Fire in the Streets (7 page)

Patrice leans over my shoulder, looking also. I read the headlines, but I'm not going to bother to struggle through the articles themselves. If it matters for us at all, Patrice will tell me what it said later. She knows I can't read well, even though I try hard. Patrice has always been good at helping me. Emmalee didn't used to help because she said if she did, I would never learn. Sometimes she still can't understand how I can practice reading all the time and not get any better, but now she has this theory that there's probably something up with my brain. Good at talking, bad at reading. That's me. So I skip the words, but the
pictures I study carefully. I wonder for a second what it would be like to be a photographer in a crowd like that. Standing still while everything happens, trying to capture it. It feels like I have a camera in my mind, somewhat. Snapshots keep coming back to me. Floating to the surface. I'd just as soon forget.

I hear a little gurgling sound, and I turn. Leroy's wife, Jolene, emerges from the back room, her two tiny daughters in tow. Releasing her mama's hand, Nia trots across the room and hugs Patrice's leg. Patrice picks her up and snuggles her, cooing silly words until the little girl giggles. Jolene carries the gurgling baby, Betty, in her arms.

“Oh, good. You're here,” she says, sounding relieved. “Will you take her?”

Obediently I cross the room and lift Little Betty out of Jolene's arms. The baby squalls for a second, flailing her chubby fists against me.

“The toys are in the back,” Jolene says. “I could really use your help today.” Nodding, Patrice scoots by me with Nia, disappearing into the back room.

“Sure,” Emmalee says, coming up and teasing Little Betty's plump cheek with a finger. I hold the baby carefully, all the while thinking, I don't want to babysit. I want to be a Panther.

“Thanks, girls.” Jolene squeezes my shoulder before
moving to one of the desks. She's off to do important Panther work, I'm sure. If they'd let me, I could help.

Help more, I mean. I pat Betty's soft diapered bottom, trying to reassure myself that babies are important too. They just don't
do
anything.

Leroy hangs up the phone and sighs. “Trouble. Chicago PD is sniffing around Bobby to determine the Panthers' involvement in the rioting last night.”

“We weren't involved at all,” Hamlin says.

“Try telling that to Mayor Daley and whatever puppet detectives he puts on the case,” Rocco interjects.

“Mark my words,” Leroy says. “If they can pin this mess on us, they definitely will.”

W
HEN THE LITTLE GIRLS ARE
there, we oftentimes end up watching them so Jolene can get her work done. Patrice and Emmalee prefer playing with Nia, but I like Little Betty because I don't have to do much but hold her. As long as she's quiet and doesn't need to be changed, I can leave the back room and sit on the couches, listening to whatever's going on among the adults.

Other days, we get assigned different small tasks around the office. We clean a lot. We make sandwiches a lot. We have gotten very good at stamping and sealing envelopes. We use a damp sponge so our tongues don't get all dried out and paper-cut.

Letters go out to lots of different people. Leroy writes to ask people for contributions to support the Panthers' community programs, like The Breakfast and the new
neighborhood free health clinic. Then he sends them thank-you notes if they send money so that hopefully they'll send more. He writes to other Panther offices around the country, because long-distance phone calling can get expensive. Jolene and Hamlin write a lot of letters to the editors of the white newspapers, but they don't get printed very often.

Sometimes the girls and I go around putting up flyers in the neighborhood, inviting people to join the Panthers or come to political education classes. We copy the flyers on lithograph machines down at the big office-supply warehouse at the edge of the neighborhood. The day clerk secretly lets us use the machines for free. We do it fast in small batches when his boss is out to lunch. We don't have a litho in the office yet.

Today Lester Smith comes trucking in with a giant box and lays it on the desk in front of me, where I've been lurking since Jolene took Little Betty from my arms. “You busy, Maxie?” he says.

I had just been wondering what my next task was going to be. Emmalee and Patrice are still in the back.

“No. What's up, Lester?” He's a beefy guy, like Rocco, but also very friendly. Lester was one of the original neighborhood protection crews, along with Leroy, Raheem, and Steve. The Panthers call what they do “policing the police” because the crews go out with their weapons on and tail the
police officers who patrol our neighborhood. If the police get into anything, like harassing people or trying to arrest someone who doesn't deserve it, the Panther crews go over to the scene and just watch the whole thing happen. That way there are witnesses, and sometimes that scares the cops into doing their jobs right and not bothering people.

“Can you sort these?” Lester says.

I peer into the box. It's a jumble of different Panther buttons. It looks like there are a few rolled-up posters underneath. This will be another mindless, silly task, like the ones they always give me. Sometimes I walk the streets pretending I am more important to the Panthers, like a policer is, but mostly I like to avoid the cops, and I don't have a gun or anything, so I always end up back in the office waiting to be assigned something menial.

“It's a mess,” Lester says. “Oakland sent us this stuff to sell, but it doesn't all go at the same price, so we ought to keep a handle on how many we have of each.”

“Okay,” I say quickly. Even though I get grumbly about it on the inside, I know that it's best to be agreeable. I'll do whatever they ask because I want to show I can be a good soldier. Follow orders. Do my part. Every little thing helps, like Leroy's always saying in the meetings.

I remember the first time I heard him say it, how proud it made me feel.

“I hear people all the time saying ‘I don't have anything to give.' Everyone's got something. You got a penny to give, we need it. You got a sheet of paper and a stamp, we'll use it. That's money saved. You got an hour to give, give it. Twenty-four people give an hour and that's a whole day's work done. You dig?”

Leroy knows how to make people with nothing feel like something. That's why people come around. The whole time we're in the office, people come in and out. Buying the paper, leaving off books and picking up new ones, poking their heads in and asking about what it is that the Panthers do. So much so that the Panthers have started having someone serve a shift as kind of a receptionist. Someone or a couple of people who sit around jawing about the Panthers' ideas with anyone who happens by. Not real formal at a desk or anything, but over on the couches, like they're just hanging out. The best political education happens on the sly, Leroy says.

Lester fetches me some smaller boxes to sort into. I dig my hands into the big box, hoping not to stick myself. The buttons show lots of different things.
THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY
. The sprawling panther logo. A silhouette of Huey Newton's head. A black fist. I pick one that says
ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE
and pin it to my shirt while I'm working. I'll have to put it back—I can't afford it—but at least I can look the part for a minute.

R
UMOR HAS IT, THE DNC DEMONSTRATION
today is headed in the same direction as it was yesterday. Cops all lined up and foaming at the mouth to get a piece of the crowd, and the crowd raging right back at them, taunting them. The Panthers are pulling out. We know better than those white kids that you want to be calm when you're getting in the face of the cops. Our policers do it every day. The right way. We don't need to get mixed up in any kind of melee, not like yesterday.

I keep my head down, keep focused on the buttons, while Lester and Leroy talk about it with Gumbo, who just walked in with a report from downtown.

“That's it,” Lester says. “White allies are just going to mess with us. I knew it all along.”

“We have plenty of white allies,” Leroy corrects. “But maybe the anti-war crowd just needs to do its own thing.
They can't see anything but how the world looks to them right now.”

“They're never going to see our side,” Gumbo agrees. “The street side, I mean. They're all rich kids.”

On that note, the office falls into a moment of silence. Panther silence isn't like total silence, though, because you can practically hear the hum of everyone thinking about things.

Into that almost silent hum walks Bucky Willis. All at once, everyone in the office cheers. Bucky has that way about him, lifting the spirits of a room.

I leap up and hug him. Others rush forward to pat him on the shoulders.

“I should come down more often, if I'm gonna get received like that,” Bucky jokes. “Heya, Maxie.” He keeps his arm around my shoulders.

I duck my face against his chest. “Hey.”

Bucky is great, and I know I hold a special place in his heart, but seeing him is kind of a mixed bag because it reminds me of everything he's been through.

“You're welcome anytime, man,” Lester says.

Bucky's not a Panther, but he's our best success story here in Chicago, so he's something of a mascot for the office.

I know the story all too well. It was one of those afternoons that starts out normal and ends up being anything
but. Sam walked me home—that was the normal part—and when we got to my street, we saw Bucky. He was running late for work, literally running down the block, and when he came around the corner he happened to bump into two cops coming the other way. It was an accident, but the cops blamed Bucky, the way that cops do. He tried to talk his way out, but they got mad and started beating him with their batons. When I close my eyes sometimes, out of nowhere, I can still see his bleeding, bruised-up face. The way he fell limp to the sidewalk, and the way the cops cursed overhead while they kicked him into the street.

Afterward, they charged him with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. They put Bucky in jail and held a big trial, and in the end it was Sam's and my word against the cops'. We went to court to testify, and it was the scariest thing I could imagine.

The courtroom was very big and very gray and it was full of angry glaring white people. A whole row of cops in uniforms in the front row of chairs, looking mad like they might leap right over that railing and destroy me. Two lines of white faces in the jury box, too, and those were the people I had to look at while I was talking, the judge said. He sat up tall in the highest seat in the room, looking all-powerful, robed in black. The lawyers asked me questions
and I told the whole truth, then after I was done I sat out in the hallway and cried. I thought Bucky was going to die in that room for sure. It felt like I'd only escaped by the skin of my teeth, and I wasn't even the one on trial.

Bucky could have gone to jail for a long time, but based on our testimony, the Panthers' legal aid lawyers got him off. It was a miracle.

So when Bucky squeezes my shoulder, I hug him back, and we don't have to say any more about it. We don't need any words, because for that long hour in the witness stand, the only lifeline I had was my frequent glances into his blank, helpless face, and he was always looking right back. There's no way of erasing a connection like that.

When I get upset about not being a real Panther, Emmalee likes to remind me about the time I testified. When Raheem asked me to do it, I thought finally I was doing something that mattered. It did matter, I guess, because I showed them I was brave, but Sam's the one whose testimony actually made a difference. He's the one who people had heard of, because of his famous father. He's the one they believed.

In the midst of the Bucky reception, Patrice sidles up to me. “Can we go now?”

“Okay,” I say. She helps me finish sorting the buttons, then we grab Emmalee and skedaddle.

We never spend all day there, especially now that summer is winding down. After we do our part for the day we escape. For Emmalee and Patrice, it's escaping the office work. For me, it's escaping the feeling that I'll never get to do anything important.

T
HE HEAT OF THE STREETS ON A
late-summer afternoon. We walk slow, trying not to work ourselves up to dripping. We stare at the sidewalk, step by step, looking for lost coins among the sidewalk cracks, in the gutter. We scope the bus stops especially hard, 'cause we know what happens when people get in a hurry.

“Another dime,” Emmalee says, leaning down to scoop it up. Her long fingernails pinch it like a claw.

“How much is that?”

Emmalee shakes her little cloth pouch. Peers into it. “One twenty.”

“Damn,” says Patrice. “This is taking all day. We shoulda gone downtown.”

“Nah, too much hassle,” I say. “We're not trying to make rent.” All we wanted was enough for a couple of ice cream cones. A buck fifty'd pull us each a cone at Charlie's. The afternoon soda jerk, Jimmy, is sweet on Emmalee.

It takes another half hour before we find enough. My neck is sweat slick under my hair. If my mouth wasn't so dry it'd be watering over the very idea of ice cream.

We pour the coins into Emmalee's hand and double-check the count. One fifty-five. We track back toward Charlie's.

The fan's whirring pretty good inside. Its breeze feels fresh and cool.

Behind the counter, Jimmy nods when he sees us. “Hi, Maxie. Patrice.” He smiles. “Hi, Emmalee.”

Emmalee's light skin purples. “Hi, Jimmy.”