Story Twenty-Eight

Minneapolis, Part 1 of 3

A writer’s note: I’ve been waiting for years to write this. It’s not polished, and it’s not meant to be. It’ll meander and it’ll be harsh and the only thing that matters is that it’s real. It is the first time in years that I have been free to write.

It comes in more than one part, because you couldn’t encapsulate this in a single writing. It’s years of pent-up everything trying to get out all at once. But I hope you read it the way I wrote it, or the way it hits you, and I hope at the end of the day you feel love from this.

Solidarity, forever.

*housekeeping: all these photos are from Minneapolis

It is a good thing that one of my favorite photos to take is broken glass, because that is all I found for the first couple hours I was out taking pictures in Minneapolis. The stores were boarded up, which didn’t make much of a difference because looters simply pried off the boards and broke into the stores anyway. I was running in and out of storefronts, taking photos of empty shelves and battered signs and the detritus of a mob.

I walked through one broken pane of glass, maybe it was a door or a window, into the kind of restaurant that rich people think of as a good lunch spot and people who work in kitchens think of as a date night. The lights were on but not too bright, and with the exception of the windows the place was largely untouched. It felt incongruous, like I should be waiting for a host to seat me. I hadn’t been inside taking pictures for long before a young man popped up from behind the counter. He couldn’t have been much over nineteen, although I am hitting the age where I describe anyone under twenty-five as “a kid.” I must have made some kind of noise, because he stood up and registered my presence. Then he said to me “Hey, you’re a female,” in that way that people do when it’s not a question but whatever comes next is dependent on what they’ve just said.

Now, “You’re a female” is not the most comforting thing to hear from any man in the middle of fires and chaos. But this kid didn’t have any malice in his voice, so I laughed and said yes, well spotted. I was caught off guard by his next question: “What kind of wine do girls like?” Until I came along and interrupted him, he had been contemplating the house wine fridge. There was a red, a white, and a rosé. I considered the implications of the question, thought briefly about the ethics of Sommeliéring a riot, and then asked was this for his mom or a girl his age. Of course, he was trying to impress a girl. I told him that for the next few years of his life, he’d never go wrong choosing pink alcohol for a girl, which I think is both true and just one toe over the line of what an appropriate response to that situation would have been.

Thing is, this kid didn’t seem volatile. But when you are in a violent situation and you are carrying expensive gear and the city is burning and you are in a weird Wonderland of calm, the normal rules of society and safety do not apply. It seemed safer to just tell him what girls typically like at his age. It’s not like he couldn’t have googled it, and it earned me some goodwill. But now I can say that I’ve Sommelièred a riot, so there’s that.

Until quite recently I was a plaintiff and for all that time I was not allowed to write anything down about how I felt. I wasn’t not allowed, to be clear, but anything that I did write down might have been potentially discoverable, which means that at least dozens of people would be reading my journals about what is probably the most traumatic experience of my life. They would read it with lawyers’ eyes, which are not empathetic like writers or therapists might be. They would pick apart raw pain as though it were published work, searching for bias or intent in a primal scream.

That’s why I waited so long to write this; it’s raw and likely inadvisable but the document is signed and sealed and I am finally, dear God finally allowed to put pen to paper and start processing this. I am often at my best in my first draft; my unorganized thoughts have often catalyzed my career. People seem to understand how my brain jumps around.

But then, I am supposed to be talking about the pictures.

So here’s what was different about Minneapolis versus any other city I’ve visited when it was engulfed in trauma: these people had a sense of humor. If you understand the dynamics of these sorts of things, it’s like watching swarms of multiple kinds of fishes self-select. First it’s just a mass of fish, it’s chaos, but then without any particular sign everyone knows to get to the group they want to be in, and they all get into their own schools and dart away. There’s not a stated goal, how people express things like rage or pain are largely societal. So every area has their own way.

Another thing that happens in any riot is hilarious juxtaposition. It’s rarely intentional upfront; usually it’s a wonderful accident. But then people notice that a funny thing has happened, and they leave it up or add to it, same as any meme. Minneapolis had a LOT OF THEM. More than I’m used to seeing. Looters ravaged one clothing store, noticed a 40% off sign and carefully repositioned it to take photos. I’m not defending looting, but that’s pretty funny. At one point I walked into a tobacco shop to see all but one box of cigars emptied, as though they were so very foul that they weren’t even worth smoking for free. In the same store I saw a maskless bearded man casually perusing the bongs and pipes, looking for all the world like it was a random Tuesday afternoon. A gentleman in a pharmacy that was being actively looted noticed a cut on my arm and offered to go get a box of bandages from a few aisles over, which, hilariously, made me think about the journalistic ethics of taking stolen goods. In this case, it was just a scratch and I carry my own medkit on location so the point was moot, but the man was so kind and polite about it, saying, “Excuse me ma’am, I don’t mean to bother you, but you seem to be bleeding” in such a perfect encapsulation of Minnesota Nice that it was difficult for me to keep a straight face.

But it obviously isn’t all lighthearted. There are different kinds of communal grief. It’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t familiar, but some riots feel more dangerous than others, because they are not directed. One time, maybe 2014 but definitely in St. Louis, I was with protesters who were demonstrating on what’s called the Delmar Loop. It is a place where they have stores that sell gourmet cookies and organic hand-baked dog treats and other such rich-people nonsense. The protest was mostly young men, specifically mostly young Black men from the parts of the city that didn’t have grocery stores much less gourmet grocery stores for dogs. The protest was angry but calm; this was during the period of protest where folks from Ferguson were making it known to the rest of the city that this time, everyone else couldn’t be complacent. They would have to see what was happening just a few miles away. They would have to reckon with it.

I remember, very clearly, seeing some young white men that didn’t belong. There were three of them, dressed all in black and wearing masks years before that was normal. It was so hot that night that nobody even cared that everything they were wearing was soaked in sweat, everyone in tank tops and shorts, and these white men were wearing long sleeves and long pants. They darted into a parking lot where two police cars were parked and started smashing windows. One got up on top of a car that was parked on the street and smashed a windshield.

And that was all it took, we were all unleashed. The police car was set on fire. People started upturning another one; I didn’t see if they succeeded. I never saw those white boys again. They didn’t stick around to face the charges, they left that for all of the Black men. But we went down Delmar, and not a single piece of plate glass was spared. It was violent and joyful, the kind of destruction that only makes sense when you are young. It felt to me like the first time I’d heard Cherry Bomb or Pussy Manifesto or I Am A Rifle, it was pure chaos and anarchy and anything could happen. I am sure that someone else would describe it differently because we all feel violent freedom in our own individual ways.

A dude tried to take my camera and another dude who knew me said I was cool and to leave me alone. I walked down the middle of that road, ran down it, with glass shattering all around me and everyone yelling and whooping and no idea what was going to happen next. And as quickly as it started, it was over; we had gone down all the blocks with plate glass and the cops were descending and everyone scattered. I spent an hour chain-smoking behind some bushes, waiting for things to calm down, or maybe I went to the nearby hotel bar after that. Things like that have happened often enough around me that I have trouble remembering the afters; I frequently hide in bushes and I frequently just go to the nearest bar and that part isn’t important anyway.

But Minneapolis wasn’t like that; Minneapolis was confused and kind and had a lot more things on fire. People on the streets might be with a few friends but they largely didn’t seem to know each other — that said, they cooperated with strangers like I’ve never seen. There was one shop, maybe it was a mechanic’s lot or maybe it was beater cars for sale, where the owner tried mightily with a garden hose to stop the whole yard from going ablaze. I am a bit of a firebug and a photographer besides, so when large things are on fire I gravitate towards them because it’s always once-in-a-lifetime. I’ll never set a car on fire just for the photos. In this instance, I had just taken a beautiful photo of a rose lit perfectly by a street lamp and saw a burning car; when I got to the lot everyone was freaking out because a man had inexplicably gotten into a pickup and tried to get it out of the lot. Maybe they thought they could save the building if they got the truck out so the fire couldn’t jump, like the way you backburn fields in the face of a major fire. Whatever the idea was, it hadn’t worked and the man was now trapped in a truck that was going to light up at any second. I wasn’t near the front of the crowd but I always carry a medium-sized knife that has a multitool to any riot, one of those that can cut or break or screw something in, and I handed it to the guy in front of me and they handed it to the person in front of them and we broke out the window and got the guy out not less than two minutes before the truck went up. I never did get the knife back.