The Names We Hold

Runner-up 2020 Summer Writing Contest

Collage by Ruby Hansen Murray

        July the ninth was my brother’s birthday. He was only thirty-four when he died. I remember my sister-in-law calling to say, “We lost John.” Even in the moment, when I knew what she meant, I wondered how one loses a human like a set of car keys, a phone or a wallet.
        On a sunny morning, he fell dead in the kitchen of his house in the Sierra foothills, his pregnant wife and two–year-old daughter nearby. He was the youngest, the funniest in our family. The space he occupied in my life stayed empty—
        He left a wife, a two-year-old daughter, a daughter in utero, two sisters, a brother, a host of friends, and a company of firefighters. I rejected that sudden death, avoiding it for years, galvanized away from anything that reminded me of him. (Fire departments, articles on grief, conversations about brothers.)
        I remember stopping for coffee in Ashland when we drove to Sacramento for his funeral. In the hazy time shortly after a death, family members move between this world and the next, almost in tandem with the deceased. It’s a holy time, when we’re vulnerable.
        Osages stay with their departed for four days after a death. Will not leave the body unattended, even in (especially in) a funeral home. We also stay home for four days following the burial, coming to terms with the way the world has changed. I was in Ashland on the way to California for his funeral, when a fire truck passed, its shiny red reality too painful to bear.

*

        When people mention Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, I think of Kajieme Powell, another African American man shot by St. Louis police ten days later. Osages know St. Louis and Missouri. We were there when Cahokia was in its glory, before Columbus, et al. We stayed as the great agrarian civilization devolved, when our relatives, the Quapaw, Omaha, Kaw and Ponca, left. Osages were there when Lewis and Clark arrived for their misnamed Voyage of Discovery.
        I paid attention to Michael Brown’s death, the unfolding protests that rocked the nation, the militarized police response in our homelands. Jason Fritz, a former Army officer and an international policing operations analyst told the Washington Post, “You see the police are standing on line with bulletproof vests and rifles pointed at people’s chests. That’s not controlling the crowd, that’s intimidating them.”
        Days later I was watching coverage of the protests in Ferguson, when I saw a photo of a middle-aged Black man with root-beer-colored eyes holding up a hand-written sign. He stood in front of a school bus, his fingers curled around a black marker at the edge of a card that reads: THE 10th DAY AND ANOTHER POLICE KILLING St. Louis City Police.
        The expression on his face compelled me to see what happened. I was working in my study overlooking the farm my husband’s family cleared out of Sitka spruce on a marshy island in the Columbia River. From my desk, I watch white-tailed deer follow the ditch line. It didn’t take long to find the videotape.
        Kajieme Powell was twenty-five when Ferguson police shot Michael Brown. He’d been upset over Brown’s death and told his grandmother, “I’m sick of this shit.” He walked to the Six Stars Market near his grandmother’s house where he was staying, about two and a half miles from the spot where Michael Brown lay those many hours after he was shot, and took two cans of energy drink and a package of donuts and stood outside waiting for police.
        St. Louis police released video from the cameras inside and outside of the Six Stars Market almost immediately after the shooting. Surveillance video shows a Black man in khaki pants, a white T showing under a blue hoodie, take one energy drink, put it in his pocket, then bring another to his lips in the light of a refrigerator case on an empty aisle.
        On the pavement outside, Powell walks up and down and returns to the store. He takes a pastry, powdered sugar donuts or a honey bun, goes back outside, and puts the two small cans side by side on the curb.
        A man from the neighborhood recorded the incident with his cell phone. “My homeboy came and got me; the dude just stole drinks from the store,” he says and laughs. He filmed as he walked along a row of apartments toward the Six Star Market on Riverview Boulevard, and then passed a retaining wall separating lawn from a small parking lot beside the store.
        On the sidewalk that runs to the bus stop in front of the market, two small cans sit neatly at the curb. The man filming chuckles. “He stole two sodas, and he said, ‘Fuck ‘em, I’m gonna drink ‘em.’ He just straight put ‘em on the ground, bro, like he’s just daring somebody to touch ‘em.”
        A heavy man dressed in dark brown passes Kajieme Powell. In an easy voice he says, “This is not how you do it; you know what I’m saying?”
        During the Michael Brown protests I watched a middle-aged man put an arm around a much younger man taut with rage and say, “We need you home, little brother. We don’t need you in jail.”
        In the store’s surveillance video, Kajieme Powell tells the shopkeeper, a man wearing a polo shirt with stripes and an orange ball cap, “Get away from me, I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, you know who I am. I’m tired of this.”
        The man filming walks down the sidewalk past the two cans at the curb, between a few men turning to look at whatever is happening.
        “This shit is crazy,” the man filming says. He passes the storekeeper when a white police car angles onto the curb near the retaining wall. “Here’s the police. You all call the police?” he asks the shopkeeper.
        As the police car arrives, Kajieme Powell backs up, walks away on the lower side of the retaining wall. The car has barely stopped when two white police men in short-sleeve blue shirts get out, drawing their guns. He turns; they shoot and he falls to the ground. Kajieme Powell is shot so quickly, it erases everything I’ve just seen.
        At 1:23 into the video the police car pulls up, at 1:24 the passenger-side door opens, and at 1:25 the driver’s feet are on the ground and he’s drawing his weapon with the car door open. At 1:26, the driver has closed the door and is standing in the street with both hands on his gun aimed at Kajieme Powell who’s on the far side of the retaining wall. At 1:30, Kajieme Powell is standing in front of them yelling, “Shoot me, shoot me now.” He moves away and then circles back. He’s dead at 1:41. The man filming says, “Oh, God. My God, they just shot the man. They’re handcuffing him. The man is dead. They’re handcuffing him and he’s already dead.”
        You can’t see a knife in the video, and the policemen don’t take time to understand what is going on. They don’t take a moment to ask what he wants, to learn what his problems are, what he is trying accomplish. It doesn’t make sense. Except it does; it’s like hundreds of similar shootings. I look for each of the moments when Powell paused, each moment when the policeman should have made a different choice. I know that Sam Dotson, the St. Louis Police Chief, the department’s internal affairs officers, and Jennifer Joyce, the Circuit Attorney, will review this video. I know what decision they’ll come to. Reporters, law students, activists and writers can see it too.
        In the cell phone footage, Kajieme Powell lies crumpled on the ground. More cops arrive and string tape from the corner. All of the police are white, the few men and two women watching are Black.
        A dark-haired policeman walks toward the man filming and another Black man with braids down his back. “Back up please, everyone back up. Now. Go,” he says.
        The man filming, says, “Hey! Hey, y’all, I got everything on tape.”
        A voice calls from the corner “They gunned that man down.” In the final frame, a dull gray car pulls up to the curb beside yellow police tape. The man filming says, “My God. I don’t know what to do. They shot the man. Here we go again. Oh, no. Here we go again.”

*

        The Osages were at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers when the Choteaus paddled upriver from New Orleans in the late 18th century. We developed a mutually beneficial trading relationship that grew to become St. Louis. In a familiar pattern, we were forced to leave Missouri in the face of a flood of immigrants, and our presence was largely erased.
        I visited St. Louis and Cahokia with Osage elders and cultural leaders when they testified at a planning session regarding a new football stadium that would pave over Cahokian artifacts. Similar hearings were held with similar results when the city built a new bridge over the Mississippi a few years earlier. I can imagine the bureaucracy grinding over investigations of both Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell. They died in separate jurisdictions within the greater St. Louis metropolitan area, where police terminated from one city readily find work in another nearby.
        St. Louis police released tape of the 911 call from the Six Stars Market. In it, the storekeeper sounds confused when the dispatcher asks which way the suspect went, he says, “He didn’t go anywhere, he’s right here.”
        Police Chief Sam Dotson said Powell approached in a threatening manner, held a knife overhead, and said, “‘Shoot me! Shoot me, already!’ Or ‘Shoot me, kill me now.’ He had a knife, like a steak knife.” But there’s no knife visible in the bystander’s video.
        You can’t turn away from a death that you have witnessed without closing a door in your heart. The Osage believe a child becomes a person when they receive a name. Kajieme Powell is remembered for a sacrifice he shouldn’t have had to make.

Karen Powell held a press conference and spoke of the loss of her son, as Michael Brown’s family had. A woman wearing lilac, she stood composed, surrounded by men from her church wearing purple shirts. A reporter was sweating mightily in the heat. She said, “I do not believe— I do not believe he posed a threat to the police.” Then she let an elder speak.
        I wanted to know why the men’s shirts were embroidered with menorahs. The full press conference posted online by the Israel United in Christ Church explained that neither the church nor the family held hope for justice in this country. In pitiful censorship, the clip that aired on a local station showed no more than a mother grieving a senseless loss. This is the familiar ritual that unfolds with each police killing that gains an audience beyond family or neighborhood. In each, a citizen video surfaces, police offer explanations, justifications, and reassurances that a fair investigation will follow. Often, in this cycle we see an interview with stunned, grief-stricken family members. It all feeds what Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., first named white people’s insatiable appetite for Black suffering.
        Writing about Kajieme Powell feels necessary, but so inadequate. Despite the hundreds of reporters from national and international outlets convened in St. Louis, all looking for fresh angles on the protests and police violence, Powell’s death went largely unreported, unremarked. His name disappeared, sinking like a stone. The names we hold: Emmit Till, Rodney King, Tamir Rice, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, George Floyd are a partial list, shorthand for the racial terror that is America.
        I think of Kajieme Powell’s family stumbling through the days following his murder. I’ve lost three of my immediate family to sudden death. Theodore, Jennie, and John. I can only imagine the additional layers of pain in having a son or daughter murdered.
        The day after Michael Brown’s 4,500-person memorial service, Kajieme Powell’s mother held a private service for her son. When an Osage dies we share a last meal the day he’s buried. We believe he walks into the sky at noon when the sun is right overhead. Cooks prepare traditional foods and take a metal lunch box to the graveside before the coffin is lowered into the ground. It’s comforting to eat the same foods the departed carries with him.
        In the days and weeks after Kajieme Powell was killed, I watched and listened for his name in the news, on social media. I waited for Eric Holder’s U.S. Justice Department to acknowledge his death, so close in time and place to Michael Brown’s, but it did not. Let’s move on, the Black St. Louis aldermen said, even with their tough questions for the police chief.
        In the years following his death, I’ve heard Kajieme Powell’s name spoken twice. Once by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and again within a litany of lost sons and daughters from poet Patricia Smith at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. His name does not appear in Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery’s careful accounting They Can’t Kill Us All: Ferguson, Baltimore, and A New Era In America’s Racial Justice Movement. He doesn’t surface in Kimberly Jade Norwood’s exploration of historic racism, Ferguson Fault Lines: The Race Quake that Rocked a Nation, published in 2016.
        In the Osage world a second memorial meal is held a year after a death to signal the mourners’ return to the full life of the tribe. We feel relief that the person is now with friends who’ve gone before, maybe chatting and laughing. I wonder what Kajieme Powell can see from where he is and whether he can feel family members’ love.
        In 2015, the year after Michael Brown and Kajieme Powell were murdered, activists held a Ferguson Commemoration Weekend. Kajieme Powell’s grandmother, Debbie Powell, spoke of her grief. At the commemoration, neighbors remembered seeing Powell walk by every day on his way to the library.
        In 2021, Powell’s name appears in a list of “Related Incidents” in a wiki article on Ferguson Unrest, although the few lines do not contain the travesty of his death. He is included among a litany of police murders in the new edition of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
        Kajieme Powell is included on a mural in St. Louis memorializing twenty-one people killed by police or vigilantes, including Francis McIntosh, a Black steam boat worker burned alive in 1839 by a lynch mob; John, an enslaved man who organized a run for freedom to Illinois in 1849; Trayvon Martin; Sandra Bland; Mike Brown; as well as others like Alexis Grigoropoulos, a Greek teenager whose death set off protests and riots when police shot him on his feast day in Athens 2008; and eight-year-old Aiyana Stanley-Jones, killed by a Detroit SWAT team raid to the wrong address in 2010.

*

        Other names bear remembering, too. The Powell family filed a wrongful death suit against St. Louis in 2017 and is still seeking justice.
        Darren Wilson is the Ferguson police officer who shot Michael Brown in 2014. In early 2019, the Brown family asked Wesley Bell, St. Louis County’s newly elected Black prosecuting attorney to reopen the case against Wilson. Six months later, Bell announced that he was unable to prove that Wilson committed murder or manslaughter.
        Jennifer Joyce was the Circuit Attorney whose office investigated Kajieme Powell’s shooting, who found that the officers might reasonably have feared that Powell was a threat as he approached with a steak knife. Joyce said the report didn’t “speak as to training to police or any other issues, those are questions for the police department.”
        St. Louis police officer Ellis Brown (no relation to Mike Brown) was one of two officers who shot Kajieme Powell. After further irregularities in 2016, including Brown’s use of boilerplate language in search warrants and failing to give aid when a car he’d chased at high speeds crashed and burst into flame, Brown was allowed to resign from the St. Louis PD. He was hired by the St. Ann Police Department, a small community in northern St. Louis County where he headed St. Ann’s Detective Bureau. In August 2020, Brown was indicted by a federal grand jury for depriving someone of their constitutional rights. He was charged with repeatedly kicking a compliant suspect whom he was arresting when the person posed no threat. He was ordered to surrender all firearms while the case was pending, but he’s free on bond.

*

        Kajieme Powell staged an action confronting police violence, an ultimate protest, a self-immolation. Humans are Homo sapiens sapiens. We are named for knowledge, a being who knows, a wise being, but we know nothing. We are drowning in blood. I think about the deaths we don’t see and who will hold the unnamed.