Reporting on violence in East Oakland after dark

This blog was written by Mills College reporting fellow Sandhya Dirks for our Fault Lines Project, exploring roots and solutions to violence in Oakland.  To hear the reports in our series, read other blogs by our reporters, and to participate in online discussions around these important issues, you can go to our Fault Lines Project page.

The one where we go out at night—and learn we shouldn’t go out at night.

So we’ve acquired some guides through this project—guides who are giving us access passes to areas of Oakland I wouldn’t, maybe even couldn’t, normally set forth in.

On this particular night we go out to meet our guide, let’s call him Dusty. Dusty is going to introduce us to residents of the neighborhood—friends of his, neighbors, people he knows from his thirty-eight years in this neighborhood. We get into Sarah’s car and head in deep, past International Blvd.  We stop in front of a house where a car idles while a women leans into the passenger window having a private conversation. In the meantime, guys are hanging out on the stoop and the sidewalk. Night is falling, and the dark makes things feel both more connected and more tinged with danger.

Sarah and I walk up, and instantly everyone is paying attention. A little hyper guy who says his name is Leon starts in at us. He’s got a pint of Hennessey in one hand, and he is smoking a joint with the other. Standing next to him is a tall gentle giant that everyone calls Slim. His dark, wise face is kind—like a monk or a Buddha. He is the person we gravitate towards, even as Leon does most of the talking.

First comes the flirting. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Flirting has subtlety to it, Leon isn’t trying to be subtle; he is trying to rattle us.

“Ooh you are fine… fine... you ever been with a black man...? But was he from the street? Cause I’m from the street. The street, you hear me?” He says he likes me cause I’m white. Really.

Okay, that’s preliminaries. We try to brush off the heavy come-ons, which don’t seem to even be geared towards getting anywhere except proving something. Leon is a fire-wire, a short man, and the term Napoleon complex, yeah, that is floating somewhere in the back of my mind.

Dusty tells us to say what we are doing. We’ve memorized the standard introduction by now: a project about violence in Oakland. Reporters. But Leon’s hide raises up.

First thing he says: “Yeah sure I will give you a story, but what you gonna give me. Yeah, if we HAVE SEX, I’ll talk.” And yes, I am paraphrasing, and cleaning it up. But it wasn’t suggested, it was said outright. “You know reporters got to do all sorts of crazy things to get a story.”

Again we try to laugh it off, to make light, and to not take it too seriously. But Leon is angered, and he’s trying to get a reaction out of us.

“What? You want to talk to me, you want to RECORD me? You gotta come to my level, you can’t just come out here, you got to drink with us, smoke with us…”

Okay, that's fair, I think to myself, in its way—we are outsiders, and as much as Leon is trying to get to us with his sexual suggestions, he is trying to make us feel outside.

We try to refocus attention on what we are hoping to talk about, so we tell Leon more about the project and he gets rowdy. We say we want to hear his stories, and ask him some questions.  All of a sudden his eyes get dead serious and his voice gets loud and terrifying.

“What the F*&%. I ain’t gonna tell you S*%@.” He stares at us directly. On the last word he looks crazy, unhinged. Then he breaks into maniacal laughter, lunging right towards us.

We jump. The man is trying to scare us, and it works. I stay a little too cool, taking "not flinching" to a level that might be dangerous. But I am determined not to show weakness.

He is enjoying the fact that he’s made two young women break a sweat. But there is a threat to him, an implicit threat that he is trying to display. He’s set his mind on scaring us because we have come to stare. It’s almost that simple. Listening is not always initially an act of love—its can be an act of intrusion. And we have to walk that subtle, snaky line.

It’s time to leave. The temperature has turned, and night has cast its close-knit dark over the streets of the Deep East. We can’t forget that it is dangerous out here. But we are Dusty's ride home, and he’s lingering with his friends, unafraid.

We’ve recorded nothing of this night—which is bad, because this is one of those moments that a reporter remembers as emblematic of the larger issues at hand. But in the end, it was good to have never pulled out our recorders, because when Leon looks at us with crazy eyes and says, “Are you recording right now? ARE YOU?” We can say, "no, we're not."

And as if on cue, right before we leave, Sarah and I hear a gun go off. It’s loud, like it's right next door. Sarah stays cool as a cucumber, but we look at each other, a tacit acknowledgment that, yeah that was a gunshot. No one else even bats an eyelash.

We get back in the car, and drive off. We are rattled. Not just because they were trying to scare us, or because they did scare us.  Maybe a little bit of both.

Dusty, our confident chaperone, laughs it off. He says that no one will threaten us when he is near, and that Leon was just playing a role. I believe him. Still, fired up on drink and smoke, Leon was trying to get a reaction from us. Maybe he got the exact reaction he wanted.

But it goes to the point that we can't help but influence the situation. We play a part in encouraging people to play the roles they think they are supposed to play. Like they are putting on a show, putting up a front. And it has to do with race and fear and gender too. It’s confusing. It’s difficult. We are trying to break down stereotypes, and here is a man who is purposefully trying to enforce them. And for us, in that moment, no matter what, it was terrifying.

I couldn’t shake the sense that the role he was trying to play was the role he thought we cast him in. Like he was trying to live up to what he thought we expected.

But at least, after tonight we feel closer to Dusty, who in his way is testing us too. Seeing what we can handle—showing us just how deep the layers can go.

Dusty tells us that after we got in the car, Leon calmed down. H says Leon “was just playing a role of that belligerent dude that you run across in the street, that want to act like he’s hard, and scare you.”

And Dusty thinks this is an important lesson for us to learn. Because even though Leon is harmless -- “here we call him Napoleon Bonaparte,” Dusty tells us with a laugh -- the role he was playing is a familiar one in this neighborhood. “It was relevant, like I said, sometimes we gonna go places and you might run into that cat, that’s really like that.”

There is this whole thing about having to act hard here. A deep pride that comes from being tough, of the street, and even more a pride to being crazy, sometimes. Of course, most people we meet are actually, once you break it down and spend enough time, truly sweethearts. Dusty for one.

But it is important to remember that we are outsiders, and that as such we are viewed with a certain amount of suspicion. One thing I learned here, from the simple fact that no one wants to give us their name and that many refuse to talk, is that trust is a rare commodity in the Deep East. It’s something you have to earn.

Dusty’s earned his through a long history here. He was in the game once, and he still has the street cred that he won the hard way, with time in prison and murders to his name. But now he is known as the "hood Unc", or the hood Uncle. And to us, he is a guide.

The thing about difference I am learning is that the more you challenge it, the more you have to face its multi-layered frequencies.