Just a Shot Away

by Saul Austerlitz

  Tommie did not want the family staying where they were, endangered by the rough neighborhood as well as the threats closer to home. She helped them move to Aileen Street in Oakland, into a slightly less downtrodden apartment. Her aunt invited Dixie to stay with her to keep her away from Ray’s perverse designs, but what would that mean for her siblings, essentially growing up without parents? It was suggested that Gwen, then seven, be placed in foster care, at least temporarily, while the family found its footing. The sentiment was well meant, but terrifying. All the siblings had was each other, and Dixie, as the elder and caretaker, made it her mission to offer her younger siblings the illusion of normalcy. No one would break her family up.

  Of all her siblings, Dixie felt the most affinity with Meredith. They saw the world the same way, talked about it with the same words, comforted themselves with the same jokes. You put one foot in front of the other, sticking to the path you had already laid out for yourself, without questioning its purpose or value. If there was school the next day, you laid out your clothes and packed your bag. And when the morning came, you got dressed and walked to school, in the hope that whatever took place inside its walls could save you.

  Life was an unending barrage of catastrophes, until chaos began to feel like the fabric from which daily life was constructed. This was Meredith’s childhood: sick, absent mother, parasitical father figures, struggling siblings, and creeping poverty. One day, Ray disappeared, with no warning, and no explanation forthcoming from Altha. A new boyfriend, Troy, soon replaced Ray, but little else changed for Altha and her children. Altha’s mood swings and her boyfriends’ criminal malevolence made their apartment anything but a home for the children, who sought escape in any form they could find it.

  * * *

  Meredith was eleven years old when he had his first run-in with the authorities in 1962. He was booked as a ward of the juvenile court, accused of being “beyond the control” of his parents, guardian, or custodian, and sent to Alameda Juvenile Court. (Although what did it mean to be in violation of that law when your own mother was herself beyond her own control?) Meredith spent eight months in a juvenile facility, then was arrested again just one month after being released and spent five more months in juvie.

  The truth was, though, that Meredith was more than a little relieved to be arrested. He had chosen to act up in the hope of being taken away from his home, and found a sliver of normalcy in the regimentation of a juvenile detention center—a school with high walls, from which there was no dismissal at the end of each day.

  Meredith’s teenage years were a closed circuit: home, the streets, and juvie. He was away for most of the years between the ages of eleven and eighteen, never home for longer than a year at a time. His family would send him packages when they could, and he would write them funny letters about the mundane details of life in juvie.

  In all, Meredith was free for little more than two years in total during that span. Things changed at home—Troy was gone now, replaced by Charles Talbot, whom Altha now lived with—but most everything else remained the same.

  Each time Meredith was released, he was soon back under the authority of the state of California. Three counts of burglary in October 1964, at age thirteen; two counts of burglary in January 1966; another burglary charge in April 1967; a parole violation a year later. Home life would be a short respite before another arrest, another incarceration. Or was it the other way around, and being locked up the respite from what seemed to be a life sentence at home?

  He was only Meredith at home. Everywhere else, he went by Murdock—a name that divested him of any traces of femininity, any genteel airs. Murdock sounded like a revolutionary or a warrior, the kind of person who might break into another’s home and make off with what they needed. Along with his cousin Richard Baker, he ran with a gang called the East Bay Executors, who were petty criminals and recreational drug users. Meredith liked to smoke weed, and occasionally injected crystal meth.

  When Meredith was home, he was on the hustle. Anything that brought in some money was welcome, whether legal or otherwise. Stealing was welcome, but so was a job that might provide a modicum of financial stability. He applied for work at the post office. A cousin lined up a job for Meredith at a restaurant, and for a time, that helped make ends meet. But adulthood was a strange land, one rarely visited and rarely discussed. Meredith had been forced to grow up too quickly, in ways few of the middle-class flower children in nearby Berkeley could even imagine. It was hard to know what it meant to be an adult, though, when so few role models were around to demonstrate maturity in action.

  He was terrified by Altha’s example, scared of her illness, her weakness, and the ways she had been abused by an uncaring world. And yet, Meredith was more like her than he would have wanted to know, or acknowledge. Here he was, too, out in the streets, seeking whatever companionship he could find. Anyone who accepted him was a friend, just like Altha. He hungered for acceptance, hungered to be part of a crew. And while some of the friends Meredith made were loyal, and decent, others did not have his best interests at heart. Were those friends egging him on to criminal mischief? His family never knew, but he was a teenage boy, and teenage boys regularly made mistakes and disappointed those who cared about them. It was part and parcel of the passage to manhood.

  * * *

  Dixie left home in those years, having met the man who would become her husband. Jesse Parker was in the trucking business, and his work often took him to the less visited rural corners of northern California. He and Dixie had driven around remote Yuba County, north of Sacramento, looking for scrap steel to haul away, and more than once encountered burning crosses on the hills. Even when he found suitable scrap, Parker would have to perform for these white men, playing the role they expected of him: that of the deferential black worker, only able to make his living because of the generosity of his superiors. So it was “yes, Mr. Smith” and “no, Mr. Jones” until they would finally deign to let him take away their scrap. He would have to beg to remove their trash, and Dixie found it distasteful that her husband, a proud man, was reduced to such abject pleading. He was, she later thought, playing the “good nigger,” and it made her stomach hurt to see him like that. But those were the times they lived in. Even in the era of LBJ and MLK, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, news of the advances made for African-Americans was only halting and irregular here in the rural corners of northern California.

  The Bay Area, and the East Bay cities of Oakland and Berkeley in particular, was a promised land for blacks fleeing the South, but as with so many other moments in America’s warped, traumatic racial history, unspoken rules governed where and how African-Americans could be themselves. Blacks knew where, when, and how they were not welcome. The rules of their world were written and enforced by whites, and became so intertwined with their daily lives that they might as well have been law.

  Meredith and his siblings knew the boundaries of their world: from Dwight Way to Shattuck, from Alcatraz to Ashby, with Oakland’s black downtown their central hub. Meredith and Dixie did not believe there were all that many white people in the Bay Area, because they so rarely saw them. Their world was so enclosed by unofficial segregation that it came to seem the natural order of the world. Oakland, and to a lesser extent Berkeley, were safe spaces for African-Americans, nestled in a more unforgiving metropolitan area where they did not always feel at home.

  When he was home, Meredith mostly stayed at Dixie’s, about six blocks away from their mother’s apartment. He and Dixie would take the 15 bus to Washington, near the old courthouse, where they would window-shop, and dream. There was the Hale Brothers department store at Washington and Tenth, with men’s dresswear on the second floor, and Cannon Shoes just on the next block. Meredith was always a sharp dresser, always interested in clothes, and his eye was naturally drawn to the boldly colored, well-cut suits on display. When you had nothing, your clothing served as your armor. What would it mean to be someone who would draw the atten
tion of passersby on the street?

  The burgeoning white counterculture leaned toward casual dress as an expression of disdain toward the gray-flannel world of their elders. Jeans and T-shirts were the new uniform of youth, but Meredith did not want to blend in, did not want to be another drably dressed cog in the youth-culture machine. He preferred dapper clothing: brightly colored suits, and wide-brimmed hats. The clothes he wore told the strangers he passed by something about himself, something about his story. And he bought his siblings new clothes as a tangible way of showing them how much he cared about them. They could wear his love.

  Segregation and redlining and a grossly unfair justice system kept blacks incarcerated in vast open-air prisons, taunting them with the promise of better lives ahead while delivering any such advances with aggravating slowness. The counterculture offered a reed of hope. Here were young people who planned to change the world: end the war in Vietnam, overturn the poisonous legacy of racism, and transform America in their image. It was intoxicating. Their Berkeley and Meredith’s were separated by mere steps and light-years. Over here, poverty and uncertainty; over there, the possibility of a more just society. Meredith had always liked concerts and dances, and the white counterculture’s celebration of music was thrilling, its belief that music itself could be transformative. Music allowed you to lose yourself, to meld with a crowd, to become a small part of an incredibly powerful, unified whole, not just a lonely cog.

  Meredith was invigorated by the Haight-Ashbury psychedelic scene, and all it offered. He liked the local rock bands (although he mostly preferred to listen to soul and jazz), but he loved the atmosphere of their shows, their implicit promise of the community bound together in mutual kindness and forbearance. There was free love, he told his sister after a few initial forays into the other Berkeley, impressed and titillated. “Nothing’s free, Meredith,” she responded.

  That was just how they spoke to each other: joking, taunting, piercing the assaults of the exterior world with a well-placed verbal barrage. Life had given both Meredith and Dixie a dark sense of humor. It was what they had always done: take the bleakest moments of a life, the darkest feelings that bubbled up, and transmute them into black humor. That was what oppressed, beaten-down people everywhere did. It was how they survived.

  Whatever ate away at them, whether Altha’s illness or the constant threat posed by their mother’s string of terrifying, abusive boyfriends, they joked about it, and it would feel ever so slightly less oppressive. Laughter brought them together, perhaps in part because Altha, oppressed by her own demons, had so little sense of humor left.

  The psychedelic scene offered more than music; it also offered the possibility of temporary obliteration of the self. Drugs tempted Meredith for the same reasons the counterculture’s rhetoric attracted him: it promised the undoing of a seemingly inflexible order. Meredith was young and energetic and silver-tongued, but there was a reason he spoke so rarely, except in the vaguest possible terms, about the future. What could the future have to offer him, a black teenager with a lengthy record, no hope for a college degree, few professional prospects, and a family that was as much an albatross as an anchor? White flower children took drugs to find themselves. Meredith, like his mother, took drugs to lose himself, if only for a few hours. The weight of being himself—in this body, in this skin, in this family, in this crumbling neighborhood—was crushing, and drugs would temporarily lift that burden off his shoulders, allowing him to float free, if only for a moment.

  In June 1969, Dixie got a call at her home from Yuba County. They asked her to come to the county morgue to identify a body, and that was how she learned that her husband Jesse was dead. While out on a job, a piece of machinery had accidentally snipped a power line, and he had been instantly electrocuted. Dixie was left alone with three small children to care for, and siblings still requiring her assistance, with no one to turn to for relief. Her oldest son Tim was six years old, and her younger daughter, Taammi, was just two at the time of Jesse’s death, too young to even remember her father. Dixie had escaped the gnarled, airless atmosphere of her mother’s house and painstakingly built her own family life, only to have it unexpectedly implode in the flash of an eye. Life could be so fleeting, and so cruel.

  Meredith came to stay at the house on Julia Street in Berkeley after Jesse’s death, there to comfort the bewildered Tim, Tanya, and Taammi, and soothe the grieving Dixie. Meredith was loving and kind with the children, always playing with them, always hugging them, and giving freely of himself. They drank in his attention, needing a father figure in the sudden, disorienting absence of their own father. He always let them know he was proud of them, devoting his time to reading to them and talking with them. “This is my guy,” he would say to his nieces and nephew, reminding them that there were still people in the world to whom they belonged.

  * * *

  When home from juvie, Meredith would often hang out in the park across the street from Berkeley High School, shooting the shit with the guys and flirting with the girls. During free periods, students would wander out the school doors and find their way to the park, and Meredith would already be there, ready to listen to all the latest installments in the perpetually unfurling emotional sagas of adolescence. He fell in with a group of African-American boys and white girls who would spend time together, often at the home of one girl whose liberally minded mother didn’t mind interracial fraternizing.

  Meredith was very tall, already six-foot-two by the time he was eighteen, with his father’s naturally straight hair. He would use Tide detergent and vinegar to reverse-engineer his hair into a natural do, fluffing it out into a small Afro. A seventeen-year-old sophomore named Patti Bredehoft, part of the Berkeley High clique at the park, took notice of Meredith, quietly observing that girls flocked to him, anxious to have his ear. He wore big-brimmed hats and colorful jackets, sometimes with matching nail polish on his fingers, and there was a certain swagger to his walk, as if he were more comfortable in his skin than all the other teenage boys and girls still adjusting to their adult bodies.

  He prided himself on his conversational skills, letting his charm and his fundamental sweetness win others over. Meredith was not a player so much as someone who often preferred the company of women. One time, he and Patti were in a car together, playing a game of the dozens. The game was usually an excuse for comic cruelty, a series of knives flung at your friends and confidants, but it struck Patti how fundamentally kind Meredith was, even when he was supposed to be filleting you.

  Patti would run into Meredith in the park across from school, and at their friend’s house, and by the fall, the two teenagers were spending much of their time together, sharing delightful adventures like going in to San Francisco to see the Temptations. Others would confide in Meredith, but he rarely spoke of his private life to others, even to Patti. He never talked to her about his family, his criminal record, or his burgeoning interest in drug culture. Instead, he preferred to share those private feelings that were too strong, too messy for public consumption.

  Meredith had an eye for white girls in particular, which Dixie believed reflected the damage Altha had wrought on her children. He might not even be fully aware of it, she thought, but Dixie believed Meredith saw black women as susceptible to the same pitfalls that had ensnared his mother. His mother was weak, and his family was fractured and atomized. Meredith saw this as the curse of blackness, dooming him to an eternal repetition of the same tragic story.

  White girls were a less risky bet. He invited Patti over to the house once, the first girl he had ever brought home to meet his family, but there was no spark, no warmth there. Dixie thought her lacking in friendliness, and Patti felt that Meredith’s family was skeptical about her presence. What did this white girl want with their Meredith, anyway?

  Meredith and Patti continued to spend time together, his family’s skepticism notwithstanding. Meredith had read Eric Berne’s pop-psychology bestseller Games People Play, and he enjoyed directing Patti�
�s attention, when they were out, to others’ conversations. “What are they doing?” he would ask. “They’re talking,” Patti would dutifully answer, and then Meredith would analyze their body language, the silent details of their interaction to demonstrate his awareness of all that went unspoken in human affairs.

  Word spread, in late November and early December 1969, about a huge free concert set to come to the Bay Area, and Meredith told his sister he was thinking of attending. He had been to the Monterey Jazz Festival and enjoyed himself, and hoped for another glorious day of sunshine and good vibes and music. He did not much care about the Rolling Stones, but the idea of soaking in the love and warmth and companionship that came from hundreds of thousands of well-meaning young people gathered together was too tempting to pass up. Perhaps, too, the idea of another Woodstock reminded Meredith of his own childhood excursions to the Berkeley hills, communing with the frogs and the strays. Nature offered him calm where nothing else could, and Meredith, practically a grown man now, still took pleasure from the natural world. Being out in the countryside for the day with his girlfriend and his friends, listening to music, interacting with thousands of like-minded souls—what could be better?

  Dixie, reminded of her rides on her husband’s truck and the burning crosses she had seen out the passenger window, told him it wasn’t safe in the outer fringes of Alameda County. Violent racism was still alive and well in America, and Meredith was too naïve—too trusting—to see it. “You do not need to be out there,” she told him firmly. Their family had long known that as African-Americans, you were treated differently, wherever you went. You were held to a mysterious standard, one whose rules you often would not know until you had been accused of breaking them.