13 Days in Ferguson

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  13 Days in Ferguson

  Copyright © 2018 by Ronald S. Johnson. All rights reserved.

  Cover photograph of Captain Ronald Johnson copyright © Scott Olson/Staff/Getty Images. All rights reserved.

  Designed by Dean H. Renninger

  Edited by Dave Lindstedt

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  ISBN 978-1-4964-1657-5

  ISBN 978-1-4964-1661-2 (ePub); ISBN 978-1-4964-1660-5 (Kindle); ISBN 978-1-4964-1659-9 (Apple)

  Build: 2018-06-05 15:37:05 EPUB 3.0

  To all the men and women in Ferguson on both sides, on all sides, who stood for humanity, for change, and for freedom

  ~and~

  To Sister Mary Antona Ebo

  (Franciscan Sister of Mary)

  Your blessed memory and angelic spirit will live within me forever.

  Contents

  * * *

  Prologue: Confrontation

  Day 1: Michael Brown’s Body

  Day 2: “This Is War”

  Day 3: “These People”

  Day 4: “Why Am I Different?”

  Day 5: Waiting for the Storm

  Day 6 (Daylight): A Different Morning

  Day 6 (After Dark): “I Need Answers”

  Day 7: “Save Our Sons”

  Day 8: “No More Than I Can Bear”

  Day 9: “I Am You”

  Day 10: A Bullet Has No Name

  Day 11: Man, Black Man, Trooper

  Day 12: “Where Have You Been?”

  Day 13: “Trouble Doesn’t Last Always”

  Epilogue: After Ferguson

  Acknowledgments

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  CONFRONTATION

  * * *

  In short, we, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.

  JAMES BALDWIN

  THE FIRE NEXT TIME

  THEY SIT A COUPLE OF TABLES AWAY, staring at me.

  Four of them. Well muscled, steely eyed, rural Midwestern, midtwenties to early thirties. White. Two with shaved heads, two with military buzz cuts. All four in full camouflage and jackboots. Laughing too loud, pounding beers, chewing tobacco, drawing attention to themselves.

  I keep them locked in my periphery. One of them senses me eyeing him and nods slowly. I’d call the look menacing.

  I turn away, sigh, and speak as quietly as I can to my daughter and her boyfriend.

  “Don’t look, but across from us, a couple of tables down, we have four gentlemen who have been staring at me this whole time.”

  I wait a beat while Amanda glances over. When she turns back, her eyes narrow and she shakes her head, not understanding.

  “Things happened,” I say. “People didn’t always agree with me. I knew at some point I would be confronted in public.” I cock my head, smile, and try to appear calm. “Tonight’s the night.”

  “What do we do?”

  “I want you guys to walk out the door. If anything happens—” I catch myself. “Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.”

  Amanda’s eyes widen slightly, sparkle. “Maybe I should call Mom.”

  I laugh. I’m a twenty-seven-year veteran of the Missouri State Highway Patrol; I go six two, two forty; and my daughter’s telling me to call my wife. She has a way of defusing even the most difficult situations.

  I gently squeeze Amanda’s hand, and she doesn’t argue. Gathering her purse, cell phone, and scarf, and with a minimum of clatter and scraping of chairs, she and her boyfriend exit the sports bar.

  I sip my Pepsi and wait. For a fleeting second, I consider calling for backup, but I immediately dismiss the thought. I’m in this alone. This confrontation is about me, my actions, my decisions—and, I expect, about both the color of my uniform and the color of my skin.

  Adrenaline revving, I signal the waitress for the check. She holds up a finger, and after clearing some dishes from another table, arrives at my side with her hands shoved into the pockets of her uniform.

  “All taken care of,” she says.

  I stare at her for what must be a solid ten seconds, and she starts to laugh.

  “Somebody paid your bill.”

  “Really? Who?”

  She shrugs. “The party wants to remain anonymous.”

  I scan the entire restaurant. I don’t recognize anyone. Nobody makes eye contact with me. I look up at the waitress.

  “Come on, tell me.”

  She pokes her finger out of her pocket and subtly points behind her. I follow the direction of her fingernail and search every face in the vicinity, but I can’t for the life of me identify anyone who would have picked up my check.

  “I don’t see where you’re pointing,” I say.

  She rolls her eyes, tightens her lips, and speaks like a ventriloquist: “The four guys over there.”

  “Those guys?”

  I don’t remember getting to my feet or walking over, but I find myself standing at their table. They pause their conversation and look up at me.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your dinner,” I say. “I just wanted to thank you for paying my bill.”

  One of the guys smiles and looks away. Another one taps his fingers on the table.

  “You’re welcome,” he says.

  “But why?”

  “We live here,” the finger tapper says. “We appreciate what you’ve done.”

  “Thank you,” I say again. “Sincerely.”

  Then, one by one, I shake their hands.

  I return to my table, pick up my cell phone, and head toward the exit. Halfway to the door, I stop and look back at the four guys who bought dinner for my daughter, her boyfriend, and me. Four young white guys with shaved heads, dressed in full camouflage and jackboots, laughing too loud and pounding beers. The last guys I ever would have expected.

  I feel embarrassed. And I feel small.

  I’ve had the confrontation I expected. What I didn’t expect was that the confrontation would be between myself and my own bias. I experienced firsthand how easily and suddenly we can cross over into presumption and even paranoia.

  We’re all biased in some way, every one of us. It’s what we do with our bias that matters. We can’t allow it to affect our attitudes, influence our decisions, or inform our behavior. Instead, we must acknowledge it. We must be humbled by it. Ignoring our biases or believing they are truth—and refusing to change when we recognize bias within ourselves—that’s when bias becomes bigotry and prejudice becomes racism.

  How do we overcome these tendencies that so often seem to separate people in our nation from one another?

  Admitting that we all have our biases seems like a good place to start.

  MICHAEL BROWN’S BODY

  * * *

  Please, God, let me be enough. I just want to be enough.

  RON JOHNSON

  THE FIRST CALL COMES IN around one o’clock in the afternoon. I’m in a car with three other African American state troopers, returning from a National Black State Troopers Coalition conference in Milwaukee. My cell phone vibrates, and I take the call. A lieutenant from our office reports that t
here has been an officer-involved shooting of a young black man in Ferguson and a crowd has begun to gather.

  “Ferguson,” I say.

  Anywhere, USA.

  A town like so many others.

  I basically grew up in Ferguson. Half the kids in Ferguson go to Riverview Gardens High, the same high school I attended. I played football there, ran track, played in the marching band, went to prom, walked in my graduation.

  An officer-involved shooting.

  Crowds gathering.

  Unrest developing.

  In Ferguson?

  I can’t wrap my head around this. We’re not talking about a depressed, dangerous, potential powder keg like the south side of Chicago or St. Louis City, where I once lived. Ferguson has its share of challenges and problems—poverty, crime—but nothing you could point to that would precipitate an officer-involved shooting.

  At least that’s what I thought.

  “Keep me updated,” I tell the lieutenant. I click off my cell and pass along the news to the other officers.

  Several hours later, the lieutenant calls again.

  “Things have escalated,” he says. He explains that more people have flooded the residential street in Ferguson where the shooting took place. He also tells me in a low monotone that the body has not yet been removed from the street, now nearly four hours after the shooting.

  “This could turn into something bad,” I say.

  When the lieutenant informs me that many more officers have reported to the scene, I end the call and tell the other troopers about the crowd escalation and the body still lying in the street.

  We all go silent. For a moment, I shut off the thoughts that are spinning in my mind and focus only on the sounds I hear—the rumble of the car on the road, a sigh, an intake of breath, a throat clearing. But a moment later, the images of race riots from fifty years ago come charging unchecked into my mind’s eye—buildings burning; black men being beaten and shot, their bodies left on the streets, their heads pressed against curbs, their faces in the gutters. Pictures of hatred. Reminders. Examples. Warnings.

  Another time, I tell myself. Another place.

  “They still haven’t removed the body?” someone asks.

  “Four hours,” another trooper says. “In the street.”

  “If that were my child—”

  An intake of breath.

  A sigh.

  A throat clearing.

  The rumble of the car on the road.

  At home, six hours later, I watch the news with my wife, Lori. While the local reporters at the scene relay the latest information, behind them and around them the crowds gather and swirl—people’s anger, frustration, and outrage simmering, threatening to boil over.

  I lower the volume on the television as my phone rings with updates, the news dribbling in, though many details remain vague or unconfirmed.

  Outside contractors working for a funeral parlor have finally removed Michael Brown’s body.

  Reportedly, a robbery was committed.

  Michael Brown was apparently unarmed.

  The police officer, the shooter—name withheld—is Caucasian.

  Protesters are mobilizing; the police presence is growing.

  My training kicks in, and my mind begins a makeshift checklist. Based on the rules in our officer training manual for crowd control, the goal is to secure the area and make the streets safe.

  On TV, a newscaster stands in front of a mound of rubble near the site of the shooting, describing what, only a short time ago, had been a growing memorial to Michael Brown—flowers, photos, candles, cards, stuffed animals. According to reports, he says, a police officer allowed a dog on a leash to urinate on the memorial and then another officer drove a police vehicle over the memorial and destroyed it.

  I have no words. I look over at my wife as her eyes water with confusion and pain.

  Why is this happening?

  I turn back to the news.

  Ferguson.

  A place I thought I knew.

  Suddenly I don’t know where I am.

  Lying in bed, my eyes jacked open, my body rigid, my arms glued to my sides beneath a single white sheet, I hear the central air humming softly like a gathering swarm of insects.

  I picture another body, beneath another bunched-up white sheet, lying lifeless and abandoned on the dirty gray pavement of Ferguson, Missouri, in the suffocating heat of an early August day.

  Michael Brown.

  Eighteen years old.

  Somebody’s son.

  Gone.

  His body left unattended on the ground for four and a half hours.

  I think about his parents—two people I’ve never met; two people whose appearances I can only vaguely conjure into my mind; a mother, a father. I don’t know them, but as a father myself I know that their hearts have been ravaged, their souls shattered. And I’m certain that one central question knifes through them: How could they—meaning the police, meaning us, meaning me—leave their son lying in the middle of the street for four and a half hours?

  By now, they’ve been given a reason. An explanation. An excuse.

  But the question remains.

  Crowds—angry, incensed crowds—had gathered near the shooting site, and the people who came to remove the body from the street didn’t feel safe. Somebody reported hearing gunshots. The officers at the scene suggested to the people tasked with removing the body that they not leave their vehicle without wearing bulletproof vests. To my knowledge, nobody provided them with bulletproof vests. So they sat in their air-conditioned black sedan, concerned for their own safety, waiting for the police to secure the area so they could do their job.

  Any way you try to explain it, Michael Brown’s young, black body lay unattended in the street for four and a half hours, beneath that sheet stained with his blood, while the residents of Ferguson gathered to gawk, seethe, anguish, grieve, lash out, scream.

  Michael Brown’s shooting ignited the fire.

  Michael Brown’s body burned the city down.

  “THIS IS WAR”

  * * *

  How do we dream ourselves out of this?

  JACQUELINE WOODSON

  ANOTHER BROOKLYN

  THE DAY UNFOLDS like many summer Sundays—slow, calm, restful, reflective, even lazy. Lori and I often go to church on Sunday, but today, feeling worn out after driving back from Milwaukee, I just want to relax, flip through the Sunday papers, catch part of the Cardinals game, stay close to my phone and the news reports, and gear up for work tomorrow morning. Although I don’t say anything to Lori, I hope that the people I saw gathering last evening on the streets of Ferguson will not come out again tonight and that the anger and outrage I witnessed has blown over.

  Like many of the people I end up speaking to during the day, I want more information, and I want civility to prevail. I want the people who take to the streets to be calm and safe. I want peace. That is, after all, my ultimate role—peacekeeper.

  Maybe because I have a premonition or fear the worst, I find myself avoiding the television, even though we keep the news on as ambient noise in the background, with news anchors describing memorials for Michael Brown and a candlelight vigil planned for the evening. As I tinker around the house and putter in the yard, I’m on alert—waiting, I guess, like everyone else, to see what happens next.

  Shortly after nightfall, the duty lieutenant calls my cell. I hear the darkness seeping into his voice as he says, “People are back in Ferguson, upset over the shooting. The crowds have gotten bigger. Much bigger. There’s looting.”

  “Okay,” I say, massaging the bridge of my nose.

  “We’ve got officers responding,” the lieutenant says. “I’m going to respond.”

  “No,” I say, louder than I intended, surprising myself and probably the lieutenant as well. “You live a lot farther away. I’m closer. By the time you get your uniform on and drive all the way to Ferguson, I can be there.”

  “You sure?”

 
“Yes.”

  I look at Lori and see the concern in her eyes, the concern I know every law enforcement officer’s spouse feels.

  “I’ll go.”

  An hour later I’m standing on West Florissant Avenue, Ferguson’s main street, in the eye of a human hurricane. People are running, tripping, falling, flinging themselves at each other, screaming, crying, and cursing against a backdrop of flames that snake up the sides of the convenience store at the QuikTrip gas station, which has been set on fire by some protesters. Fire engulfs the building as the ground throbs and the world erupts.

  I gape at the fire: a wall of gold and purple light rising and pulsing, a fountain of flames. The fire crackles and roars, threatening to explode. A burning wind kicks up around it, through it. Although I’m some distance away, the searing golden light stings my eyes.

  It feels unreal.

  Like a dream.

  Police vehicles—too many to count—surround me. Cruisers. Unmarked cars. Tactical vehicles. Police in riot gear and Kevlar vests—their nightsticks holstered, chins jutted, and faces blank behind plastic shields—form a line across the street, defying a massive throng of protesters, some of whom occasionally surge forward. Hundreds of people have converged here—maybe more, perhaps a thousand. I can’t tell. I can’t focus. I hear store windows smash, and I see looters—many of them shirtless, with red bandannas pulled over the lower half of their faces—running in and out of stores. Some carry cases of beer or soda. Some carry food. But then I see other people who risk arrest simply to provide for their families, or just to live. One man carries a package of diapers. Another man, shirtless, his body rope thin, fixes himself a hot dog.

  I stand on West Florissant, watching my city burn, and I feel my soul bleed.

  Behind me a woman shrieks, “This is war,” and then she begins to sob. I turn to look for her, but the line of officers blocks my view.

  I turn back to face the crowds and I feel stunned, as if I’ve been clubbed from behind. The magnitude of the chaos consumes me, causing my legs to quaver. I didn’t know what to expect when I arrived here, but it wasn’t this. A deep communal hurt has been unearthed, unleashed. A sense of grim destiny thrums through the air. I can’t be sure whether I’m hearing the words of every young man in the vicinity or am channeling their thoughts: Mike Brown could have been me.