Crown Candy Kitchen
Originally, I wasn’t going to blog about this. But I changed my mind.
Yesterday evening, my partner, two friends and I went to Crown Candy Kitchen in North Saint Louis. With one week to go in the city, we wanted to check off our list of sights to see. The Kitchen is the oldest soda shop in Saint Louis, serving homemade ice cream, hot fudge, and your typical slate of diner-style food. Inside is old Coca-Cola merchandise, a jukebox, and a display case of candy made at the store.
We knew that North Saint Louis isn’t the safest neighborhood, but my partner had been there a few years before (with one of the friends, L, who joined us), and we’ve heard if you stick to the restaurant and daylight hours, you’ll be okay. I was planning to go on a photography expedition further downtown with M after we ate dinner, so we brought our cameras along. The evening was unusually pleasant for June in Saint Louis, light outside, not too muggy. After grilled cheese, chili and sundaes, we walked to the car, stopping in a small park just adjacent to us, and directly across from the Kitchen.
From there, we realized we could see the Arch. I took out my camera, equipped with its 200 mm zoom lens, and lifted it up to see if I could get a shot. Just as I did so, we saw, about 300 yards away, a large African-American man, dressed entirely in black, walking directly towards us. I put my camera down–I didn’t want him to think I was taking a picture of him. He turned left into an alley, I snapped the picture, and we got into the car.
My partner pulled out the map to see the best way to get downtown from there, while L and M looked at M’s camera (a thirty-year old Nikon) in the back seat. I remember thinking, "Probably I should lock the doors–we’re just sitting targets", and as I looked for the locking mechanism, heard "LET ME SEE YOUR CAMERA!"
The same man we had seen a few moments earlier had yanked the back door open and was now wrestling with L, who was holding M’s camera. I think the man was at least six feet tall, 200 pounds or so. L is a short, Asian fellow who, while compact, is slender. The two men tugged back and forth. The intruder kept saying "LET ME SEE YOUR CAMERA!" and I saw, outside, another man standing, arms folded, watching a few yards away.
We yelled back the sort of thing that makes sense in a situation like that, "Why? Why do you want our camera!" From him: "WHY YOU TAKING PICTURES?"
L and M said, honestly, "We weren’t, we were just looking at it. Why do you want it? Give it back!"
The guy yelled, "BECAUSE YOU GOT NO BUSINESS COMIN’ UP HERE AND TAKING PICTURES!"
At that point, I told my partner, "Drive!" and she started to, hesitating because she didn’t want L to be dragged out of the car. I kept saying "Drive!" and the man at one point grabbed L, not just the camera.
Somehow we drove away and the man let go. All kinds of interpretations are possible: he was high, or a paranoid dealer, he wanted to bully the white tourists, etc. While we were in the Kitchen, we felt safe. There was a whole table full of nuns next to us at one point. Two (white) cops came inside and ordered some food.
We made many mistakes that we shouldn’t have–sitting in a parked car, valuables visible, map open, doors unlocked. Taking that picture of the Arch was the first error. Underestimating racial tension and danger in Saint Louis was another.
But whether our attacker was high, racist, angry, paranoid, or a combination of all together, what struck me was his statement that we had no business taking pictures there. I’m thinking about it in terms of the academic postcolonial theory which speaks in complex sentences about the subaltern and the oppressed. In the discussion of objectification and the stereotyping gaze. Primarily, I’m thinking about the limits of theory when it runs up against someone who wants your camera and who doesn’t want to talk but is simply very, very angry.
Image: by thejab on Flickr.