Features

Column: Undercurrents: A Neighborhood Comes Together Over July 4 Fireworks By J. DOUGLAS ALLEN-TAYLOR

Friday July 15, 2005

I went out on the corner after dark on July 4 to watch the folks in my neighborhood set the sky aflame with fireworks, one of the most brazen displays of non-cooperation with authority since Mr. Ghandi led his followers down to the seashore to mine salt. 

Before I go any further, I suppose I should let you know that I’m not much for fireworks. I don’t flat-out hate them, as some of my good friends do. I’m not scared of fireworks, either. And though I can understand and appreciate the concern about the fire hazard and the noise and the trauma to animals and such, for my part, given the nature of the neighborhood I live in, I’m pretty much relieved when the popping sound outside turns out to be an M80 rather than a 9 mil. 

Mostly, I just don’t see the point of it—at least, not setting them off myself. Given the chance, I can figure out a lot better things to do with $7.95—or whatever these things are going for these days—than to set it down on the sidewalk outside and blow it up. 

But I went out on the corner after dark on the Fourth of July to watch the folks in my neighborhood set the sky aflame with fireworks, and for a half-hour or so stayed there while the screaming missiles and cartwheeling spinners and exploding bursts of color set off from sidewalks and driveways and backyards all around, as if a hundred prisoners—trapped by themselves in hidden dungeon cells, mute and unnoticed for years on end—were suddenly given voice and were sending up shouts of “Here I am, friend!”—first one, then another, then a third and fourth—until the whole, joyous conversation rose up from every degree of the circle, meeting and then overflowing at the top of the sky to proclaim, “Oh hell yeah, here we are!” 

The next day, and for several days afterwards, the local television stations and newspapers reported over and over that all across Oakland, people had defied the city’s “zero tolerance policy” against fireworks displays. 

So for a couple of hours on one night, the voiceless had a voice. And it was even acknowledged in the media that it was a defiant voice, a voice that got everybody’s attention. What power! 

For years, such individual fireworks-shooting were both legal and commonplace throughout Oakland, though on a much less explosive scale. My father used to buy one of those box assortments, with a couple of bottle rockets and a fistful of low-level firecrackers, some sparklers, and those black-charcoal buttons that you’d set down on the sidewalk and light, and it would rise in an eerie, spasmodic dance like a snake being born out of the concrete. There was always one big firework which would always be saved for the last, my father being the only one who could touch it off with a whirr of whistles and bangs and light, which ended the fireworks-lighting for us, but did not end the night. The whole neighborhood was out there with their own boxes, usually larger than ours, and we’d stay out there ‘til the last cracker was popped. There is something of a community-building about neighbors mingling outside in the night, summer or winter, children and adults, regardless of the cause—whether fireworks, Trick or Treat, an ambulance called to someone’s house, or a traffic accident down at the corner. It is a realization that we are not just alone, separate families reading books or watching television behind our individual front doors, but there are others who share the night with us, only a holler away. 

Wisely, I believe (because we live in a tinderbox in the summer, and the fireworks are gradually getting larger and more dangerous), the Legislature eventually outlawed individual fireworks-shooting in the state, but what we got offered as a substitute was a poor imitation. At various spots around the city and county—near Jack London Square, or the Coliseum, or the Alameda County Fair before those got canceled—the authorities invited you to come out and watch them shoot off fireworks. They were bigger, brighter, choreographed and orchestrated and I’ve watched my share over the years, but it is not the same thing. It is the difference, I think, between watching a movie—even a good movie—or sitting around with good friends, singing. The difference between being a passive observer, and a participant. 

In his 1994 book Skyline: One Season, One Team, One City, Tim Keown wrote about one 16-year-old Oakland kid, Jason Wright, who dreamed of making a noise in the city’s season-opening basketball jamboree, packed with players and fans from Oakland’s six public high schools. “The Jamboree was on his mind the entire week before, and in the unlikely event that he would forget about it, somebody was sure to remind him ... ‘J Wright, you gonna get a dunk for me?’” And two minutes into the game, when Wright did, indeed, get a massive, breakaway slam, “he hung on the rim just long enough to accentuate his point, and the crowd responded with a reflexive grunt, followed by a tremendous ovation that filled every silent space in the huge building. This was what they had come to see, and this was what Jason came to do. He ran downcourt yelling at the top of his lungs, his mouth wide open but no sound audible amid the roar.” 

But who roars for the Jason Wrights of Oakland—or Berkeley—or Richmond—or Emeryville—when they come back on these crowded, broken blocks, and they’ve got no basketball in their hands, and there’s no game to play, even if they had one? Who even listens, when they’ve got something to say? 

We’ve got a whole inner East Bay full of Jason Wrights, folks who never appear on television and are never quoted in the newspaper, and so they are faceless, nameless, voiceless, dark haunts and wraiths that hover just outside the edge of our consciousness, coming to our attention only when they have followed the hip hop deejay’s call to “MAKE SOME NOISE!” and do something—like set off fireworks, or play their music loud, or spin donuts in the middle of an intersection—that annoys us. Then we write columns about them, and fill up talk shows and news broadcasts and newspaper stories about them, and make them the subject of council meetings, and pass new laws about them, and send the police out after them. And so if the purpose was to get attention—anybody’s attention, in any way—then damned if it ain’t worked, if only for just a moment, however brief. 

People need to be heard, and so they will be heard. It’s the human way. The only real question is, how will we answer, and will that answer change the dialogue in some way, or keep it down the same destructive path it’s been going?