By Shannon Herbert

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world. . . . 

-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

My ass is on fire, Sarah thought as she crossed Centinela in front of a phalanx of cars.  After Pilates she could feel every muscle pulling and flexing.  She was sure with each ass-clenching step, the anxious drivers on their sad morning commutes were riddled with jealousy.   When she hit the curb, there was a dead man lying on the sidewalk.  She didn’t pause to see if he was just asleep, like the blanket-covered bodies huddled on almost every bus stop bench.  She didn’t have to.  His head was resting at a grotesque angle to his neck.  His dark skin was brightened by the sun but there was no shimmer of sweat.  There is no way to sleep that soundly that exposed.

No one she crossed the street with stopped.  One couple walked passed the gas station and down the block.  Sarah and the remaining three turned toward the other street and waited for the light to change without looking back.  His denim shirt hanging open, his jeans like shapeless oily rags, his one bare foot.  It was possible, having turned away, to think that he was just another homeless person who had somehow found sleep in the busy junction of busy roads.  They didn’t look at each other either.  

When the light changed, she started crossing and only then began digging in her bag for her phone.  She didn’t look back, but she knew she should call someone.  She would google it: homeless services los angeles.  But her phone wasn’t in her purse.  She started walking with more urgency still fishing, head down, in her purse.  If she found it before she crossed the street, she would turn around and run back to him, no matter how odd it would look to the cars poised eagerly at the light.  She would call from there and then stay with him.  She might check to see if he was alive by putting her fingers against his neck, but she knew, the angle of his head to his neck.  

But she’d forgotten her phone, which she never did, and when her foot hit the far corner she broke into a run and started searching for it the minute she got into her house, without even putting down her bag, looking in all the places it could be: entry table beside the bowl for her keys, bedside table, kitchen counter, and when she couldn’t find it, she started to feel frantic for the first time and irresponsible.  “What’s wrong with you?” she muttered, but not like someone might be dying or dead on the sidewalk.  As she searched the house, she wondered whether she should really call.  Was she over-reacting?  If she couldn’t find it would she go to the neighbors to use theirs?  Would she run into the street and flag down a car?  If she found it, would she call immediately or be distracted by the notifications that were surely piling up?

But she found her phone (it was in her car).  She didn’t unlock it, because it was an emergency and because she was afraid that she would get distracted by the notifications.   She called 9-1-1.  

When the dispatcher picked up, she was very matter-of-fact: there’s a man lying on the southwest corner of Centinela and Washington Blvd, and I don’t think he’s alive.

The dispatcher took all of her information and minutes later there were sirens.  She sat on her couch and listened as they dopplered in, stopped, and then dopplered away.  And then, of course, she unlocked her phone and opened Facebook.  

She was still sort of trembling from the intensity as she scrolled through her newsfeed.  Her friends were obsessing over hurricanes, flooding, a tropical storm, and North Korea was threatening World War III.  Everyone was at a fever pitch and everyday realities felt far away and small.  And she had just walked by a dead body on the streets of Los Angeles.  It suddenly felt urgently important to convey that immediacy, how important it was not to see that tragedy is inextricable from the everyday, not fantastical or particularly far away.  

She was alone in her house, the sirens were gone, but she couldn’t think of anything to do with herself, so she posted it.  Poetic and earnest.  The news makes death and danger seem foreign, a foreign event happening to foreign people—even if they are in Texas—not a dead man lying on the corner of Centinela and Washington Blvd during the morning commute.

She wasn’t really expecting comments, a few likes before it disappeared down the newsfeed.  Her friends barely commented when she posted anything vaguely political.  They liked her workout gains, her pictures of the sunset over the Santa Monica mountains or her cat acting aloof.

But a local friend asked where.  She gave the intersection.  Someone asked if she was okay.  She said she was fine.  

A few hours later, someone confirmed what she had sensed with such visceral urgency: the man was dead.  Someone else, one of the internet’s great overachievers, posted a screenshot of the police announcement.  

These comments kept buoying the original post to the top of her newsfeed, so it stayed current for everyone else.  At this point, she’d just watched clips from the most recent Saturday Night Live, she was embarrassed by what she had written.  It sounded both flowery and dogmatic, like she wanted everyone to do something, or feel something but she didn’t say what.

When she checked again during her lunch break, the comments had started to turn: Is there a reason you didn’t mention he was a black man?

She didn’t normally respond to confrontational posts because she knew she wasn’t going to change anyone’s mind in the middle of a random thread, but she felt like she should respond to someone who was clearly accusing her of being racist.  By the time she sat down because she had something semi-composed in her head, Of course there was.  What difference did it make that he was black?  There was literally a dead man lying on a busy intersection a half block from her house, this was there: Did you check to see if he was dead before you posted this?

It was posted by a friend of a friend.  A friend of a black friend if she was being transparent.  A black friend of a black friend with whom she was not friends.  If she saw the post it was because her black friend pointed it out.

She didn’t check, but neither did any of the 5 or 6 other people who saw him and knew something was wrong.  She was sure of it.  She’d felt a sense for a second of group awareness though only two or three of them barely broke stride before deciding to all keep walking.  None of the drivers who stopped at the light had called either.  Hers was the only 911 call for him.  

She was trying to think of how to post this without sounding defensive, but she didn’t have a chance to.  The next comment read: Did you call 911 before you posted this?

This one was also from a friend of a friend.  Also someone she did not know.  Also black.  Even though she called before she even thought of posting anything, she knew that there was no way she could respond and nothing she could say that didn’t sound like a pathetic excuse.

She knew she couldn’t say that she was afraid to call the police, even though she was.  Because what if he was alive, just a homeless man sleeping, his head at a horrifically unnatural angle to the curb?  If she called the police would he end up in jail?  Or beaten?  Or dead?  

But he was already dead.  She knew that.

After she called, she could have gone to watch over him, to make sure they loaded his body into the ambulance with proper care.

But she didn’t have time to admit that.  The same online overachiever who’d posted the police announcement posted a screenshot of the original time-stamped post, and the time of the 911 call.  There was a 26-minute lag.  She was temporarily vindicated. 

And then came this:  Did you go back to see whether he was dead or alive?  Or did you leave him there for the police to pickup like a dead raccoon on the road?

A friend tried to redirect the comments to homelessness, to the tent city that had appeared in the island next to the on-ramp she took everyday.  But it quickly circled back to race, and to the fact that another white woman had called the police on a black man.  If you didn’t want to seem racist in your post, maybe you shouldn’t have acted like a racist.

Another white bitch scared of a black man even though he’s dead.

You’re lucky to have the police as your clean up service to keep your rich white streets clear. 

After it had turned, it picked up incredible momentum.  Comments were posting simultaneously, while the “still typing” ellipses pulsed.  She turned off her computer.  She thought it would stop.  She assumed people would get bored and move on.  If it didn’t, she would take down the post and end it right there.

When she woke up the next day she was a meme posting totally free of her newsfeed and well beyond her circle of friends. 

Someone had found a picture of her looking bored and aloof and photoshopped it into pictures of victims of domestic assault, stacks of corpses presumably from concentration camps, black bodies hanging from trees.  As new ones were created, a friend texted her screenshots: Have you seen this one?  Another friend asked if she was okay.  I’m fine, she responded.

There were random supporters, lone voices in the wilderness probably just trying to make her public shaming about them:  But she called 911.  No one else did.  This didn’t help.  It just became another meme.  And a hash-tag: #butshecalled.  Sometimes it was shortened to #BSC with a phone emoji next to it, or printed, Barbara Krueger style, white print in a red stripe over a black and white split screen of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy on the phone, or some other combination of powerful black leader and feeble white savior.   

In less than twenty-four hours there were thought pieces.  Dying While Black; Bystander Apathy is Alive and Well; Erasing the Black Body.  There was one that came to her defense: Sarah Angelus is the change we need to see.

The articles proliferated, but she didn’t respond to requests for comment.  She knew anything she said, any explanation or excuse, would proliferate and turn, hydra-headed, back on her.

But when a news station called for an interview, she said yes.  She thought she’d be able to tell her story.  They wanted to interview her on the corner.  She said no.  So she met the interviewer, a well-dressed black man, and a camera man in a green screen studio in a warehouse office up the road from where she’d seen the body. 

She expected to be asked about that day, what she saw, what she did, why.  But the interviewer picked up where the most recent comments must have left off (she’d stopped reading everything but headlines), “Did you not stop to help him because he was black?”

She hadn’t been asked in that way.  It had been intimated, but by the time those intimations emerged, they weren’t questions.  

Now she took the time to think about it, to ask herself if she would’ve stopped if he was white.  She figured they would edit out the pause, so she let herself imagine it all differently: a white man lying perpendicular to the sidewalk, his head at that frightening angle to the curb.  No, she didn’t think she would have.  And maybe that is what is really wrong with this society, this world.  No, that wasn’t the reason I didn’t stop.

It wasn’t race she was afraid of.  It was unmoored men.  She’d been harassed by a man at the beach once, at night.  He said hello to her and a couple of friends, and when they didn’t answer back, he followed them threatening to cut her with a knife.  She’d called 911 then, and he kept walking after them screaming as they got further away.  Even though she could hear him screaming through the phone, the dispatcher had treated it like an unnecessary call.  I can dispatch a car if you would like.  But they’d just run to a more crowded place and then to the car.

She tried to explain this, but the interviewer interrupted her: Was that man black too?

She almost laughed.  Yes.  Yes, he was.  

Why did you fail to say that again?

Because it wasn’t the most salient thing about that night.  I was terrified, but I was also embarrassed because I wasn’t sure whether I was over-reacting.  That seemed to put the interviewer off.  But none of it made it on television.  The edited version of that interview led to the pretty damning conclusion that her racism, even though some allowed that it might be unconscious, caused her to walk away from a dying man on the ground.

That was another thing she knew she couldn’t challenge: the word “dying” had come to replace “dead.”  It was possible, one could infer from the police report, that the man was not dead when the fire engine arrived.  Only “unresponsive.”  So she could have saved him.  She could have rolled him over, relieved pressure on his trachea, so oxygen could flow once again to his brain.  

But she wouldn’t have done that even if he had been dying, not dead.  She knew you’re not supposed to move someone with a neck injury, and there was a neck injury.  She could still call it up in her mind, the angle.

In her defense, the police said she did the right thing.  As someone who has no medical training, she was right to immediately call the authorities.

But she didn’t start running for help immediately.  If she thought he might be alive, shouldn’t she have been running?  Was it an emergency for her?

But she called.  She  was the only one.

And she crossed the street with 5 or 6 other people, and they weren’t all white.  She never came out and said that.  It was a black man with long dreads and a sharp white and blue button down who swerved across the sidewalk so he almost ran into her because he was trying to avoid stepping over the man’s arm, and also, shielding his date from it.  Or maybe he was trying to get away from it himself.  She didn’t know, but she knew he saw it too, and he didn’t call.

But she didn’t say that.  That’d just be fuel in the fire.  So she kept her mouth shut.

If there are stages to the process of internet shaming that’s one of them.  She went dormant, to let the embers cool, so eventually Trump could do something egregious that everyone could condemn, and she would be briefly forgiven or forgotten.

But the embers didn’t go out completely.  They identified the man and put up a plaque on the corner.  On the anniversary of his death, they held a memorial.  She answered a few calls.  It felt like penance.  She didn’t go to the memorial even though it was a half block away from her house.

There was a thread about that, which was silenced by one comment: Why would she suddenly go now, a year later?

She couldn’t answer that question, but she answered others.  Over the year she’d rehearsed and tested out answers like testing a sword for strength and soundness, could it withstand pressure from all angles?  Would it project the persona that was true?  Or at least less reprehensible than the one that had solidified and only recently started softening.  

She longed for the ability to control what she looked like to the world.  But she knew better than to say that.  

A little after the anniversary L.A. loosened its Good Samaritan laws so that, presumably, something like this would never happen again.  A local reporter called for her opinion.  She didn’t think the law had anything to do with her, or what happened.  He was dead.  There are dead men on our streets.  She couldn’t have saved him.  

But she couldn’t say that.  She applauded the law.  Said good samaritans should be celebrated.

“Do you think of yourself as a good samaritan?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you want to expand on that?”

“No, I don’t.”

Then he asked the question she was most wary of: “Do you ever get angry that you got targeted?  I mean, you were the one who called the police.” 

She couldn’t evade it.  The question would continue to appear in one form or another every year on the anniversary of his death:

Why did people target the one person who actually called the police?

Because she didn’t go to him. 

And drop to one knee.

And put her hand on his dead sun-warmed skin.