I chose to read “Nightcrawling”, a debut by Leila Mottley, because I lived in Oakland as a little girl in a tough neighborhood.
I spent several years living off High Street (in our cockroach gray house)….
near the funeral homes …
My father, grandparents, and other relatives are all buried in the Jewish funeral home in Oakland.
There are many sides to Oakland.
Bad rap Oakland -and great city Oakland.
Leila Mottley, shows us the ugly side of ‘Bad Rap’ Oakland.
…..the crime, the ghetto neighborhoods, the poverty, and the struggles to survive to stay alive.
When I lived near High Street, I remember walking door to door - [at age 5] - alone - selling camp fire mints …
‘needing’ to sell the ‘most’ chocolate mints in my campfire (Bluebirds) troupe because only one girl got to go to overnight camp ‘free’.
If I didn’t win that contest, I wouldn’t have been able to attend.
My mother had a low paying job at Montgomery Wards, and was financially struggling after my dad died. She was also grieving.
I spent hours a day each weekend walking door-to-door selling those mints along High Street … a very unsafe thing to do for a five year old girl.
I won that contest, and went to overnight camp.
Today — I hate knowing that Oakland still gets a ‘Bad Rap’ reputation— because many of us know it’s a beautiful city!!
However,
it was important that I visit this story — I had already known much of the horrid history - history that must not be forgotten - and crimes that should never be allowed to go unpunished.
I was pulling for greatness for this 17-year-old author even before I started reading her book. I didn’t need to—
as Mottley held her own - with no help from me.
I’m so inspired by her. She wrote a story that needed to be told…
Her writing had emotional fire— one that felt like cockroaches were crawling all over my skin.
Clearly, this is not a sunny-rosey-posey novel….
but it’s passionately written -powerfully affecting- spirited with purpose!
“Downtown Oakland has a whole lot of bars clubs, and holes where people find themselves wasted and dancing at 2 am in the morning”.
“There’s a strip club tucked underneath a yoga studio on the corner, its metal door painted a sparkling black. I can hear the faint sounds of music and even though it’s only five or so in the evening, they’ve got the door propped open. I walk into a room dimly lit by those lightbulbs that look sort of light candles, and a few lone people are propped on the stools or sitting at the circular tables, lurking in the darkest patches of the place, the poles looming large in the center, one woman aerial and another bored”.
Kiara didn’t have a resume, and she didn’t know if she wanted a job stripping… but she was desperate. She used to think the only thing one got from turning eighteen (she was still only seventeen the day she walked into that bar)….was the right to vote.
Ha…. apparently there were other benefits.
For real….
In 2005, a major scandal broke out in the news involving a teenager- a sex worker at the time- in Oakland who was sexually exploited by more than a dozen police officers.
The officers were suspended but no criminal charges were brought against them.
This story tells of the heartbreaking and devastated violence done one young girl — inspired by one case that entered the media — but there were dozens of other cases of sex workers and young women who experience violence at the hands of police and did not have their stories told.
Leila Mottley —
—at age only seventeen— she knew what it felt like to be a young black girl, vulnerable, unprotected, and unseen. When she was growing up, she was often told she had to shield her brother, her dad, and all the black men around her —
—shield their safety, their bodies, and their dreams. But what she learned was that her own safety, body and dreams, was secondary.
In this novel, Kiara was a fictional character but she was a reflection of the types of violence that black and brown women faced regularly.
In 2010, a study found that police sexual violence was the second most reported instance of police misconduct and disproportionately impacts women of color.
With Leila Mottley’s piercing prose, I am reminded that
safety, justice, joy, and love is a birthright!!