"The fifth night we spent San Luis and it was like the whole world lit up." Huckleberry Finn marvels at the sheer number of lights in the Midwest city, built near the confluence of the two largest rivers in the United States, the Missouri and the Mississippi. Mark Twain, the latter's great chronicler, published the adventures of Huck and the Negro Jim in 1880, when this piece of America was a promised land for Irish and German immigrants, a trading bastion of the young and vibrant country.
Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch, born in Germanic lands, had founded a prosperous brewery in the city that, in time, was to become the multinational owner of Budweiser or Stella. The great world fair of 1904 further spurred the growth of the metropolis, immersed in that dolce vita that embodied the smiling Smith family from Cita in San Luis (Vicente Minnelli, 1944).
If someone today wants to find some vestige of that power, of the bourgeois dream elevated to musical, they stop by Lindell Avenue and take a look at the mansions and groves. When I got there on the first Monday in August, after a whole day touring the suburbs, it really seemed like "the whole world lit up." No one would say that this delightful avenue belonged to one of the cities with the highest murder rate in the United States. That sunny and cool morning was undoubtedly the St. Louis of Minnelli and Judy Garland, the St. Louis of the fair. The appointment in this penultimate installment of the series on the black United States, however, was not with the Smiths, but with the McCloskeys.
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
CANADA
Minneapolis
Minnesota
saint Louis
Missouri
Memphis
Tennessee
Winfield
Alabama
Clarksdale
Mississippi
Birmingham
Alabama
Oxford
Mississippi
New Orleans
Louisiana
Gulf of mexico
500 km
MEXICO
THE COUNTRY
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, a completely anonymous married couple of middle-aged lawyers three months ago, have become prime time television meat in the United States after an altercation on June 28. That day they went out to the garden of their house pointing weapons - he rifle, she pistol - at the Black Lives Matter protesters who were marching on their land and the image traveled half the world. On Monday they were honored speakers at the Republican convention that crowned Donald Trump as a candidate for reelection.
At the appointed time, Mark McCloskey opens the door and greets him warmly. Inside, the upholstered walls, the quality of the woods and the decoration - horn on the wall, feline fur on the floor - transport you to another era. They bought that house, built at the end of the 19th century, a decade ago and renovated it to become their office. Because his home - and here the beer entrepreneurs return - is a Renaissance-style mansion that the magnate Adolphus Busch built for his daughter Anna as a gift. It is the one that has now become so popular as a result of the arms incident and today houses a good collection of art that the couple has accumulated in 30 years: Roman, Renaissance, 18th century English antiquities ... For about an hour we talked the day of cars - for which they have been accused of illicit use of weapons -, the insecurity in the city, the chances of Trump's reelection and, of course, the Black Lives Matter movement (Black lives matter).
The couple is famous for pointing guns at protesters
“Not a single unarmed black person has been shot to death by police this year in San Luis. However, so far this year there have been about 153 homicides, according to the last time I looked. Most, if not all, were African Americans against African Americans. So black lives matter, but don't these black lives lost in St. Louis matter? It is very hypocritical ”, criticized the lawyer.
At the time it had not yet been announced that they were going to be speakers at the Republican convention, but it was rumored. They feared that their image of wealth would challenge Trump's anti-elitist discourse. “For that same reason we never put up pro-Trump signs in the 2016 election, because they were going to say, 'Oh, look at those millionaires going with Trump,” she explained.
As is the case in much of the country, San Luis is a city of Democratic government, increasingly progressive, in the middle of a conservative state. Political contrasts can be abrupt from one street to another, almost literally.
This is what one can verify by looking for the home of trumpeter Miles Davis, born in 1926 in an African-American neighborhood east of the city. To get there you have to take a bridge that crosses the Mississippi and leaves you in Illinois, a Democratic territory where the East Saint Louis district belongs. On one side of the river, the Missouri river, the only abortion clinic left open was about to close last year under pressure from conservative authorities. On the other side, Illinois was enacting a law around the same time that extends rights and forces health insurers to bear the cost.
Previous deliveries
- At the wheel of black America | 1. New Orleans
- At the wheel of black America | 2. Birmingham (Alabama)
- At the wheel of black America | 3. From Alabama to Mississippi
- At the wheel of black America | 4. Clarksdale (Mississippi)
- At the wheel of black America. 5. Memphis (Tennessee)
But this was about Miles Davis. The house, rehabilitated and turned into a museum, looks like a fairytale house that morning in early August, the house of a children's painting, with the raging blue sky, unlikely clouds so perfect, the intense green garden, the red door. In his autobiography, Davis tells how his dentist father had the practice there too. The musician mentions the tragedy of July 2, 1917, when a white mob swept through the neighborhood and killed 40 people, according to estimates of the time, but later raised by many researchers to a hundred. He was not born, but his memories show how marked the event had been in the neighborhood.
"The black people that I knew never forgot what those sick white people did to them," he says. “The same year that blacks were fighting in World War I to help America save democracy. They sent us to fight and die there and they killed us here like nothing, ”he writes.
And in the same book, he tells of several of his attacks on women. For example, he sneeringly recounts slapping one of his wives, Cicely Tyson, how he assaulted her because she didn't like a friend she brought home. She called the police and hid in the basement. The officers did not see her injured and ended up leaving after laughing with Davis. Then he slapped her again. The musician, with a well-documented history of misogyny, is able to boast of such violence in the same biography in which he shows his stupor against racism, which he himself suffered, a case of dissociation, or perhaps just vileness, worthy of study.
That 1917 massacre was widely remembered in 2014, when police killed unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis. This August a teddy bear was in the middle of the road, in the same place where everything happened, and miraculously no car knocked it down. The sixth anniversary was about to be completed and the prosecutor had just announced that the policeman who shot would not be charged.
"Not a single unarmed black person has been shot to death by police this year in St. Louis," says Mark McCloskey.
An old wealth, now evaporated, can be seen in dozens of neighborhoods in the city, full of abandoned houses, reminiscent of Detroit. On Page Avenue, a local artist, Christopher Green, painted the bricked up windows with portraits of prominent black residents of the city.
The Ferguson case ignited that Black Lives Matter Movement that today has crossed borders and has become institutionalized. One of its most prominent activists at the time, 44-year-old African-American Cori Bush, has entered politics. I went to see her on Sunday, just two days before the primary in which she was going to face William Lacy Clay, who has been on Capitol Hill for 20 years in Washington. Bush had called a press conference at her modest campaign headquarters and looked downcast, as if fearing defeat, or maybe just exhausted. She denounced foul play by Clay's campaign, which had released a photo of her with a Muslim woman and had darkened her skin. The funny thing is that Clay is also black. "Well, she wants to expose me in the image of an angry black woman, she just tries to win the election ...", she told me later.
He wore a purple T-shirt, the color of his campaign, a black blazer and sneakers, although in his small office, where he worked on a laptop full of stickers - Bernie Sanders' in a prominent place - he also kept some rhinestone sandals from colors. The Tuesday night following the interview, cell phone alerts broke the news: Bush, a single mother, former nurse and former preacher, had defeated a veteran congressman in the primaries and had a clear path to be elected in November by the district. democrat.
Minneapolis, the city normally associated with Prince, had been placed at the center of the global conversation after Floyd's death in a brutal police arrest, become a sudden and global icon against racism. How the city was two months after those events was going to be the final chapter of this trip.