What is Arresting

Maura Pellettieri

 

I am singing Christmas carols when I am arrested. It is the Friday following Thanksgiving. There are about fifty of us, and we are like carolers anywhere: We laugh, nudging each other, when someone goes out of tune. Our carols have new lyrics: “Silent Night” is “Trampled Rights;” “Silver Bells” is “Life is Hell;” “White Christmas” remains “White Christmas.” We sing to passersby and restaurant windows. The people inside the restaurants look entertained, but also embarrassed—for us or for themselves? It is hard to say. We are making a spectacle. A small news crew trails us—livestream renegades with phones on sticks. We carry signs.

▱

On November 24th, 2014, in Clayton, Missouri—a municipality that is Ferguson’s opposite in terms of economic privilege and race—St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCullough announced that a grand jury had not indicted Darren Wilson for killing Michael Brown. The jury, tasked only with deciding whether there was probable cause to take the case to trial, had landed on their verdict the previous week. It was suspected that McCullough delayed his broadcast to slow the inevitable—public reaction. If the decision was revealed just before Thanksgiving, everyone might stay home. In The New York Times, on November 24th, Erik Eckholm wrote, “Probable cause … does not require that most of the evidence be incriminating, let alone be proof ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ … grand juries are ordinarily instructed to issue an indictment when there is ‘some evidence’ of guilt.”

McCullough’s November 24th statement began: “On August 9th, Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson.” Three autopsies showed that Wilson shot Brown at least six times. The jury was made of nine white and three Black jurors.

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In September, it still felt like summer. I went with a friend to bring water and Gatorade to Ferguson. Two white women, we were regarded warily and kindly. We dropped supplies at a tent and were told by the woman organizing the donations to feel welcome, but that if we didn’t live there we needed to be gone by nightfall: “No reason to be here if you don’t need to be.”

On the cul-de-sac where Michael Brown died, Ferguson community members debated what was next. One man took the mic to share, from a legal perspective, the best ways to navigate interactions with police. People shook their heads. “Hands up, don’t shoot!” someone shouted. Helicopters circled overhead.

In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death, St. Louis citizens held vigils in solidarity with Ferguson, but the city didn’t erupt until an off-duty police officer shot 18-year old Vonderrit Myers in Shaw on October 8th. The crowds at protests reflected who lived where: Ferguson protests were mostly Black; St. Louis protests were more mixed, but the common denominator was the mood—which was that of a vessel burst.

I have attended other protests since McCullough announced the non-indictment, but this is the first one that feels witty, even light. In Shaw, where I live, not 4 miles away, I watched canisters of tear-gas rolling, as an armed St. Louis Police Department swept the streets. I linked arms with strangers, witnessed a journalist get Maced; I flinched at the sight of Tasers, and listened to the news, delivered in real-time through a bullhorn: Police warning protesters to disperse or prepare themselves, organizers announcing possible negotiations with police.

Now a fellow caroler uses a bullhorn to amplify his song. We face the wide windows of a restaurant. He curtsies, pretending to fall over, and inside the restaurant, people laugh. A server smiles and nods. Someone else looks at his plate, frowns, shakes his head. The bartender takes a step back; he looks left and right to see who is near him. Then he raises his fist above his head, pumps the air once, and puts his arm down again, quickly.

We are in the Central West End, a neighborhood where wealthy people eat and drink and live, along gated residential streets—residues of an effective redlining campaign. To get from here to there in St. Louis, you must go around iron gates and cement barriers. Through-streets are annoyingly few; we live, at best, elliptically. It is often exhausting to move forward in St. Louis, to attempt to arrive.

Antiquated mansions line partitioned side streets. Some of the people who live in this part of town are the same old-money philanthropists who maintain free admissions at St. Louis’s museums, and employ many—Peabody Coal, Monsanto. They keep us in debilitating gratitude. Behind tall and spikey wrought-iron gates, windows are shuttered. In one such window, I see a Black Lives Matter sign. Houses tower and gardens stretch, estate-like, within city limits. Just blocks north of sushi restaurants and vodka bars, buildings and streets fall sharply into architectural decline. Vacant lots stretch through North City—lots the size of small farms, fields.

While we sing, the police arrive, one or two cars at a time, quietly. They walk around us, looking anxious. They do not use a bullhorn. They make no attempt to match our volume, as they have in other neighborhoods, recent nights. They don’t arrive in armored vehicles or carry their batons. Here, tonight, among holiday opulence, they do not want a scene.

At Maryland and Euclid, we walk into the road and circle the intersection, pausing the pulse of traffic. To my left and right are people I don’t know, and stranger to stranger, all of us hold hands. The picture of us like this, standing in a circle, reminds me of a scene from some fictional pastoral schoolyard—fictional for its peace and diversity. My own schoolyard growing up was mainly white. No one held hands, but whatever violence I survived was archetypical; I remained more or less safe.

We sing our “Silver Bells,” Life is hell, life is hell, that’s racist life in the city, when a cop takes my arms behind my back and zip-ties my wrists. A woman in a neon green cap that reads “Legal Observer” makes eye contact with me. She makes the motion of zipping her lips, turning the lock, and throwing the key. She nods at me with a stern face. I nod back, accepting her instruction, wondering what I know; what exactly I am agreeing to not say. People film me, holding up their phones. The other protesters, in the wake of my arrest, move to the sidewalk. We knew arrest was possible, as it is every time we make this choice, but we did not plan mass arrest here, tonight.

I start to sing again, loudly—as though the reason I’m singing now is not partly sourced from fear—and my strangers on the sidewalk raise their voices with me. The officer who holds me shuffles me to a car, saying, “We have to get her out of here.”

▱

In the car, I wait for whatever is next while my right hand goes numb. “Is it Officer McRee?”

“Yeah?”

“The zip-tie is cutting off my circulation.”

“You’re not supposed to be comfortable.”

I start whistling the carol I was singing when I was arrested. McRee turns on the radio—some kind of soft-core metal produced in the 90s. I keep whistling. He turns the radio up. I try to whistle louder. It’s the same game my sister and I played when she was ten and I was seven. We shared a room, but we were very different. It was difficult for us to coexist.

“Are you going to read me my Miranda rights?”

“You have the right to remain silent,” he returns, his voice raising up at the end, as if he is not sure that this is what he wants to say. A shiny white SUV pulls up alongside his car, and he rolls his window down, leans on his elbow. The driver is a young blonde woman, perhaps 23, lips bright and dark, eyes lined, lids pink.

“Scuse me, Officer?” she says, “Are we okay to be here right now?” Her voice has a peculiar affect—at once plaintive and seductive—as though she wants to sound like Little Red Riding Hood and Mrs. Robinson at the same time.

“Oh, you’re good,” says McRee. “We’re clearing all this up in a minute.”

“Can I ask you,” she says, squinting slightly, “what is going on?” Her vowels are flat yet long: the shape of her last word sounds more like yawn. I can see her through the tinted glass, but she can’t see me.

“Don’t you worry,” McRee says. “It’s just protesters. But we’re not going to let them ruin your night.” He pauses. “We’re not going to let them ruin anybody’s.” He clears his throat pointedly, his words as much for me as for her. Little Red Robinson says a sugary goodbye and speeds off.

Fifteen minutes later, McRee and I are still at it, me whistling and him drumming on the steering wheel. Separate as we are—him in front at the wheel, me in the back with my hands tied behind me—both of us use sound to try to claim the space. Then a paddy wagon arrives, or as the cops call them, cruisers. An officer opens the door and tells me to get out. Then he says, “Whoa, whoa.” First he must release me from where my handcuffs are locked to the seat. He says, “There’s no real wiggle room here.”

McRee yells at him to hurry up. Finally, I am detached. They move me to the paddy wagon, the door closes, and we drive.

I am alone, except for the two officers who sit in front, on the other side of a thick mesh cage. Through the divider, I can see myself in their camera. Watching myself is disorienting; the camera faces down, showing me the top of my head. Unsettled, I try to ground myself by way of objectivity. I think: This is arrest. This is what it means. It is not lost on me that even my fake objectivity is white.

▱

Around this time last year, I was finishing my graduate thesis. Compensating for long late hours spent writing, I drank too much coffee. I felt worn and irritable, bothered by my neighbor’s loud TV and the howl of trucks on the nearby highway. Mostly I was annoyed by a church in The Hill, St. Louis’s Little Italy, a neighborhood that borders mine. Toward the end of November, a church started blasting a tinny-sounding excerpt of “Ave Maria” each night. They played it on a loop for hours, and I remember thinking, This season is hell. When I ran into one of my neighbors in the hallway, she cooed, small-talking: “Isn’t it lovely?”

That same month, three young Black men I know, also neighbors of mine, were visited by the police. They were playing music at the same hour and volume as the church, but as it turned out—as I learned later, when I ran into one of them—they were disturbing the peace.

▱

In the paddy wagon, I brace myself. I cannot use my hands to steady my body and there are no other bodies beside me to help keep me in my place.

“What was she doing?” one of the officers says.

“Singing in the intersection.”

“What?”

“Christmas carols.”

They laugh.

“Oh yeah, but with revamped lyrics.”

“Yeah, I heard a couple.”

They laugh.

“Who’s her arresting?”

“Don’t know.”

“What’s he charging her with?”

“No idea—nothing?”

We circle streets, sometimes braking or turning sharply, and if I do not keep my feet planted, I will fly against the metal, the dividing cage. We are still somewhere in the Central West End, I think I can see the Chase Park Plaza Cinemas ahead. We pull alongside another police car and the officer in the passenger seat rolls down his window. He leans on his elbow. “Do you know what we’re doing?”

“Nope.”

They laugh.

“Do you know where Major Lashock is?”

“Nope.”

“Does anyone know where Major Lashock is?”

“No-ope.”

They laugh.

“What are we doing with her?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are we doing?”

There is silence then, which seems to be born of boredom, and I wonder what these men expect from their night. The light ahead changes. Cars drive by and I hear the sound of freedom in the whipping wind.

“I think we’ll drive around till we get a few more.”

“How many are we getting tonight?”

“I don’t know. 50? 100?”

But as it turned out, I was the only protester arrested in the city of St. Louis that night.

▱

I am arrested when I wake at 4 a.m. to the dissonant pitch of a helicopter hovering nearby, and to sirens—the same sounds I fell asleep to. Whatever is happening now has been going on all night.

▱

At around 10 p.m., on November 28th, 2014, I was arrested at the intersection of Maryland and Euclid. At the time, the arresting officer would (or could) not tell me why I was being arrested. Later, I was charged with impeding traffic, a minor offense. About 40 minutes later, after circling the Central West End, I was driven to Lindell Avenue, somewhere west of Kingshighway, where sixty or so riot cops loitered in the dark. They were armed to the teeth. They were expecting fifty protestors, maybe one hundred. Among them, I saw two women. They were waiting to be dispatched. They blocked the road. They asked me to get out of the paddy wagon. One of them took my picture in a flash of blinding white light, while another said, “Well, aren’t you having a good time?”

I am arrested when I am thrown against the paddy wagon by a female officer, with sixty or so male riot cops watching. I am arrested when she lifts my dress above my waist. I am arrested when they laugh. I am arrested when I am roughly pushed against the car, pulled away from it, turned around, thrown against the car, removed from it; my boots and socks are yanked from my feet. She yanks at my bra until it goes above my breasts. I catch glimpses of men who lean on shields. Palms rest on the blunt edges of batons.

I am arrested if I call this a pat down or if I call it an assault. I am arrested because even as it happens, even as I cannot name it, I understand it to be a performance. The setting is disorienting, undetermined, in the dark. At the airport, at least superficially, the purpose of a pat down is to make sure I have no weapons. If this performance has a meaning, it seems to be to warn me; if an example is being made of me, it is for my benefit only. I understand this to be a necessary humiliation. I am being offered a lesson that has to do with choices—mine—and with position, and positioning: This is what might happen when you block the flow of business, when you use your body to alter a street’s function, or to name it what it is, when you call a borderland a borderland. If I do not play my part, the performance may escalate. One of the actors may be required to improvise. And so, without choosing it, I allow this abuse of power, I comply.

From behind helmets, shields, and weapons, the men continue laughing. Some have raised their visors. They stand in a half-circle around this piece of road that is our stage—as other roads in this city have been stages for other stories. I stare at the officer who gropes, exposes, pushes me. I stare at her, my fellow actor, I try to make her look at me. She looks at me. When our eyes meet, I see something that I either can or cannot recognize—without warning, I wonder if she knows exactly how I feel—and I am arrested.

I am pushed onto the bumper of the cruiser. I am partially re-dressed by two male officers. One tells me to stand up, and when I do, he pushes me down again, his palm on my thigh. I am arrested when I realize that I don’t know if the play is over or if it is just about to begin.

Handless, I am scolded when my boots do not go easily onto my feet. My jacket, yanked to my wrists, is now dragged to hang on one shoulder. “Get her with her arresting,” someone says.

A man steps forward, takes my bicep in his fat knuckles. He smiles as if a sporting hunter, posing with game—he seems gratuitously proud. I am captured in a flash of white light. He grips my arm as if I could escape it. I am aware of this record as it is fixed—in it, my mouth is closed but feels open, as if a wound could be silent. The pink-faced hunter giggles uncontrollably, and passes me to another who holds me by my elbows, jerks me forward. The sea of armed men parts. I am paraded to a third police car, my dress still above my waist. I believe I feel the woman’s eyes on my back. The rest of them I know are watching. Still, I hear their laughter. Still I am arrested.

▱

We are on a highway, but I don’t know where we are. I struggle to pull my dress down with my elbows, to writhe my bra back into place, and I wonder if it appears I am trying to get free. We enter a caged lot and park in a wide blank garage. The officers open the back doors of the paddy wagon. I see their faces for the first time. They ask me to step out; suddenly, they are eerily saccharine. They tell me to be careful. They call me sweetheart. The empty grayness of the parking garage looms; one of the officers pushes ominously on my lower back. Then his hand slips.

Despite the size of the garage, I am claustrophobic. Time is focalized to a point. With this man’s hand on me, I cannot remember what came just before this moment, or guess what might be next. I feel only nausea, which stems from my knowledge that I am not protected by my innocence. I am protected—but not by my innocence, nor the Constitution of this country—by something else, false and sinister. It is the construct of my whiteness. Even as I feel the threat of this officer’s hand slip down my back, I feel something else. A tipping over in my body, as if one reality is pouring into another.

Before all of this, when a street was just a street—(though perhaps it has never been just that)—when a street was a mere vehicle to get from one place to another, I felt the presence of men, as all women do, when they tracked me with their voices and eyes—their implied power. Now, in this garage, with no one to witness, I am supposed to know what this man portends. I am supposed to believe it. And I do, I believe his threat because it is real; this type of violence can at any time be looming. But even as he invites me to my fear, I feel, in the press of his palm, another invitation.

Although he cannot promise safety—in fact, no one can—the concept and illusion of it is a lure to get me to agree to something unspoken—to complicity, complacency. If I can be made to fear him, I might require his protection. I remember Little Red Robinson, her willful naiveté. She received from McRee exactly what she requested: information (however watery) and the promise of safety (however false). There is a forced stillness in my body that informs and repels me: My gut tells me to run from these men, but there is nowhere to go. We walk forward altogether not because I chose to stand in the road, but because my hands are bound.

He takes his permission to touch me from the state. When he does, we are both drenched in history. In his touch, I understand something beyond myself: The police’s rationale for their presence in the street is implicitly and historically dependent on this officer’s unspoken, unsubtle threat, and my want and disdain for his other offer—that empty one, of safety. White women are, as we have been, the excuse. I sense something else too—another thing unnamed, although it is armed. It is another false condition, the most sinister of all. It is the projection of his threat onto others—who are not protected by their innocence, nor the constitution of this country.

My assault, and even my pain, has little to do with me and everything to do with race in America. My assault—because it is an implicit part of an assault on another—becomes my responsibility to witness. I am the responsibility of my captors. And they are mine. We are bound by our whiteness; by handcuffs and zip ties; by the enactment of injury, whether we give or receive; by the moments in which we speak, or don’t, by what we say, or don’t, and by what we choose to do next, or not do at all.

▱

Inside the jail, I am patted down. The officer who cuts the zip ties off my wrists struggles to fit her scissors between the plastic and my flesh. She says, “Damn,” softly. I sense her attempt at tenderness. I examine my wrists. The ambiguity of my pain has clarity: my skin is broken.

I am processed, which means an officer asks me questions, as if to build a map of my life. What is my height? Address? Place of work? Do I have a spouse? Children? I say nothing. They empty my pockets, take my sweater, and catalogue my belongings, gleaning whatever they can from my wallet before dropping my things into a Zip-loc.

They start to shuttle me off when I ask to make my phone call. The sheriff asks for the name of the person I am calling. I say I don’t know, which is true. He tells me that if I don’t know the name, I can’t call. I tell him I am calling legal support. “I have a number, no name,” I say.

“Well now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” he says. His voice is cold, paternalistic. “See where a little cooperation can get you?”

He dials the number but will not allow me to hold the receiver or speak. He tells whoever answers that he is calling on my behalf, that I want someone to know I have been arrested—but he does not tell them my name. The call lasts less than ten seconds. I am told this is policy—his. “That’s how I do things here,” he says. If I want to make a call, there are phones in the cell—and it’s true, but they aren’t free.

▱

Roughly once a month, as I commute from home to school or to the bar where I work, I pass a certain scene. A young Black man—a different man each time—is sitting on the curb. He appears bored, drained, frightened, angry (these adjectives are my own, and at best, they are superficial). Police officers (almost always white) open the doors and the trunk of his car, pointing, yelling, sometimes throwing things.

I wonder—what should I do? Often, I stop to witness—I have been told by community organizers to stand close enough to film but not so close as to aggravate the police or draw attention to myself—but regardless, I go home complicit. I go to protests, but I wonder, what about this recurring scene? What exactly is “the peace,” and who does it belong to, and who are the ones who disturb it?

▱

Two officers escort me to an elevator; we go down. They lead me to a cell, where my cellmate stands at the door, pleading for water. “Just a sec,” they say. “You’ll get your water.”

“They don’t care,” she says, as soon as they are gone. “I’ve been asking for an hour.”

She says her name is Dina and that she is in jail for disturbing the peace. She speaks bitterly, in a way that makes me wonder whose peace she disturbed, and the circumstances of her story. I try to study her without staring.

Dina peers out the small square window of double plastic in the door, then sits down, shaking her head. She cups her hand; there is something in it. When she looks at me, I see her eye is red. She tells me her contact lens has fallen out. She cannot see. I bang on the small square window in the door of the cell. “This woman needs water,” I shout.

Three jailers walk to the door of our cell. They stand and stare at me, until one of them winks. Then they all crack up. In a line, they walk away. Another officer comes to the door. “You hush!” she says.

If peace exists in this basement, we take turns disturbing it. Slowly, Dina tells me her story. She works at Washington University—the same place where I teach. She has enough money to release herself, but the police won’t let her post her own bail. She doesn’t know who to call. She doesn’t want to call someone from work. She doesn’t have many friends—in fact, she’s not sure she has any. She spends most of her time working to provide for her sons, and the rest of her time caring for them. She went out to discuss a custody matter with her ex before her son arrived home from school, and never returned. She is worried. Her son’s cell is broken. She has no way to reach him, to tell him she’s alright, or to tell him that’s she’s not. Her ex had her arrested when she broke his glasses in a fit of rage. Before that, she endured 19 years of domestic abuse. Over the course of those years, she had three court-ordered restraining orders against him. She says that he is the reason she has no friends, why she knows no one.

The officer who winked at me walks by, winks again. “We can’t bring the water now,” he says. He gestures to a man in a yellow jumpsuit who is mopping the floor. “The floor is being mopped.” He walks away, over the wet floor, in the direction of the water fountain.

In turns, Dina and I are called away. I am taken out of the cell and brought to see a nurse. After the disgruntled nurse is satisfied, or sick of me, I am returned to the cell, and when I return, Dina leaves. Dina returns: “I didn’t sign their shit. I can’t see it, so I’m not signing it.” She sighs. “Don’t know if that means I’ll never get out of here.”

Each time one of us returns, I hear more of her story. Each fragment ends with a moral—“Don’t have kids,” “Don’t get married,” “Stay away from men,” “Don’t expect a thing from a judge, the law don’t care a thing for you if you’re a woman.”

I don’t have any morals to offer, so I just nod. Sometimes, right before I think Dina is about to get to the moral, she cracks up, so I crack up too, not because anything she’s said is funny, but because what else is there to do? There we are, two lonely crazies, who have nothing to our names but our own sense of peace, or our lack of it, laughing to keep our minds, or forget them, because time is lost on us in this tinny florescent place.

▱

I am arrested when I realize that inside the jail, protest means silence. I am arrested by my silence. I am arrested when I realize that while almost all of the riot police I have seen in the streets have been white, the majority of the officers inside the jail are Black.

▱

The jail feels empty and lonely, though we are never alone. They move us from one cell to another, then they move us again. Between lockups, we stand in a hallway, our palms flat against the wall. The hall is grimy, long and yellow, lined with empty cells. There is a large faux-wood office desk at the end of the hall. A woman sits behind it. She seems far away. Suddenly, I realize I am in a Kafka story, and I am alarmed, excited.

“Turn the protester around,” the woman at the desk says. The escorting officer turns me around. Dina faces the wall, sighing.

“I have to ask you some questions,” she says. I attempt to make eye contact. It seems courteous, or perhaps it is another form of protest—to see and acknowledge her, even in my silence.

“What organization are you with?” she says.

“Who organized the protest that you went to?”

“Are you receiving any information from any organizations regarding your activities?”

I don’t know what the last question means. I resist the temptation to ask for clarification for a question I won’t answer. I stare at her. She sighs.

The officer who stands beside me says, “What are you bothering with those for? She’s not going to answer them.” She turns to me. “You’re not, are you?”

The woman says, “I’m just doing as I’m told. Supposed to ask all the protesters.” She scribbles something on the paper in front of her, looks at me, eyebrows raised, and says, “It’s all the same to me.”

Dina and I are led to our third cell that night. Before we enter, three male prisoners are taken out of the cell, and moved to the one directly next door. They jeer. Their ogling approximates comedy; they seem to be entertaining themselves more than threatening me. Yet I am aware that a part of me shakes inwardly—in the context of this expression, I do not really know the difference between comedy and threat. Both can be so subtle. Only one escalates. Dina scoffs, and we all look away.

▱

An officer comes to the door of our cell. “What’s your name?” he says, pointing at me, grinning. His question, a simple one outside jail, feels invasive. He knows my name. Why does he want me to give it to him too? “I need you,” he says, jocular, still grinning.

We go down the hall. I am passed off to another officer who takes my mug-shot, then my fingerprints and palm prints, pressing my hands onto a blue screen. I watch the impression light the screen—my palm in blue, the lines that define it in gray. I have never seen my palms this way—flattened but architectural. I find them representative of myself in a way I don’t expect. They are abstract, attractive, new. I consider the aspect of this is uncomfortable to me: I am being catalogued, like a book—a book I didn’t author, and yet the book of me.

This archiving officer, this librarian of fingerprints, has the kindest face I have seen since I arrived, and when he presses my hands onto the screen, he holds them gently. I think about what hands represent—like the eyes, they are place where we meet each other, where we may know who another person is, even when we do not know them well, or have not known them long. Hands and eyes have the ability to create intimacy, even in unlikely circumstances. I say, joking, “So, are you going to read my fortune now?” He looks sad, or perhaps tired, or perhaps thoughtful, or perhaps bored. He says, “No, I wish, I don’t know how to do that.”

After my fingerprints are captured digitally, he releases my hands. He points to a wooden table—old, roughly hewn—and stands beside me again; he takes my right hand in his right hand, then he takes my left. He presses my finger pads into a flat bed of ink, and to a sheet of paper. This time, my fingers are black, the lines defining them in white. He points at a sink, tells me to wash my hands. He looks at my paperwork, then looks up at me. We stare at each other for a long few seconds, as if we are both waiting for something to change.

“You live by the Botanical Gardens,” he says. He pauses, his lips open, as if deciding whether or not to say what he says next—“You live like a block away from me.”

“Oh yeah?” I say, “I guess that makes us neighbors.”

“I guess it does,” he says, oddly, as if caught unawares.

▱

What else arrests us, besides the police? The strange exhilaration of stopping traffic at a busy intersection, of lying flat on our backs in the middle of the street. To travel a road, to cross it—this means something new. We traverse boulevards and interstates on foot, en masse, and the asphalt shifts slightly under our collective feet. Yet where are we?

The cops and protesters, though neither side admits it, share a likeness: we feel anger, we all feel that we are right. The police believe the protesters are dangerous; the protesters know the police to be dangerous. This is the state of our emergency. If we wield banners or batons, our actions are urgent. We live a mutual potential threat. Some protesters feel fear and it is visible, while others do not seem to. But however they posture, the police cannot manage to look unafraid—their weaponry precedes them. When protesters hold ground in the face of brutality, however they achieve this, the action of staying is seeded by fraternal love; to some, this is frightening.

It is illegal to block roads, and so we are arrested. In fact, the police and protesters block roads together, but only the police have power. Or all of us have power, but we don’t have the same kind. In numbers, the protesters make up the majority in the streets. What police lack in numbers, they make up for with LRAD. But who is loudest? That depends not only on our voices and machinery, but also who is listening and what narrative is made. Sound is physical in every now in which it’s made, but it also forms our future when it goes beyond the protest site. Which is a way of saying that our future health here depends on a media beyond us that has its own agendas. The evidence of this problem exists in the discrepancies between what I know, having seen it in real time, and what my friends and family know, having seen it on their screens. The question of whose voice is loudest is also the question of who you believe.

Living in a state of threat, we live in the present tense because we must. We stay watchful to try to be prepared. We cannot be. They have weapons, we have numbers; they have their fear and purpose and we have ours. The present tense is exhausting. But too, it is simpler than it has been for me to lead a meditative life, if the action of meditation is to breathe, and by breathing to know what it means to be human, which is to know that all of us suffer—and then, what follows, to be at once thoughtful and without thought, to be strong-willed, unyielding, and simultaneously kind. From a direction, someone throws a rock, the crowd surges, and a battle cry is called, but I can’t tell whether it comes from us (whoever us is) or the police. A friend grabs my hand, we run, and I am breathing—her hand in mine, I feel that something is in sync. Everything else is far beyond a sync. But what does kindness look like when a canister of tear-gas is rolling? What ethics are relevant in the face of racism, a history of trickery?

We might name our desire in so many ways. We want to live not elsewhere, but in a different place. Perhaps kindness simply means to meet this moment on its terms, to name and face the violence. I believe I must bear witness to the violence—my own and that which belongs to others. Or, as in my dreams, all the violence is mine, because the pain belongs to all of us, and whatever is all of ours is mine. Witness has always been a writer’s job, and it is active—it requires vigilant watching, listening, and speaking—but sometimes it is not enough.

▱

Jail is timeless. Whatever thing that stands in for time here is more like a seamless ball than a linear succession of hours, and it rolls in the corners of the cell, or the brain. I listen to Dina. While Dina is being processed, I sing. I sing to the walls, or whoever can hear me, “Which Side Are You On?” I sing because it is comforting, and it is what political prisoners do in movies. I can’t remember the movies, I just remember that they sing. The singing is performative and makes me feel foolish, but it wards off the endlessness of the florescence and my lack of access to the hours.

Eventually, the jocular officer returns. He beckons. I sign papers. Someone points at a bench. I wait. My possessions are returned to me. Another officer appears and tells me to walk ahead of her, only on the right side of the hall, please. We turn corners in the concrete labyrinth.

She points at a door, which clicks, all on its own unlocking. She says, “Go now,” I do, and I am in a small chamber. “To the right,” she calls into the chamber. At the hall’s end, there is an elevator. It is elating to be alone—or to seem to be—in the jail. Then she leans into the hall. “You okay?” she shouts. “The elevator’s working?” She asks as though she expects failure. I hear a rumble rising in the wall. “Yeah—”

She nods, and points at me. “Don’t ever let me see you in here again,” she says. “This is no place for nobody.”

“Thanks,” I say—because I do not want to make false promises, and I do not know what is next—“Stay safe.”

“For nobody,” she repeats, nodding.

It is not until I step outside that I know where I am. I am downtown, not far from the place where, 6 days before, some thousand protesters stood in the interstate and faced a riot line. When police shook cans of pepper spray that day, I turned back and went on with my life. I remember how the protest fractured—some retreating, some holding ground. Then there were those who moved between those actions, running Maalox and milk to the injured, to pour a thing like relief on their eyes. I went home and gathered with friends to watch the news. In Ferguson, fifteen miles away, there was no option to retreat. No thing like relief. Famous flames burned television screens across the country, and whatever devastation was captured was a small fraction of the hurt; of what happened, is happening.

I shiver in the wind. It is night and it is morning. The temperature has changed. I have the feeling that I lost something, and wonder briefly if it is my jacket. But no, I am dressed—

The men of the National Guard stand in fatigues in the dark across the street. They lean, smoking, against their Humvees. Guns across their bodies, casually.

▱

In a letter to his nephew, James Baldwin famously wrote: “We cannot be free until they are free.” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of freedom too, at roughly the same time as Baldwin, and from its other side—or, if I take Baldwin’s words to heart, there is only one side. But Sartre spoke, if not from the other side of freedom, then from the other side of status. Sartre spoke of the heavy price the French soul paid for the occupation of Algeria in the 50s and 60s. No doubt others feel and have felt this way, before Sartre, besides me: My soul is not free, and so my body cannot be, bound, as it often is, to whiteness—and yet the whiteness I walk within looks as freedom might. There is evidence of it in my neighborhood, at the university where I teach, the bar where I work, and in many of the choices that I make.

When I arrive, I touch the walls of my apartment, as if to convince myself of something—that I am home, that I am free. But walls are different to me now, my sense of inside and outside irrevocably changed. I attempt to parse my freedom from my privilege—I attempt to feel free—and I find I cannot. I don’t know what it means. The jail, though I have left it, stays within me. I went into the street in an effort to alter it—and yet, the thing was not that I made this choice, but how this choice made me.

▱

I was singing Christmas carols when I was arrested. Just north of that corner—north of themed bars, ceramic-tiled roofs, and boutiques—the city changes, along a strictly governed line. There, storefronts are boarded, and asphalt-colored roofs slip down to weedy sidewalks, cracked cement. As one living south of that line, I am discouraged daily—by white St. Louisans, the facts of the urban plan, and the privilege embedded in my life—from traveling north. Just as those who live north are discouraged from traveling south. We live in a grating binary—though it is true too that both sides of the binary are a face upon the same coin, and the higher the gates are built in the Central West End, the more clearly the relief stands upon the faces on the coin.

We live together, in two cities with one name, united only by moments of arrest—moments in which we are thrown together by circumstance, or in which we throw ourselves against it, against the lines, and then, if we are lucky—or perhaps, if we are privileged—the map of the city blurs, the lines that gate us become less clearly defined. There is such a blur in my story, in the map of my arrests—a gap that exists and may always, in an unknown blank of a known street, in a city I know well and don’t know at all, wherever I was alone and too far from it, in the dark, in a glare, in my wrists, outside my body, between the carols and the jail.

▱

I am arrested when a friend I am on the phone with, who I am attempting to find, abruptly says, “We’re being gassed, I have to go,” and hangs up. I am arrested by the fact of grocery shopping, the sonic dissonance of a joke, and the sound of my own laughter. I am arrested when I reach my arms out to someone dear to me who has fallen on his knees, and am sucker-punched by a baton. I am arrested by an email I receive one day from one of my students. He wants to know if I am safe, if I am okay.

A jailer enters my cell with a sly smile, and slips me a note, written on a paper towel. It is from someone who came to find out what my charge was and where I was being held—I don’t know where I am, but someone outside the jail does. I am arrested by the knowledge that multiple people conspired to bring me this note. There are hearts drawn on the paper towel. There is a phone number.

▱

Between dreams of unrest and dreams of unrest, I edit my students’ papers, calling attention to the passive voice. I read the news, and am arrested by the passive voice, which claims, in article after article, that no one pulled the trigger. I am arrested when I hear that an unnamed white officer has killed Antonio Martin. I am arrested when, days later, someone counts the young Black men killed by police in Missouri since August 9th. I am arrested by the fact that we are counting; that we do not know the number.

When I am rescued from a cloud of tear gas by the clergy, whose doors are open at all hours, who offer food, water, shelter, and clothes, when our own clothes are covered in a chemical war—I am arrested. Their kindness has no contingencies.

▱

Writing this, I arrest myself. I am arrested when I decide, as I have decided before—each time I try to make meaning—that words are just another construct within which we live. The poet Theodor Adorno said: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This seems true of our hour as well. This essay represents a compulsion, an attempt at relief, for myself and my city, as much as it represents an act of polemic will. I must relearn the word hand, and the infinitive to handle—as in, he holds my hand gently. As in, She handled me. I must rethink the phrase, it’s not in black and white; and relearn gray-space; and, redefine assault, which like many other abstract nouns, thrives in gray-space and resists definition. It is a word that can be altered by context, but it does not change as other events do, because of or with the passing of time. It is a word very much like jail—at least as it is from the inside—always placeless in a sentence, having no place on any map to pin itself.

I am arrested daily, not by a trauma but by something immaterial and internal—my own wariness. Lately, almost any time someone speaks, I am on guard. I listen more carefully than I did before my arrest, but too, I listen furtively. I speak cautiously. When people want a lot of details about my arrest, I am wary; I am wary if they don’t want to hear about it at all. I am wary of myself, of things I hear myself say. I catch myself saying these things, often to my students, usually too late: “Be suspicious of language. Language is a construct. When you know that, you have power.” I wonder if they do have power, and if so, what kind. I wonder if I am helping, or not. I am wary of open blinds and unlocked doors, of the morning and of the mundane, which asks us to go on as though nothing has happened and doesn’t pick a side.

I am wary of this essay, which you hold in your hands—your hands which have an architecture, which have a relief. I wonder whether it addresses the question of our country’s pain or whether the writing of it merely reflects another facet of my privilege. I wonder if I stand where I intend to, not upholding, in this body that knows and does not know its whiteness, my palms flat against the walls of a history that has been flattened—a history that is, in truth, no one’s history—because too much has been erased.

Winter comes. We go in groups to our court dates. Protests continue, hindered by weather and fatigue.

Friends call from other places: “What is going on there? It looks like the whole city is burning.” Something more than Ferguson is burning, but I struggle to find words to describe the way white America reveals itself to anyone who does not share my present, who does not know my body now, as it is changed. In St. Louis, all we can do is survive the hours, the meaning of duration, in which the present tense is constantly in motion and unchanging. We live in the place known as “the heart of the heart of the country,” which is many things, but hardly “these united states.”

▱

In the heart of the heart of the country: “How are you dealing?” we ask each other sometimes, knowing that while there may be fragments of an answer, there is no answer. What we really want to know is: Where are we going and when will we arrive? All the cameras are rolling, and they say the world is watching, but when will time start? When will the clocks begin again?

To be arrested means what? To be stopped, detained, prevented from moving forward.

We arrest ourselves, we arrest one another, and we arrest ourselves again. Our collective life is a series of splices, which cannot be contained, but do not connect. As strangers and friends, we step into the road. We hold each other’s hands. We lay in the street for four minutes and thirty seconds, to represent the four hours and thirty minutes that Michael Brown’s body lay in the street. We know that no act of symbolism can repay what Michael Brown is owed, and no act of symbolism can save us. We know it is not right that he become a memorial to himself, or to anyone else. Yet bodily, we link ourselves, and try to link ourselves to him.

 

A Note:

I wrote this essay in the fall and winter of 2014 and 2015, between daily and nightly protests in Ferguson and St. Louis, following the non-indictment announcement of Darren Wilson. Since that time and since the 2016 presidential election, we are in a different place as a country, but we are also in the same place. St. Louis was back in the streets in September of 2017, protesting the not-guilty verdict of Jason Stockley. (The Stockley case is striking for the amount of evidence against Jason Stockley, not least of which is the recording of Stockley stating his intent to murder Anthony Lamar Smith. The city of St. Louis was cited by its citizens for having withheld evidence from the trial.) Although the events of this essay are dated by five years, this essay remains as I first wrote it—in the present tense.

 

Maura Pellettieri is a poet and fiction writer. Their writing appears in The Kenyon Review, The Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, Apogee, Tammy Journal, and elsewhere. They received their MFA in Fiction at Washington University in St. Louis. They live and teach in California.