Photography by Henry Trinh
The “smoke” in the web series Smoke City is the unrest after Michael Brown’s death. Cami Thomas had been home that August, had hit the streets to protest. Then she’d returned to New Orleans for her senior year of college and thought of little else all year. The people who told her the smoke had cleared were in West County. But she lived in Florissant, and in her mind, it had only been a matter of time before something like Ferguson erupted.
“People kept saying it came out of nowhere,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought, ‘Wow. We live in the same city, and we are experiencing a different version of the city every day.’”
Thomas had gone to a private high school in Ladue and was now working in University City; she’d slid in and out of the various bubbles in which St. Louisans live. She started a documentary web series (now streaming on Amazon). Each episode introduces a place—Ballwin, Walnut Park, Hazelwood, South City, the North Side—that people might have misconceptions about if they’d only seen it from a distance.
By season two, her opening monologues were a little more vulnerable, a little more honest. “I was holding myself back, and that doesn’t do us any favors,” she says. “We are adults. We can do this together.”
So she shows it all, softening the sirens and tear-gassed protests with bits of everyday joy—a scruffy little dog, a young couple intensely in love, an adorable toddler. She intercuts the safety and quiet racial tensions of Chesterfield with places of deep beauty on the North Side. She explores an abandoned school covered in graffiti and a block in Hyde Park where her grandparents, instead of leaving, bought up all the dilapidated properties around their house and created a peaceful, pretty street.
“The strategy behind the opening,” she says as we watch an episode together, “was just having as much fun as possible”—there are gorgeous scenes of swimming underwater or sitting in the hoop on a basketball court—“as the voice of the protests and police sirens cut in, just to show that these things coexist. That’s kind of how I feel in St. Louis: happy, my friends around, but always knowing, Hey, something might pop up.”
In the third episode, Thomas re-creates the night she came home, opened her car door, and saw a guy pointing a gun at her. She managed to drive away, and as she did, he was shooting at her car. When police asked for a description, all she could say was “a young black male in a hoodie.” And at that, all the layers rose up at once: the irony, the injustice, the terror of violence, the reasons beneath it.
“People don’t necessarily create monsters,” she says, “but the decisions we make, the policies we enact, can, in fact, make our greatest fears a reality.”
Photography by Tyler Small
Her favorite interview, in episode two, was with Luke Babich, who’s from University City and describes it as “kind of a microcosm of St. Louis as a whole…sliced so that the white part of the city is in one ward, the black part is in the Third Ward, and Ward Two is in a state of flux. For a long time, it was also a black ward, and now it’s in this position where either it will gentrify, as the work coming out of Wash. U., coming out of the Loop, pushes students this way, pushes wealth this way.” A lot of good can come with gentrification, he adds, but when it’s not done right, all the good in a neighborhood can be washed away.
U. City’s diversity made going to school there awesome, Babich says. “By high school, I’d made some of the best friends who you could ask for. It was weird, because you lose track of the fact that there ever was that divide. We’re spending every waking minute together… It wasn’t until we hit graduation that all those divides manifest inside your lives again.”
He’d gone off to Stanford, “this university where the sky’s the limit. Anyone I know who really, really loves St. Louis feels, I think, that moment—that moment when you realized that anything that’s good that’s happening for you is a little bit arbitrary.”
Back home, he called all his friends. “‘Hey, it’s great you’re back in town. When are we gonna meet up?’” one asked. “And then he didn’t reply for two hours, and I got a message”—Babich’s voice cracks—“saying he’d been killed on Olive.” He pauses. “So many people idolize this idea of the self-made man, and what a joke that turns out to be. You don’t realize how many layers of protection you have to have just to not end up dead.”
Thomas spent hours listening to that interview, editing it but also processing it: “He’s a white male, but that’s how I feel as well. It’s almost a survivor’s guilt. Some of the people I grew up with are in jail or dead, and it feels very…arbitrary.”
She speaks clearly about racism, the idleness of simply saying, “I’m not racist,” but doing nothing to stop it. Yet the theme of the last episode is love: “If I say ‘North Side’ and ask someone to write down the first three words that come to mind, I don’t know if love is one of them,” she says, “but for me it’s the first one.”
Each episode ends with a poem written by Julian Keaton for the series, a few more lines quoted each time:
We cut from a different cloth.
We from a city that pimp butterflies, turning them into pale moths.
You may look at it as being a pest; some look at it as being unruly
But it’s interesting how we’ve turned our submerged pain of death into a thing full of beauty.
