Dispatch from Ferguson

A holiday road trip to America’s latest snow globe

[Ed. note: Jennie invited me for a beer the day before Thanksgiving; she had an idea to pitch. “I want to drive to Ferguson,” she said. “Right now.” I asked what kind of story she thought she might get in Ferguson. She said she didn’t really know, didn’t really care. She, like all of us, had seen the sensational coverage on television news. She’d seen the riots and the fires. “I just want to go see what’s really going on there,” she said. “I want to walk around and talk to people, see the town with my own eyes. I want to see what’s happening in places the cameras aren’t pointed.” 

The following is not an incendiary exposé. It’s a travelogue: Jennie spends Thanksgiving Day in the most talked-about town in America. — Matt]

I call the Huckleberry Finn Youth Hostel in St. Louis’s Soulard district. Todd, the hostel’s owner and innkeep, answers the phone.

“Where are you coming from?” he asks.

“Tulsa.”

“Tulsa!” He asks about the weather.

“It’s… nice.” People are laughing and drinking champagne and the sun is shining on the Soundpony’s graffitied patio.

“Well, it’s been snowing here,” he says.

Todd tells me to call him when I’m near, and to be careful.

I tab out, pack a bag and drive. The clouds turn muddy on the horizon; it gets dark fast. My heart lodges like a stone in my throat the whole drive. The rain turns to snow, whipping like soft ashes against the windshield. Minivans and sedans eddy around 18-wheelers. The snow and freezing rain slow me down.

Just before midnight, I pull into a Jack in the Box parking lot in St. Clair, Mo., defeated, and call Todd again. “I’m still an hour away. Do I need to find somewhere else to stay?”

“No, no,” Todd said. “I’ll be up for another hour or two. I’m getting ready to put my turkey in the oven. Don’t worry, just drive safely.”

Closer to St. Louis, 24-hour news footage runs through my brain; helicopter shots of big box stores with caterpillars of smoke rising up. Riot police, armored tanks. Steamy plumes of tear gas tossed into streets.

In St. Louis, all’s quiet. The grass is covered in light snow. The clouds are immobile, heavy, low, eerily lit by orange streetlights.

The hostel is an ancient three-story brick building. Todd greets me in the brick alleyway carrying a basket of fresh linens. As he sets about stacking the linens, he sighs, “It’s been a little crazy around here…” He trails off, hands over a small key, “With this Ferguson stuff.”

We leave it at that.

***

At 10:30 a.m. on Thanksgiving, Ferguson is not the run-down, fiery hellhole from TV. It’s a charming suburb with gas lamplights, neighborhoods of stately ’20s mansions set back from tree-lined streets. This is clearly not the part of Ferguson where Michael Brown was shot and killed in the street.

The trees disappear and industrial buildings crop up as I get closer to the Canfield Green apartments, where Brown was shot on Aug. 9. Half a mile from the complex, Ferguson police SUVs are parked crossways along W. Florissant Road. Three officers are out in bulletproof vests across from a Family Dollar store, waving off a steady stream of cars. 

I make a U-turn and drive slowly, thinking of what to do next. A Ferguson Police Department SUV pulls up close behind me. I turn into the closest driveway. An officer motions for me to roll down my window.

I open the car door. She is smiling. “You were driving on the shoulder.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m not from here—I’m just… press?”

She nods sympathetically. The area will be blockaded, possibly through the weekend, but the press hangs out at Marley’s Bar on South Florissant Road, she says; she gives me good directions and tells me to park in their lot.

“They’re painting murals on all the boarded up storefronts today,” she says. “It’s really something to see.”

Marley’s is closed for Thanksgiving. Mine is the only car in the parking lot. One block up, a cameraman follows a group of four girls. He lines them up in front of a boarded-up storefront. The girls sing part of “Where is the Love?” by the Black-Eyed Peas as he trains his camera on them.

“People killin’ people dyin’
Children hurt and you hear them cryin’…”

The girls’ a cappella refrain of “Where is the love, the love, the love,” echoes along the street. The cameraman asks the girls to do another take, and they start from the top.

Two blocks farther, more cameramen. A few women supervise their young sons as they finger-paint a big red dragon on the plywood covering a Chinese restaurant.

“What made you want to come out here and paint?”

“Well, it’s much better than the plywood,” says Becky, one of the moms.

Becky and her family have lived in Ferguson since 1999 and often got Chinese takeout from this place, now closed indefinitely. Her son, Ethan, climbs down from a ladder and shows her his splayed hands, covered in red paint. He grins.

“That’s enough,” Becky says.

A TV reporter asks Becky if Ethan will get back on the ladder. “Could we get just one more shot?”

Ethan scrambles back up again for another take. The dragon’s smiling mouth plumes with orange fire across whitewashed plywood.

***

A young girl and her mom walk toward us carrying trays of McDonald’s coffees and boxes of doughnuts. Zuri is six, and the tray of coffee is too heavy for her little hands, her thin arms in a puffy coat. She asks if I’d like a coffee. I thank her and take one. Still warm.

Zuri and her mom, Pastor Gladys, are from Marion, Ind., and are spending Thanksgiving offering warm drinks and snacks to the people out in Ferguson today. 

On the next block, a wrought-iron fence is knotted with hundreds of colored ribbons.

A satin black ribbon reads “Stop Killing Us” in thick gold marker.

A royal blue one is painted with the word PEACE in block letters and three pink hearts.

A thin, tattered white ribbon reads “Justice Courage Love Faith PEACE” in slanted script.

A half-dozen peaceful protesters walk back and forth alongside the ribbons. They pray; some quiet, some loud. They all hold bibles in their hands. 

“Bibles up don’t shoot! Hands up don’t shoot!” a tall man in a black hoodie calls out as he walks by.

“Mind if I take a picture of you?” I ask.

“Bibles up don’t shoot!” he says again.

“Shoot pictures?”

He laughs. “Naw, bullets.”

“I don’t have any of those,” I say. “What’s your name?”

He pauses. “I am Mike Brown.”

It’s nearing noon, the sun is out now, the clouds have faded. At the other end of the ribbon fence an older black woman preaches to the cars driving by. “This is a beautiful day of Thanksgiving!” she shouts. “The day we give thanks to the Lord for he is gonna change this mess.”

She gets a round of “Amens” and “Hallelujahs” from the peaceful protesters along the fence line. I take off my sunglasses and put them in my pocket. Now we can see each other.

“We are praying that the Lord will bring peace to this city,” she says. “Open the doors of the hearts of the people. Stop all the violence. Stop all the confusion.”

The protesters sing a hymn as they walk. 

The man who calls himself Mike Brown says he isn’t surprised by the grand jury’s decision not to indict policeman Darren Wilson. 

“It’s what they do,” he says. “When it’s all said and done, those rioters and looters and stuff? They’re heroes. They did what they were supposed to do.

“That was the voice of the voiceless,” he says. “It’s nothing they chose to do or wanted to do. They were forced to do it by a system that has traditionally served them injustice.”

“Is it ever gonna change?” I ask Mike Brown.

“The question is,” he says, “Will I ever live to see it? This is bigger than Mike Brown. This is about all the Mike Browns nobody ever heard about.”

***

It’s 1:30 p.m., and the Wellspring Church on South Florissant Road stopped serving Thanksgiving dinner an hour ago. People mill about inside the glass side doors, so I go in. The pastor walks me into the kitchen and calls out, “Sister Lily, you got an extra plate?”

The kitchen is full of warm steam and the hum of refrigerators and dishwashers and the kind of laughter that comes after the work is done.

A woman turns and says, “We have more than enough food, honey.”

A group of women pull out aluminum-foil covered pans and load a paper plate high with turkey, cranberry sauce, thick slices of honey-baked ham, heaps of stuffing. But they can’t find the green beans. Nothing disappears on Thanksgiving Day like a good green bean casserole.

Wellspring’s recreation room is lined with tables dressed in plastic tablecloths, each one set with a glass vase filled with fresh purple and white flowers. A few kids throw a ball back and forth. Kitchen laughter floats out into the room. A woman stops by a minute later with a blue plastic cup of spiced punch.

“It tastes like it’s spiked, but it’s not,” she says.

“Oh, too bad.”

We laugh. “I know,” she says. “I’ve got some rum at home; I’m going to take some of that with me and—” she winks and heads back into the kitchen.

A moment later, a young girl brings me banana pudding in a plastic bowl. 

She returns with a bag filled with plates in plastic wrap. “For you to take home,” she says. “Apple pie, too.”

Outside, it is still bright and cold. South Florissant Road is quiet. A young man in a knit cap and sunglasses carries a black cardboard sign that reads, “God Is In Control” in silver letters. All of the O’s are peace signs.

Alone, he shouts verses and chants as he passes me on the sidewalk. A giddy man half-jogs sideways a foot ahead of the lone protester, in his face as he records him with an iPhone. The protester ignores him. The man catches my eye, smiling wildly, like, Get a load of this.

***

Around 6:30 p.m., an armored Humvee rolls by, festooned with American flags flapping in the wind. Young National Guard soldiers are hunched inside, dressed in full camo gear and helmets.

Marley’s Bar & Grill is open now; a Ferguson police car is parked at the front of the lot, lights flashing.

The people who come into Marley’s are almost exclusively regulars. The bar slowly fills up. I step outside to have a smoke and watch the Humvees roll past. Eighty percent of the traffic on the road outside is Humvees and police cars from St. Louis County, nearby Dellwood, Ferguson.

The jukebox is bouncing and loud.

“We can boogey all night long
In a stolen paradise
Shouldn’t talk about it.”

The bartender, in an oversized T-shirt and gym shorts, says, “All these businesses they burnt down, now all these people are out of a job right before the holidays. They’ve been working like the rest of us. Working to afford Christmas, and now they’re shit outta luck.”

The flat screens above the bar used to run the news networks, before they showed up here with cameras. They show football now.

“Welcome to beautiful downtown Ferguson, Missouri,” a regular says to me. He has wire-rimmed glasses and white hair. Violence has ebbed and flowed since August, the regulars say.

I picture all the glass storefronts knocked out of the Blue Dome District, Greenwood, the Pearl.

Outside, a middle-aged man in a black zip-up coat stamps his feet to warm up, an L&M cigarette in one hand. He gestures to the Humvees with their blue lights bouncing off the glass—what’s left of it—up and down the street.

“This is the safest place to smoke a cigarette in America tonight,” he says.

For more on Ferguson, try Ray Pearcey's stories on the winds of change and police transparency or Jennie's piece on militarization.