The Kids on the Stage

The two little girls have been up there for a while. About ten years old, they’re wearing long dark dresses and headscarves, like smaller versions of the women who brought them. They’ve been standing in a corner of the stage with their arms raised, patiently, as if in class. Every now and the woman and the man next to them whisper something in their ears.

Gavin Newsom won’t take their questions. The room, after all, is full. This is another one of the San Francisco mayor’s town hall meetings around the state, pre-campaign campaign stops for the 2010 race for governor. Though the meetings have been billed as a chance for Newsom to get to know the issues of places outside San Francisco, they’re also an opportunity for him to shine. The Napa crowd is receptive. One man spends his question asking Newsom if he can take the mayor’s picture and load it onto his Facebook page.

Yet the kids still stand. They are part of a group from Bayview which has dogged Newsom at each meeting. Two nights ago in Oakland they and people sympathetic to them overran the circulating microphone, shouting questions instead of waiting for a turn. Newspaper articles made that Oakland meeting seem like a circus, nearly a brawl.

It doesn’t feel like a circus tonight, except for those kids, and that the Bayview group won’t stop asking questions. As I watch the meeting, the kids’ raised hands seem like something of a secret weapon, an ace in the hole, pushed up to the stage after Newsom stopped taking questions from the black people in the room.

It’s sad that I can say that, but it’s true. It’s easy to tell who’s from Bayview and who isn’t, some are seated in the folding chairs laid out for the Napa crowd but most of them stand along the walls, some just outside the doors. Some of them, in suits, look like bodyguards – one is still wearing sunglasses even though the sun set fifteen minutes ago.

Their complaints are familiar: Lennar, the company slated to redevelop a great deal of the existing neighborhood, has been given too much. In places the soil is still too polluted to build on or to live by. Promises the city made have not been kept. The complaints, Newsom’s answers and the way the people from Bayview shake their heads and mutter angrily when he responds, all of it has a practiced quality.

But the kids! They’re still up there. After a while each girl supports her raised arm with a free hand.

After it’s all over, after the Facebook man asks his question and Newsom is applauded for his support of the gay community, the Napa crowd, minnow-like, clusters around Newsom to ask him more about his environmental policy. A woman confronts the group from Bayview, shouting at them for bringing San Francisco’s issues to Napa, saying they had stolen the smaller community’s chance to let Newsom, the potential gubernatorial candidate, know what is important to them. I go up to the girls, who are looking down, being patted and comforted.

I ask the older girl what her question had been.

“About Lennar,” she says, close to tears. She is holding piece of paper with something of a speech written on it. Could that be her handwriting? The writing looks, perhaps, too neat to be hers, but she could be a precocious student. How old is she?

An undercurrent of opportunism runs through this meeting. It’s in Newsom’s presence and his answers, in the way the Bayview group has followed him from town to town, in the emotional punch a critical question from a little girl might pack. I wonder whose idea it was for the children to come on stage and raise their hands.

Seeing me speaking to the girl, a woman in green takes her elbow and leads her away.

I feel like a jerk for asking anything of a child.