It began innocently enough. I met with a group of writers who, like me, needed time away from whatever else was going on in our lives to do what we kept saying we needed to do: Write.
The group is called Shut Up and Write!, and that's pretty much what we did for an hour on Friday over a lunch break for some, in a coffee shop just south of downtown Milwaukee. For me, it was to jumpstart some important research I'd done for a book I'm writing, research that I had left unfallowed for far too long.
After cursory introductions--this was my first time--away we went. I pounded the latte I'd ordered along with the laptop keys. My notes weren't very legible. I had promised myself to redo them, but the time had slipped by. I couldn't get all of them for what they were. Nonetheless, I recalled some of them and the basic story, which was fascinating and will someday appear in the book.
Transcribing them took nearly the whole hour allotted by the group to get whatever work done one could. A fellow across the room at the coffee shop who was pounding away at his laptop came across when the facilitator called time and said hello. He had been up since about 4 a.m.
But why he'd been awake was the crucial point. He'd heard shots in his neighborhood, Sherman Park, and called 9-1-1. Nobody showed up. Nobody.
He'd learned that there had been some confusion about which precinct had jurisdiction. Nonetheless, he said, having someone at least drive by in the area would have been enough for him. I said that a police presence, at least, might have served notice that at least they knew something was up. "Yeah, a presence," he said in agreement.
I asked him whether he'd written down the incident, including the lack of police response. He hadn't. "You should do so," I said, "before you forget." I noted to him my lackadaisical response to the aforementioned interview, dealing with another dangerous situation (in fact, it had had a happy ending, a child-napping that had crossed continents seven years ago) that might have ended otherwise.
It was part of a book I'm writing on all the Graftons in the world. This one was connected to Grafton, West Virginia, the site of the founding of Mother's Day. The lady I interviewed was honored as a Mother of the Year, partly, I'd guess, because she lived in West Virginia, partly because of her absolute tenacity with which she'd hung in there for some two years to get her daughter back from a childnapping which had taken her to Africa. I had been there when she was honored and in doing so had shared part of her harrowing experience with her saved daughter in the audience. We'd exchanged business cards and I had followed up by phone.
The fellow from Sherman Park asked if I lived in Grafton, Wisconsin, not that far a drive from the bus station, half a block from where we were speaking. No, I'd said, I lived on the east side now. "Well, you wouldn't have this situation there," he said casually.
I kind of defended myself, saying that, just weeks before, a shooting had taken place near an east side corner that was maybe a mile away. "I think all bets are off about that," I said. "You never know when the next one's going to happen."
But it was a weak argument compared to his neighborhood and we all knew it. Here was a textbook example of white privilege. My neighborhood had few, if any, people of color living within it. The blacks I had normally encounter are panhandlers. One confronted me at the entry to a Whole Foods store, and, upon my refusal to help him, gave me a suggestion of sexual gymnastics I could perform if I had a minute.
Unquestionably, I also noted, similar situations have happened and will happen. This probably wasn't the first instance of police reluctance to respond. I recalled, too, my experience as a union grievance officer and staffer. "I always told the members to write things down right after they happened and to save the information," I said. "You forget important details that you don't think matter, but they might in fact be the deciding factor in a case. And I suggested, too, that he should tell others to do the same so stories overlapped and could be corroborated.
"People get much more respect for their accounts if they're written down, even if they're the only people to do so," I went on. And they do, because the computer always records not only the words, but the time and date in which they're written, so that nobody can complain about disingenuousness or outright lies.
Yet, under what new circumstances would this fellow get the attention he deserved? He hadn't sounded either panic-stricken or excessively needy. But he did sound pretty worried. And confused. There had been shots fired. The police had been called. Why hadn't they come? Were they all that busy at 4:17 a.m.?
I had no answers for him. Neither did anyone else. But we all knew without knowing. In that neighborhood, thoroughly populated with people of color, there were probably as many false alarms as actual shootings. People are easily jolted by anything resembling gunfire, especially people who live in places in which gunfire is more customary.
Maybe the police are too numbed by such reports to take many of them seriously. But that's been true for a while. In the book Evicted, which hit many best-seller lists, Matthew Desmond notes that during "the last decades of the twentieth century"--twenty to thirty years ago now--cities including Milwaukee began passing "nuisance ordinances," by which landlords could be penalized for the behavior of their tenants, including excessive numbers of 9-1-1 calls made within a certain timeframe. The police, in other words, tended to wash their hands of situations involving loud noises and domestic violence--including situations in which guns were drawn, if not actually used.
If that's the culture of the inner city, then, the poor fellow with whom I had the conversation faces an uphill battle at the very least. And it is there that white privilege glares at me. Nothing compares to the general climate that exists there, nothing that has reared its head in the time I've lived in Milwaukee, during the last decade and this one as well.
I wonder what he's thinking now. I wonder if he'll actually follow up. Can't blame him if he does. Can't blame him if he doesn't.
With that sad thought, but glad that I had suggested a path of some sort, I returned to my relatively calmer environment, an area with stately homes and pillars holding up porches, quiet days and mostly calm nights. It has plenty of money. I have a parking spot in the alley behind my apartment building. People use that alley en route to tasks and errands. A fellow of color was doing the same just as I pulled up. We kind of nodded and grinned at each other as I got out of my car and he passed me.
Then he stopped. "Wondering if you had a dollar," he said, being careful not to approach too closely. "I need to catch a bus."
He was dressed fairly neatly, with a Seattle Seahawks shirt on. I have said both yes and no to such requests. But something said yes this time. There are more panhandlers emerging now, more now that the income distribution becomes more distorted by the day. It is nobody's fault, and everybody's fault.
I pulled out a small wad of bills to give him a single. He trained his eyes on the twenty and a five among them. Would something suddenly happen, here at 1 p.m. on a Friday? And why did I have the mindset to consider it? The neighborhood wouldn't necessary dictate that I was in that kind of danger, but not 200 feet from where we stood, some drunk had taken out his unit and peed on a utility pole on a Wednesday afternoon at just about the same time a few weeks ago. He hadn't bothered to get anywhere near the pole, either. In fact, he stood about five feet back and sprayed away so anybody could see the disgust. Heading back from the pharmacy, I happened to have been there. It was impossible to miss. He could have used the alley, for mercy's sake. And there I was, without my cell phone to call 9-1-1 and/or to take his picture. Nobody else was there or watching, then, either.
Would the police have come running? It's a good bet. The address would probably have demanded it. It would have been too late there, too. But there would have been attention paid.
The panhandler thanked me for the dollar. Walking away, he added, "God bless." "You bet," I replied. Wouldn't have been anything wrong with that, either.
Three days later, the same thing happened. But I could tell this young man of color the honest truth: "I don't have a dime with me." His response surprised me: "Thanks for being nice about it. People aren't always very nice." "No problem," I said.
Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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