come to life. He was long and muscular, dark as obsidian, handsome with dreadlocks. And the gun—that was the topper. He was shouting at a mob of about a dozen who were trying to make their way into the store. I signaled to Matt and we walked right into the beehive and sat down next to him.
You wouldn’t know it using a long lens, but here on the steps, in the wan yellow light, a remarkable scene was playing out. The long dark man was no criminal, no looter. He was the only thing around that could pass as law and order. He was trying to keep the mob out of the Arabs’ store.
Y’all ain’t even from around here, he shouted at the looters. This shit’s ignorant.
His name was DJ. He said he was from around here. He was raising a son around here. He shopped in this store. He didn’t want some drunk assholes burning down his neighborhood. Or the world contorting his meaning of Ferguson, having images of looters supplanting the peaceful calls for justice earlier in the day.
Considering the seemingly selfish and cowardly behavior of the police, DJ was the only thing out here that represented order.
Some faces in the mob were masked with T-shirts, but their eyes glistened with booze and purpose. They looked at me and then said to DJ: You friends with the devil?
I’m friends with everybody, DJ answered with feeling. But we ain’t gotta loot.
They inched toward the store, skulking like scavengers, daring DJ to plug one of them.
We gonna eat out of this motherfucker!
What could DJ do? Shoot them? What would that accomplish? More death. More ignominy to his community. He threw his hands in the air, muttered a few bitter words, and disappeared into the night.
With the pistol gone, the crowd emptied the store, then turned on us.
Turn the camera off, motherfucker!
I told Matt to keep filming. We weren’t going to get run off that corner. We were going to do our job and then we were going to leave like men. It was our country too. My countrymen are not my enemies. Besides, we were on TV. Images matter. I wasn’t going out looking like a pussy.
Looted bottles started flying, then batteries. A guy from nowhere emerged with a heavy orange traffic cone and hit me over the head. I stood my ground. Fighting or fleeing, either one could lead to a head stomping. You never know in a crowd. The dude took a swing at the camera and Matt, his face buried in the viewfinder, never saw it coming. The eyepiece snapped and the rioter slipped back into the mob. That’s when a man, a black man, in leather gloves and a shirt as tight as a prophylactic, appeared from the recesses and ushered us back to our truck.
That’s enough. You gotta go.
Thank you my brother.
Was the attack racially motivated? Did the crowd come at us because of our skin color, our hair texture, the way we carried ourselves? Did outsiders need to be pelted, cut, and beaten? Was this a payback for Michael Brown? Maybe, a little, I suppose. Again, this is America, remember. And color matters. But mostly, I figure the attack was based on the fact—and this is a provable fact—that people don’t like being filmed while committing felonies.
The company was pleased. Great footage! They wanted us to make a black-mob-attacks-white-reporters internet clip. But Matt and I and bleary-eyed Bob all agreed we would not racebait. The story was DJ, not the beatdown. We wanted to provide a positive image, if such a thing could be said to exist amid the looting and rioting. There was something deeper there, something with a conscience, something with a higher truth. Things might be fucked up in America, but we could fix them. America is the greatest experiment in the history of humankind, a nation composed of tribes striving to overcome ancient impulses, a society improving itself through reason rather than destroying itself through violence.
I choose to believe we are more like DJ than the few dozen dumbasses stealing and burning. The poetry of the man, his manner and grace of speech, his bravery in a dark place, where the world would never suspect it. That was the story. He was the majority in Ferguson. It may have cost us a few million YouTube clicks, but it was the truth.
Bob was crestfallen the following day. He was taking it hard that he’d snored through the evening’s mayhem.
Don’t worry, man, apnea’s a bitch, I said. You really should see a doctor about it, though.
Aw, shit, he moaned. I really feel bad.
Don’t worry, man, I repeated, pointing to the TV behind the hotel bar. Look.
Missouri governor Jay Nixon was at a local church announcing that the state of emergency would be back in effect that evening at midnight: “This is a test. The eyes of the world are watching.”
This guy’s a real marshmallow, Bob said.
Yeah, he’s on again, off again, I said. Send in the commandos. Pull them out. Let the town burn. You don’t think St. Louis and Ferguson know that? You don’t think they’re coming out tonight?
It was a sure bet they were coming out tonight. Over at the concierge desk, the retinue of the Right Reverend Al Sharpton was already checking in. It was on. The riot and the shitshow. Welcome in, Al.
That evening, there was a heavy police presence in Ferguson, and West Florissant was completely blocked off to traffic. We pulled up to a county officer at a gas station that marked the perimeter and produced the credential: NEWS MEDIA PRESS OFFICIAL IDENTIFICATION.
He looked at us with an eyebrow raised.
You wanna go in there? he asked, incredulous.
It’s the job.
Suit yourself. But I’m warning you, there’s no telling if they’re going to behave like animals. You’re on your own.
The crowd was pulsing, expectant, hostile, black. The media was there, a swarm of them, white. We stood under the awning of a boarded-up chop suey joint, readying our gear, game planning, convincing ourselves to stay out of the way—no meddling, no heroics. A man out at this hour is a menace. Who else would be out at this hour? Good people are home in bed, their doors locked, their televisions tuned to this.
A group of strong-looking young men were muttering among themselves: Some motherfucker’s getting hurt tonight. Malik Shabazz, the national chairman of the New Black Panther Party, seemed to take them at their word and implored the men through a bullhorn to please respect the curfew: No violence, my brothers! Please go home!
Ultimately, it wasn’t Shabazz who convinced them, but seemingly God himself. Minutes before the curfew deadline was to take effect, the heavens opened and heavy rains began to fall. Almost instantly, West Florissant Avenue was washed clean and largely deserted. But not completely. A few dozen of the most devout remained. And wait . . . Who is that bebopping along the avenue, sippy cup in hand, humming and shouting, palm slapping and sightseeing, taking in the evening scenery?
It was good old Brian! He gave a wide smile. Take it easy, baby, he said. Take it slow. Get home safe. And off he disappeared into the crowd.
The police had once again mustered in armored vehicles at the south end of the avenue, the protesters massed to the north. Bob went west near the beauty shop and Matt and I to the east behind the rampart of the Chinese restaurant. At precisely midnight the rain stopped as quickly as it had come and the imperious voice of power, a white voice, booming through some unseen loudspeaker: You must disperse immediately. Now! This is an order. You are subject to arrest or other actions.
The most rowdy, committed, and possessed mocked the police. Here’s the finger, motherfucker! Here’s a rock, cocksucker! No justice, no peace, bitches!
They were egged on, encouraged, enticed by the gaggle of media, white reporters with cameras and recording devices who were making stars of them, instantly live-streaming their antics across the planet. And the protesters knew it; they began shouting not at the police but into the lenses. Just lay some music under it and you’d have had yourself a rap video.
Five hundred yards away, flanked to the east of the police, were the less adventurous members of the media, mostly mainstream, who weren’t about to risk their good clothes in the muck and lather of the street. They stood behind metal barricades in the parking lot at McDonald’s, looking from a distance like veal calves in a holding pen. This was the official “media section,” where one could observe the action under the protection of the local police force. And Christ, what seats for the shitshow!
The reporters in the street filming the protesters had their backs to the police, conspicuously exposed and vulnerable but knowing full well that the cops would not open up on them. When all is said and done, white people, even the liberal ones, trust authority, have a deep-seated belief in it. The police would not blast a group of them. They knew it. Somewhere in there lies privilege.
The black protesters understood the racial calculus as well. With the mob of white reporters as a protective buffer, they grew bolder. Those hiding in the shadows drifted back onto the street. Soon they were throwing objects, taunting the police to let it rip. No one was backing down.
Clearly, TV was making things worse. Being a reporter requires some common sense and responsibility, but all that seemed to have vanished into the night.
Shut it down, a reporter from Texas shouted to his cameraman. He turned to me: This is disgusting.
It was. I liked the man and shook his hand. We too had stopped filming the protesters for that very reason. But we had not stopped filming the scene. We backed away, allowing for the showdown at high midnight. Maybe we were no better than those shooting the close-ups. Probably not. But history was unfolding nevertheless.
You must disperse immediately. Now! This is an order. You are subject to arrest or other actions.
Fuck the police!
You must disperse immediately. Now! This is an order. You are subject to arrest or other actions.
Again: Fuck the police! And again. This soundtrack looped for a few minutes.
Finally, their patience exhausted, the police let it rip. Tear gas cartridges and rubber bullets came flying from the armored vehicles. A white female reporter or blogger or sightseer with a small expensive-looking camera was struck in the stomach, and she knelt on the pavement near us whimpering. The governor had promised earlier that afternoon that authorities would not use tear gas or rubber bullets. Media in the calf pen reported that the canisters were smoke bombs, but they sure smelled like tear gas to me. In the pandemonium, I made out Bob’s silhouette across the street, a silver ghost entombed in a cloud of gas.
Pop! There was screaming from the shadows. The guns were out now. A few hundred feet away, some punk shot into the crowd. Matt and I waited a moment to be sure the gunfire had stopped before running toward the corner, just in time to see a limp body being tossed into the back of a car and whisked away. Calm and steady, the police held their fire.
Their armored vehicles began rumbling toward the mob, toward us, toward the violence. I called Bob on the cell phone. He was lost somewhere amid the smoke and shouting. Let’s back the fuck out of here, now! Meet us at the truck.
We made it back to the hotel in time to catch the bartender wiping up. It was a bizarre juxtaposition. The charred and shattered shopping district of West Florissant and the crimson-tiled reflecting pool of the Four Seasons. The black desperation at street level and the noble undertaking of white civilization far above it, tastefully decorated in chromium and hardwoods. The bartender, a young black man, noticing our dishevelment and wild eyes, gave a knowing nod.
What’ll you have, gentlemen?
Let me get a gin and juice, bartender. Make it a double.
On the house, he said, sliding the highball my way. Messed up out there, huh?
That ain’t the half of it.
Tell the world what you saw here, he said in a whisper. Tell them black lives matter.
Black lives matter. It was the first time I remember having heard the phrase. And I instantly understood what it meant. Equal treatment and equal justice. Nothing less. Nothing more. What was there to debate about that? The great American ideal. Black Lives Matter. It was the first time I’d heard it, but not the last. Certainly, not the last.