Golden State: Lesson Two

I'm thinking about learnings related to violence and violence prevention from my time in the Golden State

I’m opening the piece with a close up of a sky blue wall in San Francisco near Divisadero. The street name is written in cursive in round, bubble gum pink letters. The image cuts off at the “e.” There are also 5 yellow stars on the wall and an image of a light pink figure with green wings who holds an orange kite on a string. A sign at the top left corner shows a dark blue M on a white background. I'm opening with this image of the vibrancy of San Francisco’s public art that mesmerized me in my early walks through the city.

In the dream I was walking up to an ATM near 16th street and Mission near the BART station and an unknown arm put a gun up to my temple. I jumped awake in my bed, safe, adjusting my eyes to look for the comforting contours of my books and clothes. I didn’t know where the image had come from. Was it an aftershock from the movies and the newsreels that I had seen during my lifetime, or was it a warning of something to come? Movie tickets and ad buys run on fear and violence. My nerves like so many others’ are taut with accumulated responses to what I have been tuned to expect when I step outside of my home.

The dream left me uneasy when I got up the next day to continue getting to know my new city. I wanted safety like everyone else. I was a young, Black woman alone in pre-cell phone days, away from everyone I knew and therefore vulnerable. I was the daughter of immigrants and all my ancestral spirits and my guardian cemis were miles away facing the warmer Caribbean sea. I could not count on familiar road signs to help me find my own way out of danger. The people around me could not easily fit me into their understanding of who belonged in their schools, stores, churches, temples and streets. So far growing up in the United States, I walked around knowing that I could expect authorities to question my right to be wherever I happened to be. 

I had been taught by the world around me that no one was invested in my safety.  

In New York, I had learned to walk as if I was upset so that I could repel unwanted attention from strange men, or to stick to crowded streets so that I could ask for help if there was a threat of violence. But the San Francisco streets were much quieter and lonelier than those in the Bronx..

My first few months in San Francisco I joined a group that observed the trial of a man who was accused of violently murdering women who did sex work in the city. I was interested in figuring out how I could contribute towards interrupting injustice and observing these cases with this collective seemed one way to do this. I was just beginning to orient myself to the hilly streets in San Francisco, no longer surprised by the topography. But now as a result of listening to graphic testimony, the street names became haunted by the women’s stories. It didn’t make sense; these colorful storefronts with their signs full of wordplay and their murals marking the contributions of many hands to the present day beauty were the sites of harm, death and neglect. As the trial continued, it was clear that in order to defend the man the defending attorneys were keen to show those of observing and those in the juror’s box all the ways that these women were so different from us. 

Here I was in the friendly city where people had been known to dance in flowy clothes and put garlands in each other’s hair. Yet just like everywhere else, people found ways here to justify why certain people did not deserve the care, concern and compassion that the city promised.