Photo by Tyler Small
Cami Thomas, right, with videographer Calvin Tigre
Cami Thomas’ new season of short documentaries about St. Louis premieres this Thursday, September 27—and begins streaming on Amazon the first week of October. A web series, Smoke City takes its name from a remark she heard regularly when she returned home after college: “It’s good you’ve been gone for a while. The smoke has cleared.”
The “smoke” was the unrest after Michael Brown’s death. 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, wishing she could be home and useful.
The people who thought the smoke had cleared were mainly relatives and coworkers in West County. But Thomas lived in Florissant, “and the smoke had not cleared.”
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 are so disconnected. Are we even talking to each other? 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. But she knew lot of people who hadn’t. She started a web series in which each episode introduces viewers to a part of the city people might have misconceptions about, if they’d only seen it from a distance.
“There’s a line in St. Louis. A thick line that we seem to have trouble jumping over even to speak to one another.”
For Season One, Thomas explored Walnut Park, Ballwin, Florissant, South City, and Ferguson. In Season Two, she moves on to Dogtown, Chesterfield, University City, Hazelwood, and the North Side. And now, her opening monologues are a little more vulnerable, a little more honest, a little less carefully polite. “I think I was holding myself back a bit in the first season, and that doesn’t do us any favors,” she explains. “We are adults. We can do this together.”
It’s time to start acting like one city, she says. 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 problem properties around their house, brick by brick, and created a peaceful, pretty street.
Courtesy of Cami Thomas
Thomas' grandparents in front of their Hyde Park house
“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 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 all the time: happy, my friends around, but always knowing, Hey, something might pop up.”
In the third episode, Thomas re-creates a terrifying night when she came home from having tacos in the Central West End with friends, opened her car door, and saw a guy pointing a gun at her. He froze for a second. “I leaned back, and as I was leaning, I kicked him, and he stumbled back, and as I was driving away, he was shooting at my car,” she says, voice tight. “By reflex, I drove to the police station, and when they asked me to describe him, I broke down crying.” 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.”
After the nerve-racking re-creation, she started asking people where they felt safe, and the place she heard most often was Chesterfield. So she interviewed Mark and Candise Uhles, who live there with their 2-year-old, Keel. Candise is African-American; Mark is white and grew up in Ferguson. “This is not the image people have of the typical Chesterfield family,” Thomas says, satisfaction in her voice. “We are fluid; people can move. These invisible lines we put around the city aren’t actual walls.”
Photo by Tyler Small
Thomas interviewing Luke Babich
Her favorite interview was in Episode Two 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 get washed away.
U. City’s diversity made going to school in U. City awesome, Babich says. “By high school, I made some of the best friends who you could ask for. It was weird because being together doing things together day in, day out, 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 and there’s all these resources thrown at you and people expect you to do great things and it opens doors, just by virtue of being there. 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.” His first weekend 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.”
That night, Babich ran, hard, up and down the streets of U. City, and as he passed a grand, disheveled mansion on Delmar that had been vacant his entire life, three police cars pulled to the curb to quiz him down. Three cars, protecting a vacant building owned by rich people who’d never maintained it, he thought, and 15 blocks away, a boy’s been killed.
“So many people idolize this idea of the self-made man,” Babich says quietly. “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. We are always experiencing this division in one way or another, and I had this assumption that I was noticing it the most.”
She speaks clearly about racism, the idleness of simply saying, “I’m not racist” but doing nothing to stop it. She shows the effects. 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 mini-documentary ends with a poem written by Julian Keaton for the series, quoting a few more lines 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.
