Monday, December 15, 2008

Deleted from Part One


Tahija and I were at the front window. It was night, late, and Jessie Dell was in the park losing it. We knew it was her in the dark behind the police van because she kept shouting it, “I’m Jessie Dell! I’m Jessie Dell,” like if she didn’t her very identity would escape into the night along the wild wires of her hair.

Jessie Dell was schizophrenic. On her meds and otherwise stable she was peaceful and functional, but a month before Barbara’s addicted sister had moved in with her, renting a room, but no rent had been paid and as we learned later she’d stolen Jess’s SSI checks. The landlord had her put them both and changed the locks.

“Tony did it! Tony’s the one!”

“Who’s Tony?” Tahija whispered.

“Someone call the police!" Jess yelled. "Won’t no one call the police?”

I got dressed and went out. Usually Kaki was the one to get dressed and go out for things like this. I’d thought she was crazy, a busybody. But here I was doing the same, because —

“Don’t get too close,” Tahija warned, “you know how she gets.”

Because I did know her. She was my neighbor. I approached the two officers with cautious familiarity. They were white, one young, one fiftyish, with bluish bags beneath his eyes like little jelly fish. They came from a precinct the neighbors had organized to complain about, because we felt they were ignoring us, descending only for the occasional, frighteningly violent drug raid. These were not always unwelcome, given the violence that went with drug dealing, but seemed extreme, like shooting someone’s head off to cure a migraine.

So it was good they were there, and probably Miss Jesssie would have to be brought back into the metal health system through this rough door, but I didn’t want them to hurt her.

“Her name’s Jessie Dell,” I began. “But I guess you can hear that.” I laughed, no laugh back. “She lives on our block. She’s mentally ill. Maybe I can talk to her?” Jess was screaming about Tony swinging her big purse in wide arcs. Even from ten feet I could smell her. She must have been sleeping outdoors since the eviction. We’d assumed, hoped (pretended to ourselves?) that she’d gone to the aunt she sometimes stayed with.

“We’re going to have to 302 her,” said the older policeman wearily. “She pulled a knife on us.”

I tried talking to her, but she was in another place, a hellish unsafe place where you needed a knife and best not give it up. All I could do was keep watch as two more policemen came and the four closed in on her. When she saw it was hopeless, she let herself be walked into the police van.

“I’m Jessie Dell,” she said, running down, “Jessie Dell.”

“We know you Jess,” I said, “everybody on Howard Street knows you. Come on back here, okay?”

And she did, not to live; just to visit and remind us she’d been our neighbor, and always would be.


I cut this passage because it seemed to invade the privacy of Jessie Dell (pseudonym), who lives with her aunt now but visits the block often. She has the most beautiful, angelic smile, and I am always glad to see her.

I also worried that the scene seemed to be trying to put me in too bright a light — the savior. But the fact is I’m proud of having intervened on Jessie’s behalf that night, and glad Tahija watched me do it. In a sense, I was intervening for Tahija too, in her traumatic childhood. Jessie was my neighbor and the police had a reputation for brutality. I wanted them to see her as I did: a human being with full human rights.

There were other times when I used my white privilege to protect innocent and vulnerable neighbors from the police. In one case, I witnessed a man being hurled from the front steps of the rooming house next door by an armed drug sqaud. They demanded that he unlock the rooming house door. I knew that a) he didn’t speak English, b) he was drunk, and c) the rooming house was never locked. His panicked confusion looked to them like resistance. He was arrested and charged with assaulting a police officer—a very serious offense. I knew, had seen, that he’d been the one assaulted. I went to his arraignment and spoke with his court-appointed lawyer (who never met him and knew no Spanish). The charges were dropped and he received only a few hundred dollars fine. This fine was very hard for him to pay. He had to sell his beloved bicycle.

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