Oakland Noir

by Jerry Thompson

  “Like the Eddie Longs and T.D. Jakes of the world, he’s receiving the largesse of the Bush administration—except instead of faith-based initiatives it’s No Child Left Behind federal funding,” another writer noted.

  Others were more opinionated: “What a black cracker! Not to play the ‘race card,’ but is there any chance in hell that white kids would get guinea-pigged like this by an education fascist?”

  Glassdoor disrobed the town and had a million stories to share about its birthday suit, but it was still just a website. For all the Internet could reveal and make accessible, it couldn’t replace the intimately felt reality of genuine reporting. There was no flesh to grasp onto online, no facial cues, hushed tones, or eyes that would rather wander a million miles than meet your own. No viscera. Everything was cloaked in keyboards and anonymity. I had to get on the campus (through the plaza mall, past the Wells Fargo and the dance studio) and talk to real people, on the record.

  “The dress code is selective,” said one staff member who declined to be identified. “For the record, remember what a charter is and isn’t. There are private schools in Oakland’s enclaves with bigger endowments than state universities. These schools serve two, three hundred children at most. We are not private, kids actually go to school here. Our endowment is the overtime wages Hill shorts us on. If we didn’t receive public monies, we wouldn’t exist. But at the same time we’re not true public schools because we’re not union or school board regulated. There’s no unions, no boards—just Hill. Hill regulates us and himself. As far as this school is concerned, he is the state. Only the federal government has any say over him, and you know the feds don’t come to Oakland unless it’s a drug bust. Plus, he’s got friends in the White House.”

  “Friends?”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “Duly noted.” I moved us back to firmer ground: “The dress code is selective, how?”

  “Selective like this: If your GPA is above a 3.0, your standardized test scores are above proficiency, and you’re a girl, you can wear a cropped halter top and high heels. Your blouses can expose back and shoulders. If you’re a boy with those same credentials, you still can’t sag your pants, because Hill thinks that’s coded communication between gang members. But you can wear your hat at any angle you like, you can wear jewelry, and you can curse without facing reprimand. These privileges are not open to the low-performing student.”

  I remember pausing to take stock of a few of the class photographs that adorned this woman’s office walls. The children wore an array of outfits, some with pants sagging ludicrously low, evidently in open rebellion to the rules. Others wore their shorts high-water, like old men, Urkel, and wary boxers. Several of the girls wore “stunner shades,” huge block-shaped goggle-like sunglasses that seemed to only come in hot pink, flame orange, or neon blue. These young ladies were also bursting out of their tiny shirts emblazoned with provocative insignias, which drew my attention that much more shamefully to their taut teenage breasts. “These must be the straight-A students,” I cracked.

  “No,” she shrugged, “not even close. This crew isn’t exactly headed to Harvard Yard.”

  “But I thought only the smart kids could dress like they want.”

  “In theory, that’s the rule. But Hill can’t patrol the halls every morning and afternoon inspecting each student’s clothes. He has a school to run, and day-trading to do,” the woman reminded me. “That would be unrealistic, even for a demagogue. The dress code mostly comes into effect the day before standardized tests, and everybody knows it. I think he learned it from Chavo over there at the Indian school. Baggy jeans, exposed boxer briefs, halter tops, and visible bra straps will get you suspended on test day, if you’re bad at taking tests.”

  “Is that legal?” I asked ignorantly. Was the place where I lived legal under any compliance code? Was the homeless encampment on the street outside legal? Where were their permits? What about the police who curb-crawled the neighborhood nightly, extorting the prostitutes and shoestring pimps? Where was running a protection racket out of a police station endorsed under the law?

  “I asked the same question when I first showed up here.” She nodded at me somberly. “I don’t anymore.”

  * * *

  AYP scores came in: Sobrante rated a 650, hardly in the elite category that the Native American Middle School consistently claimed, but it was at least a hundred points higher than the public high schools deep in East Oakland.

  According to my inside sources, Principal Hill was unsatisfied. He blamed the mediocre score on race and culture. One source had surreptitiously recorded Hill’s rant on her phone: “If these Negroes would consent to an eleven-month school year for their children, we could social engineer our way to a 900 AYP in no time flat. I promise that on my brother’s grave. We could create a black Bill Gates. We could make us a Mexican Stephen Hawking, minus his ALS. You know, you can’t get that shit if you learn to salsa at three years old. Think about it, you ever known a Mexican falling out of his wheelchair with ALS? Mexicans are a healthy people with a healthy culture, but Negroes are a lost people. They require some inhumanity. They need to be reeducated by any means necessary, and the eleven-month school year is the nicest way of doing it. It could be twelve months. If it were really up to me, I’d do like Mao and send them all back to the land, beat it into them. The Marxists had a good idea—they just applied it to the wrong people. The rich don’t need reeducation. Whites and Asians do not need reeducation, and if they did, they wouldn’t bitch about it like blacks do. They would do whatever was necessary not to become a subservient class.”

  The recording exposed everything that was wrong with Mr. Cash Hill. The guy was sounding more fascistic by the moment. Whatever his business acumen, whatever his connections to born-again Bush, his guidance of children was taking a dark turn. There was no way such a man would have been allowed to lead affluent white children, and no telling what such a man would do to the poor and powerless.

  Unfortunately, I knew I couldn’t print any of this, or even post it to my blog. It’s against California law to record or publish people without their permission. I know FOX News all but destroyed ACORN using it as a tactic, but I’m just a small-time citizen journalist. Hill would be up my ass with lawsuits and countercharges; my underwear would be up for auction if I tempted fate like that. Even now I wonder what will come of it, if he is out there somewhere reading my words, plotting to put me before a judge. All for exposing his mad love.

  I located a janitor who had moved on from the high school for reasons he wouldn’t discuss. But he admitted on the record that he’d more than once wandered into Principal Hill’s motivational sessions while fetching things from the janitorial supply closet. Inside he’d find some banished child wearing a dunce cap that read, DEPORT THIS LATINO, or, CRACK BABY BRAIN, or, DANGER: LAZY NEGRO HAPPY SLAVE. Then there was the tiara, always given vengefully to the boys that bucked against rule and order—BITCH, it read in bright white sequins.

  “It’s not right to teach children that way,” the janitor said, “even if they is in high school and they did somethin’ wrong.”

  Add to the alleged wrongs an oft-used method one HR employee explained to me: “You lock the unruly student inside one of the windowless classrooms or a storage closet. All they miscreant asses need is a tablet of some kind and a writing instrument. You turn off the lights and you leave ’em there, go about teaching those who want to learn, then come get he or she who was actin’ out from the lock-up at three p.m. when school is out. Now that’s a policy that ain’t on paper, but one that is practiced here without apology. Shit, if Principal Hill ran East Oakland like he runs this school, these streets wouldn’t be lookin’ the way they look, I can tell you that much.”

  * * *

  I was not looking forward to Hill entering local politics, though perhaps that was where all this was headed. With him at its helm, East Oakland would either transform into a sprawling, chocolate-city suburb, or it
would be overtaken with roving bands of disgruntled ex-employees and students who’d been kicked out of the school system.

  If Principal Hill would have been a lightning rod as a mayor, Principal Chavo at the Native American school would have been the thunder, plus a few downed power lines. In a turn of events that made local news, Chavo pulled his own card by cursing out a contingent of Berkeley School of Education students who were touring his campus. Apparently they disagreed with the principal patrolling the halls on standardized test day and suspending kids on the spot for the merest of infractions. One kid (who might not have been the sharpest of students) just looked at him wrong and was gone. In another instance, Chavo swooped straight into a classroom, asked everyone if the test was too hard, and then kicked out all those who raised their hands. Several dozen students ended up on the curb, waiting to be picked up by parents, guardians, or whoever scooped them up. Some of the graduate students were concerned by the haphazard pickup situation, others by the initial disposal. Chavo didn’t give a damn and had them put out of doors as well.

  The Berkeley students went to the papers and local TV. After that, the scrutiny on Oakland’s charter school movement increased. Mrs. Majesty’s custom-made job applications, with question after question about prior union involvement, came under suspicion; Glassdoor was inundated with anonymous complaints; meanwhile, Principal Fowler’s penchant for ridding his school of strapping young men, and his frequent cancellation of football games, pep rallies, and school dances suddenly seemed rather suspect.

  And Principal Cash Hill, though he had only been in the booming business of high school education briefly, was not immune. A few mothers, wrung raw by the world and by Hill’s commandments, complained to the newspapers about the new push for an extended class schedule to ten or eleven months. Their children were not robots, they inveighed. The Ivy League was not the be-all and end-all of life in East Oakland, they said, just in case Hill was unaware. My blog even received some attention—mostly from the lame local media that plundered it for my “exclusive interviews” with employees from the school. I had yet to publish the really explosive stuff about racist dunce caps and locking kids in storage closets. I was holding off on that until a couple more shoes dropped. Also, the “legitimate” reporters had a bad habit of publishing my content without crediting me. Of course, I could have sued them, but in news everything is about timelines—nobody reads the retractions.

  Then the Oakland Police Department reopened their investigation into the murder of Sobrante Prep’s namesake. A press conference was held, to which I was not allowed entrance. I waited outside next to a network news van parked between the plaza mall and the McDonald’s. The gathering was not large and I could hear the spokesman at a distance, describing how Shaun Sobrante was a college-bound student, a good kid, and what had happened to him was an unmitigated tragedy. But he had made a fateful mistake and had gotten himself kicked out of the public school system. Shaun had been asking around about the new charter schools; in particular, he was roaming the plaza halls trying to get a meeting with Principal Hill. Enrollment at what was then called Forging the Future Preparatory Academy was low. There was opportunity there, maybe even for a kid with a pending court date for drug possession. It was unclear if Principal Hill had ever met with Shaun, or whether the school had a policy then against accepting children with pending criminal charges. Charters could keep a lot of things private back then.

  “That’s all we know right now,” the spokesman said. “That, and the fact that it’s a shame that Shaun never got a chance to attend the fine school that bears his name.”

  I imagined the spokesman exiting stage left, cameras flashing on his retreating profile like a harried president disappearing into the White House’s inner sanctums.

  I knew it was time to interview Cash Hill. Not the next morning, not that night, but right then. And unlike the local media, I knew how to find him.

  I’d never dialed it before, but I’d had Hill’s cell phone number on speed dial for some time. It was given to me by the disgruntled janitor, who shall remain nameless. I called him while standing beside the network news van.

  “Cash Hill?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “The closest thing you have to a friend in the Oakland media. I know you’re aware of the televised press conference that just went down at the police station right outside your school. I know you know there’s scrutiny on the charters right now. You need to set the record straight—about Shaun Sobrante, your school, and the proposed eleven-month schedule.”

  “Eleven months isn’t shit!” he shouted. “Nothing comes by expectation alone; anyone who tells you success can be had without resistance is lying on their mama! Of course there’s people that hate me, so what? When we have our black Bill Gates, they’ll thank me. History will absolve me.”

  “Fair enough. You want to go on the record with that?”

  He repeated himself—on the record. “This over now? I’ve got work to do.”

  “You’ve got a public image to maintain, Mr. Hill. People will begin to question the seemliness of naming your school after a murdered child whom you refused to enroll. Unless you get out front of this story. Tell me about yourself, Mr. Hill. I’m not interested in a hit piece or a shock story. I want the people of Oakland to know you, to know why you are enraged about education in the town, and the radical measures you’ve taken to change it.”

  Apparently this struck a chord. Thirty minutes later, I was standing at the doorway of Hill’s Oakland Hills home. The big man, adorned in vaquero hat and boots, a Sobrante Academy blazer, and slim-fit jeans, summoned me in. He was an imposing man in person, just as he appeared in his newspaper advertisements and TV interviews. He was hard-jawed, broad-shouldered, tall, muscular, lean, and rough-hewn. He looked more like a boxer than a broker, and more like a broker than a school administrator. I could see him striding around Wall Street, but it was much harder to imagine him sitting down to give careful attention to a kid’s homework assignment. I wondered if he had any children of his own and scanned the walls of the front room for pictures, but I just saw photograph after photograph of Hill with a woman I took to be his wife. She was dark and striking, angular and alert in her posture, with typically round, lush African facial features that contrasted with her otherwise straight, narrow frame. She was beautiful and she was everywhere, but there were no children in evidence.

  Shrouded and dark, curtained in deep blue and purple, the front room felt oceanic. I had the sense that I was sinking into something.

  Hill led me down a winding staircase, typical of homes in the hills, and I felt I was wandering beneath the earth into a small, dark chamber. The room he led me to was crowded with shelves and was so tight we had to angle and sidestep our way around before arriving at an area where there was space to stand and furniture in which to sit. The shelves didn’t contain many books, I noticed. The few that were there were balanced against dozens of trophies and plaques. At a glance, the books were professional manuals and black nationalist tomes, while the memorabilia celebrated graduations, certifications, and administrations. There was a framed photograph of Hill shaking hands with Bush 43. Something, maybe a signature, was scrawled across the front.

  Hill sat down on a large leather chair and motioned me to an office chair nearby.

  “We gotta lynch Thug Life on every oak tree in Oaktown!” he thundered. There would be no small talk, I ascertained. “We’re making inroads, with President Bush’s emphasis on faith-based living and institutions, and the charters breaking up the bad public schools and the bloodsucking teacher unions. Once we get what Malcolm called them foxy white liberals outta office, we’ll be on our way to real change. Anyway,” he said, suddenly breaking from the rhetorical mode, “Shaun Sobrante was a political expedient.”

  His words fell cold in my mind. “What does that even mean?” I asked.

  “Look, kid, if you haven’t noticed, Oakland’s the kind of place where people get shot every once
in a while.”

  We were clocking in at a murder almost every other day at the time.

  “It’s not a soft city. Sobrante was interchangeable with others that are just as dead as he is. But he was in the news, there was populist momentum there. As far as not enrolling the brother—you know what I say about Thug Life: it’s not tolerated, its perpetrators are not allowed at my school. I don’t know why he got killed any more than I know why the last hundred murders happened, but I will say this: you get iced outside a police station, sounds like the 5-O put that work in themselves and are just tryin’ to relocate the blame. But you and I know that that shit would never see a courtroom, so what’s the point? Better our expedient than their victim.

  “I’m not into murder mysteries, kid. That’s why I got the hell outta them East Oakland flats when I was eighteen, saw the writing on the wall. Crack was hittin’, bullets was about to be flyin’. But education and capitalism saved me. I capitalized on my brain and some elite private institutions. You see, public schools and universities don’t give a fuck about minorities. They’re like the Democrats—they got us by the droves. Private institutions, they actually care, they teach and nurture us. That was when I realized public education was fatally flawed. I went from USC to an Ivy League MBA, and then after that I got my real education on Wall Street. Got to be where the kid from East Oakland was about as grassroots as a skyscraper. One day I woke up, checked my bank account, and I was actually kinda rich compared to everybody but my colleagues.

  “I’d been asked by an old friend from East Oakland to come speak at her high school. Janie McPherson, her name was. She’s Mrs. Cash Hill now, but back then Janie told me I was the kind of role model the kids needed. I had risen up from the same dust, you might say. Back in the day, I just wanted to get the fuck out. But I was aged and experienced when Janie came calling. I had learned some things, been through some things.” He paused. “It took my close—”