Project Diary: the civic mourner

Scene after funeral gunfire, East Oakland

I have been to a lot of funerals of the killed in Oakland, usually accompanying Miss Marilyn, who would have worked with the victim's family in the immediate aftermath of a killing to help them, among many other things, plan, and afford, the funeral so suddenly a necessity. At the very first funeral I attended, gunfire broke out. At a subsequent funeral, someone in the church yelled "Gun." Here is part of that story.

It was just as I reached the back of the church after viewing the body that the first scream sounded. From the middle of the congregation, from a girl, it came like a javelin hurled up and out of a general wailing. It was incoherent, but clearly urgent. There followed a momentary pause while the crowd gathered its senses, then another scream, and another, and so we begin to understand -- a gun -- and then a chorus of screams and pointing, an initial mad scattering of groups for the exit, a bottleneck there, people dropping to the floor, hiding behind pews, I looked for the gun, for a gleaming, for someone with an arm out, someone pointing. I listened for a sound. I saw and heard nothing threatening, but the realization came to me that this could be real, and so I crouched behind a pew, alone, waiting.

By the time I stood back up fear had turned to anger. Apparently, there was no shooter; people were outraged that the solemn and dignified mourning of the Hadnots for their murdered fifteen-year-old had been cruelly interrupted. His sister was at the pulpit insisting on order and respect for her family and her lost brother. Soon, one of the preachers asked that everyone but the family leave the church.

I'm not even sure there was a weapon, just the fear of one, and somebody yelled "Gun!" and everyone scattered. Out on sunny Foothill Boulevard police cars began to arrive. The scene was not unlike at the funeral of Davante Riley, when gunfire had broken out in the church. That day, in a black suit, I’d been mistaken for a preacher. This time, tie-less, in a blue shirt and black blazer, I was taken for a cop by an angry man with gold teeth.

“You’re a cop,” he'd said to me, with outrage, “why didn’t you tell them the gun wasn’t inside the church!” I’m not a cop, I said. “Then what’s your business here?”

I didn't know exactly how to answer him. For sure, I had started out attending funerals as a journalist, and I still held within me that hunger to record what I was seeing. But in the electric cloud of grief and pain and power I had witnessed at each service, my sense of my role had undergone a change.

How could I explain it to this man, how could I answer his fair question? At this moment outside this East Oakland chapel, what am I? Part of me feels guilty; part of me feels that I am right where I need to be. Here today I am many things.

I’m an ogler, a voyeur, a grief junkie, a friend, a mourner. I represent the Oakland neighborhoods where no one gets shot, or goes to storefront churches, or proudly worships Jesus, the neighborhoods where, if kids die, it’s from car accidents or leukemia or defects they’ve had since birth, where few own handguns, or have seen a lifeless body in the street, or leftover police tape, or blood that’s gone brown, where few have had a brother or son gunned-down, or a father incarcerated, where a baseball cap is just a baseball cap, where, if people have watched a season or two of The Wire, then they think they know everything about the lives of others and why they die. I come from Oakland, but an Oakland where, if people were aware ten days ago that a fifteen-year-old boy from their town had been gunned down, they probably haven’t thought about it for nine days since. I want to tell them about how the story continues and continues. I think they are missing out on something important. But so far I've failed.

But I don’t say any of this, and before I can say anything, a woman in a blue sweater emerges from the church and, having sensed our confrontation, steps in to tell the man that I am okay, and immediately he turns away. I didn’t know who she was or how she knew that I was "okay" or even if she was right.