34th and Portland

The bus isn’t in service yet; we have to ask the driver stretching outside to make sure it’s the right one. It’s a line I’ve never taken before for a reason I’m not used to traveling for.

Something in my constitution is allergic to chanting at protests. My life’s work, more or less, is to look for better joints to cut the world at. I try to speak more precisely than those around me so I can refer to things that are more real than we’re used to talking about. It’s not a macho complex where I need to be a leader and not a follower; just a hard-won disdain of slogans.

But this is a vigil, not a protest, and bearing witness is where all meaning ultimately flows from. So here we are, me and my partner and the bus driver who says “There’s a vigil? I was working, I only just heard…” A minute later, he walks back to our seat on the bus with a picture of her face. “This is what she looked like.” We don’t know how to respond to this, but he wasn’t looking for one.

The bus starts to crawl towards the scene of the crime. Conversation is more muted than usual. A heavily pregnant woman is not going, but thanks us for doing so. At one stop, the driver leans out and asks: “So, are you getting on?” Give me ten seconds, the person by the curb says. There was just a hit and run and we’re leaving contact info. We give him ten seconds and he gets on. He has borne witness. The traffic grows heavier as we get closer.

We’re a bus of strangers until we pull away from the stop before Portland. Then, all at once, the next stop ding joins a chorus of zippers being zipped, bags being picked up, people offering to move for their seatmates only to learn their seatmates are coming too. Nearly everyone on the bus gets off four blocks south. The bus driver tells us to take it easy.

The Twin Cities have danced these last few days on either side of freezing, a downpour of rain into a slick of ice into melted slush. The sidewalk holds all these hours together at once; random happenstance of microclimate or homeowner diligence puts bare concrete here, a mound of ice there, a puddle complete with desire path around it. Almost all of us are walking the same way, but there are a couple of exceptions: a woman with a pinched, apologetic face, a baby determined to say “Hi!” to every passerby. We say hi back.

As we get closer some invisible gradient of density is reached and we own the road too. We hear whooping and cheering up ahead and my partner whispers to me: “Not what I was looking for here.” Nor is it for me, but we know why those things must be here too, and we walk forward. They start a call and response that we don’t know and can’t hear, but our neighbors evidently know. This leads to the slightly surreal chants of “No peace….no peace…” in a sermon’s sotto voce. We’re too far to feel comfortable being loud.

We reach the intersection. Helicopters lazily sweep the air around us but it otherwise feels completely demilitarized. There are a couple of old men in vests standing near bikes and a Metro Transit pickup driver looking at a traffic map.

We’re meant to meet my sister and sister-in-law, and we text our location, but service is spotty and the crowd is thick. She tells us she’s at the intersection on the right side; this is highly underspecified but we eventually find them anyway. We tap her shoulder and she mutters “We’re standing off to the side, to keep the sidewalk clear.” This sort of service is more what we had in mind; we stand aside. Needing to attend so we had a chance to get out of the way sounds like a contradiction, but my sister is family and we don’t need to explain this to each other.

We’ve seen the video and don’t need to be told what happened, but it still helps to hear it. A man with a mask tried to drag someone out of her car and shot her when she tried to leave. Because we pay the man’s salary and he came here from out of state specifically to drag people out of their cars, several federal employees have made public statements that it’s good that she was killed. It was nice to avoid those statements and see common sense reassert itself. “They don’t win in the judicial system, so what do they do? They kill us in the street!” Yes, indeed; sometimes things are literally that simple.

“Say her name! Renee Good!” I realized I had not heard her name before. Even this is not enough to make me chant, but I do say her name to myself, trying to keep it at hand, making sure I learn the lesson while it’s here to be learned. The mid-thirties temperatures are too warm for me and I open up my coat. I wonder if this makes me the most obviously local Minnesotan in eyeshot until I spot the person next to me wearing a Metro Gold Line beanie. Okay, that guy’s definitely from around here.

A sign I hadn’t seen before: “Who would Jesus shoot?” A lady walks past chanting “Bless you for staying peaceful”, and I feel blessed. My head is solidly atheist but my heart still feels at home in the Sermon on the Mount. When you read the news after a criminal federal act you always worry that this will be the big one that destroys the community and then you attend and realize what a ridiculous fear that was. No one here is so angry they forget who their neighbors are. There was one sudden opening on the sidewalk that I worried might be something aggressive, but it was just the crowd opening for a man with a cane. A Minnesotan can never be so packed in that they can’t ope, let me sneak right past ya.

More speeches, an indigenous song, Black Lives Matter. I find it a little distasteful that this killing is already being folded into the Omnicause, when we have the federal government occupying our cities and killing people for the crime of looking at them and not wanting to die. It feels too specific to merit this immediate smearing into history, to call it a lynching. I keep silent and meditate on how the ways her death was different, not just the ways it was the same. To me, this is what it means to say her name. Renee Good.

As we’re walking away, grateful we hadn’t parked there and more grateful my brother will give us a ride home, we come to a busy intersection with a couple of community crossing guards. One walks up to a car in the middle of the road and does the easiest thing in the world: not kidnap the driver. Instead, he asks “Are you going straight or turning?” Straight. “Okay - I’ll escort you through.” And he does. He must be from around here too. We stick together.