Chapter 5
The next evening, Yolanda mapped her 1.2 mile walk to the Red, Black and GREEN! community meeting. Her block was alive with young people talking and laughing in the warm weather. In front of the bungalow next door, a young man murmured insistently on a cell phone, while a young woman on the porch cornrowed a preschool boy’s hair.
The block dead-ended into Holloway Avenue, and had a bustling liquor store at the corner. A cluster of young men stood around. One of them said, “baby got ass for days,” as a pair of young women strutted past. The girls grinned, but another young woman huddled into her jacket and darted inside, steeled against the “hey, why don’t you smile?”
At the next corner, passengers stepped off the #17 bus. A young mother struggled to get her stroller down onto the sidewalk, and a man in a mechanic’s uniform leaped up to help. An older woman stepped off the bus, her back advertised SPIC N’ SPAN CLEANING OF POINT RICHMOND. A pair of girls in Holloway High athletic uniforms sped off the bus, dribbling a basketball.
As RBG’s church came into view, Yolanda began scanning the faces, looking for subjects to match with the names and photos of key members from the file. She saw only blacks and Latinos. Latinxs, she reminded herself to stay current. Although one pale young woman might possibly be white. The girl had sandy brown hair oiled and pulled back in a tight ponytail and hoop earrings.
As Yolanda approached the storefront church, she saw RBG had planted raised beds in all the curb strips on the block. Kale and tomato plants.
A burst of laughter erupted from the knot of teenagers on the street. A young man smoked a cigarette, and a young woman pushed him, playfully. He staggered back to catch himself, and the cigarette’s ash fell onto the sidewalk, scattering among the blackened gum spots and broken glass.
“Look what that fool messaged me,” one young woman said, brandishing her phone.
A twinge of anxious nostalgia hit Yolanda. She had never been the teen girl in that knot. She casually surveyed the faces. None of them matched the photos she had been studying so carefully. Over the last twenty-four hours, she had watched the video over and over without sound and listened to the audio without visuals to memorize the voices. She made the photos into flash cards, with profiles written onto sticky notes on the back.
She had memorized the broad planes of the group leader’s face and the words on the canary yellow sticky note:
Marcus Winters
40 years old
divorced
two sons and a daughter
former union organizer
teenage participant in the Black Radical Congress
former member of the Communist Party
high school dropout
never attended college
Yolanda wondered how he could lead an organization with no degree. She had highlighted this fact on the bottom of the sticky note. Like in her high school senior year. For the championship basketball game, she posted the article about the other team captain’s ankle injury. Yolanda wanted to remind herself that she was the strong one, uninjured, victory imminent. Yolanda had marched into the game confident, and her school had won.
* * *
On the wall was a poster with the title SAY THEIR NAMES, and a long list of hundreds of black people killed by police, and the years they had died. At the bottom was an ellipsis ( . . . ) letting people know that the list would only grow. The poster had been made a couple years previously. Someone had taken a marker and written “DEFUND POLICE.”
Yolanda recognized one of the printed names in particular. Dante Clark. He, along with Kisha James and Michael Lawson, were the three teens that the police had shot back in Georgia during her childhood. Dante Clark had always been a notorious case, because the officers managed to shoot him over thirty times in the back while he was allegedly threatening them with a knife that was never found.
As a kid, she had always taken her father’s word for their innocence, for the police’s guilt. But in eighth grade, she’d done a google search on another topic and the name of her hometown had popped up by coincidence. She found a number of articles that painted a very different picture of the shot teens. Yolanda’s father had conjured images of child angels lying in the coffins with their wings folded over them. The newspaper articles revealed a mug shot of Dante Clark, who had actually been nearly twenty at the time of the shooting, and had been in juvenile hall for disturbing the peace, auto theft, and assault. There were two arrests of the underage Michael Lawson for selling drugs, although no convictions. And Kisha James had been arrested for trespassing, shoplifting, and smoking marijuana. In that moment, Yolanda reevaluated everything she had thought about her father. He hadn’t been a crusader for justice in the community. He’d been a charlatan who had taken advantage of a community that wanted someone to blame for their problems. She saw it every day around her in middle school in Detroit. Kids who didn’t apply themselves. Were always whining and wanted handouts. No work ethic. So these three kids had been hoodlums, like the boys who grabbed her behind in the hallways at school, or the girls who called her a stuck-up bitch because she was in advanced classes, or raised her hand in class when she knew the answer.
When she was a little girl watching her father preach, she had no idea how black teens acted, but now she knew all too well. Why did people make excuses for these kids? In middle school, she saw how her peers mouthed off to the principal, to the security guards at the school. She watched them get into fights. Cuss out teachers. They didn’t seem to care. If those black teens had gotten shot in Georgia, she wasn’t going to say that they deserved to die, but if you get belligerent with a white cop with a loaded gun, what do you expect?
“Is you new here?” a young voice asked. Yolanda returned from her recollection to see a boy of about eight standing in front of her.
Yolanda had prepared her explanation for a teenager. How young were these kids gonna be? “I saw a flyer,” she said. “I thought I’d come check it out.”
“What starts with F and ends with U-C-K?” the boy asked.
“Excuse me?” Yolanda asked.
A teenage girl grabbed the kid. “I told you not to bother anybody.” Yolanda recognized the thickset, light-skinned girl as Sheena McHale. “You supposed to be doing your homework with Carlos.” Sheena turned him around and gave him a push toward the far end of the room. “Go find him.”
The boy walked off, dragging his feet, then turned suddenly. “Fire truck!” he said, grinning at Yolanda. “Fire truck starts with F and ends in U-C-K!”
Yolanda smiled back, and he disappeared into the crowd.
“Sorry about my little brother,” Sheena said. “I’m supposed to be the welcoming committee, not him. I’m Sheena.”
“Yolanda Vance,” she said, and they shook. FBI agents often used an alias, but since Yolanda was there as a Cartwright graduate, she needed to use her real name.
“It wasn’t such a bad joke,” Yolanda said.
Sheena rolled her eyes. “At least he can spell,” she said, and handed Yolanda a flyer. “Ten Things I Hate About Randell Corporation.”
As Sheena greeted an older black couple, Yolanda drifted along with the sparse crowd into the storefront church sanctuary. Rows of folding chairs lined the battered linoleum floor. The only remarkable feature was the stained-glass Black Jesus that she had seen from the street. Yolanda found a seat where she could see the entire room. She spotted most of the teenagers from the file, but not Winters. Several teens were setting up a flip chart and a video camera. Yolanda checked her watch. 7:05. When were they going to start?
Yolanda kept her eye on the group’s teen leader, Dana Whitfield. At 7:30, Dana tapped on the microphone. By then, the room was packed with people, about half were high school age. A few minutes before, Marcus Winters had rushed in, bicycle helmet in one hand, briefcase in the other. His light-skinned face was flushed, and his right pant leg was held up in a strap.
He had put on weight since the video had been taken in the fall. His belly and face were slightly fuller, and his eyes looked puffy.
Several other adults drifted in, and Yolanda realized with a start that she knew one of the women. Kenya, a tall woman with extension braids and an African-print jumpsuit. They had played basketball together at Cartwright. And then they had run into each other in New York.
Yolanda opened her mouth to call to Kenya when a sudden memory made her breath catch. She had seen Kenya at her favorite blues club. Maybe six months ago. Kenya was in New York for vacation, and they’d had a couple drinks. Lester Johnakin said never to keep good news a secret. Yolanda was feeling very good news about her recently acquired job in New Jersey. At the time, she wasn’t on any track to work undercover. She had told Kenya about the drama with Van Dell, Meyers and Whitney, and that she’d bounced back with a great new job. As an attorney. She didn’t say FBI, but she definitely said something about working for the government. That would be sufficient to blow her cover.
Yolanda shrank back. She couldn’t let Kenya see her.
Slowly, she retreated toward the rear of the sanctuary, putting as much distance between herself and her former classmate as possible. She leaned against the back wall, slouching into her sweatshirt. Then she ran her fingers through her hair, combing it forward on the side that faced Kenya, obscuring her cheek and the line of her jaw.
Through a curtain of hair, she saw that Kenya was sitting with two other black women she didn’t recognize. Yolanda was still focused on them when she heard the thud of tapping on a microphone.
“Good evening everybody,” Dana spoke into the microphone. Her shoulder-length hair was in dreadlocks, pulled back from her heart-shaped face. She wore jeans and a “Red, Black and GREEN!” t-shirt. Unlike Winters, she looked more vibrant than in the video, more confident. Yolanda noted that Winters hadn’t briefed her beforehand. Dana had sat laughing with friends, until Winters arrived and gave Dana a thumbs-up from across the room.
“We all know why we’re here tonight,” Dana began. “Because our community deserves better. Because, in the words of Fannie Lou Hamer, ‘we’re sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”
A murmur of approval rose in the church.
“How many of you know at least one person with cancer?”
All the hands in the audience went up.
“I know more than just one,” a young man called out.
“So we’re sick of being sick,” Dana said. “And how many of you, or your folks, have to travel at least an hour to get to and from work every day?”
The majority of the adults’ hands shot up. Yolanda noticed Kenya’s two friends put their hands up.
“And that’s if we’re lucky enough to even have a job,” Dana said. “When the recession hit, it hit our community hard. But why aren’t there jobs right here in Holloway? Jobs for us. Because a certain company moved in promising thousands of jobs.” The congregation murmured its agreement. “And they brought jobs. For white people who don’t even live here.”
Yolanda had coached kids like that during college. They sneered at her because she went to Cartwright. “Success,” she had always told them, “is not just a white thing.”
Dana went on: “So these white professionals drive through our town, on an overpass built specially for them, running over our neighborhoods, over our broke-down schools, speeding through our town like a fast-food drive-through. Yes, I’d like a one hundred thousand dollar a year job with full benefits please. Can you supersize that?”
A ripple of laughter ran through the church.
“Oh, wait a minute,” Dana said. “My bad. We did get some jobs. One of my cousins works in the mailroom. I bet the maintenance crew looks like us. Too bad nobody in my family is qualified to be a chemical engineer or a data analyst.”
“Then the pandemic hit,” Dana went on. “And those Randell employees could work from home while they sheltered in place. But our people didn’t get those jobs. Nope. Our people were essential workers who had to travel at least an hour on public transportation to clean hospitals in San Francisco. Our people already had high asthma rates from the air quality in our city. Our people already had diabetes from the food deserts that we live in.”
Murmurs of agreement from the room.
Dana nodded. “And how many of you know at least one person who died from COVID?”
Again, all the hands went up.
“So our people were the ones dying, while the employees at Randell who live in cozy white suburbs worked from home.” She banged a hand on the podium. “Randell has been here twenty years! They could have set up programs to prepare us for those jobs. How dare you set up shop here and not create one job training program. Not donate a single dollar to the science department at our high school. Not a cent for professional development for people who live a block from your mega lab. They don’t even bother to send their listings to the employment counseling office in Holloway. And this crooked city administration gave them the world’s sweetest deal. They get cheap land, a freeway, a place to dump their toxic waste, and don’t have to pay a cent in taxes. As far as I can see, that lab is a big middle finger to our community. And it’s not enough to have a handful of custodian jobs—”
“And they killed my grandbaby!” a white-haired woman yelled from the middle of the church. “She was a janitor, and they killed her!”
At the mic, Dana faltered.
“They killed her!” the woman yelled, skirting the edge of shrillness.
Eyes wide, Dana shrugged and motioned with upturned palms for Marcus Winters to help.
“Sister,” Winters said, rising from his seat. His voice was loud enough to carry without the microphone. “Would you like to testify about what happened with your granddaughter?”
“That’s why I came to this meeting tonight,” the woman insisted. She stood up, waving an arthritic hand with each word. “The police won’t tell me nothing. They say she was on drugs, but I know they a lie.”
“Can you come to the microphone?” Winters asked.
“I don’t need no microphone,” she said. “I’m just gon’ say what I told the police. And they couldn’t give me no answers.”
One of the adults from the file photos approached the woman. A black woman in her fifties with long dreadlocks. Yolanda identified her as Sharon Martinez.
“Tell us about your granddaughter,” Sharon said.
“Her name was Anitra,” the woman said, her dark brown face crumpling as she held back tears. “She was a good girl. Didn’t get into no trouble til a few years back. I know she was smoking that crack cocaine, but she didn’t never steal or nothing. Put her own self in treatment. How they gonna say she still using drugs? I’m telling you, my baby was clean from them drugs almost two years. They a lie. They a goddamn lie.”
The woman’s face blazed as she spoke, jabbing a finger into the air for emphasis. Her red polyester blouse was buttoned incorrectly, leaving a gap through which her bra flashed white.
“Who said she was using drugs?” Sharon asked.
“The police,” the woman insisted angrily. “They said it was a heron overdose. Ain’t no overdose. She didn’t never even use heron.”
Heron? Yolanda figured that must be slang for heroin.
Marcus Winters now stood at the podium, beside Dana. “Sister,” he asked the elderly woman. “What’s your name?”
“Mrs. Dorothea Jenkins,” she said, sucking her teeth as if he should have already known.
“Sister Jenkins, we’re gonna help you get justice with Randell,” Winters promised, then turned to the crowd. “This is why we need to have these community forums, because nobody else is telling the truth about what Randell is doing in our community.”
Yolanda saw a look pass between Winters and Sharon Martinez.
“Sister Jenkins,” Winters went on, “I’m gonna put you in the capable hands of our group’s Wellness Coordinator to get the whole story.”
He turned to the audience. “How many people want to know the truth about what happened to Mrs. Jenkins’s granddaughter?”
The crowd roared back that they did. Sharon escorted Mrs. Jenkins to the aisle.
“We got you, Sister Jenkins!” somebody called after her.
“How many people want to know the truth about what other dirt Randell is doing in our community, dirt that our own young people have dug up?”
The crowd shouted its encouragement.
“All right,” Winters said, nodding his approval. “I’m gonna turn it back over to Dana Whitfield, spokesperson for Red, Black and GREEN!”
As Dana took the mic, Yolanda looked back to where Kenya had been sitting, but suddenly couldn’t see her. She glanced around, and saw Kenya walking up the aisle, directly toward her. Reflexively, Yolanda pulled the drawstring to the hoodie, and the fabric contracted over her face, leaving mostly just the lock of forward-combed hair visible. She must look ridiculous. But hopefully more like an antisocial teenager than a former classmate who was now working for the FBI.
Kenya strolled up the aisle, her eyes roaming over the crowd. Yolanda could see the exact moment when Kenya’s eyes swept around to her, and the split second when her eyes moved on, unrecognizing.
Her ex-teammate walked past, asking the teen at the door which way to the restroom.
Yolanda stayed in her spot, just inside the door, listening both to the kids on stage, and the two women in the hallway outside.
Mrs. Jenkins was crying quietly now, and Yolanda could hear the occasional murmur of comfort from Sharon.
“She was doing so good,” Mrs. Jenkins choked out. “She got that job at Randell and look like she was gonna be all right. Her brother in jail, so I just prayed. My whole church praying for them and then she got clean, but now they say they found her with a needle in her arm?”
A burst of laughter in the sanctuary drowned out the rest of her words, and Yolanda looked toward the podium to see two teenagers with a flip chart.
She recognized both from the video. The girl, Nakeesha, had on a glossy black sweater over a pair of tight jeans. Carlos, a Latino kid, wore a button down plaid shirt over dark pants.
“So this,” Carlos said, pointing to the taller of the two black bars on a graph “is the total amount of emissions caused by a single gallon of fossil fuel gas, but this,” he indicated another bar that was barely visible, “this is the amount of emissions from a gallon of Randell Lab’s designer ‘Emerald Standard Fuel.’”
“Looks good, right?” Nakeesha said. “Like they really doing something for the planet, right?”
“It’s what they call a renewable biodiesel fuel,” Carlos said.
“And Randell been going around advertising they gone green,” Nakeesha said. “Commercials with pictures of trees and grass. Celebrities driving they cars through mountains with this gas. But as usual, the only green Randell really cares about is money.”
“Because this is the real environmental impact of Emerald Standard Fuel,” Carlos said. He took a red marker and made the second bar on the graph nearly as tall as the first one. “They collect some of the biofuel sources in the United States. But they don’t want to pay US real estate prices or US construction prices to build the refinery. Or pay US workers minimum wage to work in the refinery.”
“So instead they ship the fuel all the way to the fuel refinery they built in Southeast Asia, y’all,” Nakeesha said. “Then they refine it and ship it all the way back. And they don’t use renewable fuels for all that shipping.”
“So the celebrities in their commercials aren’t lying that their biodiesel Mercedes is burning a hundred percent clean fuel,” Carlos said. “But the amount of fossil fuels that are getting burned to produce that clean fuel is ultimately the same as if they had just gotten regular gas.”
“And this is what we trying to bring home to y’all,” Nakeesha said. “Even when Randell looks like they trying to do the right thing, they still up on something fraudulent. Not only did they admit to dumping toxic waste in our neighborhoods, they also destroying the planet with products that pretend to be fighting the climate crisis.”
“And that’s the bottom line,” Carlos said. “These shady corporations are never going to be the solution to the climate emergency. We need to let Indigenous people and frontline affected communities of color take the lead. The solutions have been clear for years: keep these fossil fuels in the ground. Transition into clean energy like solar power, wind power, consume less, and stop destroying the trees and mangrove swamps and wetlands and other natural ways the earth already has of getting carbon emissions out of the air.”
“She what?” Sharon’s sharp voice cut through the presentation of the two teens, and Yolanda tuned back into the conversation on the other side of the wall.
“It was all up her arm,” Mrs. Jenkins said.
“That’s not possible,” Sharon said. “We’ll definitely look into it.”
At that point, Mrs. Jenkins began to cry again. “You lose your baby,” she sobbed. “And you know it ain’t right, and you gotta fight wit’ so many folks but you jus keep on going til somebody finally listens and when they do, you stop fighting for a minute and you realize that she’s gone.”
Kenya walked back in and headed down the aisle to her seat. Yolanda looked at the floor and held her breath as she passed.
“My grandbaby’s gone.” Mrs. Jenkins said from the hallway.
Loud applause broke out in the sanctuary, drowning out the elderly woman.
By the time Yolanda could hear her again, Mrs. Jenkins’s crying had turned to gasps and hiccups.
“Thank you,” Nakeesha was saying at the front of the room, as she bowed grandly.
“And, thanks to our teacher, Jimmy Thomson,” Carlos added.
“We love you, Jimmy,” Nakeesha waved to the camera as they stepped away from the podium.
The rest of the evening consisted of teenagers complaining about Randell. While Yolanda had found the case against Emerald Standard Fuel compelling, the complaints had the opposite effect.
Yolanda had been in a bad situation, too. She was poor as a kid. She went to a terrible school in Detroit. But what did she do? She worked hard and got a scholarship to a boarding school. And she bounced back from Van Dell, Meyers and Whitney. Bad situations didn’t have to define you. You want better, so you do better.
* * *
After the meeting broke up, a crush of people moved toward the exit. Yolanda kept an eye on Kenya, who was chatting with her two friends.
“So what did you think?” Sheena, the teen from the welcome committee asked Yolanda.
“I had no idea all that was going on here,” Yolanda said. Kenya was getting her purse and heading up the aisle.
“I’ve got another riddle!” Sheena’s brother said, coming up to them.
Swiftly, Yolanda knelt down beside him, turning her back to Kenya.
“What’s long and hard and full of semen?” the little boy asked.
“Boy, if you don’t—!” Sheena grabbed his arm and looked down at Yolanda. “A submarine.”
“Why you gotta spoil my joke?” he asked.
“You are such a little pervert,” Sheena steered him out through the door.
Yolanda lingered inside, trying to make sure that Kenya would be gone. She followed some of the last stragglers out. In front of the church, the crowd had thinned. Mrs. Jenkins was gone, and there was no sign of Kenya.
Marcus honked the horn of a van parked in front, as a dozen teens piled in. “Come on guys, I wanna get to bed.”
Yolanda hurried down the church steps and turned onto Holloway Avenue. Not until she closed the apartment door did she stop looking over her shoulder, convinced that Kenya would appear behind her, calling her name.
She emailed a report to Rafferty that she had identified every single face from the file, and she reported the development with Mrs. Jenkins. Then she went online to find out more about Kenya.
Her former teammate apparently had just started teaching history and coaching girls’ basketball at the middle school in Holloway.
Not good.