There was a striking exchange amidst the shouts and shivers as individuals convened near Frost and Hanley in Berkeley on Christmas Eve, when hundreds gathered to protest the death of Antonio Martin, the latest black teen to die at the hands of police.
Martin’s body – which had just been moved – was still visible when the unrest got underway.
Along with the standard format of emotional face-offs with police that escalates to aggression, confrontation and ultimately ends with arrests and chaos was a silver lining on this particular night.
After a midnight melee that resulted in a handful being taken into custody, the police assumed their position of standing between the property and protestors.
Some protestors formed their own line directly across from officers, while others paced the parking lot with frustration that seemed to make them impervious to the cold.
One woman was so enraged that she approached the formation of police and made her way down the line of officers while letting out a series of blood-curdling screams.
But to the right of the action, a young black man stood intensely engaged in conversation with a white officer – one from the more than a dozen municipal police forces who were at the scene of Martin’s death, which quickly turned into a protest zone.
A dried white substance covered half of the youth’s face, and most of his sweatshirt was wet.
The conversation was intense, but cordial – even jovial, at times, as the two laughed at certain points.
“Babe, what happened to you?” a woman said as she approached the two and was the first to successfully break the conversation.
It wasn’t that others hadn’t tried – they were met with “I’ll holler at you in a minute” or “all right, man, I’ll get at you.”
“Babe, what happened? Are you all right?” the woman persisted.
“He maced me,” the young man, said pointing at the same officer he was chatting it up with.
“Well, at least he didn’t shoot you,” she said.
Both the officer and the man rolled their eyes and shook their heads.
“He’s from St. Charles, too,” the young man said to the woman, speaking of the officer, whose nametag said Lloyd.
Orlando Brown is a resident of St. Charles where Lloyd is an officer. Brown has been a regular on the protest scene since August.
He usually falls back when things get hectic. This time was different.
“I went to grab one of my friends from off the ground, and he just maced me,” Brown said.
Even so, the two seemed to have genuinely made a connection.
“Seriously, if you see me over there, come over and say hello,” Lloyd said as Brown prepared to walk away. “Be good. Don’t get in any trouble.”
“I don’t be in any trouble,” Brown snapped back – with a smile on his face. “I haven’t had any trouble since I’ve been coming out here. You’re the first person out here that did this [expletive] to me. You’re gonna go down in the Guinness Book of World Records.”
They shook hands and waved in parting.
Brown walked around to check in with the friends he had made through the protests. Most were wondering how he was holding up after getting mace sprayed directly in his face.
His eyes and nose were like faucets.
“Yo, man, you good?” was the question of the night for Brown.
“Man, [expletive] those cops!” another man shouted in response to seeing that Brown had been hit with mace.
But of all the people on the scene, Brown did not share those sentiments – at least not after everything had settled.
At first, however, he was seething.
“I was pissed – I’m still mad,” Brown said. “It was awful.”
Things changed for him, though, after Officer Lloyd initiated the conversation.
“Man, I was so mad,” Brown said. “He saw me keep staring at him, and he just came over to me.”
Officer Lloyd had no comment about what compelled him to reach out to Brown – or how he quelled the situation to the point where the two seemed to be looking forward to seeing each other back in St. Charles.
“We had our conversation, and that’s the only thing that’s important,” Lloyd said. “Everything I had to say about the situation, I said to him.”
Brown said that it was a natural conversation – even though it grew from the most unnatural of circumstances.
That night Berkeley was the scene for yet another of the worst-case scenarios with respect to broken relationships between police and people of color. But on that very same gas station parking lot in Berkeley, Brown and Lloyd offered a glimmer of hope.
“I really didn’t want to talk with him – or hear what he had to say,” Brown said. “But then I thought, ‘Me standing there calling him out of his name won’t solve [expletive].’”
