Report from an Urban War Zone:
Can the Altars of Violence
become Memorials to Victories?
by Daphne Muse, Guest Commentator

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On September 20 of last year, three-year-old Chazarus Hill, Jr. met a violent death at the hands of his 23-year-old father, provoking an outpouring of grief and outrage in Oakland, California. Neighbors and family members say they repeatedly warned the local social service agency that Chazarus was being abused. Five months later, agency officials absolved themselves of any blame in the case, claiming they did everything they “were supposed to do.” On March 15, the child’s birth-mother and grandmother sued Alameda County Child Services and the Oakland Police Department “for not acting on warnings the boy was in peril,” according to the Oakland Tribune.

The following article was written by Daphne Muse shortly after the death of Chazarus Hill, Jr., for broadcast on Pacifica radio station KPFA’s Morning Show.

I cherish living in a city surrounded by acres of Redwoods, miles of amazing shoreline and thousands of people who work so very hard for a better life for their children and themselves.  I’m also a founding member of the “East 23rd Street Posse for Peace in Oakland and around the World.”  But the ongoing annihilation of life continues to sear my spirit.  Before the body of number 92 had barely cooled, Oakland's 93rd homicide was sacrificed at the altar of violence, only two blocks from my home.  And then on the heels of those horrors came the murder of three-year-old Chazarus Hill, Jr.  His 23-year-old father has been charged with one count of murder, two counts of child abuse and assault on a child.  Chazarus, also fondly known as Cha Cha, allegedly was beaten when he did not give the correct answers in a counting and alphabet game.  This tender little spirit lived in a home where his grandmother and stepmother bore witness to the seemingly relentless abuse and battering and in a community where neighbors took appropriate actions and called both the police and Child Protective Services.  Those neighbors stepped up, trying to keep this little boy’s emerging life from being claimed by the repeated brutalization of his father.

In 2002, 113 homicides were recorded in Oakland, California, a 33% increase over 2001.  This year alone, there have been even more recorded murders than occurred by this time last year.   Unlike the neighbors who did all they could to intervene on behalf of Chazarus, too many neighbors are frightened out of their wits or disconnected from community to provide information that could solve some of the mounting killings in Oakland.  The lack of viable and sustainable community police relationships doesn’t serve us well either.

In many  instances the killings, and attending drama, have become a kind of sport and entertainment comparable to what the gladiators did during the first Roman Republic in the 6^th century B.C. and that's now being done in Iraq. The killings, and the teddy bear and Hennessey shrines immortalizing these mostly young black men, infuriate me.  Why was their manhood interrupted?  Why couldn't they have become wizened elders after whom schools, sporting arenas or affordable housing complexes would be named?  Why didn't their hands demonstrate the skill to create, invent or hold the surgical tools to save lives instead of positioning Glocks, 380 Colts or Berettas made to snuff them out?  Did walks along beaches, taking a scout troop fishing or attending their child's school play – life's simple pleasures – constantly elude them?  Black men kill too many of each other too often for reasons that have everything to do with societal madness made personal.  I saw a similar play on black-on-black violence, when I returned home to Washington, D.C. in 1967, after graduating from college in Nashville, Tennessee.

In the twenty-six years I've lived in the Fruitvale District of East Oakland, I’ve heard the sky burst with the repeated fire of shotguns, smelled the rancid post mortem vapor of an expiring soul and felt the lingering spirits of those who struggled to gasp for that last breath before dying.  On one occasion, I took one of the handmade quilts passed down in my family and covered the bullet ridden body of a man who lay dying in the middle of an intersection, half a block from my home.  I've also seen mothers and grandmothers come to the places where their children and grandchildren were gunned down and sob from the core of their souls trying to wish them back to life. 

The almost three decades of the terrifying sounds of gunfire piercing the sun drenched day, starless night or crack of dawn skies has subsided significantly in the community where I live.  In the last two years, the sound of gunfire and sirens has gone from an almost weekly riff on the backbeat of life, to an occasional sound puncturing the dense fog that often settles across the Oakland Hills like a shroud. 

It's been months now since I've seen clusters of sometimes handsome young men with intelligent eyes "on call" clinging to corners like roaches on a stove.  Some of them were round-faced little chocolate boys who used to come to my house on Halloween for my annual book giveaway. Too many of them grew up to become brutal men claiming corners, killing others fresh out of puberty or being killed at the hands of family members, once upon a time friends or homies from their infamous posses. 

For more than twenty-six years, six black men lived on my block.  Four of those men regularly got up, went to good jobs and managed to avoid the local weapons of mass destruction that claimed so many others.   One of the six, a retired gardener who spent 30 years working at UC Berkeley, mentors the neighborhood odd jobs man.  And one of those six men was a legendary dope dealer whose life was snuffed out more than ten years ago.  While I applaud the efforts of now hundreds of black men who have organized to provide the emotional support, love and care many of these young men so desperately need, despite their rantings to the contrary, I'm equally disheartened by the lack of conflict resolution efforts on the part of those who provide national leadership and drive public policy or appear on the big screen.

Revenge circumnavigates our society on a daily basis. Fifty Cents’ festering feuds with dudes who can’t shoot straight and George Bush's latest campaign to avenge the dissin' of his daddy compound efforts to bring these young men to any table to learn how to speak a language that clearly identifies the rage, while acquiring the skills to place that rage into something creative, productive and life affirming. Driven by the conviction to build solid communities where children play, attend good schools and go out into the world and pursue wonderful dreams, thousands of mothers, teachers, ministers, longshoremen, students and boys on the cusp of puberty continue to press forward to provide alternatives to the violence beyond the hyperbole of hope. 

But we also continue to live on the edge of the next round of gunfire and the almost certain annihilation of a spirit connected to a mind that could have developed a cure for cancer, written a Pulitzer Prize winning novel or become Oakland's father of the year.  On those days when I used to stand at the bus stop awaiting my public transit limo to take me to conduct research at UC Berkeley for a book I’m writing on Pulitzer winning-poet Gwendolyn Brooks and teach my class in children’s literature, I look around wondering if any of the young men clinging to the corners would one day lay down their guns, board that bus and go to Berkeley to get another kind of learning groove on.

Chazarus Hill, Jr. never even got to go to kindergarten, let alone college.  Maybe his spirit will be honored one day when one of those young men, with intelligent eyes, clinging to the corner, puts down his gun, picks up some books, earns a degree and works with fathers like Chazarus Hill, Sr. to prevent them from abusing and killing their own or anyone else.

Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet. Visit her website, www.daphnemuse.com. Her e-Mail address is [email protected].

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