A saccharine ballad from some passing car floats through the window, a boy-man’s naked wail that isn’t about love or sex but the desperate longing for completion. It’s as desperate as the yearning for Heaven in the spirituals, a longing so ingrained it might be racial, born out of being strangers in a strange land. Perhaps the song—and all the rest like it in the ever-changing but always the same seasons of pop music—is a code. Music’s always contained secrets that could get you killed—the location of a camp meeting; the time of the runaways’ departure. Songs like this one can lead you to court the wrong man’s woman and die violently; lead you to love the wrong woman and die slowly. Because it really is possible—though who still thinks so anymore?—to die of a broken heart if you’re fool enough to take as gospel all the song promises.
The song passes, leaving Shepherd’s useless hunger for home mired in its wake.
—David Nicholson, “Flying Home,” in Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City
Welcome, mortals! In this edition, two books about DC—both deploying that resentful, poignant trope of “the secret city,” DC beyond the monuments and the diplomatic plates. DC the hometown, not Washington the dateline.
Rosa Brooks’s Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City is memoir and analysis by a left-wing law professor who trained and served as a reserve police officer. It’s hard to avoid comparisons to Locking Up Our Own (which mingles memoir, history, and analysis by a former DC public defender). I didn’t regret reading Brooks, there are a lot of powerful scenes and good reminders, but it does feel less acute than Forman’s book—more glancing, more of an outsider’s perspective, strenuously constructive but never quite touching the longing for reconciliation that animates Forman’s work.
From my perspective, the best contribution of Brooks’s book is the 100pp about her training. She’s very good at depicting the way police training conditions cops into certain expectations: every possible situation should be met with tension and fear, lest you slip up and get killed; your main job is physical, the deployment or credible threat of force; the department is more your enemy than your friend, unlike the police union the department will always consider you disposable. There’s a great bit about trainees spending their breaks gathered around somebody’s phone to watch videos of every possible kind of police encounter that ends in injury or death for the officer. Brooks returns to that aspect of the training, later in the book and really works through her own perspective on it, as a mother who has “a right to come home safe” to her children but also a servant of the city, whose civilians also have that right. You’re trained into fear, but doing your job well requires you to exercise gentleness and choose risk; you’re trained into force when a huge swathe of your job is talking and understanding.
Other strengths: the descriptions of situations in which the cops are boxed in to bad choices (the footnotes here are fun in general but I’ll note especially the long one about “the central paradox of policing [which] has been with us for millennia: police function as enforcers for the establishment, but are locked out of the establishment themselves”); the institutional portrait, there’s plenty of miserable bureaucracy humor here; the forthright willingness to see the strengths in cop culture even though a lot of the book is about its failures.
There are basically two weaknesses. Brooks is the daughter of left-wing journalist Barbara Ehrenreich, and there’s just too much, imho!, of their family drama here. I know it’s a book about the personal experience of policing, and about the experience of moving between the opposing worlds of the police and the left-wing academy, but too often I felt I was being asked to litigate a mother-daughter conflict. And Brooks refers, early on, to “contempt” as one of the central problems of cop culture. But we really only get glimpses of it: a cop mocking and catcalling a teen girl rejected by her family; witnesses treated as suspects. More often, Brooks argues that DC cops still have the empathy and humility their training tries to knock out of them, and they cause suffering because of the structures in which they operate, not because they don’t care. I know I’m obsessive about the idea that contempt vs. humility is the only political question, but this area needed more attention and analysis.
And I read David Nicholson’s collection, Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City (check your library!). These are stories of the inner lives and longings of barbers and housekeepers, handymen who serve as deacons in their church and children trying to be good when all their choices push them to be hard. At first they felt slight to me, but leafing back through the book I find that I remember them more vividly than I expected: the twist on St. Augustine’s pears in “Gettin’ on the Good Foot,” a story of childhood fruit theft at once wry, tough, and gentle; the baseball legend in “Seasons,” in which a man has to reject triumph and find love in resignation; the barbershop debate about the war between the sexes in “A Few Good Men.”
The last story, “Flying Home,” is about a man who returns to the broken neighborhood of his youth in order to teach his sheltered daughter some kind of lesson. It’s the clearest articulation I’ve found of the way in which success, safety, escape can all be things to be mourned. Loss is loss, loss feels punishing and shameful, there’s no need to be sentimental about loss; but gain is loss as well, and carries its own shame.
Now Playing
Maiesha and the Hip Huggers, “Encore”
DC row houses (in Anacostia) via Wikimedia Commons.