Chapter 21
Two hours later, the four adults of RBG, along with Carlos, Sheena, and Dana, sat in the emergency room.
Carlos had suffered a head injury. He had walked in with all of them but seemed unsteady on his feet.
“I don’t need to go to the hospital,” Carlos had said in the Holloway police parking lot. “I hate hospitals.”
“When a cop clubs you in the head, you go to the hospital,” Marcus said.
Sharon had looked in his eyes and determined that he might have some sort of concussion.
The seven of them had squeezed into Jimmy’s car and headed to Kaiser emergency. As they arrived, a man was being rushed in on a gurney. There were already over a dozen people waiting, several of them bleeding, a few barely conscious, and a baby who kept screaming at the top of her lungs.
Carlos sat around dazed, watching sitcoms. The RBG members were glued to their phones. Yolanda still didn’t have any of her own social media accounts, so she looked on with Jimmy.
Several of the protest videos had gone viral, but none of the ones that really showed the excessive force used by the police.
“That guy right there,” Marcus said. “I saw that guy. He had a perfect shot of the cop clubbing that woman. When he got arrested, they took his phone.”
“You think they selectively targeted the people with the best video?” Jimmy asked.
“I’ll bet they did,” Marcus said. “I fucking hate the police.”
“I thought you said law enforcement were just members of the working class who’d been manipulated to go against their people,” Dana said.
“Some days I believe that,” Marcus said. “On days I get arrested, I fucking hate them all.”
“Amen,” said Jimmy.
Yolanda ran her fingers across the exterior of her shoulder bag. She traced the ridges that defined the edges of her FBI credentials pressing against the vinyl from an interior pocket. Manipulated to go against their people?
In the background, the canned laughter from the sitcom died down, and the network aired their news preview clip, as they had done at every commercial break. They showed a brief clip of the rally, an image of the melee as the cops moved in, with the audio: “Mass arrests at a protest against Randell Corporation in Holloway today. Details at eleven.”
Just before the second sitcom ended, they called in the woman with the baby, and the screaming finally stopped.
“Are they ever gonna call us?” Sheena asked.
“Eventually,” Sharon said. Then she turned to Carlos: “Cómo tás amor? Cómo tá tu cabeza? Quieres mas hielo?”
Carlos had his face in his hands. “I told you I’m fine,” he mumbled. “Leave me alone.” They had given him a large bandage when he came in, which had stopped the bleeding, and an ice pack which had warmed to room temperature half an hour earlier.
The rally clip came on TV again. “Police had to break up a demonstration at Randell Corporation in Holloway. The story at eleven.”
“They didn’t have to break up the demonstration,” Dana said. “That’s bullshit.”
“I was hella scared,” Sheena said. “When those cops rolled up, I was like ‘oh fuck!’ But Sharon came and grabbed me and Nakeesha and Jasmine and held onto us in the crowd.”
“I got separated from you guys,” Dana said. “But I held onto Darnell and we did what you told us to do at that nonviolent protest training we had last year. Don’t panic. Don’t run. Don’t yell. Stay together as much as possible, and don’t resist arrest.”
“Thank god Darnell ain’t on probation no more,” Nakeesha said.
“We’re lucky we had all those cameras there, or it would have been so much worse,” Marcus said. He had finally surrendered the bullhorn to the police and hadn’t gotten it back when they released him. The teens had been cuffed with their hands behind their backs. So even though many of their phones were never confiscated, they couldn’t use them until after they were uncuffed and released.
“They wouldn’t let us off the bus to pee or anything,” Sheena said. “I had to go hella bad, because I’d been holding it at the rally. We were on those damn buses for three hours! I thought I was gonna pee my pants, for real.”
“Watch,” Marcus said. “When the news segment comes on, I’ll be surprised if they don’t interview Andrew Wentworth from Randell or Chief Evans. Turn this shit into some kind of PR opportunity.”
“That’ll be next week,” Jimmy said. “You watch. Sometime soon, there’ll be a news story on Randell’s Pick Up the Bay Day activities with Holloway Elementary.”
“My brother was in that,” Sheena said. “All they did was have him pick up one piece of trash, give him a donut, and have him pose for a picture.”
By ten PM, Jimmy had made a run to take Dana and Sheena home. Sharon had gone to the nurse’s desk twice to see when they might call Carlos in, showing her badge and explaining that she was a Kaiser therapist.
The nurse seemed unimpressed.
“You do realize he has a head injury and is bleeding?” Sharon asked.
“Miz Martinez, we’re doing everything we can,” she said. “We have two gunshot wounds, and a cardiac arrest. And that’s on top of the five-car pileup that happened nearby on 580 from earlier today.”
By the time the Eleven O’ Clock News came on, they were still waiting. During a news story about a celebrity wedding, the nurse came out.
“Carlos Moralow,” she butchered Carlos’s last name, Murillo.
“Finally,” Carlos grumbled, standing up.
“You want me to come in with you?” Sharon asked.
Carlos tried to shake his head, winced, and waved her away.
On the television, a blonde woman with stiff hair and thick makeup wore a somber expression as she detailed the story on the protest. Above her shoulder was the Randell logo.
“In Holloway today, a demonstration against Randell Corporation, led by Project Greener and Red, Black, and GREEN! got out of control and police had to break up the crowd.”
The story cut to the young man yelling “[Bleep!] the police!” Then they cut to a clip of the police on the loudspeaker: “This is the Holloway police department. This is an unlawful assembly and you need to disperse immediately. I repeat, DISPERSE IMMEDIATELY.” The next shot was a quick cut to pushing and chaos in the crowd.
“Police arrested over three hundred protesters, but most were released this evening.”
The next clip showed a line of protesters filing off the bus into the Holloway PD parking lot in the plastic handcuffs under dim light.
“However, several were charged with resisting arrest, and one had a warrant for a felony charge.” The final clip showed police escorting a few demonstrators into the building with their heads down.
The anchorwoman smiled and turned to her co-anchor. “I guess he’ll be spending the night in jail. So what’s our weather looking like?”
“I knew it!” Marcus said, turning away from the television. “I knew they wouldn’t even mention Anitra Jenkins.”
“This is bad,” Sharon said.
“MSNBC showed a few clips from protesters’ phones,” Jimmy said. “And Democracy Now is gonna run a story about the protest in the morning.”
“Does it look like anyone got the video of the police clubbing that white girl?” Sharon asked.
“Not yet,” Jimmy said.
“By then, it won’t fucking matter,” Marcus said. “They’ve already framed the story. Protesters were out of control. The police did what they had to do. By the time Democracy Now shows the real story, the mainstream press will have moved on.”
“You’re right,” Jimmy said. “To the average TV viewer, it looks like another episode of COPS where they get the bad guy in the end.”
“This is gonna make our organizing twice as hard,” Sharon complained. “None of the black parents of Holloway will want their kids to go to RBG.”
The door opened and Carlos came back out. The nurse came with him and spoke to the four adults.
“He has a mild concussion. He can take a pain reliever for the headache.” She talked about Carlos like he wasn’t there. “Which of you are the parents?”
“The guardians,” Marcus volunteered quickly.
“Wake him up every two hours. If he won’t wake up, call us, okay?” She handed them an information sheet and walked back to the desk.
“Is your mom home tonight?” Sharon asked after the nurse had left.
Carlos shrugged. “I think she’s working graveyard.”
“You’re coming home with me,” Sharon said.
“Oh joy,” Carlos said in a deadpan.
“Or,” Marcus said. “You could come home with me. I got a frozen pizza, some mix and pour brownies. A bunch of sci-fi movies. Maybe we won’t even go to sleep.”
Carlos gave a lopsided half smile, the first Yolanda had seen since he had stepped off the bus. He pointed at Marcus and gave a thumbs up.
In the Kaiser parking lot, they all squeezed into Jimmy’s car.
“I’m gonna drop Carlos and Marcus first, okay?” Jimmy asked. “It’s not the most efficient, but I want to get Carlos settled ASAP.”
After everyone agreed, none of the adults said anything.
“Damn. you guys,” Carlos said. “I’m not dying. I don’t need a moment of silence or anything.”
“Of course not,” Yolanda said.
At the same time that Sharon said, “We were just so worried about you.”
* * *
“Carlos could tell something was weird,” Sharon said, after they’d dropped Marcus and Carlos. She, Yolanda, and Jimmy were standing in the cold night outside Sharon’s house. “We’ve gotta figure out how to handle this bugging thing.”
“Maybe we should just go public,” Jimmy suggested.
“Maybe we should,” Yolanda agreed.
“I can’t think clearly, I’m so tired,” Sharon said.
Sharon hugged them both goodnight, and Jimmy and Yolanda drove in silence to Yolanda’s house.
As they reached the corner at the end of her block, she tapped Jimmy on the shoulder and motioned for him to keep going. They passed her building and drove out onto Holloway Avenue.
Yolanda felt reckless, unleashed. Nobody else seemed to be playing by the rules. Where was the payoff for being good? Being the best? The best grades, the best test scores, the best law school didn’t pay off when Van Dell Meyers and Whitney wasn’t paying by the rules, and now it seemed like nobody was.
The empty casket in the Holloway cemetery? The sixty seconds for hundreds of people to get out of a park? Cell service suspended in the area? Phones confiscated? What if the young black kid really was a provocateur? Sent by the FBI?
Johnakin’s words came into her head: “When we let fear make our decisions, we are rarely pleased with the outcome. Take a risk and see what happens.”
She directed Jimmy to park the car downtown.
“Where the hell are we going?” he asked after they got out.
“I don’t know,” Yolanda said as they walked across the BART station plaza. “I can’t go home. Not knowing if it might be bugged. I need—I don’t know what I need. Let’s just go.”
“Okay,” Jimmy said slowly, and they caught the last BART train out of Holloway.
They sat side by side, holding hands, not talking. As the train slid into the Transbay tunnel, Yolanda mustered her courage to speak, emboldened by the loud echo of the train in the tunnel that drowned out the music blaring from the headphones of the young man across the way, and the fussing child several seats back.
“Let’s go to a hotel,” Yolanda’s heart pounded furiously as she spoke. “Somewhere we can be alone.”
He blinked several times. “Are you sure?” he said. “I don’t want you to make a decision you’ll regret because of some sort of post-traumatic coping mechanism.”
“Jimmy,” she said sharply. “Don’t psychoanalyze me. If you don’t want to spend the night together—”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he yelled against the noise of the train. “I been wanting you since that first day I saw you at the runner’s path. I just don’t want to fuck this up. I want you for more than just tonight.”
Suddenly, Yolanda smiled. “Geechee geechee yaya dada,” Yolanda said, looking him directly in the eyes.
“Well hey sister soul sister go sister,” Jimmy said, grinning.
* * *
In high school, after Yolanda became disillusioned with Lester Johnakin, she briefly found solace in the words of her own father. She had sat through all of his sermons back in Georgia, but as a preschooler, she could never make anything of the content. She was happy to watch the rapidly changing expressions on his face and follow the rise and fall of his cadences.
But when she was fourteen, she had come across a recording of one of his sermons on the internet. When she played it, the theme was clearly about loyalty. She downloaded it into her computer and listened to it every night at bedtime. Her father’s familiar voice sliding in through earbuds to soothe the slice of Dale’s disloyalty.
“The world is full of shiny things,” her father began. “We can get so distracted by them. You see me up here with my bling? A gift from my lovely wife. Praise God . . . I know it’s a nice watch, but I’m up here promoting the word of God, not showcasing accessories. See, we get distracted. I get distracted sometimes. Lord have mercy! But I know where my loyalty lies. And it’s not to any of these earthly distractions and pleasures. It is to God.”
See, we get distracted. I get distracted sometimes.
At the time, Yolanda had taken the sermon to mean that she had gotten distracted by Dale and designer clothes from her real goal—success. Success was her god, and she vowed to serve faithfully.
She had listened to the recording every night for months. Her father’s voice was the only way she could fall asleep. Feel protected again. This digital file, more than anything her father had actually said to her, became the memory she had of him. Even now, she could recall fragments, whole paragraphs, but not in any coherent order.
In the days leading up to the rally at Randell, she had searched again for the link online. She found it and downloaded the audio file into her phone. She listened to it as she worked out in the gym.
Yolanda saw that her understanding in high school had still been faulty. As a teen, she had shaped her father’s message around her need to make sense of Dale’s betrayal. But now she could see that he was talking about more than just God vs. material things.
“If you have your Bible with you today . . .” She could hear the rustling of papers as she worked with the free weights in the gym. “Yes, let’s stand for the Word of God. Turn to Romans thirteen, verse one: ‘Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.’
“So we have the Bible telling us here that we are to obey authority. That the government exists because it was instituted by God. But that was why we needed a New Testament, where Jesus came down and said that God was love. Not rules. Not rulers. But love. Somebody say Amen.”
“Amen,” the congregation responded.
“Even in the Old Testament.” Again, the rustling of paper. “Proverbs three, verse three: ‘Let not steadfast love and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck; write them on the tablet of your heart.’
“The Bible is telling us that what is in our hearts is the ultimate authority. Oh I wish I had some saints up in here today to validate this holy word.”
“Amen.”
As a teenager, she had interpreted the love part as the ambition she had in her heart. But now she thought about loyalty in a different way.
“Oh thank you Jesus for your holy word. Because in Matthew six, verse twenty-four, the Bible says, ‘No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.’”
Yolanda met her own eyes in the weight room mirror. Wasn’t that exactly where she was right now? The FBI had made a case for her to despise RBG, but then she had spent time with those people, and it became increasingly clear that the Bureau had painted a false picture. “Black Identity Extremists,” is what the FBI had called them. But it was just a bunch of teenagers who wanted decent schools, safe air and water, and not to get shot by the police. What was so extreme about that?
“You see me up here with my bling? A gift from my lovely wife. Praise God . . .” And then there was a quiet moment in the recording where all she could hear was her father’s throaty chuckle. He was flirting. Flirting with his wife from the pulpit. She remembered it now. How he would beam down at both of them, but a special look he had just for her mother.
“See, we get distracted. I get distracted sometimes. Lord have mercy! But I know where my loyalty lies.” Yolanda had faltered, right there in the gym, right in the middle of her third set of reps and looked at her phone. As if the screen could tell her what she already knew. Her father was apologizing to her mother. Explaining his behavior. I get distracted by other women, but I’ll always be loyal to you.
How had she never considered that possibility? That her mother knew? Knew something. Had she accepted the affairs because she thought they meant nothing? Didn’t include children? Or was she just humiliated at the funeral that it had been such an open secret? Or maybe a woman doesn’t have that much of a choice when she has a powerful husband and no local family of her own.
How had her father justified his affairs? If he was supposed to be such a man of God? She had wondered this in the gym.
But now, as she sat on the train, her fingers tangled in Jimmy’s, for the first time she could imagine what her father might have felt. It wasn’t the same. Her father had betrayed his wife, his daughter—women he loved and had vowed to cherish. But she was an FBI agent, barreling through a tunnel into an unfamiliar city to bed a man she was lying to—was spying on.
She couldn’t even quite bring herself to say it to him. Had counted on Lady Marmalade to say it for her. But she wanted him in that way that says consequences be damned. Every pore in her skin hungered for him. “The Bible is telling us that what is in our hearts is the ultimate authority.” She thought again about her father’s loyalty sermon. She wasn’t sure whom she was betraying: Jimmy or the FBI. Maybe both. But right now, the only loyalty she had was to the desire she felt. That longing had become her ultimate authority.
“Embarcadero,” the driver’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Embarcadero station, our first San Francisco stop.”
She took Jimmy’s hand and exited the train, leading him up into the hotel above the ground.
She had always thought of herself as her mother’s daughter—most of her life shaped entirely by her mother’s choices and failures. Her father’s only relevant act was dying and leaving a void, in which her mother could make mistakes. But in this moment of recklessness, she felt herself as her father’s daughter for the first time in her adult life.