How Many Weren't Filmed?

Alice - A silent Grief walk through Minneapolis, where a thousand bells rang and no one spoke.

What you are about to read is an excerpt from WOMN, a collaborative effort of the women of Minnesota who kept showing up during Operation Metro Surge, holding the grief, the rage, the tenderness, and the fierce love that women know so well.

If you see yourself in these pages,
Pass it to the woman next to you.

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Silent Walk for Justice. Hosted by Twin Cities Buddhist Communities.
All Are Welcome. Sunday, February 8th, 3–4:30pm.
Gather at Powderhorn Park West Playground.

All are welcome to join this mindful walk in solidarity with those harmed by ICE, and to bear witness to all who have been harmed by state violence. There will be no speeches. After we gather we will walk to the sound of bells through the neighborhood to be fully present and to manifest compassion. As we walk, we invite you to rest your attention on your feet on the ground, your breath, the people and places around you, and all that you see and hear.

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The Handmaids are here.

Alice didn’t actually say the words, she just thought them as she elbowed her husband and pointed in the direction of eight women dressed in heavy red cloaks and stark white bonnets. They stand in two lines of four, perfect posture, heads forward, red gloved hands folded over their bellies.

But what makes Alice shiver a bit is their red masks. This is a silent walk, and seeing their masks makes Alice somehow mute, even though everyone else around her is still speaking in low rumbles as they wait for the signal to start.

Even though it is a nice warm upper-twenties winter day, Alice is chilled from the inside. She wishes she had worn more layers and her warmest winter coat. As she glances at the handmaids once again, trying not to stare, she feels a sort of ripping at the seams of her thoracic spine, like a breeze is getting in underneath her shoulderblades and chilling her from the inside where she can’t get warm again.

Alice recognizes the feeling as her unwelcome-new-friend Grief, who had taken up residence inside her weeks ago.

I guess my silence starts now.

Grief had first arrived with the helicopters in early December.

Because Alice lived close to the Minnesota State Capitol, the helicopters were relentless during the surge. They flew low over her neighborhood, and Alice’s heart decided to match their rhythm. She’d press her palm flat against the th-th-th-thumping behind her sternum, and she’d try to breathe it down, but her heart had tuned itself to the rotors and wouldn’t let go.

At first it just felt like anxiety and confusion with a dash of disbelief. But once Renee Good was killed, it was like all her emotions twirled around in a cloud of dust and a flurry of a dark grey wizard’s cloak, revealing Grief as the master of ceremonies.

When she saw the handmaids, Grief crawled inside her ribcage and was pounding on the walls to be let out.

Ahead of the handmaids, the clergy members and faith leaders gather. Pastors, ministers, rabbis, chaplains, dozens of them, wearing their stoles over their coats in greens and purples, and carrying processional banners, the kind that would be carried into a church. So many different denominations.

Are some of them the ones who kneeled on the pavement at MSP that day?

The cluster of volunteers wearing yellow reflective vests over their coats has started to spread themselves out amongst the crowd, guiding people with smiles and hand gestures to line up, two-by-two, like cars zipper-merging from several lanes into two.

How many people are here? Must be over a thousand.

Then the bells rang, and the low rumble of the crowd went silent.

Alice’s grandmother’s bell was small and heavy, heavily patina-ed. It had a loop just big enough to fit on her pinky finger to the first knuckle where it dangled as she started walking. The clap of metal against metal rang with the natural swing of her arm. A steady pulse she could just feel as she walked.

Grandma, I need you here with me now.

Her husband walked beside her. It took a long time to move into their space in the line. She had a knot in her throat. It wasn’t the I’m-about-to-cry knot. It was more of a pressure from the unzipping feeling between her shoulderblades pushing up through her neck.

Grief refusing to let go.

Once out on the city streets in a long snaking line of walkers, Alice noticed things she normally wouldn’t notice in the city. Mainly, the signs. Sad signs, old worn-out ones, brand-new ones, humorous ones, and stop-you-in-your-tracks signs.

Love for Renee.

It Takes a Village.

ICE OUT.

Give Peace a Chance.

Pretti Good

The pace for the walk was much slower than Alice’s usual walking stride. Every couple of blocks the line slowed to a stop because the front needed to wait for traffic before crossing a street. Reflective-vest volunteers holding their arms out, as patient drivers put their cars in park to let the long line proceed. A thousand people in noble silence, stopping and starting like a pulse.

At a moment when the line stalled almost to still, Alice stopped on a street corner in front a bus shelter in front of two boys who didn’t look a day over fifteen, but were probably in their young twenties. They wore identical black ski caps pulled down over their eyebrows. Thick gaiter masks were pulled up over their noses and ears so that the only skin showing was the whites of their eyes.

They stared straight ahead — not at the walkers, but over them, noses up in a posture that said we know better than you and we are better than you and you are stupid and beneath us. They wore identical heavy black winter coats and heavy black pants and boots. Almost militaristic. Definitely a uniform.

Is this what White Christian Nationalists look like?

One of them broke his stare and looked Alice right in the eye, almost like he’d heard her thinking and wanted her to know she was right.

She smiled.

She actually smiled.

Like her smile could do something to shift him.

He narrowed his gaze for a moment, then quickly looked back up over her head. His nose went slightly higher than before.

Alice felt a shudder run through her body that she literally had to shake off by rattling her bell louder for that one moment.

She went back to reading signs to block the vision of his ice blue eyes piercing into hers.

ICE Agents - Stop Crashing Grindr

Alice chuckled as she read the sign stapled high up on a telephone pole three or four times.

I needed that. Whomever posted that there, thank you.

As the line moved into a more residential area, the signs multiplied. Yard signs. Window Signs. Garden flags. Every house had some kind of sign. Some for the children of Annunciation School. Some for ICE OUT. Some for local political candidates. A few Harris/Walz leftovers. Some professionally done, most handmade.

One house with a front porch that reminded Alice of her own home had several simple black-Sharpie-on-cardboard signs, one for each pane of glass. She didn’t remember what any of them said except the one in the top left corner.

HOW MANY WEREN’T FILMED?

Her back unzipped some more and that familiar breeze rushed through the back of her heart just as the line slowed to a stop right there. Alice stood staring at that sign, reading it and re-reading it, dozens of times in the minute or so they were still.

The only thing that distracted her was the dog two house up..

A pitbull, peeking through the curtains of the picture window, wagging its tail, barked a happy bark. Alice watched her and hoped the dog would bark at her when she saw her, and then went back to reading the sign. Again and again. Each time the dog barked, Alice looked at her. Each time the dog went quiet, Alice looked back at the sign.

Sign. Dog. Sign. Dog.

How many weren’t filmed?

How many are able to go back home?

How many are gone forever?

How many are still safe because of the whistles and neighbors?

Across the street, a tiny hand pulled back the heavy drape just enough to reveal half of a child’s face. Alice waved, and the tiny hand quickly closed the drapes.

Then the front door to the house opened and a young father stepped out, a toddler on his hip. He waved, squinting at the crowd like he hadn’t seen daylight in days.

Or weeks.

The walkers kept moving, ringing their bells. Some waved back. They were only a few blocks from Renee now.

One block away from the memorial site, a woman came out onto her front porch. It had been almost exactly one month since Renee’s death, and this woman was crying big, verbal sobs as she thanked them, over and over and over.

I love you guys! I just love you all so much! Thank you!

No one responded. But Alice was grateful she verbalized what a thousand silent walkers were thinking.

Alice felt her bell wanting to ring more and louder as they approached the memorial.

But there wasn’t time to stop and take in the everything of everything. They were a crowd of a thousand walking in a line two by two. They had to keep moving. So Alice breathed it all in quickly — the flowers, the photos, the messages, the candles, the stuffies, and the prayer flags.

And then she stopped. Holding up the people behind her. What stopped her was the firewood, a pile stacked twenty feet high next to a burning fire pit.

A man sat in a lawn chair beside it, tending to a portable fire pit on his other side.

That fire had been lit the day she died, and someone had tended it 24/7 ever since, for a full month.

Does he live here?

Renee’s memorial was right in front of an apartment building — the same building where the man who filmed her death had been standing. Alice’s heart reached toward the people inside. All of them, living with this on their front lawn. So many strangers coming and going from their home, every day, for a month. And someone, or many someones, keeping that fire going through sub-zero nights, wind, and blizzards.

All those hearts.

All that passion.

All that pain.

All that rage.

So much emotion in that one small space.

Alice stopped and time stood still for that moment in front of the fire because she suddenly felt warm. The fire reached past her coat and her skin and found the place where her thoracic spine had been ripped open for weeks, and it zipped her back up, sealing the seam.

The fire’s warmth, of trees giving their life force in honor of the dead, pushed Grief’s cold fingers away from the stitching and pressed everything back together from the inside.

Her husband gently nudged her hand, ringing the bell, and she started walking again.

The warmth lasted for the entire walk back to the park.

Grief had taken her hand and helped her to swing it to ring the bell with more gusto. He wasn’t inside her anymore. He was beside her, walking with her, swinging her hand the way you would a child on the way to the playground.

This is an excerpt from WOMN- a book about the women of Minnesota and what Operation Metro Surge made of us.

It’s a mutual aid effort — written by us, for us, moving hand to hand the way love does when it’s real. New excerpts will be released as I write them, every Tuesday, here on Fierce Love. When the manuscript is complete, I plan to release it the grassroots way. Self-published, and supported by grief at grounding community gathering events and independent bookstores.

If this chapter found you, it found you for a reason.

If you want to support this effort, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers will receive full chapters (not just excerpts) with my author’s commentary about my process and experience at least once a month.

Please add your voice by sharing in the comments. I’m listening. We all are.

That’s how this works.

That’s how we work.

I love you fiercely,

TeriLeigh 💜