Picking Up the Pieces

 
My last essay was about the protests and looting in Minneapolis, so I wanted to talk about the aftermath this week. After a week of curfews, they finally called them off this weekend. Things have settled down, but I doubt we’ll be going back to the way things used to be.

Friday night (May 29) was the first curfew night, and that’s when shit started to get real (at least for me). I heard a helicopter hovering overhead in the evening and definitely had that feeling of being in a City Under Siege, in some kind of authoritarian dystopia. There was a little gunfire in the distance, but nothing alarming.

On Saturday morning I awoke to a more real sort of reality. I started off with my usual weekend morning regimen of stream-of-consciousness writing for an hour followed by about 20 minutes of meditation. My roommate Kenny and his boyfriend left to help with the clean-up, which sounded like a great idea. I also stole their idea of making banana pancakes.

As I enjoyed my brunch, I went on Facebook and saw my friends’ shock and horror at the previous night’s events. I had no idea it had been that bad. Suddenly, this was no longer a chance to see history up close and personal. This was a real crisis that threatened my life.

I called my parents to let them know I was OK. My mom had emailed that morning, but I didn’t realize the urgency of replying until I saw the news.

Now I really had to go help clean up, in order to preserve my faith in humanity and find some sense of community to combat my anxiety. Mom said they suggested people bring brooms, so I grabbed one with a dustpan and biked down to Lake Street at the Midtown Global Market, near Chicago Ave.

There were already tons of people walking up and down Lake Street with brooms, garbage bags and masks. It was a very heartening sight. There were tables by the Midtown Global Market where people handed out push brooms, garbage bags and other cleaning supplies.

A woman told us we could head to Bloomington Ave or Franklin Ave. I’d come from Franklin, so I stayed on Lake and walked east to Bloomington. We passed a lot of volunteers heading the other way. I wondered if there were too many of us and not enough work.

People were sweeping up broken glass from bus stop shelters and storefronts. I helped a guy move some plywood off the sidewalk. The plywood was for boarding up windows, which was happening on a lot of buildings.

There were already plenty of people working on Bloomington, so I kept going east as did seemingly every one else in my group. I didn’t stop until I got to the Hi-Lake strip mall by Hiawatha. There seemed to be more to do there. Two stores had burned down. I swept up broken glass for a while and gawked at the ruins.

Where there was broken glass, there was usually water from sprinklers. Where there’d been fire, water was a virtual guarantee. This made sweeping up the broken glass more difficult.

There had been a Savers thrift store here that I’d gone to many times since I got my first apartment in Mpls. back in ’03. It closed last year, another puzzling case of thrift store attrition. The Little Caesar’s, Aldi and a liquor store remained.

I continued on to the light rail station next door, where all the windows had been knocked out. A legion of people was already sweeping up the glass. Most of them were White. I wondered how many had ever used that station. Maybe all of them, maybe none of them.

Like the Minnehaha Mall on the other side of Hiawatha, Hi-Lake was another strip mall I didn’t feel comfortable in. It had the same sense of poverty and despair I mentioned in my last post. Combine that with a latent hostility and you can understand how I felt going there. But it was the cheap thrift store (not the “vintage” kind of thrift store) closest to Uptown, so I had to get over my discomfort.

Then I walked under the Hiawatha overpass. A few people were sweeping up glass. I picked up a few shards, but there wasn’t much left. Normally, there would’ve been houseless people (mostly Native or Black) sitting under the bridge or panhandling to the cars at the stoplight. Now it was mostly White folks like me with masks and brooms.

I kept moving past Hiawatha to the epicenter of the uprising, the area around the Third Precinct. It looked much different from Thursday. There were a ton of people at the Minnehaha Mall cleaning up outside of Target, Cub and the other stores. (I didn’t even know it was called the Minnehaha Mall until this day, when I took a picture of the graffiti on the mall sign.)

I walked past Target and a few more storefronts before stopping in front of a Minnesota Transitions School (MTS) location. MTS is a charter high school. It seems to cater to kids who don’t function well in traditional schools. I know it mainly from its seemingly improbable (albeit coming in Class A, the smallest class) state championship in boys’ basketball in 2010.

The graffiti on Target was painted over.

I was just standing there looking through the empty window frame at a guy sweeping up a pool of water and broken glass. He asked if I wanted to help. That’s all I’d been waiting for, so I stepped through the window to help him.

I shouldn’t have needed that kind of encouragement, but such is my personality. Even in the midst of this outpouring of goodwill and generosity, I was still reluctant to speak up. Of course, the mask didn’t help either. It feels like an obstacle to being heard. It obscures the source of your words. But maybe that’s just an excuse.

A petite, young woman and I collaborated on sweeping up inside, switching roles as the sweeper and dustpan or bag holder. I asked her if she had any connection to MTS. She said no, she just lived nearby.

A guy came along and asked us to get out of the building. He didn’t want us to get hurt. We obliged and swept up glass on the sidewalk.

Another woman asked me where I live. I told her. She said she’d just helped paint a mural at a brewpub in Nordeast (a local nickname for Northeast Mpls.). It was kind of a weird non-sequitur, but I didn’t mind. It was nice how she skipped ahead in the conversation instead of just telling me where she lived.

She seemed to be there with her husband and another couple. They had some tattoos and looked like middle-aged hipsters, so I felt right at home.

A man of East Asian descent came over and asked me to help him carry what looked like about a 6-foot-long light pole. He gave me the heavy base end, which was OK, but it was a bit awkward trying to keep up with his pace. I managed to follow him to the dumpster without tripping, and we threw it in. He said it had been used to smash windows. He seemed to be a proprietor of one of the stores.

Some people had come around with water bottles, one of which I had accepted, so now I had to pee. I really wanted to bid adieu to my fellow hipsters, but I chickened out. I remembered seeing a porta-potty by the light rail station, so I walked back there. I was afraid there’d be a long line, but as soon as the current occupant came out it was free.

Then I went to the Cub Foods, which had been my primary grocery store. I felt no compunction to help clean up Target. They’re a huge transnational corporation. They’ll be fine. But I did feel the need to help Cub out, since I’d depended on it so much.

There was a bucket brigade line of people leading out of the entrance. They were passing food out of the store and setting it on shelves that had been set up on the sidewalk. There were even price signs hanging over some items, but I didn’t see anyone ringing up customers. They were just giving the food away. It was essentially a more orderly version of the looting I’d seen 2 days before. People loaded up on groceries and took them to their cars in the parking lot.

At the exit, a mass of people was raking through the river of water streaming out of the store. There was garbage mixed in with the water, packaging and food that had been turned into pulp by the sprinklers. I joined in this project with my broom and dustpan. A woman offered me her push broom, which I took and set down my broom and dustpan on the storefront.

The woman was there with her daughter, who might’ve been about 10. The girl was quite industrious, as was a boy a little younger than her. It was really cute to see them busily sweeping the garbage downstream or into someone’s waiting dustpan. For some reason, people kept giving the boy pennies. He must’ve asked for them.

I got frustrated, because I was not on the same page as the woman who gave me the push broom. She was operating a dustpan, but we had different theories about the most effective sweeping and dustpanning techniques. I thought my methods were universal, but apparently they’re not.

It was dumb of me to get frustrated, of course, but I wasn’t willing to just tell her what I wanted her to do with the dustpan. I could’ve nicely let her know what I had in mind, but that would’ve been extremely out-of-character for me. Again, the facemask felt like an obstacle to that. And I didn’t wanna ruin the esprit de corps of the occasion.

One of the hipsters at MTS wondered why no one had turned off the water or power to these buildings, leaving the sprinklers running and live wires hanging in the window of the store next to MTS. Somebody wondered the same thing about Cub. It seemed like an excellent question.

An older woman said the water might make it easier to clean out the store. I questioned that, but I couldn’t think of a good rejoinder. After I got home, of course, I realized that the water was causing the mess, not helping it. (I’ll leave you, dear reader, to make your own parallel between this and the role of the police in our society.)

The woman was from Hugo, the exurb where I’ve spent most of my year-and-a-half at Habitat for Humanity working on a development of 4-plexes (and one 5-plex). I was really touched by her willingness to drive a half-hour from the boonies into the city to help us clean up. I wasn’t expecting that from an exurbanite.

We scooped the garbage into plastic garbage cans with our dustpans or snow shovels. The cans were then hauled off by people with a power jack for pallets, who took them around back, presumably to be dumped into the dumpster.

After doing that for a while, a man shouted and whistled to get our attention. He was standing on the hood of his car and, once everyone was quiet, introduced himself as a vice president of the company that runs this Cub. He said he’d been told there were “a couple people” helping to clean the store, so when he pulled up he cried at the sight of all of us. He said they would do whatever they had to do to reopen the store as soon as possible. He thanked us, and everyone clapped.

It was a heartwarming scene, and I was moved. But I wasn’t satisfied. Returning to the status quo ante isn’t enough. We’re going to need big, structural change (a big, structural Bailey, if you will) if we wanna move forward and right these wrongs. I overheard a young Black man say that we were all helping clean up because we wanted to restore the System. I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up, but he wasn’t totally wrong, although he overestimates how many of us actually wanna restore the System.

I was there to facilitate change, and I think a lot of others were there for the same reason. Our mere presence was a big change from the norm. I’d never seen that many people in those neighborhoods, and certainly not that many White people. We were there to pick up the pieces, because the authorities had clearly lost control or were no longer willing to maintain it.

We were there to pick up the slack, fill the vacuum left in their absence. As with the largely peaceful looting and protests that occurred there, the fact that the community stepped up to begin the rebuilding won’t soon be forgotten.