A Piece of the Pie

Working nights in a hospital the noise level can be surprisingly high. My preferred patient population is babies which means a lot of crying but the shrieks can usually be managed by a bottle of formula or the intervention of a boob. Lately my patients have all been adults in moderately bad shape and what they talk about at midnight and beyond—past the hour when most hospitals will give out sleeping pills, which is 2 a.m. The conversation in the patient's room can be pretty wide-ranging and informative. Or not. Some things you don’t really want to hear, but other subjects are more entertaining. Had a lady a little while ago with breast cancer which had gone away and come back. She said that her history teacher back in the day at Fulmore Middle School was future Governor Ann Richards. “She was really funny,” this lady said, the only time the patient smiled in our interactions over the course of one very long weekend. Otherwise she had a flat affect and wouldn’t take any pain medication which can be a bad sign, even refusing the kind of pills that usually cheer people up.

Another patient about the same time who had a stroke mentioned his roots in Texas went back to revolutionary days and included slaveholders. You hear a lot of family history in a hospital because there may not be much future for the people talking or they think not and also because—one supposes—some folks, seeing the end, whether it’s looming or not, are trying to come to terms with their forbearers. In order to figure out their own place in the parade of life. It was the second patient more than the first who helped me to come to terms with my lineage as an African American in this Southern state. My people or my father’s people come from Washington County, county seat Brenham, in the Brazos River valley, on the road between Houston and Austin. My great-grandfather was also named Lucius and was born a slave in Austin County next door to Washington County where he was sold or moved and was later sentenced to prison for murder, twenty years after Emancipation. That's all the background you need. My grandfather and father—Lucius II and Lucius III, respectively—were born in Brenham and in Houston, respectively, but not in any kind of bondage and were not destined to do fieldwork. Everyone on my father’s side of the family turned to crime, actually, a step up from slavery, actually. My own preference today would be to say that they were “economic freedom fighters” or “proprietary insurgents against The Man,” something like that, in the modern context of the civil rights struggle, which includes discussion of money and lately reparations. They were in it for the money. 

In their own way my ancestors did not accept white privilege, to use the terminology of our present more enlightened debate. My family history as slaves doesn’t obsess me or anything but every time the name Brenham pops up, my ears prick up. Antebellum Texas was a long time ago and most of my day today is more concerned with what white people are up to now. Which you do have to continue to watch out for, here in the Lone Star State. Because Caucasians seem to have been caught once or twice but not stopped trying, you feel me? 

Through the years however, half-attentively—the members of my family have collected quite a little dossier on Brenham, our former hometown, and the content of the file is not good. It has nothing to do with the high prices at the bed-and-breakfasts, in picturesque Washington-on-the-Brazos, or even the recent listeria scare at Blue Bell Ice Cream which is manufactured there and that Brenham is best known for today. Not to be a hypocrite either. Dutch Chocolate and the occasional spoonful of Rocky Road have passed my lips. There will be no suggestion of BDS (boycott, divestiture and sanction, like in the Middle East) but there’s no product endorsement of anything that comes out of Washington County either. Anyway this guy—the patient with the stroke—added to my understanding of Brenham’s pre-ice cream economy and also explained something from a book of the period that had perplexed me back in the day. He said that the Brazos River valley was cotton country, the original Texas plantation economy, and what made the state part of Dixie so to speak. Don’t know if that’s totally true but it makes a certain sense, being fertile river bottom land and all.

Tenting on the Plains was written by Libby Custer—wife of George Armstrong Custer, who at the time of Libby's writing had just had his fateful final encounter with the Sioux. General Custer was military governor in Texas immediately after the Civil War and Libby wrote that Union officers arriving in Texas for occupation duty after the Civil War usually landed at Galveston, by steamboat from New Orleans, and took a train to Brenham, where the tracks ended, and were met by a string of horses for the ride to Austin. That’s because apparently there was only one rail line at the time west of the Mississippi, the one between Galveston and Brenham. That’s the story we are told. And it carried cotton from the plantations to the port to be shipped. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The economy was what it was, its best-known product was called King Cotton for a reason. Mother’s family was from Galveston, by the way. She was born during Jim Crow, her grandfather arrived from Jamaica to work on the docks a little after the Custers arrived with another aim, in post-bellum Texas, to make a better life. Cotton endured even if the Confederacy did not. So, like, it was almost as if the most famous agricultural product of the South brought together the two sides of a black family—in the sheets, presumably fine Texas cotton—and on the docks. My belief is that slavery and Jim Crow and even discrimination today has never been about skin color. It’s all about money. My feeling about Galveston is that it’s a great town. My forbearers were paid for their labor on the dock, however little that may have been, and my attitude is kind of, like, “Brenham bad, Galveston good,” which is not a very sophisticated view but there it is. The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston awarded my degree which is also a big plus on the Galveston side because it relates to a paycheck, our subject here. During the time of my studies the only prejudice was Galveston’s B.O.I. vs. not B.O.I. distinction—"Born on the Island,” or not. Which people do hold against you if you weren’t born on the right end of the Houston causeway. But has nothing to do with skin color. Whereas Brenham—you couldn’t pay me to spend the night, so we’ll never know. Or you could pay me which is what this is about. 

Years ago a famous Galveston resident named Schwartz, who was state senator, and Jewish, and B.O.I., said that all modern relationships on Galveston Island are based upon who your family sheltered with during the 1900 hurricane, that killed at least 6,000 people, still the largest single natural disaster in American history. During the storm you stayed with whoever had a house with strong walls or a foundation above waterline, again, irrespective of race. Brenham’s great disaster on the other hand was a fire, and it was set intentionally, not an act of nature or an act of God although one likes to think the Supreme Being, looking down, was smiling.

1866 right after the Civil War and Yankee troops of the army of occupation got drunk one night and torched the town. The Washington County Historical Society or whoever makes a big deal about the fire. Personally though this fire—or the fact that there was a fire—which took out the whole town or most of the town—is totally okay with me. My view of the state’s history is that there wasn’t enough burning, actually, either during the Civil War or immediately thereafter. How can you reconstruct—as in Reconstruction—if things haven’t been destroyed in the first place? Fire cleanses, not to be puritanical or anything. A little more flame and ash would have been a good thing for the state, actually, that’s my unsolicited professional opinion now. But in Texas only Brenham got the full cure.

Washington County State Bank was the oldest ongoing financial concern in Texas until a few years ago when it was bought by a holding company. If my ancestors’ wages, that they never received as slaves, had been invested at even 2 percent, my nights now would not be spent changing diapers or wiping drool on babies or adults. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s honorable work, you hear some interesting things as you slather on the butt cream. But there are better ways to spend one’s evenings than wiping front to back. That is my point. Btw, Brenham has always had, one way or another—using slave labor or, today, selling ice cream—a pretty vibrant little economy. “Despite a brief reign of terror by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” the Handbook of Texas informs us, “merchandising, marketing, and processing industries enabled the town to preserve its position as a regional economic center between 1910 and the 1950s.” Happily today in its post-Klan incarnation Brenham continues to make a buck. Anytime events leave me down and depressed—opening Libby Custer’s book and reading about the Union Army crossing the Sabine River cheers me up. Were the Union troops carrying torches? One would think so, but apparently not. Happily still there was a price for being on the wrong side of human rights. Even if you got a county or a school named after you later. 

A footnote: General John Bell Hood for example was the most prominent of the Lone Star rebel commanders and namesake of what was Fort Hood and Hood County, Texas. George Custer fell into conversation with the defeated Confederate on the boat to New Orleans just after the Civil War ended, they were both West Point men it seems. Old college ties and all that, there was no hostility between the two, Libby noted in her journal that General Hood was a poor sight to see, all shot to hell—he had lost an arm—and even worse he had lost the battle for Atlanta and his reputation was in tatters. As a rule, Texans don’t care how you win but you do have to win and General Hood had not. He got his comeuppance, in other words, not to be puritanical, just as George Custer would get his comeuppance in Dakota at the hands of the Sioux. Both white men making the wrong choice about white privilege, you could say. So, like—everybody gets taken care of eventually, by history or by life. The disputes about people’s reputations only elicit a big yawn from me. Especially at four o’clock in the morning, making rounds with a package of Pull-Ups. The Rebels all got the cure we all get eventually. They were proven wrong by a change in values or by the unending irrelevancy of being dead. But the land, especially this land, that’s another thing. Texas never got the full cure. Except Brenham. And there, like my lady who never smiled in the hospital, the cancer came back. 

Brenham is about 25 miles from Hempstead in Waller County where Sandra Bland just hanged herself in a jail cell. Waller County borders Washington County, my ancestral home. The state trooper who arrested Sandra Bland for, basically, being black and talking back to a white man, was a newbie with the Texas Department of Public Safety. His prior job was as an “ingredients supervisor” at Blue Bell ice cream factory in picturesque Brenham, not that there’s anything wrong with that either. My favorite flavor is Cookies n’ Cream, btw, and my theory of race relations is kind of like one of those pints of ice cream, dark chunks of rich chocolate in what otherwise would be plain vanilla? Apply any heat whatsoever and there’s a meltdown. Instead of delicious dark sweetener, some people get treated like bacteria in the vat, which is what happened to Sandra Bland. Of course that doesn’t account for all the other people of color in Texas, there are other flavors, so to speak. My theory has not completely been worked out, you have to give me a little latitude here, regarding Brenham however the facts are incontrovertible—there's absolutely no fucking doubt. There’s just something about the town. You may say that you can’t stereotype an entire geographic area of a huge state like Texas but if you could, Washington County would be the place to start. That would be my whole point, actually. 

Chief Manley Takes the Witness Stand

  

There’s a warning among African-Americans about visiting the Texas capital city. “Come to Austin on vacation,” some peeps say, “leave on probation.” Or don’t leave at all because you’ve been shot by the damn pigs.

Or leave in the sheriff’s van headed to state prison which is also a highly-likely outcome for people of color in the World Capital of Live Music. Statistics just released by the Department of Criminal Justice show Travis County—of which our bucolic city is the progressive county seat. Travis County leads Texas’ major urban areas in percentage of the minority population sent to prison even though the capital city’s relative black and Latino population is lower than in Houston, Dallas, Ft. Worth or San Antonio. For such a progressive place with such a high-minded view of itself, justice outcomes here are an embarrassment. A lot of fingers have been pointed recently to explain these law & order discrepancies: at prosecutors, at the courts and at a predatory probation office. But nowhere more than at the police—the pigs, colloquially—alleged officers of the law. 

The actual dynamics of policing a racist police force were just explored in some detail in a Travis County courtroom as two SWAT guys faced charges of excessive force in what is said to have been the first civil rights trial of a police officer in Hill Country history. From the start there wasn’t much doubt about the verdict but as a black man my feeling was sort of like sitting down to watch a much-anticipated new movie—or turning up the volume on a long hoped-for album. This should be good. 

There’s an old photograph in my memory of the civil rights era, which you may have seen as well—of a backwoods Southern sheriff, back in the day—on trial for the deaths of Freedom Riders. That was apparently the background to the picture. A Jewish guy and a black guy were the vics, a famous case of the FBI's “Mississippi Burning” era: A cracker sheriff grinning and chewing tobacco, like he was having a good time at his own trial, because he knew he would be acquitted. For me seeing the Mississippi photo always brought on indignation—until suddenly, in the 299^th Travis County District Court, Honorable Karen Sage presiding—the enjoyable prospect of a civil rights trial became clear, even if you knew from the beginning what the verdict would be. Chewing tobacco is not my thing. Instead, for a couple of days in early December my enjoyment was the discomfort of two white police officers not to be mean-spirited or anything. 

The original plan was to sit in the front row, stretch my feet out to watch a spectacle. Only popcorn would be missing because you can’t eat in court, you know? So, like, the details of the charges against these two SWAT idiots were not extraordinary by any means. Basically the case involved two white officers. A black suspect. Unnecessary use of a Taser. Faked documentation, stop me if you’ve heard this before. “Overtime” was probably the single most spoken word in the courtroom because it’s probably the most common expression in the local public safety vocabulary—in this city at least—where paying firefighters and feeding the pigs is like a quarter of the budget, the highest-paid police force in Texas, literally. 

So, like, the two SWAT idiots on trial were working overtime and allegedly on regular patrol, on the night in question, early last year, when they stunned a black guy who had already submitted to their command to kneel. So. Like, stop me if you’ve heard that before. The defendants were Officers Pfaff and Petraitis—"P&P” as they were called by prosecutors outside the courtroom—or Peepee which was my own preference. One P was a little guy with a shaved head and the other one was beefy with a red face. At least one of the P's had capped a suspect or two as a sniper employed by the City of Austin, in the past. To the degree that Peepee's defense was that they were being singled out and did nothing that any other cop in town has not done, or was not doing, on that mild morning in December as the trial began—you could feel a certain sympathy for them because it was probably true. This is what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Peepee just drew the short straw and got arrested by the D.A. They were caught when prosecutors were actually watching. The new D.A. said the old days are over. 

The trial audience was, hmmm, pretty much what you would expect. The testosterone level was near-toxic. Although prosecutors have denied the existence of a blue wall, as it has been called elsewhere—in Chicago for example—of silence and oppression on the police force, the audience for Peepee’s trial was made up almost exclusively off-duty cops whose whole demeanor spelled pig, not to be mean-spirited again. Almost exclusively white males who looked like they had spent, growing up, too much time in the gym and not enough in the library. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, because the jury was pretty fucking suspect too. From the concerned black male perspective: A sprinkling of minorities but, critically, three or four young white guys with beards, like the faces you see so frequently on our city streets today. Originally from Portland or Seattle or some other high tech locale probably on the West Coast and who in an earlier generation might have been long-haired liberals but today are just as likely to side with the cops. Not that there's anything wrong with that, either. Tech bros. The kind of guys who served in Iraq or play the game online. 

There was also a white chick in the front row of the jury box, blond with pearl earrings—you know the type, kind of hot, actually, in a milfy way. Not to be racist or sexist or anything but she looked like she did good deeds. And she was paying close attention too, which is a good thing. She did not appear to be particularly Negro-friendly, you never know, again, the outcome of the trial was assured regardless of this chick’s membership in Junior League. It only takes one vote to walk and Peepee had that from the beginning. With the verdict a foregone conclusion, that did not mean the trial was a wasted endeavor on the part of District Attorney Moore. The new D.A.’s new approach has been complemented by smart work at City Hall. In the new Police Association contract the pigs were given more money in exchange for greater scrutiny. The carrot and the stick, you could say, and in Judge Sage’s court it was the stick being applied. In the Mississippi Burning photo the sheriff looked oversized and arrogant but Peepee looked small and frightened. 

 It was interesting for example that the abuse Peepee was charged with perpetrating took place not far from the courthouse where they were being tried, in an open area near the old Brackenridge Hospital site that the mayor now calls the “Innovation Zone” and is designated for high-tech healthcare entrepreneurship. Allied with the University of Texas’s new Dell Medical School. The two SWAT idiots just happened to single out a black guy. That fits into a continuing black narrative, the belief that the police are only doing what City Hall wants, clearing inner city neighborhoods for newly-arrived techie whites. In that narrative the Negro who got zapped by the Taser got zapped because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, not because he didn’t kneel when he was ordered to. He was supposed to have made way already for a hypothetically-white, preferably-young female medical researcher out with her dog. As gentrification—backed by police action—police pressure let’s call it—has progressed, the mayor has spoken of a “right of return” for minorities forced from their homes, but in order to return you have to leave first. It’s something that Steve Adler the human being will likely regret in retrospect but Mayor Adler the developer's friend is promoting now. City Hall has endorsed a kind of reverse-Soweto approach here, in the Live Music Capital of the World, instead of keeping African-Americans in a defined area—a la apartheid—the city has tried to move us out. That includes clearing the Innovation Zone. The mayor and the members of the Chamber of Commerce aren’t bad people, it’s just that the easiest way they know to make money is through real estate. The economy has to keep growing. They’re greedy, in other words, just like the damn pigs. 

One can only hope that Peepee's defense depleted the union’s defense fund. It’s noteworthy now that our two last police chiefs have both turned on their own officers, Chief Art Acevedo who recently decamped for Houston, after a decade in River City, was famously recorded in show-up ripping his own people a new asshole. The Chief himself was also widely believed in the Department to be responsible for a series of leaks to the daily newspaper, against his own guys and girls. “You notice,” a police lieutenant said to me just the other day, speaking of the American-Statesman’s scoops on pigs-gone-wild, “that the stories stopped when Acevedo left.” Chief Acevedo saw APD with the skeptical eye of an officer whose career was spent in internal affairs, in the California Highway Patrol. He already knew what bad cops looked like. His reaction against what he saw in Austin seemed visceral while new Chief Brian Manley’s appearance in court seemed more calculated. He agreed to testify against Peepee. However it came about it was still welcomed.  

Other testimony during Peepee's trial was actually encouraging. The original patrol idiot on scene was a bicycle cop who arrived before the two SWAT idiots. He admitted under cross examination that the only reason he was testifying against his brother officers was that prosecutors told him that if he did not, he would be charged with faking reports of the incident, after he was caught (by video) lying in his written narrative. The bike officer raised what has become a legitimate question, in our digitally-obsessed world, first asked a couple of years ago by Police Association President Ken Casaday, who is not an idiot but who has only the interests of his membership at heart. The issue of what “really” happens and what video shows happening. It's an almost existential question. Casaday's idea being to allow officers to see their film before writing reports. There was one curious thing about Peepee’s trial, in my view, as a moderate black man, although it was not anything coming from the bench or at the defense table. Instead it was Peepee's audience, the gallery, the pigs themselves, colloquially-speaking. You couldn’t help but notice a violation of courtroom decorum, actually. So, like, one off-duty officer was sitting in the front row in plain sight of the bailiff and presumably the judge—during testimony—gradually peeling back the wrapper of a candy bar and chowing down. He kept on eating while also taking sips from a bottle of water. My recollection is that he even had the bottle on the rail in front of him at one point. It was hard to miss, in a supposedly non-drinking no-food courtroom, and one of the guys next to me even had a coffee cup on the bench beside him. That may not seem extraordinary behavior unless you spend any time in courtrooms, where it is. These pigs were texting and you also heard the occasional beep of an incoming message in the gallery. At least one phone rang, a subdued chime that was nonetheless noticeable in a hushed courtroom. Normally the bailiff would be moving you out the door. But the judge didn’t seem to mind and during breaks the bailiff was deferential to PD in the audience, like the court and the Police Association were all one big happy family which they are, actually. 

Whereas during an ordinary trial—when this gallery is not full of cops, and there are only the unfortunates and the losers/thugs who make their way through the county criminal justice system. So, like, an average day at any other time in Judge Sage’s courtroom for example—the rules are posted on the door, aren’t they? No eating, no drinking or cellphone use. Like that. And the rules are enforced for anyone else. Usually. Except these damn pigs.

Ordinarily Her Honor would have gone off like a bomb or the courtroom deputy would have escorted someone to the door. But for los puercos in the courtroom it was like there were no rules. It’s like that on the street too.