Fire in the Streets (2 page)

“We will.” He doesn't need to tell us. It's how we survive.

I'm still amazed that the girls and I are being allowed to come along. We're assigned to help Hamlin and the guys set up, and then we're supposed to leave, but I'm planning to stay as long as possible. At least long enough to hear Bobby Seale speak.

“What time does Bobby come onstage?” I ask. Now that the silence is broken, it's going to be hard for me to keep my mouth shut. Talking stops me from thinking, and when my
thoughts are all about how I hope I don't die today, that's probably a good thing.

“Sometime this afternoon,” Hamlin answers. “He's flying in from Oakland now.”

Emmalee stirs a little. She wants to meet Bobby too, I know. She likes reading his writings, almost as much as she likes reading Huey's. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale are the Black Panther Party founders. Huey is the Panthers' minister of defense and Bobby's the general chairman of the party, which was started in Oakland, California, but stretches across the whole country now.

“Is Bobby coming to the office later too? I can't wait to see him in person,” I blurt. “I want to hear him speak up close. It's so exciting.”

“Yeah,” Hamlin says. He's all cool about it because he's met Bobby in person lots of times. Hamlin had been out in Oakland for the past few months, learning about how the Panthers operate out there, and came back to help get the Chicago chapter up and running smoothly. So far, so good.

“How much farther?” I ask. The truck has moved less than half a block in the whole time we've been talking.

“I don't know,” Hamlin says. “Might be as close as we're gonna get.”

Raheem knocks on the back window. “We can hoof it from here,” he calls. “This is taking forever.”

Hamlin tosses him a thumbs-up and begins a several-minutes-long ease over to the right-hand side of the street.

We're closer to the center of things now. Through the gaps between the buildings, the crowd teems. From our slight distance their heads bob in a small swirling mass. The chanting and roaring rolls toward us in waves. Up close will be . . . I still don't know what it'll be like, just that I have some wrong feeling about it all.

“Okay, girls,” Hamlin says as the tires skim the curb.

Patrice levers open the door and we pile out onto the sidewalk. We stand at the edge while Raheem and Gumbo unload the boxes, pausing every couple of minutes to let Hamlin roll the truck forward with traffic. Raheem stands in the back handing boxes down and Gumbo's on the street with us, stacking them on the hand truck they borrowed from someone's job.

When the hand truck is full, what's left in the pickup's bed are some loose bags and the Black Panther Party banner we'll be carrying. Raheem starts handing things to us.

Emmalee slings all the cloth bags over her shoulders. She looks like a horse with saddlebags out of some cowboy picture. Patrice and I kind of laugh.

“What?” she says.

“Nothing.” Patrice grins, all sweet and innocent. Emmalee narrows her eyes, not a bit fooled. We've been
friends too long for any kind of wool to be pulled.

“Neigh. Neeeeeigh.” I paw the ground with my toe. Patrice busts up. Emmalee glares.

Then Raheem hands down the tall poles we're gonna use to hang up the banner. Patrice takes them in her hands, straightens up, and turns real serious all of a sudden. It's like—
zap
—called up for duty.

Emmalee gets in on the joke. “Spear carrier,” she whispers. Patrice's mouth twitches, but she holds the smile off, makes a fierce warrior face instead.

“Aieee.” She pounds the poles on the ground.

Laughing lets the nervous ache in my stomach ease up for a second. Maybe we all feel the same, 'cause for a minute we get to grinning.

Raheem jumps down from the truck bed and dumps the banner into my arms. It's heavier than I expected. I clutch it tight, nearly bending forward under the weight of it, and wait for the girls to make a joke on me. But they're staring at something behind me, and they aren't smiling anymore.

A clump of policemen—six, no, eight—marches along the sidewalk, right toward us. They're half a block away, but their presence pushes out around them like a cloud. Clad in their pale blue shirts with helmets to match. Batons dangling from their belts like little warning flags.

T
HE POLICE BRUSH BY US WITHOUT
stopping. Seeing them gives me a chill, all the same. I try to shake the cold feeling, to get brave inside, but I can't. Where there are cops, there's trouble. Never fails.

Just last week, a pair of cops blipped their siren at us for crossing on the red. Jumped out of the car and started yelling. Came over to us. We stood shaking in the crosswalk, thought we were goners for sure. But they just shouted awhile. Laughed at Emmalee's “pickaninny tears.” That's what they called it.

I see cops, and I can't help but think about the worse things too. My friend Bucky getting beat with a baton on the street right in front of me. That was six months ago, but I still wake up some mornings thinking about how broken they made him look. How small.

Senseless things. Once, when I was little, Raheem was
walking me home from school and he was doing this airplane thing with his arms to make me laugh. Raheem was little, too—maybe eleven—but already kind of tall, with long arms, which was why it was funny watching him zoom around. He tripped on a sidewalk crack and stumbled, caught his balance by leaning his hands and belly against the side of a parked sedan. Cop came up out of nowhere, accused Raheem of trying to steal the car. Got the handcuffs out and everything. A white man came out of a store just then. Didn't even say nothing, but didn't move along, either. He stood there watching, and the cop backed off. I didn't recognize the white man, didn't know what he was doing down in the neighborhood, but now I know him being there, seeing it, might have been all that saved Raheem from getting scooped up. Act of God or something. After the cop left, Raheem picked me up and hugged me and made me promise never to tell anyone. He acted like it was a one-time thing, a secret. But I learned the lesson good that day: In the neighborhood, you always got to be on your toes.

When the cops are past, when the moment is over, I look toward Raheem. Feeling glad he's here today, which is all that matters. Today. Like he says sometimes—there's a lot of “what if” in our lives; doesn't do any good to dwell on it.

“We'll go down to the corner and wait for you,” Raheem says through the truck window.

Hamlin shakes his head. “Don't wait. No idea how long I'll be.”

“Look for us by the stage.” Raheem slaps the open window. “Hopefully we can get the banner up quick. That'll help.”

We start moving toward the demonstration. “Pigs are out in force,” Gumbo murmurs as we walk.

He's right. Cops everywhere, lining the edges of the park around where the protesters have begun to gather. Seeing them in their straight, cold, black-and-blue rows—the only familiar sight before me—sends a shiver across my back. We'll have to cross through in order to join the protesters behind them. Usually, behind the police is the place I
want
to get to, but nothing back there seems comforting. I can't see a single hint of brown skin anywhere, except ours.

Emmalee works her fingers into the crook of my arm and pulls closer. I figure she's thinking the same thing as me, that we've never seen so many white faces all in one place before. Except maybe from a distance, or maybe on TV. Leroy promised us the people in the crowd are our allies, but it still feels strange walking into them.

We shift toward a gap in the police barricades. The officers are lined up in double rows. I look at the crowd, and I
look at the stern-faced cops. I don't understand why there are so many, because everyone here is white. It makes me scared, scared that they've been waiting for us.

I feel all their eyes on us as we get closer. Little round helmets. Chubby cheeks.
Pigs
, I think, trying to calm myself down. It doesn't really work.

A rippling banner posted high on one of the buildings says:
WELCOME, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION DELEGATES
. It's signed by Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago. King of the pigs, Raheem would say.

As if he knows what I'm thinking, Raheem chuckles low. The it's-not-really-funny kind of laugh. “Pigs on parade. Dick Daley done himself proud.”

“Shh.” I don't want anyone to hear him. The police are all on Daley's side. If the mayor orders them to kill us, they will. He's tried it before.

Raheem cuts his gaze down to me. “Hey. You remember what I told you?”

“I remember.”

At home this morning, Raheem had made me promise that whatever happened, the girls and me wouldn't stay in the park after dark. He'd said it first thing when he woke me up, right into my face, like he already knew I was going to defy him and stay past when we were supposed to.

“I want to hear Bobby,” I told him.

“That's still daylight. You leave right after,” he said. “Promise me.”

“I promise.”

“There's pigs all over that joint,” he added. “Stuff tends to happen when the sun goes down.”

Rumors travel fast, breathed from one person to another like germs. There'd been trouble in the park last night, and everyone was already on edge.

I sucked my teeth at him. “Whoever heard of a white-people riot?”

Raheem looked at me slantwise. “These cats shake it up,” he said. “Remember Columbia? They tried to take over the damn college.”

“Yeah.”

“They be stunting things we couldn't get away with in a million years.”

I shrugged. “We're going to their demonstration for a reason. We all want the same things.”

“They're protesting a war abroad; we're fighting a war right here. They're trying to keep out of uniform; we're already on the front lines.”

He held my shoulders. “Listen. Don't let nobody white talk you into doing nothing. You hear me? They got no fear. When the law comes down, it comes down on us.”

I don't like the feeling it gives me, thinking about that.

“Maxie.” Patrice huddles close to me. “What are we doing here?” She's clutching the banner poles so tight her knuckles are pale.

“Shh,” I whisper. “It's going to be okay.” Even though I'm not so sure of that myself.

Patrice glances over her shoulder, releases a tiny, desperate sigh. I don't have to look to know. The edge of the crowd is somewhere far behind us. We've disappeared into the middle. Nothing but people, pressed close and jumping, rocking, chanting. I'm surrounded by the chests and shoulders of people taller than me, trying to forge a path through them. All I see are vests and beads, jeans and belts, cutoff shirtsleeves, scruffy beards. Lots of long, straight hair. All I can breathe is the scent of people sweating, the occasional sweet whiff of smoke.

“Excuse us,” I call out.

A large blond man looks down at me. Clear blue eyes, like surface of a pool. His gaze catches mine, makes me nervous. Then he steps aside an inch, which is about all he has to offer.

“Thanks.” I barely breathe the word. Shove Patrice through the small opening first and drag Emmalee through behind me. Our feet tangle with the thick layers of paper and trash littering the ground.

Raheem steers us toward a thin spot in the crowd, as close to the stage as we can get. “Let's set up here,” he says, kicking aside some discarded food sacks to make room for our boxes.

Emmalee sets down her bags and starts unfolding the banner from my arms. Patrice struggles to angle the poles down without hitting anyone.

“Watch out,” Gumbo says. “We'll do it.”

“We can help,” I say, but he lifts the banner from my arms, letting it loop toward the ground. Raheem leaves an opened box and takes the poles from Patrice.

My arms have been sweating under the thick fabric. The sudden breeze on my skin is refreshing, but leaves me with a bit of a chill. Now there's nothing at all between me and the crowd. I can feel them jostling, feel them breathing. They smell strange, sound strange. Their energy is all up in the air above us, slightly floating, slightly pressing down.

The guys are tall enough to heft the banner onto the poles. They tug on it and the fabric snaps tautly into place. It reads
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
with the sprawling cat logo underneath.

They twist and twist until the poles sink into the grass, still dewy with morning mist.

“That'll do,” Gumbo says.

“Now what?” Patrice is nervous. She keeps shifting her
hand from one hip to the other, like she does on test days at school.

“Stand by the pole,” Raheem says. “Don't let anyone knock it over.”

“That's it?” Emmalee says. “We came all this way to stand by a pole?”