Spaced City
By John Nova Lomax
The weekend visit to Houston had been going well enough for Army Sergeant Mohamed Sesay. Now stationed at Killeen's Fort Hood, he'd been back in the States for less than a week, after serving for more than a year at Camp Bucca prison in Iraq, where he had helped guard the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 detainees — many of whom had been transferred there from Abu Ghraib.
But now that he was back in America, the Sierra Leonean-American soldier came to Houston to have some fun at the invitation of his friend Lamine Faye, a Houstonian originally from Senegal.
The two West Africans hit several clubs in Midtown and on Washington Avenue on Friday night, and on Saturday started out downtown. All without incident. Their luck would change when they decided to end their evening at Rice Village's Bronx Bar.
Sesay and Faye arrived around midnight. On their way from their car to the door, they ran into a knot of people — mostly black and Hispanic — standing around outside the club. These strangers warned Faye and Sesay to expect trouble. "They told us that we weren't going to be allowed in the club," Sesay tells Hair Balls. "They said minorities were not being allowed in."
"We looked at him like he was crazy," says Faye of one of the guys they talked to outside the bar. "We told him he had to be joking. He said, 'I'm not even being funny. This is for real. I've been here for 15 minutes, and this guy lets every white person walk into this club and he's not letting any minorities in.' When we heard that, we had to go and see for ourselves."
The two men walked up to the door, where the bouncer told them to wait. And they did. And kept waiting and waiting, as the bouncer let in a long string of white people. "I was thinking, 'He said to wait. All right, I'll be patient,'" remembers Sesay.
After five or ten minutes, a group of women burst out of the club. "They were furious, I guess because they had been observing the bouncer all night," Sesay says. "They came out and said, 'Get out of the way. We're leaving this club because you're not letting minorities get in all night.'"
Sesay asked the bouncer if that was true. According to Sesay, the bouncer said, "Hey man, I told you to wait. You'll have to wait."
Two Houston Police officers were stationed by the door, in uniform but presumably off-duty. Sesay approached one of them. "I said, 'Officer, you see what's going on here? Can't you do something? And he said there was nothing he could do, 'cause he was just security."
Sesay was getting upset, which worried Faye. "He was getting really frustrated, and I was getting nervous because I don't know if he was suffering from PTSD or what the heck he was gonna do," he remembers. "But I could see from his face that he was really getting agitated."
But the soldier didn't quite lose it. He was still trying to reason. "I said, 'Hey man, if I could put my life on the line for 14 months for this country, I should be able to go in any club that I want to."
Around this time, the second policeman came down from his perch on the stairs near the club's entrance. According to Faye, this policeman — Lopez by name — was belligerent.
"He said, 'Calm your ass down or I'm gonna fuckin' Tase you up with a gun.' Like yellin' at him in front of everybody. Really cursin' him out, telling him to shut the fuck up and stuff."
Faye and Sesay left. They looked back at the club and saw the cops and the bouncer exchange high fives, congratulating each other on a job well done.
"It wasn't worth fighting for," says Sesay. "But I swore I was gonna let the public know, and that I was gonna file a complaint about it. Nothing like this should be tolerated in this country. Every race in this country fights in the military. If you've been in the military, you see all races — Hispanics, blacks, whites, Polish. All races. We all put our lives on the line for this country, and none of us should be refused service wherever they go. Nobody."
And Faye and Sesay were not alone. If you Google "Bronx Bar" and racist, you get a surprising number of hits. Both the Yelp and Citysearch capsules for the club turn up plenty of smoke, but it could be just that. Those reviews could conceivably be the work of a rival club owner stirring up trouble.
But then you are also steered toward the blog of Demetrius D. Walker, a graduate of Vanderbilt University. There, under the title "Racism Still Exists In the Obama Age," you find a tale similar to that of Faye and Sesay. Walker, a young black male, successfully entered the club one night, but his friend, a rapper named REO, had lagged behind the racially mixed group. When he got to the door minutes after his friends, he was turned away by the bouncer.
