(Dis)location: Black Exodus

Marie Harrison

Watch the video about Marie above or find it here

Where is your family from?
       I wasn’t born and raised in San Francisco. I was born and raised in Missouri—Kansas City. My mom used to clean houses and she worked for a restaurant. She was the most spectacular cook I’ve ever known. I miss that.

       We moved to California because my dad could not find work in Missouri during the winter time. He was a jack of all trades and a master of none. My dad did everything including washing dishes for different restaurants so that we would be provided for. He’d build houses. He worked on the freeways. He worked as a longshoreman. He was a plumber. He was a carpenter. He was a cement layer. My dad did everything. He came out [to California]. Two years later, he sent for my mom and the rest of the children. We moved to California a week after I turned 16. We lived in the Western Addition, and from there we were displaced and moved into Bayview. We were transplants from the Fillmore to Bayview, once Redevelopment started.
       Do you remember the houses that they had sitting down across from the park, down off behind Turk and Golden Gate? They had houses, these old houses sitting on cement blocks that they lifted up off of their foundations. They were selling them for $1 and guaranteeing you that if you bought one, that the bank would loan you the money to fix it up and have it set on a foundation in some of the areas where they had cleaned out right behind Geary.
       I remember a friend of mine—she worked the cosmetic counters for Nordstrom and her sister was a bus driver. Her sister wanted to buy one [of the houses]. She kept getting rejected for one reason or another, and she made very good money. So her and her sister went together thinking, “If it’s the money, what you make and what I make—we ought to be able to buy this house.” She was sitting in the break room one day and she was ranting like mad that they could not, together with their income, buy the house.
       The next time I saw her, they had bought this house, but how they got the house was that a friend of the sister’s who was a bus driver, who was a white lady, went down. She bought the house for the $1, the bank gave her the loan, she sold the house to them, and they had it fixed up just the way they wanted. It was beautiful when they finished it. But for a whole year, the title of the house had to remain in this lady’s name, even though she never moved into it. She simply helped them get over the—for the lack of a nicer word—the bullshit. That’s where the racism comes in, when the banks won’t assist the community. A stranger could come in and borrow whatever it takes to purchase your house from you, but you couldn’t borrow enough money to hold on to it. That’s racism in its worst form. Redlining should be written across their foreheads.

       I think San Francisco is one of the most beautiful cities. It is really truly beautiful. However, it is the most racist city I’ve ever had the displeasure, not just living in, but visiting. I have sit up in meetings, and sometimes being the only Black face there, and had people say things to me like, “Oh, my God, you mean to tell me you live over there with those people?”
Well, sweetheart, I am those people.
       I’m proud of being Black. I was raised by a Black man and a Black woman who were very proud of themselves, because they picked themselves up from nothing.
       We were never rich and we were never going to be rich, with nine children. I cannot remember a day or a night ever going to bed hungry. I cannot remember a day or a night ever wondering, “Where am I gonna lay my head at tonight?”

Tell us about your connection to the shipyard.
       That shipyard was considered by a lot of folks who came out of the South a lifesaver. It was the very first job for a lot of folks that actually paid them what we considered a livable wage. It allowed families to reunite. If you left, like my dad did, looking for a job, that job, a permanent job at the shipyard meant that you could bring your family here.
       You might find someone that wasn’t a Black family who lived in maybe every fourth house, but those three were all owned by Black families, because they were able to afford them then. They were able to send their children to college. I don’t know how to explain to you how important that job was to a lot of families.
       When that shipyard closed, it was devastating. I remember watching and discussing with folks the trauma that they were going through when they had to tell their children we could no longer go to college. You had to get out and help feed the family.
       I used my sister’s California ID to get a job at the shipyard because I was too young. I was turning 17, but the navy initially wasn’t hiring civilians that weren’t at least 18 and over, and so I used my sister’s ID. Didn’t have a picture on it—it was just a California ID. So I used it and I got the job. For a long time I couldn’t remember how old I was because I had been so practiced [in] using her birth date.
       I was a file clerk specialist. I worked in buildings on Area C, in the office buildings there. It was a very tall building, with a barrage of glass windows. Right across from us was a dry dock where they would bring ships. They would bring these ships in and sandblast.
       I rode the bus in. You would be covered with little white stuff all over your clothes. Every time you come in, back into the office, everybody was standing at the door doing this: your hands was the broom to get all the stuff off. You would end up with stuff in your hair, so you were constantly picking at your head or going into the ladies’ room and re-combing your hair. It was so visible. It was very visible, even though it was maybe a spot here, spot there. It was all over.
       It was the asbestos from them sandblasting drums that came out of these ships. They were big, round drums. Some were long, some were round and fat looking. The men would dress in these white things that covered up all their clothes. Not all of them though—that’s what’s strange.
       I didn’t know then that it was asbestos. I didn’t know then that it was a cancer causer. I didn’t know any of that kind of stuff, so we didn’t worry.
        My dad worked there. My husband worked on the dry docks, down toward pier 70. My uncle used to work out there on the dry docks. 
       They would take thick, yucky-looking Black stuff off these ships. They would start it off wrong by digging a hole and dumping it in there. It started creating little sinkholes because the oil was eroding the sand and things started to fall, so they dug it out. They covered the hole with cement, then dumped the oil back in. The cement was supposed to stop the oil from leaching into the surrounding grounds.
       One gentleman—he was a big guy, he used to be a big guy, but he wasn’t a big guy anymore, when he came and talked to Dr. Tompkins about this. He would swell up—these puff pockets all over his body. It was like he was perspiring. All of a sudden, for no reason at all, they would just start to leach, all through his clothes. He was constantly changing shirts and pants.
       It was something to do with the big barrels, he believed, of contamination, when he worked out there. He used to lift them up. He didn’t wait for the forklift. They buried a lot of that stuff in Parcel E. He was not outfitted with protective clothing. They wore their own clothes. Mostly, the men who worked outside in the open fields—they weren’t advised to wear protective clothing.
       No one ever even attempted to explain that to us—the potential dangers. We found out later. It’s sad.
       I sat on the RAB [Restoration Advisory Board]2 for the shipyard after its closure. I think at one point I was the longest sitting community person on that board. I had been on that board for at least 15 years, if not more. The more I found out, the sicker I got. All of this stuff was going on and nobody said any of that to us.
       I remember asking at a community meeting about something that, when I was working out there, I saw.
       First, the commanding officer—he denied it.
       Then he said, “You don’t understand.”
       Then they said, “Yes, but we dug those out and cleaned it up.”
       I was still sitting on the Restoration Advisory Board until the Commanding Officer, or, he was an ex-Commanding Officer, decided that we were just too argumentative to get anything done. He petitioned the Secretary of the Navy, and someone else in the BRAC [Base Realignment and Closure] office, to shut down our RAB. That created such a ruckus.

       As it turns out, we were right. We were more than right. And, they were in denial. We were right about the improper cleanup.
       Their intent was that we were to come to these meetings, and hear everything they had to say, and say nothing. Just agree with them, because they are who they are. They liked to take pictures of us, and send them back to the BRAC office to say, “See, the community is fully involved.”
       I’m thinking, “No. No, that doesn’t work for me.”
       And, God bless America, it didn’t work for any of the folks that were sitting there.
       We started to really dig in, and educate ourselves on cleanup processes. What exactly was left in there? And what does this mean? How harmful is this to the human body, in any amount? What if you add a little bit of this, and a little bit of that?
       Finally, he said that he decided that we weren’t the ideal board, because we asked too many questions. We held up things. The smarter we got about what we were doing, we became a handicap to him. So, he needed to shut it down. We wouldn’t approve anything that didn’t sound right to us.

What health effects did residents experience?
       A lot of people, up on the hill, have died from one thing or the other. From asthma, cancers, you name it. Our asthma rates, our cancer rates, our heart disease rates, the premature babies—there’s something going on that’s not right. We’re not scientists and we’re not doctors, but you can’t tell us that there’s not something going on.
       On my block alone, on Quesada, and this was before my husband died, there had been eight men who died from two different types of cancer.
       Then if you go across the street, cross Third Street, down Quesada a block, there used to be a duplex. Two of the women upstairs had breast cancer. The person on the bottom, their mother who lived with them, she had breast cancer. You cross the street, and the woman lived in the triplex across the street, two of those out of that four units had breast cancer.
       Can you spell “cluster”?
       Up on top of the hill, one household had children. Two of their daughters—babies were born one day and died the next. One’s heart was not covered with a protective skin or muscle. Something is wrong.
       One of the mothers had breast cancer. One of the daughters had breast cancer. One of the brothers had asthma so bad and a skin rash that would flare up. At nighttime, his mother would tie his hands up because he would scratch himself till he bled. Got to where he was rubbing himself so hard at nighttime, they literally had welts.
       Mavis is experiencing health issues. Tessie just died in July. Like I said, on my block alone, eight men died from cancer before my husband died. He had colon cancer.
       Oh my God. A lot of people. I just know too many people who’ve died. I don’t know a block in Bayview where I don’t know somebody who has not died. It’s hurtful, because you have to wonder: oh my God, am I next?
       I ask myself that question now a lot because I just recently discovered that I have a lung disease. My doctor said the whole bottom half of my lungs are scarred up. My breathing has been terribly restricted.
       I’ve never been sick before. I used to brag about being the oddball because I was the exception to all the illnesses. All my life, I’ve never been sick. The only time I’ve ever been in the hospital was when I had my babies. I had my first cold when I was in my 50s.
       I would say that my lung disease is a product of, one, my work, and, two, the fact that the bulk of my time was spent in Bayview, on that shipyard, or at that power plant.
        For me, simply acknowledging that we were correct is not enough. It’s not even enough to apologize for the damage, because you can’t repair that damage. The only thing that would work would be that they stop, right now, and resolve to clean that shipyard up to the highest quality. Do it right. And that we are allowed, as community members, to have oversight.

Tell us about the closure of the PG&E plant. What was the motivation for organizing?
       My grandson, Roman, and his brother, Giovonni—every morning, they would wake up, and their sheets would be bloody, their pillows would be bloody. They were having nosebleeds. They stayed directly across the street from the power plant before it closed down. Giovonni would have nose bleeds and a day or so later he would be okay. Roman would be nosebleeds, breaking out in rashes, and it would take him a longer time to regroup and get better. This little kid right here was the worst. I wanted to see him be able to breathe without choking himself.
       I used to work with the Southeast Alliance for Environmental Justice. When we parted ways I was looking for someone who would fight the good fight and it wouldn’t rely on how much money we could raise. Once money runs out, half the time they don’t say goodbye. They are gone.
       Working with Greenaction to shut down the power plant was really where I jumped into the whole thing with both feet.
       We started relating that to the power plant and the emissions. I’m not a scientist. I just had my gut feeling, and no one really to help me scientifically understand it, until we started meeting with PG&E, and finding things out.
      I started to learn a lot of things that I don’t think they intended for a mother or grandmother to know—infuriated me to no end. I was taught once you dig in on something, you go all in, or just don’t go at all. So, we were going all in.

       I worked with a bunch of mothers on top of the hill, in Hunters View. After eight years, we were successful in forcing PG&E to shut down.
       The day that PG&E made that announcement, Tessie went up to her office up on the hill, in public housing, and put together, out of her own pocket, a celebration.
        She barbecued everything she could put her hands on—chicken, ribs. Whatever she had in her freezer, she barbecued. She fixed great big pans of salad and invited everybody in to celebrate, made a big ol’ pot of soup. She just wanted to feed everybody and have everybody have a good time. That’s the kind of a person she was.
       She’s gone now. They used to say that wherever you saw Marie, you saw Tessie. We were like two peas in a pod. Every place I went, she went. Every place she went, I went. I’m at a loss without her now, because I was so used to being able to rely on her being there.
       We were happy, and we didn’t make a mistake of cheering and going away. That’s what happens in a lot of communities that have issues—they cheer and they applaud, and then go home. We learned early on not to cheer and go away.

Interview by Jin Zhu and Alexandra Lacey
Edited by Maya Sisneros and Jin Zhu
Thread portrait by William Rhodes

Endnotes
1.   See the University of Richmond’s feature, “Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal America,” for an interactive map of San Francisco’s redlined districts.
2.   According to 1994 Department of Defense guidelines, Restoration Advisory Boards are required to be “formed at all closing installations and at non-closing installations where the local community expresses interest.”













 

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