Rankine writes: "The drive to Ferguson prepares me for Ferguson. Once out of downtown St Louis, county after county radiates a pervasive poverty: abandoned malls, boarded-up stores, homes in disrepair, the occasional fast-food place, gas stations and, finally, the Ferguson Market & Liquor store on West Florissant Avenue."
Protests in St. Louis. (photo: Koran Addo/St Louis Post-Dispatch/Twitter)
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12 October 14
Two months later, too many young men must still contemplate their mortality in the way of Ferguson
he drive to Ferguson prepares me for Ferguson. Once out of downtown St Louis, county after county radiates a pervasive poverty: abandoned malls, boarded-up stores, homes in disrepair, the occasional fast-food place, gas stations and, finally, the Ferguson Market & Liquor store on West Florissant Avenue.
Around the corner on Canfield Drive, I pull into the parking lot at Red’s BBQ. The owners have set up outside their establishment because a few nights before, protesters caused extensive damage to the restaurant in a show of defiance. This is two months ago, when the history books began to document Ferguson, before more than a thousand protesters came to St Louis this weekend to stand against the continuation of the police’s self-named “low intensity warfare” against young black men. But in the August heat, I look around at the burnt-out buildings and the roped-off areas and I finally understand, fully, that I am in the midst of the continuation of the LA riots of the 20th century, where the beaten black male body has been executed publicly, in the 21st.
Michael Brown’s memorial is set up halfway down Canfield. The memorial is constructed out of stuffed animals, flowers, homemade signs. “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is itself memorialized on drawings, and t-shirts. All this stuff, which feels to me like the hands of the community, lie where his body bled out for four hours in the hot sun.
Standing under a tree for shade, I am approached by two men. The older one says he’s heard they are giving away food. I point across the street, where spread out on the grass are Pampers, bottled water, cans of soup, boxes of mac and cheese, crackers, bread and cereal I hope aren’t going bad in the heat.
The younger man, in blue and gray striped pajama bottoms, is looking at a poster with a photograph of Michael Brown taped at the center. Around the top half of the photo someone has written “rest in peace” in a semi-circle, like a halo, and in black marker across the bottom are the dates of his short life. The funeral hasn’t happened yet, so for now this piece of paper holds the place of a tombstone. He looks just like me, says the young man. I don’t say anything because I think he is speaking to himself. He repeats what he’s said: He looks just like me. His friend is walking toward the canned soups and boxed cereals. I want to say: No, he doesn’t look like you.
But he does look like him, so I don’t say anything. Instead I join the young man in examining Brown’s face. It is the face of a teenage boy who looks like this teenage boy. Like I could be him, he adds, rooted in Brown’s likeness. I am reminded suddenly of President’s Obama’s comment that Trayvon Martin could have been his son.
If this boy’s imagination has transported him into the bullet-riddled body of Michael Brown, it’s because he could be next.
A woman with a toddler comes up to me. I have been taking pictures of the memorial with my iPhone. You can take his picture if you want, she says, as if he is part of the memorial. She pulls the toddler’s hands up in the air so as to inhabit Brown’s body while he was being saturated with bullets and I want to snatch the child away from her, even as I know this is the recognition all black bodies enter in the quotidian. In the incoherency of our citizenship, we don’t matter to here, and as Rodney King said, “We are stuck here for a while.”
I put my iPhone in my bag and kneel so I can interact with the child – as a child in America, not as an American black child. His mother pulls a collage she made from the memorial and hands it to me, perhaps to turn my attention back to the death that brought me here to Ferguson, that brings so many back each day and had so many returning to the region for the first time this autumn weekend. The woman wants me to look and document how she and her child are at the center of what has been lost and what could and will be lost by virtue of being us.
Standing there on Canfield Drive, I pass back to the mother a piece of construction paper with her handwritten words – HANDS UP DON’T SHOOT – and I begin to wish I had taken her child’s picture. As one mother to another, I could have portrayed how our boys can never surrender.
