Fire in the Streets (5 page)

I scramble to my feet.
Crowd, not cops. Crowd, not cops
, is all that flashes through my mind. I'd rather be tossed in the crowd forever than face the pigs. Diving desperately, I skid through the edge of the grass on sweaty hands and aching knees. The roll of quarters is sticky in my fist, and I know in that instant I'm never going to make it. I've failed.

Hauling myself to my feet so I don't get trampled, I discover I'm still too close to the edge of things for comfort. The line of cops advances at us like a wall. Behind them, at the corner of the street, two lumbering city buses pull in, nearly mowing down a couple of guys who scramble out of the way at the very last second. The bus doors open and more riot-dressed cops pour out of them into the crowd, a rippling flood of blue helmets streaming forth like water from the tap. Protesters scream as the cops try to drive
them back, swinging their batons high and bringing them down hard.

People go running around me, pushing forward. I let them pass, let them get between me and the frightening sights at the clash line. They jostle and push, and I feel like I'm fighting a current. I don't understand, and I don't know where to turn.

It hasn't grown cooler with the dusk. The sun sinks low behind the skyline, stale rays peeking through the avenues in the last gasp of daylight. Someone has a bullhorn. “This demonstration ends at dusk. The park is closing. Please disperse. Please disperse.”

Raheem's warning looms large in my mind.
“Promise me you won't stay in the park after dark. Stuff tends to happen when the sun goes down.”

The bullhorn squawks again, but the crowd's chant has changed. A small group near me is calling,
“To do what's right, we'll stay all night. You can't scare us with your might!”

Skirting the edge of things, I can see how it's all turning bad. The cops are over here, too, lined up and helmeted with clubs out and pushing people back with their big plastic shields. I know enough to stay away from the cops, but everyone else seems to be rushing forward. It's happening around me and I'm fighting the forward surge. You
never
go toward the cops.

Shadows begin to stretch over everything. I'm afraid to stay, but more afraid to leave. I don't want the cops to see me. That's when it hits me. I don't want them to see me, because I'm not allowed to do what everyone around me is doing.

They are angry. Angry on the outside, allowed to let it show. Not like us.

At least, not until the Panthers came along and said we can't wait anymore. Can't be pressed down anymore. It's time. That's what's happening here. People are standing up.

They're protesting for peace, but they're angry. It covers everything, this miraculous, captivating, overwhelming force that's already thrumming in me deep. It swells in great waves, stirring the air like wind beneath a fire. I can feel suddenly how hot it's burning, how the heat of the day didn't start in the sky, but here among us.

I can't leave this place. Not yet. This place where everything is stirred out in the open. Anger, with no fear. Raheem would say it's 'cause they're white; he says you can do anything if you're white, that everything's okay if you're white, but we're not white and never going to be. He doesn't come out and say the rest, but I get it. That nothing is ever going to be okay for us. Except, the Panthers—the Panthers say we gotta try harder and then maybe it can be.

The Panthers say get angry, don't bother to tamp
it down. The Panthers say get busy, trying to make the change happen 'cause it sure ain't happening on its own. I've been going to Panther class long enough to understand what's happening here tonight. The demonstrators are white, they're screaming and bearing down on the police, but nothing more is happening.

I want to do it too, but I can't.
“When the law comes down, it comes down on us.”
I have to get out of here. Now.

But, strangely, I find myself sliding back in among them, joining in the chant at the top of my lungs.

T
HE FEAR RETURNS LIKE A THUNDERBOLT
strike. People are running and screaming. The police have entered the park. The sky is dark, and I've been chanting, like a reckless fool, like some wannabe white.

I flee.

The protest has spilled beyond the park. Protesters have taken to the streets. Flashing lights brighten the darkness, and I stay as far as I can from the edge of things. It doesn't stop me from seeing too much. Protesters—white ones—being handcuffed and dragged. Cops with their clubs swinging up and down, and I see it more clearly than ever, why we're supposed to call them pigs.

I have el tokens in my pocket and ten dollars' worth of quarters in my hand, but neither is any use to me, because I'm not going that far out of my way. I edge out of the
park as close to the lake side as I can get, sending up a prayer that the pigs won't see and catch me.

It's a long way home, on foot. A matter of hours, it seems. By the time I'm back in the neighborhood, I'm exhausted of running, dodging cruisers, ducking into alleys when they fishtail around corners, screaming toward something that seems to be everywhere. I thought it'd be okay, once I got far enough away, but what is far enough?

Even the neighborhood has caught the reckless spirit of the day. Fires burn ugly in the storefronts. People run in the streets, some looking for safety, others for something else to set aflame. Sirens rage against the night.

Tonight is bad enough on its own, but in the midst of it all my mind is thrown back to the day Dr. King was murdered. The terror and sadness of those nights. To be wrapped in what is awful. No way out, no chance to breathe through the smoke.

I see my building ahead, but I can't even feel relieved yet. So much has happened between this corner of the street and my front door. It's where Bucky was beaten. Where I found Sam throwing rocks into a storefront the night Dr. King died, which was the moment it all sank in for me that everything had changed in the most irretrievable way. It's the sidewalk I've fled down a hundred
times, sometimes to get home but most times to get away.

A stretch of road that sometimes brings me to tears. I don't know why I have no tears tonight. My clothes and body are drenched with sweat, so maybe that was all the water in me.

I
T'S ALL I CAN DO TO CLIMB THE STAIRS. I OPEN
the apartment door and Raheem storms at me like he's been standing there awhile, all wound up and waiting.

“Jesus, Maxie. Where have you been?”

I brush past him, wanting to get indoors. “I'm here now.”

“You were supposed to be home!”

“I know.” Him being mad is making me mad, and I've had about all I can take for tonight.

“The streets are a goddamn pigsty!” he shouts. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“I got lost,” I shout back. “I was trying to get Leroy his quarters.” The roll is locked in my fist; it's hard to pry my fingers from their death grip.

“Nobody cares about any damn quarters, Maxie,” Raheem yells. “Are you okay?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, then.” Raheem throws himself down on the couch. Jumps right back up again. “We don't know what's happening,” he blurts. “Daley might order a shoot-to-kill again.”

Like after Dr. King? I close my eyes. Not that I have to close them to remember. When the neighborhood was burning for days and days, and no one knew what to do to make it stop because the pain burned hotter than any fire. It still hurts; might as well have been yesterday. Sam and I walked home from school that night, as if everything was usual, and then out of nowhere, people started roiling around us. We made it all the way to my block before we really noticed the commotion, and we didn't know what it was about, so we said good night and went our separate ways. I went into my building and found a cluster of mamas screaming in the stairwell, sick and crying over the news. Dr. King had been shot and killed in Memphis.

The truth slammed down on me like a flat, heavy weight. I couldn't climb any farther after hearing it, so I ran back into the street, as if I could get out from under. Not the smartest thing, Raheem told me later, but at the time I couldn't help it. Sam was out there, and the first thing in my mind was to get back to him.

He hadn't got very far. He was crying, like me, and shaking, like me, and throwing rocks against the broken windows
of the shop across the street, which hadn't occurred to me yet but seemed like a good idea.
“Sam,”
I said. He turned around toward me, and I could already start to see emptiness about him, like a mirror of what I felt. We held hands and ran as far and fast as we could, but the weight was on us and there was no escape.

The riots lasted for days. Dr. King was everything for a long while there, and when “everything” got shot, all that seemed to be left was a whole bunch of nothing. It was no wonder to me why people were raging; you got to fill a space like that with something.

But then the cops rolled through, trying to quell the rage with bullets. The order came straight down from the mayor himself: Shoot to kill any rioters. People died those nights. Shot in the street like stray dogs. Tonight the whole city seems to be on fire. Again.

“Do you hear me?” Raheem says. “They'd be shooting at the white rioters, maybe, but definitely at us. I don't want you out there.”

“I'm in,” I whisper. I sink onto the couch, feeling smaller than my quietest voice can make me.

Raheem stands over me for a while, looking all mad, but I've said everything I can and the bad part is more or less over. He can't let it go, though, because it's not the kind of night where anything cools down. Finally he walks to
the window, stares down into the street. Whatever he sees makes him mutter to himself.

I kick my feet up on the couch. I'm much too grimy to be sitting on the furniture, and I ache to scrub myself clean, but first I need a few moments to just be still. Let my gaze roam anywhere it wants. Study the ceiling, the walls, places where the paint has chipped, the edges of the furniture where the fabric has frayed. The slightly burned corner of the big floor rug. Nothing is perfect, but when it's just the two of us in here alone, the apartment feels like a pocket. All safe and close. Nothing from the outside can get in.

Raheem turns away from the window, no longer mad—at least not at me. He comes and sits on the floor beside the couch, leaning against it.

I let it all rest for a while, thinking. Raheem reaches over and touches my filthy, grass-stained skin. My forearm is scratched and, sure enough, kind of green. I move it out from under his hand. His face holds all these questions and I can't let him ask a single one.

“Did Bobby Seale speak?”

“Yeah.” Raheem's eyes glow. “He was great. People got really turned on to what we're doing.” He thumps his fist on the cushion. “Before it all went to hell.”

“Oh.” Flakes of disappointment. I missed it.

Raheem studies my face awhile, but lets the questions
drop. I'm safe now, so maybe he figures it doesn't matter where I've been. Only I know different.

We lie there, staring out the window at gray plumes of smoke rising, at the slight red glow on the sky. He stretches his arm up on the couch near mine again. We don't say it at all, but we're waiting. Waiting for Mama to come home safe from work, which won't be till late. Waiting for the light of day, for it to be okay to go outside again, because that's what we prefer.

The color of the sky is strange and unsettling. Not red enough to speak for itself, just glowing with a reflection of everything roiling below. The whole city is burning, it seems, but I wonder how it manages to bleed onto the sky.

A fire is like that, I guess. Licking from one surface to another, from one person to another, until everything is glowing red and melting.

T
HE SHOWER MAKES ME FEEL ABOUT 1,000
percent better. I stand beneath the spray for a long, long while, running it cool. Watching the soapy, dirt-tinged water swirl down the drain until it runs clear and I imagine the day has been fully flushed away.

I turn the water off before I'm really ready, but I know there's only so much that can be dealt with on the surface of things. The knot in my stomach is still there. The memory of losing myself among the chanting crowd. The absolute high of the power of that kind of freedom. For the first time ever, I realize what a weight it is to carry fear every time I walk down the street. Always wondering, will the pigs be watching? Will today be the day I can't get away?

I put on my nightgown and come out to the living room. By this point, Raheem is wearing his shorts and
undershirt. He's at the window again, looking out. Raheem opens his mouth to say something, but then there's a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” He heads over there.

“Lucille Junkitt.” Our neighbor down the hall.

Raheem opens the door. “Hi, Mrs. Junkitt.”

She's in her slippers, hair in rollers under a shower cap. “Your mama called. I told her it's not safe trying to get home, so she's staying with someone from her job tonight. Everything okay here?” She pokes her head in to get a look at me. “Maxie?”

“We're fine, Mrs. Junkitt.”

She nods. “Y'all let me know if you need anything, you hear?”

We promise to do so, then Raheem locks and bolts the door behind her. He starts back to the window.

I step into his path. “Don't watch. We shouldn't watch anymore.”

“You're right,” he says, hands on my shoulders. “It's late. Let's just go to sleep.”

We go to the room we share. Our beds are parallel, pushed to opposite walls of the room. I slide under my single top sheet. Even though it's warm, I can't fall asleep if I'm exposed.