 |
Marion Meredith is aided after being hit by a rubber
bullet during the riot on April 10.
|
"They're serious this time," a young black man said to me while we were standing under the canopy at Jordan's Market, trying to stay out of the rain.
We had just watched a gang of kids in their teens run past us at 12th and Main streets overturning motorcycles and throwing metal garbage cans in the street. They threw a brick in the window of Jump's, the high-tone dance club and restaurant across the street. They overturned the vendor carts, smashed Japp's window. A man I've known a long time told me downtown was trashed, "as if a tornado had hit."
Police helicopters were buzzing low overhead, and the police were there in full riot gear long black coats, helmets, guns drawn, marching in formation, hitting the shields. I couldn't tell if they were my friends or my enemies. I couldn't see their faces. Behind them the camera crew of a local television news station was running in hot pursuit.
The mood was angry and defiant. The people I'm accustomed to seeing in the neighborhood weren't around, and many faces were unfamiliar to me. Even the Street Vibes vendor, Ricardo, wasn't at his post this afternoon.
Monday night at around 7:30 or 8 I was in my apartment with a couple of friends when we heard voices shouting in unison, "Fuck the police, fuck the police."
"Omigod," we said simultaneously and headed downstairs to see what was up, but we all knew what it was about: the shooting of the 19-year-old boy last Saturday night on 13th and Republic. About 50 people paraded down Main Street, then headed toward District 1. Everyone in Kaldi's was out on the sidewalk, in a kind of shock.
The unexpected April heat was stifling, and the black people who were around were surly and uncommunicative with us. If we tried to approach them, they shut up fast, even if we were old friends.
Some of the Kaldi's regulars who went to the police station on Monday night said it was like a fortress under attack but that the police had things well in hand. People were throwing 40-ouncers and bricks, anything they could get their hands on. Alan Sauer, who was there quite late, estimated there were 300 people surrounding District 1.
On Tuesday afternoon, the mailman delivering mail by Jump's when the window was broken told me he had to take cover inside an apartment door that someone had left open to escape the flying glass. People weren't agreeing about much on the streets, but they were all saying it's going to be a long, hot summer.
Rebecca Watkins, a writer, told me her account of incidents around Washington Park Tuesday afternoon. At first there weren't many cops around, she said, mostly African Americans, and then it began to get more chaotic when a Metro bus drove past. The crowd starting throwing bottles and hitting the bus. The cops were waiting somewhere close, because they came pretty readily.
People had already been sprayed with tear gas, and Watkins helped one guy clean out his eyes with water. He'd been sprayed for no apparent reason. The crowd was screaming and running through the park, and one lady in particular was screaming, "This is not a racial issue. We're fighting them!"
The cops cleared Washington Park, and then most of the media attention was focused on a car in which a couple of windows appeared to be shattered, and a girl whose face was cut was getting medical attention from the fire department.
Watkins started to walk down 12th Street toward Kaldi's, and a couple of black men, who were nice about it, said, "You don't even want to go that way." She said she thought she heard one man murmur "you're white" under his breath, but he was kind.
A woman was sitting in a parked car crying, the same woman who'd been hit with tear gas in the park. She was on the passenger side, her door ajar, one foot was on the sidewalk. Watkins said she stopped and asked if anyone had tried to help her clean her eyes, but she shook her head no. She was very upset, crying. She didn't seem like she wanted company.
Back in my apartment on Tuesday night, Rebecca and I are waiting out the twilight. It's darkening and quiet, but Main Street is lined with trucks full of camera crews and news people. I hear bottle rockets around me whining, punctuated by angry voices, and the playground by Peaslee Center is briefly overrun with angry protesters.
We have water, in case our supply is cut off, and so far the reassuring hum of the television set, but we can't help feeling a little bit like we're in Kosovo.
I keep wondering why every news organization isn't here, why the news channels are allotting only a certain amount of time to the violence, as if by controlling its exposure they can contain the damage. I don't think that's going to happen this time.
It's now 8:30 p.m., and the trashing of Main Street has begun in earnest. Someone has shot a small hole into a Kaldi's window. Janette's Market is evidently a prime target, and then the senior center. The contents of all the receptacles on the street are emptied everywhere. Main Street looks like Calcutta.
The young, plump black man who works at Jordan's is taking credit for keeping it, as well as Neon's, intact. All other businesses are closed, but it's a party atmosphere.
Rebecca, my dog, Sister, and I stumble downstairs into a fog of tear gas, and though everybody downstairs is coughing and stumbling around, no one can tell us where it came from or why it's being used. The police copters are hovering low, making a constant annoying buzz.
Three black women are walking along Main Street. One of them stops and points to Sister. "I don't mean nothin' bad," she says, "but if your dog bites me, I couldn't be responsible."
"Oh, she's just scared," I say. "She won't bite you."
We walk to the corner of 12th and Main and see a couple of cruisers parked at Neon's, but the odor of tear gas is so strong we beat it back to our own doorstep, where we learn that Alan Sauer is at University Hospital having been beaten severely enough to have five stitches in his thick skull.
What we're going to be able to tell about the first night of the revolution is told now. Tomorrow is another story.
KATIE LAUR, a CityBeat contributing writer, lives near 12th and Main streets in Over-the-Rhine.
