His words fell cold in my mind. “What does that even mean?” I asked.
“Look, kid, if you haven’t noticed, Oakland’s the kind of place where people get shot every once in a while.”
We were clocking in at a murder almost every other day at the time.
“It’s not a soft city. Sobrante was interchangeable with others that are just as dead as he is. But he was in the news, there was populist momentum there. As far as not enrolling the brother — you know what I say about Thug Life: it’s not tolerated, its perpetrators are not allowed at my school. I don’t know why he got killed any more than I know why the last hundred murders happened, but I will say this: you get iced outside a police station, sounds like the 5-O put that work in themselves and are just tryin’ to relocate the blame. But you and I know that that shit would never see a courtroom, so what’s the point? Better our expedient than their victim.
“I’m not into murder mysteries, kid. That’s why I got the hell outta them East Oakland flats when I was eighteen, saw the writing on the wall. Crack was hittin’, bullets was about to be flyin’. But education and capitalism saved me. I capitalized on my brain and some elite private institutions. You see, public schools and universities don’t give a fuck about minorities. They’re like the Democrats — they got us by the droves. Private institutions, they actually care, they teach and nurture us. That was when I realized public education was fatally flawed. I went from USC to an Ivy League MBA, and then after that I got my real education on Wall Street. Got to be where the kid from East Oakland was about as grassroots as a skyscraper. One day I woke up, checked my bank account, and I was actually kinda rich compared to everybody but my colleagues.
“I’d been asked by an old friend from East Oakland to come speak at her high school. Janie McPherson, her name was. She’s Mrs. Cash Hill now, but back then Janie told me I was the kind of role model the kids needed. I had risen up from the same dust, you might say. Back in the day, I just wanted to get the fuck out. But I was aged and experienced when Janie came calling. I had learned some things, been through some things.” He paused. “It took my close—”
Hill, shockingly, let forth a noise so desperate and clipped I wasn’t sure what it was — a choke, a gasp for air, a cry for peace. I didn’t even react to it until after he had regained his voice. “My own family, my brother. Some thug put a bullet in him out of mistaken identity. For no damn reason, just a gun and a mistake.
“In college, I never went to no black-issues rallies, didn’t take no African American studies. I didn’t go see no ghetto violence movies like Boyz n the Hood when they came out. I had seen the caskets closed for real, why I wanna go see Hollywood tell that story all over again? I wasn’t really tryin’ to change the world or know it three times as deep. You understand me?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not in sympathy, but because I didn’t understand. I was a wannabe reporter, diving after my idea of the truth, as unconcerned with the feelings of others as Hill was with his students’ feelings when it came to standardized testing.
“After my brother, it was different. So I done did my speech at the little school, and in the Q&A this light-skinned shorty in the front row with cornrows and amberish eyes asks me, Do you ever wish you could trade places with your brother? That’s why I’m on fire like this. That’s why I came home.
“That the story you were searching for?” Hill questioned. “My side of the story, my blood.”
“And as for Shaun Sobrante?” I pressed — not because I thought it right or appropriate to do so, but because I was young and lost in complexity and bloodshed, and I didn’t know what else to say. “You’re willing to let me publish that he is your political expedient?”
Hill took a moment to consider that. I could tell by the way he held himself that he was walking out of his history and back into the present. He shrugged. “Maybe Oakland will understand.”
Oakland did understand. But it also didn’t.
There was a second press conference, this one downtown, led by not a spokesperson but the chief of police. “We have no suspects and have made no arrests in the Sobrante murder investigation,” he said. “It’s our determination that the integrity of the crime scene was jeopardized by the amount of time and foot traffic that probably went by between when the crime was committed and when law enforcement arrived on the scene. Forensics are minimal and would likely be inadmissible in court. No witnesses have as of yet come forward, either. It’s a tough case... Sobrante Prep? Look, it isn’t for me to comment on the ethicality of naming a high school after a dead child, who was not allowed to enroll at that very school due to a criminal charge. It should be noted that charges are not indictments, and indictments are not convictions. I think Principal Hill’s published comments on the matter speak for themselves: unfounded insinuations about police involvement in the death. He was our expedient. The police department deals in people, not expedients.”
Oakland PD was steadfastly unwilling to do interviews with me, or any other journalist about the matter. FYI: the strictest no-snitching policy of all is the one amongst law enforcement itself. But retaliatory information leaks, they’ll give you those in a heartbeat: Cash Hill’s serial harassment of underachieving students and his flirtations with grade fraud quickly came to light. The Chronicle, the Trib, the Merc — everybody ran the story. Federal funding for the school was jeopardized.
East Oakland rallied to the black man’s defense, reminding law enforcement that there was no love lost, ever. Despite the dunce caps and other creative cruelties, parents started to send their children to the besieged savior in droves — just to spite the police.
The Sobrante case went cold, and justice was of another world.
Meanwhile, Cash Hill’s days were numbered. Heightened demand to attend his school only increased the cost pressures, until it was him or Sobrante itself — one or the other had to go.
I’ve heard tales about Cash Hill’s whereabouts since — that his ghost walks the halls of Sobrante Prep; that he went back to Wall Street; that he was sent to Havana to kick up dust and overthrow the communists; that he fell in with an evangelical venture capitalist and created a for-profit online education business bearing his brother’s name. If he had told me his brother’s name that afternoon, I could at least go searching and find out if the school — or even the brother — was real, rumors, or lies.
But Hill had never spoken his name when he and I were down in that dark chamber, high in the hills. Around here, cases go cold as corpses, and mysteries stay mysteries.
Divine Singularity
by Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder
Piedmont Avenue
I should have known that bitch was lying. All the “Sorry, Maggie, I’m working late” and “last-minute business trips.” What utter bullshit. I followed her last night, waited outside her office in Jack London Square and watched her walk to her car. I parked closer to the train tracks, out of sight, safely hidden by bustling tourists crowding the streets doing God-knows-what in this part of town. It must be the only place in Oakland that gets visited solely on its name alone. Jack-fucking-London. The place appeals to people whose tastes never made it past their high school reading list, if you ask me. Anyway, I watched that snake as she crossed 2nd Street and climbed into her fire-red Wrangler. She was wearing her slightly out-of-fashion teal power suit. I’ll admit, I once thought it was quirky and cute, but now it just screams LESBIAN. I mean, she already drives a Jeep, isn’t that enough? And how was I ever attracted to a woman who wears that much product in her hair? I used to joke that she looked like Molly Ringwald OD’d on gel. As I watched her sitting in the Jeep, messing with her phone, I received a text: Sorry Maggie, gonna be late tonight. Finishing up a contract with an old client and then for some new place called Divine Singularity, LOL, so lame <3.