Fire in the Streets (3 page)

Raheem shrugs. “Someone's got to do it. It's better than having to hold it up all day.”

“Not much,” I say. But we do it. We form a little triangle around the pole on Gumbo's end, our backs to it, with our shoulders touching on each side. Patrice takes my hand, so I take Emmalee's too. The three of us together, facing the world. It should be okay, as long as we have each other.

But when I look around, all I feel is surrounded.

T
HE SUN IS BEATING LIKE SOME KIND OF
cruel oven. Trying to cook us, trying to sweat us out. Every crease of my body is damp. I open my elbows over and over, trying to feel a breeze. The air is thick and still.

A man I used to know, one of Mama's, always called these the dog days. Don't know what it ever meant, but it feels true. Working like a dog. Sweating like a dog. No kinda choice about nothing, like a dog.

We've been standing by the pole all morning. Watching the guys move around us, hawking the paper and talking to people in the crowd. Now they've drifted away, closer to the stage, leaving us unprotected.

The protesters are screaming, chanting, shaking their signs. “
Hey, hey, LBJ—How many kids did you kill today?
” There's nothing good in the tone of things. Their spitting, hissing rage spills out over everything. Every bit of their
movement leaves me feeling further and further away. There's a feeling in the air that wants into me, but I'm holding it at bay.

I try to hold myself above it, and I start to feel like I'm floating. Floating on a sea of white faces and colorful signs. I try to read them as they bump along over the heads of the crowd.

The big
HHH
stands for Hubert Horatio Humphrey, vice president of the United States, trying to move up a slot in the next election. Many more signs bear the huge face of Gene McCarthy, another candidate. The McCarthy fans seem to be everywhere. Half the time they're just shouting his name.
“Mc-Car-thy! Mc-Car-thy!”

Plenty of posters scream
END THE WAR IN VIETNAM
. Because that's what everyone wants. Everyone except the Washington dogs, Raheem says. Our cousins went over. One of them died. Lots of brothers from the neighborhood too. Some we liked, some we didn't, but in the end it was all-around bad no matter what the score was personally. It scares me to think that Raheem could be next. He turns eighteen in a couple of weeks. His name will go into the draft, and if his number comes up he'll have to go fight. I can barely allow myself to imagine how that would feel.

The protesters bob and sway. I float. “Peace now, peace
forever!” some guy shouts. The chant swells and crashes like a wave against rocks.

I start to feel an itch under my skin. It makes me want to move, to grab a sign and start screaming to match the energy around me. I eye the box of newspapers sitting open beside us. We aren't supposed to be selling the paper ourselves—that's a job reserved for the older, full-on Panthers—but we're the only ones near the banner right now, and the papers are just sitting there.

I pull one out of the box and set it on top to serve as a display. People want to see what they're buying. I'd be a good saleswoman, I know. Better than some of the stiffs I've seen trying to hawk the paper around the neighborhood. I'm good at math—not like you really need to be to hold on to a bunch of quarters—plus, no one knows
The Black Panther
better than me. I've seen every issue of the paper since they first started coming around in Chicago. I've studied all the pictures and looked at every article. Even though I had to let Emmalee read out loud to me when the letters moved on the page, I remember every word. I even bought copies of three different issues myself, when there were poems published that I liked best and I could get the twenty-five cents together.

I pull another copy from the box and hold it up. “
The Black Panther
community newspaper, twenty-five cents. Get your
Black Panther
here,” I call out.

“Maxie,” Patrice hisses. “What are you doing?”

“It's okay,” I tell her. She looks worried anyway. People get arrested when they're selling sometimes. It's not illegal, but it's one of the ways the cops like to bother us.

“Don't,” Patrice says. “You'll get us in trouble.” I'm not sure if she means in trouble with the Panthers or the cops, but I'm not worried. The guys have been selling all morning, and nothing's happened.

“
The Black Panther
,” I say.

“Maxie!” Emmalee eyes the crowd. “Be careful. You never know who's a cop.” A little while ago, Hamlin came by and warned us that there might be plainclothes officers hiding in the crowd. Local cops or even the FBI. Keeping an eye on things . . . and people.

“Get your
Black Panther
here,” I call again. No one really seems to notice. They're too busy chanting and cheering.

The convention is all about who's going to be picked to run for president. Raheem says it's six one way, half a dozen the other, which basically means it doesn't matter much. A white president is a white president and none of them would really look out for black folk after the voting is done. The only one we had any hope about was Robert F. Kennedy, but someone shot him dead right when it looked like he might go all the way to the White House.

Dr. King, dead. RFK, dead. It gets to be too much
sometimes, hoping after things that keep getting snatched away. I don't know if the war is ever going to end, the one that's far away or the one that's here and up close. All I know is, I'm going to be part of the fight.

“
The Black Panther
community newspaper,” I call into the crowd.

Their screaming swells louder, a great surge of voices. Something's happened. I can't see far enough to know exactly what. My heart beats hard, but I don't let myself be scared. I'm going to be a Panther soon, and Panthers don't get scared. Panthers always stand up.

I notice several other Panthers approaching. They've started to arrive. Black berets bobbing among the crowd. Sweat sheen on their skin, like mine. Like everyone's. I'm glad to see them out there. Nothing can touch us, as long as they're nearby.

“I want to go home,” Patrice says. “Let's go.”

“No,” I say. “We're not done.” There are papers to sell, things to see. And usually when I hang around long enough, someone sees me and puts me to work.

Emmalee's on my side. “This is weird, but kind of neat,” she says, eyes wide as anything. “We should stay.”

We have to stay. Bobby Seale's coming. It's not the only reason to stay, but I can't put my finger on the other thing.

The heat of the day grows thicker, and the crowd near the stage thins somewhat as people shift in and out of their places. A lull falls over things, a respite from the shouting voices coming out of the stage speakers. After hours of it, their words are a blur, variations on “End the war” and “Vote McCarthy.” When the speakers hum, empty, for the first time all day I feel like I can actually breathe.

Two blond girls in flowing skirts go running by me. The skirts stir the air around my display copy of the paper and send its pages floating to the ground.

I crouch down to scoop them up, and suddenly my hands aren't the only ones reaching to straighten the mess. Boy hands. Hands I know. I follow the line of the leather jacket sleeve, up his shoulders to his face.

“Sam.”

“Hi,” he says, handing me the loose papers.

We stand up, and to avoid looking at him I make a point of lining the pages up all neat on the box top and picking off the blades of grass that linger.

“Hi.” I don't know what to make of his sudden appearance. Things haven't been good for a while now. To get into it all again . . . just the thought makes me tired. “What do you want?”

Sam rolls his shoulders around inside his jacket. It still
hangs too wide and heavy on his shoulders, and it must be ridiculously hot. But it's Steve's jacket. I haven't seen Sam without it in all the three months since Steve, his brother, got shot and died. It has a dark X of tape patching the hole where one of the bullets went through it. Morbid, it seems to me. I don't like to see Sam in it. It gets between us in a way, a leather wall I don't want to get close to, can't ever cross. Sam hides behind it, just the same, and I guess that's what went wrong with us.

“Leroy sent me.”

Relief. Disappointment. They hit at the same time. I cross my arms. “And?”

“He wants you and the girls to come over to the stage.”

“Now? What for?” We'd have to leave the banner unattended.

“He's going to speak soon and he wants more folks on hand to sell the paper.”

“Fine, we'll come now. Why'd he send you?” I give him the look that says we're over, just in case one of us needs reminding. I catch occasional glimpses of the stage area from here; maybe a dozen Panthers mill around there. Figures, out of all of them, Leroy would pick my ex-boyfriend to carry his message.

Sam rolls his shoulders again. “Leroy always thinks he knows best, right?”

“Tell him to mind his own business.” I say it kind of snotty. Leroy's second only to Fred Hampton as Chicago chapter leader, so I wouldn't have said anything of the kind to his face, but Sam needs to know where I stand with things.

“I can help you with the papers,” he says, grabbing for a box still full of newspapers.

“Fine, since you're going anyway. I'll get the girls and meet you over there.”

Never mind that Emmalee and Patrice are standing five feet from us. But they're looking every which way and acting right, like they haven't heard everything we've been saying.

“I guess so,” Sam says. “See you.”

As he backs away, I can see it in his eyes, the way he's drifting. I will myself not to care.

O
UT FROM UNDER THE PANTHER BANNER
, everything feels different. We cluster together, an armful of papers each. I wish we had the Panther jackets, or at least the berets, to let people know we aren't just here on our own. We squeeze on through, but without the larger guys and the bulky stuff to force a path for us it's harder. Emmalee is cute and polite so we put her to go through first, but more than once someone does a bit of a double take and frowns, the way you might look at a stain on a nice clean tablecloth when you're not sure how it got there. A girl my own height shrugs away as I slide past her, like she doesn't want my skin to touch hers. I want to tell her that black don't rub off, but by the time I blurt it out, she's already found some distance from me. Patrice smacks my arm, and I know it means watch your mouth. It's always been kind of a problem.

Leroy's already speaking before we get close enough to see him. His voice echoes out over the crowd.

“The Black Panther Party stands in solidarity with the anti-war movement,” he's saying. “Will you stand with us in return? We are fighting a war here in our own land. In our own black communities. A fight that is being waged by black citizens and white citizens alike in this nationwide movement for civil rights.”

When we get through the thick of things, I see some Panthers down front, trying to energize the crowd, though Leroy can manage it all on his own. He has a way with words, which is how he ended up in charge.

“We believe America can be better than what it has become,” he says. “One hundred years out of slavery and we are still colonized. Nearly two hundred years since the Declaration of Independence, and we are still not free.”

The speakers boom and tremble, as if they feel Leroy's conviction. “We have been to Selma, and Montgomery, and Birmingham, and Oakland. We have marched for equality under the banner of unconditional peace, yet at our every turn we have been met with crushing, irrevocable acts of violence.”

We stop pushing through the crowd, because we simply want to listen. Will the white demonstrators come to our side? Will they become the allies Leroy hopes they
can be? It occurs to me that if not, we will truly be surrounded.

“When peace-loving citizens are unjustly and brutally murdered by the police—agents of the very government that is supposed to protect us—when we are slaughtered in the streets out of hatred or fear, such actions are low. Dirty. These are the actions of pigs. We call these corrupt officers pigs when they act as pigs.”

Here we are, entirely ringed in by these very pigs, and Leroy's up there belting it out as if he's simply speaking in the neighborhood. Panthers don't back down from threats. It's thrilling to listen.

“One of the founding values of the American nation is that citizens have a right to oppose tyranny. To throw off their shackles and demand a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. America can be better! Stand with us. The time to fight has come. All power to the people!”