Chapter 20
Two days later, Yolanda left the apartment for the rally against RandellCorp, clutching her handbag to her chest. Ever since she’d started writing in her Learning Japanese Kanji on the Go book, she took it everywhere with her. She adjusted the strap tight on her bag and carried it messenger-style, over one shoulder and across her chest. She had bought the bag from a young woman at one of the RBG meetings. It was made out of thin, durable multicolored plastic from a recycled billboard ad.
She caught the #26 to ride the fifteen blocks to Randell. An easy walk. The kind of walk she liked on a warm day, with the few raggedy plum trees on her block with their wine-colored leaves and gnarled dark wooden branches. But lately she felt too agoraphobic to walk alone and exposed on the street. She pulled her baseball cap lower over her face and slouched into her bus seat.
Two blocks from Randell, the traffic began to slow. From a distance, Yolanda could see the high antennas of TV vans. Up ahead, rubberneckers gawked out of their car windows at the crowd. At 4:15 PM, the bus was packed with students, and several complained loudly as they crawled through the traffic.
Yolanda signaled for the driver to stop. She exited from the rear door, her messenger bag with the journal pressed between her breasts, keeping a firm grip on it with one hand.
RandellCorp was located up ahead and on the right-hand side of a two-lane, one-way street. There was only one entrance to the parking lot of the Randell facility, with the security of a military checkpoint. All individuals and vehicles entering RandellCorp needed to be approved at the guard hut. The exit had spikes that would shred the tires of any vehicle that tried to enter the wrong way.
A small cluster of protesters were picketing just outside the security gate on the RandellCorp side of the street, waving signs: JUSTICE FOR ANITRA, BLACK LIVES MATTER, CLIMATE JUSTICE NOW! and HONK IF YOU THINK RANDELL IS SHADY. One driver started honking, and the picketers cheered wildly.
The bulk of the protesters, however, had congregated in a small park next to Randell. But as the crowd had grown, they had spilled out into the sidewalk. The two lanes of traffic on the street had to squeeze into a single lane, because they were bottlenecked between the picketers and the battalion of news vans parked on the other side of the street.
Initially, the crowd had been mostly black and brown, with teens from RBG! and Youth vs. Apocalypse in Oakland. But then a huge contingent from the Sunrise Movement had marched over from the BART station—a racially mixed group of young adults in their black shirts with white letters and their signature yellow logo.
Meanwhile, Project Greener had brought out their base of supporters, a mostly white twenty-something crowd, heavy on the earth tone fabrics, tribal tattoos, and pale dreadlocks. A group called “Food Not Bombs” had set up a table and was giving out free organic vegan food.
An African American teenage boy was sampling their chard, beans, and brown rice in a bowl made of pressed leaves with bio-degradable utensils.
“Ugh,” he said to the young man next to him. “It ain’t no meat in here.”
“That’s what vegetarian means, fool,” his friend said. “And that shit is good.”
Project Greener staff and volunteers circulated through the crowd handing out leaflets for their national fundraising campaign, emphasizing that RBG was sponsored by Project Greener.
On the far end of the park, several RBG! teens had created a makeshift stage by standing on a picnic table and were addressing the crowd through a bullhorn. Behind them, the concrete back of another building marked the unyielding perimeter of the park.
As Yolanda moved through the rally, she caught a glimpse of Marcus and Sharon, and worked her way toward them. At the same time, the teens on the bullhorn led the crowd in a more hip-hop version of an old protest chant:
The people . . .
What?
United
What?
Will never be defeated
That’s right!
The people . . .
They chanted on for a while, and then a young Latina climbed onto the picnic table and led the chant in Spanish:
El pueblo . . .
What?
Unido
What?
Jamás será vencido
I said the people
What? . . .
The young woman handed the bullhorn to Darnell who began to beatbox, vocalizing a rhythm to go with the chant, as she and another girl screamed the words from the picnic table.
When the crowd heard the beat, they roared with approval. Two young men next to Yolanda began to dance in an undulating break rhythm that made their bodies look boneless and impervious to gravity.
Yolanda pushed through the crowd to find Marcus and Sharon. “Hey there,” she said when she finally caught up to them. “Great turnout. I’ve never seen this many white people—”
“We need to talk,” Marcus said. “Sharon and I are calling a special meeting of the adults in RBG.”
“Right now?” Yolanda asked.
“Let’s get away from this crowd for a minute,” Sharon said, and ushered them toward the edge of the park under a large pine tree.
“I don’t know how to say this,” Marcus began.
Yolanda turned and gave him her full attention.
“I know you don’t have a lot of experience with political movements,” Marcus said. “But sometimes, particularly when a movement is effective, it can attract attention from the government or the opposition.”
Yolanda’s mouth felt dry.
“RBG has been building our reputation for a while, but lately, with the Jenkins case, and the article, and everything—”
“Oh God, Marcus,” Sharon interrupted. “Look at her face. You’re scaring the girl to death. Yolanda, the office is bugged.”
“What?” Yolanda said.
“We don’t know who did it,” Sharon said. “We don’t know what else is bugged, whose house, whose phone, what. But we want to tell all the adults today, and we’ll have a meeting to figure out how to tell the young people.”
As the words tumbled out of Sharon’s mouth, Yolanda’s mind spun, dizzy with relief. Everyone knew. She could stop pretending to be comfortable.
Another half-confession poured out of her. “It’s so—so terrifying to think someone could be watching us, listening to everything we say,” Yolanda said to Marcus and Sharon. “Not to have any privacy. Or—or not to know if you have any privacy or not.” And her eyes welled up with the relief of it. She looked into their concerned faces, Marcus’s furrowed brow, Sharon’s open-eyed face nodding.
“All of us are really scared,” Sharon said.
All of us. Yolanda felt more connected to them than she had to anyone since she left Georgia.
In the background, Yolanda could hear the crowd singing:
People gonna rise like the water, gonna calm this crisis down.
I hear the voice of my great-granddaughter saying “keep it in the ground.”
“Yolanda,” Marcus said, “I’m really sorry that we got you into this. I know you’re new to political work. Worst case scenario, you might have an FBI file now. It could jeopardize your future. I feel like I pressured you to take on a big role in the organization really fast. None of us expected this. I would understand if you left RBG.”
“No way, Marcus,” Yolanda said. “I’m not leaving RBG just because we’re effective. That’s like leaving a winning team, just because the opponents pull a prank in your locker room.”
“Okay,” Sharon said with an anxious smile. “Then we should find Jimmy so we can have this meeting.”
Yolanda scanned the crowd, looking for him. On the picnic table, the teens were leading a new chant:
Listen to the youth!
We demand the truth!
The crowd chanted along, waving their fists in the air.
As Yolanda, Marcus, and Sharon circulated through the protesters, Dana had the bullhorn and addressed the crowd.
“That’s right, we demand the truth today,” Dana said. “Did you know that Andrew Wentworth, the Executive Vice President of Randell who runs their operation in Holloway, makes ten million dollars a year? That’s right people, ten million.”
Yolanda squeezed past a man with a sign saying, “Randell can go to hell!”
“According to the property records,” Dana said, “Wentworth lives in a twenty-five-acre estate in Blackhawk. His pool is bigger than most of our houses. On the weekends, Andrew Wentworth plays golf or goes to his cabin on Lake Berryessa.” She made quote marks around the word cabin. “As in a five-bedroom, four-bathroom building. You know. A little cabin.”
“Bullshit!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“Andrew Wentworth, are you kidding me?” Dana yelled. “People in Holloway are trying to hang on to one house! Our unhoused population is exploding. Young people in Holloway don’t even have a ten-million-dollar budget for our high school. Every year our community has more and more climate refugees. We’re sick of corporations like Randell getting rich off the destruction of the environment and the destruction of our people.”
“Hell yeah!” a thin, bare-chested white guy in baggy burlap pants yelled.
“We don’t care how much money you make or where you live. We demand that Andrew Wentworth be accountable for the death of Anitra Jenkins. Black lives matter!”
The crowd exploded with applause.
“Jimmy!” Sharon yelled, and waved her arm high over her head. Yolanda looked in the direction Sharon was facing, and saw Jimmy standing far back on the sidewalk outside the park with his video camera panning the crowd.
“Jimmy!” Marcus yelled, but his voice was drowned out by the crowd noise.
On the picnic table, Nakeesha took the mic and began to chant.
“What do we want?”
“Justice!” the crowd yelled back.
“When do we want it?”
“NOW!”
The three adults from RBG moved toward Jimmy through the masses of people.
“Hey,” Jimmy said. His smile expanded when he saw Yolanda.
“Some serious shit going down, bruh,” Marcus said.
Sharon took his arm and pulled him to the side of the crowd. Jimmy reached for Yolanda’s hand, and the four adults walked even further from the park.
As Marcus told Jimmy about the bugs, Yolanda could see his jaw clench.
“We gotta figure out what to tell the youth, who to tell, how we tell them.”
“They deserve to know,” Sharon said. “But I don’t know if they can keep their mouths shut. I know Nakeesha can’t. But it doesn’t seem right to tell some and not others.”
“What the fuck?” Marcus said. “If we keep it from them and they find out later that we knew . . .”
“I just don’t know what integrity looks like here,” Sharon said. “But I’m most concerned about their safety.”
“We don’t even know what the hell to do to keep them safe!” Marcus exploded. “I’ve talked to their mamas. They’re worried about their kids protesting, and I’ve looked in their eyes and promised them it would be okay. This shit is not okay!”
Jimmy put a hand on Marcus’s shoulder. “Take it easy, man. We don’t want to attract any attention right now. And we don’t want the youth coming over and asking what’s wrong.”
As Marcus took several deep breaths and tried to calm down, they heard a booming voice over a loudspeaker coming from the RandellCorp side of the street.
“This is the Holloway Police Department,” the cop in charge spoke through a much larger megaphone. “You are participating in an unlawful assembly and you need to disperse immediately. I repeat, DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.”
A cordon of police began to march from the Randell lot in full riot gear. Yolanda froze for a second. What the hell was happening? The police had vehicles barricading the street on both ends of the block.
The picketers were backing away from the cops, signs in hand. They moved across the street to the relative safety of the larger protest.
“Fuck the police,” a young man’s voice came over the RBG bullhorn, suddenly small and tinny compared to the police loudspeaker. The young black man—someone Yolanda didn’t recognize—had grabbed the microphone from Nakeesha. She was fighting to get it back, two handfuls of his jacket in her fists, face contorted with the effort of pulling against him with all her strength.
“Oh shit,” Marcus surged forward.
“Marcus,” Sharon barked the order. “You and me should go deal with the youth. Jimmy and Yolanda, go talk to the police.”
Jimmy and Yolanda crossed the street at a brisk walk to speak to the officer with the loudspeaker.
Yolanda put a hand on Jimmy’s arm. “I’ll handle this,” she said as they approached the cop. “I’m a lawyer.”
Jimmy nodded, and Yolanda could feel the tension in his body.
“Sir,” Yolanda said to the officer in her most polite yet professional voice. “My name is Yolanda Vance. I’m an attorney. This is my colleague Jimmy Thompson, from the science faculty at Cartwright. What seems to be the trouble, sir? These people are just exercising their constitutional right to assembly.”
“Ma’am,” the cop said. “They’re blocking traffic. They’re loitering. We caught some individuals littering, jaywalking on the street, the food people don’t have a permit, the protest doesn’t have a permit.”
“It’s a public park, officer,” Yolanda said.
“We received complaints from employees who say they can’t get in or out because their way is blocked.”
“You’ve broken up the picketing, sir,” Yolanda said. “No one is blocked anymore. Why can’t you just allow these citizens to continue with this lawful assembly in a public park?”
“Randell employees and other neighbors have complained that they feel intimidated by the protesters.”
“The protesters aren’t intimidating anybody,” Jimmy said angrily. “Randell is the one killing people.”
Yolanda had never seen him angry before. She squeezed his arm gently.
The cop looked squarely at both of them. “Tell these people that if they don’t want to end up in jail, they need to disperse immediately. My team is ready to move in and make mass arrests.”
Yolanda could see herself reflected in the cop’s metallic shades, a distorted, convex version of herself, her eyes looking more imploring than she intended. She put on her most crisp businesslike face.
“If you insist, officer. But can we have ten minutes to get the crowd to disperse?”
“You can have one minute.”
“That’s crazy,” Yolanda snapped. “You know we can’t get four hundred people out of that park in one minute.”
“That’s not my problem, ma’am. I have instructions to disperse the crowd immediately or start making arrests.”
“There are news cameras here. Reporters from the press,” Jimmy heated up again.
“Would you like to be the first arrest?” the officer asked.
“No, sir, he would not,” Yolanda said. She was itching to pull out her FBI credentials and show them to this asshole.
“This is a peaceful and nonviolent protest!” Marcus was yelling into the bullhorn microphone. “We didn’t come here today to make any trouble with the police, we came to demand justice for Anitra Jenkins!”
Yolanda sucked up her rage and spoke in clipped syllables: “We’re going to try to get the crowd to disperse. Please consider the impact on the reputation of your department if you use unreasonable tactics or excessive force, particularly with so much press in attendance.”
Yolanda and Jimmy turned away from the cops and hurried across the street. They looped around the perimeter of the crowd, trying to get to the picnic table where RBG was congregated.
Over a hundred camera phones were out, recording everything.
“I’m not getting anyone to disperse,” Jimmy said. “We have a right to protest here.”
“At this point our right to protest is purely academic,” Yolanda said to Jimmy and waved a hand in the direction of the police. “We better disperse before somebody gets hurt.”
“What the fuck, Yolanda?” Jimmy asked angrily. “What fucking planet are you from? These are the Holloway fucking police. Every black man in this crowd has been slammed against an HPD cruiser. Including the one you’re talking to now. We fucking get hurt every day. Our fucking office is bugged. It’s not like there’s a safe path for us here. We need to stand up to these assholes.”
“Yes, but—” Yolanda began, when Jimmy grabbed her arm.
“Watch out,” he said, and pulled her out of the path of the advancing line of blue.
The police crossed the street in a long row, then circled the crowd and moved in.
Yolanda and Jimmy stood outside the circle, watching helplessly as the crowd constricted in on itself.
“This is a peaceful and nonviolent protest,” Marcus kept yelling into the microphone.
The young man who had yelled “Fuck the police!” began shoving his way through the crowd. The ripples pushed out toward the edges of the crush of people, sending one young white woman stumbling toward the police, her phone out and recording. An officer took out his nightstick and clubbed her in the head. The phone fell out of her hand as she threw her arms up to protect herself and the crowd surged back in panic, pushing back to the concrete wall at the far end of the park.
“The whole world is watching!” Marcus screamed into the bullhorn as several teens stood beside him on the table, phones out. Meanwhile, the news cameras rolled at the edge of the circle, capturing the panicked faces in the mob, the police moving in.
Yolanda watched, horrified, as she and Jimmy kept backing away.
They watched a police van roll up to the edge of the cordon, and the cops began to grab people and put them in makeshift handcuffs, plastic zip-ties. They confiscated several phones. Once the protesters were cuffed, the police shoved them onto the van.
Yolanda and Jimmy began walking hurriedly out toward the end of the block, passing four sheriff’s buses that rolled slowly down the street like tanks.
“Those motherfuckers,” Jimmy muttered.
“Where are we going?” Yolanda asked.
“To the car. We need to follow the buses to see where they’re taking everyone. Come on.”
Once they passed the police barricade, Yolanda and Jimmy covered the eight blocks at a dead run. Yolanda’s bag bounced roughly against her chest as she ran.
Jimmy had parked his old blue Mercedes on a side street and pulled out the key to unlock it.
“Wait,” Yolanda whispered as she touched his arm. “The car might be bugged.”
“Okay, no talking,” Jimmy whispered back. “I probably have some paper if we need to write.”
As he started the car, Yolanda was still in shock. Why hadn’t they given the crowd time to disperse? Who the hell was that guy pushing everyone in the crowd?
When they got close to the barricaded corner, they saw that the police van had pulled forward and double-parked on the far end of the block. Other protesters who had avoided the cordon stood out on the street beyond the barricade, phones out. Four black teens in bright athletic gear stood talking agitatedly with a white Food Not Bombs volunteer who had a large empty pot dangling from her hand.
“I hope folks are able to post these videos on social media,” Jimmy said.
Yolanda looked down at her phone and saw that she had no signal. It had been just fine before the protest. She felt like she had swallowed a stone.
“I’m sorry,” Jimmy said.
Yolanda widened her eyes, motioned to the ceiling and windows of the car.
“I don’t care,” Jimmy said. “I’m sorry I was so hardheaded. You were just trying to calm the situation down. Not that it mattered. The police were gonna fucking do whatever they were gonna do.”
Her mind kept flashing to the image of Jimmy being slammed against a police car? A college professor? Darnell maybe. His drug dealer friends for sure. But Jimmy?
“Thanks. For the apology. I don’t really know what to say.” Yolanda shrugged again and fluttered her hands to indicate the possible bugs in the interior of the car.
Jimmy nodded and took her hands in his as the first bus filled with protesters rolled down the street and pulled up behind the full police van.
When Jimmy tried to edge the car closer, a motorcycle cop pulled up alongside him and demanded that he move on. They circled to the other end of the barricaded block, watching the growing caravan of law enforcement vehicles jammed with protesters.
Jimmy turned on the radio, tuned it to KPFA, and listened to a reporter tell them what they already knew about the protest, including the fact that cell reception had apparently been shut down in the area. When they reported that only a few people had been injured and that most of the crowd had gone willingly into the buses, Yolanda and Jimmy made eye contact.
“That’s a relief,” Jimmy said quietly.
Yolanda nodded and kept her eyes on the radio, as if she might be able to see the news in its unchanging digital face.
“Heaven help the roses when the bombs begin to fall,” Jimmy said into the silence.
Yolanda knew this one. “Stevie Wonder,” she replied. “Heaven help us all.”
* * *
An hour later, the last bus pulled into the line, and the sun was dipping toward the horizon over the bay.
Jimmy maneuvered his car in line behind the caravan. By the time they arrived at the Holloway police station, it was dark.
Jimmy and Yolanda watched from outside the police lot as several individuals were taken off the buses and escorted into the building, including the young black man who had yelled “Fuck the police.”
Jimmy motioned for them to get out of the car.
“I think he’s a goddamn agent,” he said to Yolanda on the street, a few paces from the car. “Mr. fuck-the-police.”
“An agent?” Yolanda asked.
“A provocateur,” Jimmy said. “Look at his behavior. He grabbed the mic and agitated the cops. He started the shoving in the crowd. That woman would never have gotten clubbed if he hadn’t started the pushing.”
“You don’t know that,” Yolanda said. “Crowds are unpredictable.”
He turned to her accusingly: “Whose side are you on?”
“I just—I’m scared, Jimmy. I don’t know what the hell any of this means.”
He softened and took her hand. “Let me tell you what I think. I think they won’t be locking anyone up tonight because they don’t have the facilities here. I think they’re gonna charge a few people, the ones who resisted arrest, plus their boy the provocateur. And then they’ll just wait a little while and let everyone else go.”
“What will they charge them with?”
“No charges.”
“But they’re supposed to charge them.”
“Yolanda, these are protest tactics. It’s not about a crime that took place, it’s about the government protecting Randell’s interests.”
Protecting the baby from the edge of the bed? Protecting Randell from public scrutiny?
“I thought I knew the law,” Yolanda said bitterly.
“You do know the law, Yolanda,” Jimmy said. “You just don’t know how it gets enforced.”
Yolanda nodded, and he squeezed her hand tighter. Even though they had left the bugged car, she had nothing to say.