Stories from Wood Street on the violence of sweeps
"We had nothing, we were wiped out."
John Bowman Jonasko
One of the worst crises that happened to me was when the first time CalTrans evicted me and street family from Mosswood park. They came at 8 am in the morning with at least 20 CalTrans workers dressed in orange and fluorescent green vests and garbage bags in hand. They said we had 5 minutes to get some of our personal belongings and then we had to get out of the way. They came through and munched through all our stuff within 30 minutes. Within the next hour all we had left was a few tents and a suitcase of clothes. We had nothing, we were wiped out. The worst thing about that was we knew nobody cared about our situation at that time. CalTrans packed up their equipment and workers and drove the fuck off. There were know referrals nor did they give any suggestions where to go! We were homeless—for the very first time I felt homeless.
Tony Ray Allen
My friend got murdered last month—by the time I got there, the fire it burned down, and then my trailer burned down 3 times and they gave us a room for 3 weeks but then kicked us out. I’m just trying to get another trailer. I can’t just dread on it, I just have to get up and start over again. I learned how to survive quickly after spending half my life in jail. I learned how to get my stuff back quickly and it keeps getting taken from me.
Leejay
I’ve had so many things that have fucked me up in my life, it’s way too much bullshit from the same thang we’ve all heard before, but one thing that I’ve been dealing with that I can’t really grasp the reason—and I’m not sure if I’ll ever get it answered—but when I realized my mother hates me because I’m black, I’m thinking maybe I fucked up things for her with my family because I wasn’t really accepted. She uses me as the “way you don’t wanna live when you grow up.” Or she never talked bad about my father that beat her numerous times but she uses “well you can go live with your mom” as a threat or a punishment to my children, and the fucked up thing is that she has tried to alienate me from my babies by feeding them hateful lies poison false memories making up stories of drugs & abuse & them being both abused by drugs to where my babies questioned me for truths, but I was able to spark their memories.
Video Transcript: My name is Tony Ray Allen and my story is about Wood Street. They had an RV park over there and the reason we went up to the RV park is they said they would get all our RVs fixed, make sure that when we leave them there we’d be legit and they couldn’t take our RVs but went up there and access gives them seven things that we wanted so we gave them seven things we wanted but after two—a year and a half of this we never got any of it. The electricity stuff was messed up up here so we got a lot of guys were kind of trying to fix it to keep you going but one of the wires caught my vehicle on fire and they didn’t do anything about it, so I ended up getting another one in the same spot and that one a lady gets out of jail—I mean she didn’t get out of jail, her boyfriend got out of jail and didn’t wanna be with her anymore so she said she was going to burn something but then nobody believed it. She set hers on fire by the neighbor, killed his dog, and he had a heart attack in front of mine and another person burned up all of his and put us in a room for three weeks. After the third week they put us out and we didn’t have no say about getting another RV or no nothing and here I am, homeless.
