La Canicula 2023
Reflecting on Seasons, Shame, and Systemic Racism
In South Texas, July is the cruelest month. Yesterday, our heat index was 115. My vegetable garden is struggling, full of heat stressed plants holding on for survival. The dinosaur kale shedding leaves, and the tomatoes are straggly, as always this time of year.
I think it’s important to notice the seasons, those cycles and patterns that happen on a yearly basis. I’ve learned I feel more comfortable with my relationship to time’s passage if I intentionally honor seasons and cycles. I can discover the best ways to celebrate or endure certain anniversaries. I can slow down to a manageable pace. I can intentionally mark the journey I am on, remembering and noticing.
The rector of my parish, Fr. Jonathan Wickham, recently wrote about summer-timing as a spiritual practice. Summer-timing is a distinct period in this region in which we—like the kale and tomatoes—are holding on in harsh conditions. We learn to stay inside during the day as much as possible, limiting our outdoor time to the very early morning, or the evening after the sun has nearly set. We are careful to stay hydrated, wear sunhats and sunblock. The public libraries extend their hours to function as public cooling stations for our city’s most vulnerable. “Our physical, bodily adaptations to changing seasons,” Father Jonathan writes, “can remind us of deeper paths of adaptation. Life’s unfolding and winding path presents us with ample opportunities for change, renewal, evolution, and growth.”
In Mexican folklore, there are tales of la canicula, the days from mid-July to mid-August, signaling the most brutal heatwave of the year. Strange things are said to happen during canicula. Parents are urged to keep their children out of the sun. Meat rots more readily. Infection and illness are more dangerous. La canicula ends when Sirius, the bright Dog Star, returns to the night sky, and the dog days of summer are done.
The first, and only time, I witnessed a fatal shooting, it was during canicula. Sometimes, our seasonal cycles bring us back to places we don’t want to remember, anniversaries of deaths, accidents, and calamities. I’ve found that rather than ignore them, it’s best for me to acknowledge them, and understand that if I feel depressed or anxious or out of sorts there’s good reason for it. My psyche, and maybe even my body, is remembering past trauma. If I can be aware of this, then I can be gentle with myself. I can tend to the fragile emotional place I am in at this time of the year.
The shooting happened in July 22-years ago. It was a few weeks after I’d moved into my first apartment. I was a waitress at Chili’s, about to enter my sophomore year of college. The afternoon it happened, I was home between shifts with my summer-fling boyfriend, Jay, who looked like Shaquille O’Neal. We heard the shots first, and eventually, when we thought it was safe, we ventured outside to find that the Omaha PD had shot and killed my neighbor, Willie Greenlow, the black man who lived across the street, and who like me was in his early twenties. Here’s what I wrote about the experience, in the essay, “Shooting on Izard Street.”
Jay and I cautiously walked up the sidewalk, around to the front of the house. That’s when we saw the police. Two men in riot gear crouched behind my red Mazda truck parked on the street. They hustled, still crouching, to the lawn across the street where a Black man laid face-up on the grass.
Officers strung up yellow police tape, zigzagging from the perimeter of my front yard to the victim’s front yard, blocking off Izard Street. I didn’t realize the man lying on the grass was dead until I saw how the EMTs ignored him. From where Jay and I stood behind the police-line tape, I couldn’t see the man’s face. The only detail I made out was his dark blue JNCO jeans, familiar to me because that was Jay’s favorite brand.
I wondered how much blood seeped into the grass. This body was the center around which the whole scene swirled, charged with a negative energy. Like pressing the wrong sides of magnets together, I felt repulsed, yet fixed in my spot, wanting to both run back to the safety of my apartment, and to duck under the police tape so I could take a closer look at the body.
“Shooting on Izard Street” was the scariest essay to publish in What Will Outlast Me? Part of the trauma of the event is also remembering the vulnerable, shameful, and controversial aspects of it. I once had a writing teacher tell me: “When you’re writing memoir, you can’t save your ass and your face at the same time.” This is generally true. But, it’s not as brutal as it sounds. For me, there’s been a lot of catharsis and healing in telling the traumatic stories that have shaped my life.
That said, it still feels hard to vulnerable on the page sometimes, so let me just put it out there. Writing about these events was hard because:
The same summer the shooting happened, I was sexually assaulted Before I wrote about it in What Will Outlast Me?, it was an incident that only one other person knew about before I shared it in writing. (If you’ve ever asked yourself why #MeToo, realize that 1 out of every 6 American women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime.1 This is my #MeToo.)
For my actions to make narrative sense, I had to explain to the reader some personal aspects of my sexuality.
This essay is one of a handful in the book that has not been previously published. It’s been rejected from 30+ literary magazines, though my book editor loved it.
This essay was workshopped once at a South Texas Scribes meeting and the feedback critique ended up outing a racist, and there was a nasty verbal fight with this bigoted member of the group.
I don’t come off looking very well either. My actions come from a place of utterly unexamined white privilege.
The shooting that happened on Izard Street in Omaha, Nebraska in 2001 has haunted me for a long time. It’s a story that has forged who I am. It’s not hyperbole to say it was life changing, even if my understanding of how it changed me was a slow revelation. It took a lot of time to realize exactly who had been victims, and how and why they had suffered. These things are political, I came to realize. I’m living in a patriarchal country plagued by systemic racism and wealth inequality, and for far to many this is a deadly combination.
The ways that sexism, racism, and inequality evoke violence may be specific to individual events, but taken together, we can notice events like the one I witnessed—a person of color in a low-income neighborhood being shot and killed by the police—it’s a broader pattern fueled by hatred. The story of a friend’s brother attempting to rape a 20-year-old woman, is part of a pattern fueled by hatred.
So this July, I’m remembering Willie Greenlow. I’m grieving the world’s systemic brokenness, but I’m also tending to my spirit, so that perhaps, I can find another layer of meaning this cycle round. I’m in a good place now, even if July will always be a hard month for me. By bearing witness in writing, I hope that someone may feel less alone and less ashamed when they read “Shooting on Izard Street,” and perhaps in some small way, I can help someone else grieve on a trauma anniversary.
If you’d like to buy my book so you can read “Shooting on Izard Street,” you can purchase it from these online retailers:
Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence