THE POLICE BRUSH BY US WITHOUT stopping. Seeing them gives me a chill, all the same. I try to shake the cold feeling, to get brave inside, but I can’t. Where there are cops, there’s trouble. Never fails.
Just last week, a pair of cops blipped their siren at us for crossing on the red. Jumped out of the car and started yelling. Came over to us. We stood shaking in the crosswalk, thought we were goners for sure. But they just shouted awhile. Laughed at Emmalee’s “pickaninny tears.” That’s what they called it.
I see cops, and I can’t help but think about the worse things too. My friend Bucky getting beat with a baton on the street right in front of me. That was six months ago, but I still wake up some mornings thinking about how broken they made him look. How small.
Senseless things. Once, when I was little, Raheem was walking me home from school and he was doing this airplane thing with his arms to make me laugh. Raheem was little, too—maybe eleven—but already kind of tall, with long arms, which was why it was funny watching him zoom around. He tripped on a sidewalk crack and stumbled, caught his balance by leaning his hands and belly against the side of a parked sedan. Cop came up out of nowhere, accused Raheem of trying to steal the car. Got the handcuffs out and everything. A white man came out of a store just then. Didn’t even say nothing, but didn’t move along, either. He stood there watching, and the cop backed off. I didn’t recognize the white man, didn’t know what he was doing down in the neighborhood, but now I know him being there, seeing it, might have been all that saved Raheem from getting scooped up. Act of God or something. After the cop left, Raheem picked me up and hugged me and made me promise never to tell anyone. He acted like it was a one-time thing, a secret. But I learned the lesson good that day: In the neighborhood, you always got to be on your toes.
When the cops are past, when the moment is over, I look toward Raheem. Feeling glad he’s here today, which is all that matters. Today. Like he says sometimes—there’s a lot of “what if” in our lives; doesn’t do any good to dwell on it.
“We’ll go down to the corner and wait for you,” Raheem says through the truck window.
Hamlin shakes his head. “Don’t wait. No idea how long I’ll be.”
“Look for us by the stage.” Raheem slaps the open window. “Hopefully we can get the banner up quick. That’ll help.”
We start moving toward the demonstration. “Pigs are out in force,” Gumbo murmurs as we walk.
He’s right. Cops everywhere, lining the edges of the park around where the protesters have begun to gather. Seeing them in their straight, cold, black-and-blue rows—the only familiar sight before me—sends a shiver across my back. We’ll have to cross through in order to join the protesters behind them. Usually, behind the police is the place I want to get to, but nothing back there seems comforting. I can’t see a single hint of brown skin anywhere, except ours.
Emmalee works her fingers into the crook of my arm and pulls closer. I figure she’s thinking the same thing as me, that we’ve never seen so many white faces all in one place before. Except maybe from a distance, or maybe on TV. Leroy promised us the people in the crowd are our allies, but it still feels strange walking into them.
We shift toward a gap in the police barricades. The officers are lined up in double rows. I look at the crowd, and I look at the stern-faced cops. I don’t understand why there are so many, because everyone here is white. It makes me scared, scared that they’ve been waiting for us.
I feel all their eyes on us as we get closer. Little round helmets. Chubby cheeks. Pigs, I think, trying to calm myself down. It doesn’t really work.
A rippling banner posted high on one of the buildings says: WELCOME, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION DELEGATES. It’s signed by Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago. King of the pigs, Raheem would say.
As if he knows what I’m thinking, Raheem chuckles low. The it’s-not-really-funny kind of laugh. “Pigs on parade. Dick Daley done himself proud.”
“Shh.” I don’t want anyone to hear him. The police are all on Daley’s side. If the mayor orders them to kill us, they will. He’s tried it before.
Raheem cuts his gaze down to me. “Hey. You remember what I told you?”
“I remember.”
At home this morning, Raheem had made me promise that whatever happened, the girls and me wouldn’t stay in the park after dark. He’d said it first thing when he woke me up, right into my face, like he already knew I was going to defy him and stay past when we were supposed to.
“I want to hear Bobby,” I told him.
“That’s still daylight. You leave right after,” he said. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“There’s pigs all over that joint,” he added. “Stuff tends to happen when the sun goes down.”
Rumors travel fast, breathed from one person to another like germs. There’d been trouble in the park last night, and everyone was already on edge.
I sucked my teeth at him. “Whoever heard of a white-people riot?”
Raheem looked at me slantwise. “These cats shake it up,” he said. “Remember Columbia? They tried to take over the damn college.”
“Yeah.”
“They be stunting things we couldn’t get away with in a million years.”
I shrugged. “We’re going to their demonstration for a reason. We all want the same things.”
“They’re protesting a war abroad; we’re fighting a war right here. They’re trying to keep out of uniform; we’re already on the front lines.”
He held my shoulders. “Listen. Don’t let nobody white talk you into doing nothing. You hear me? They got no fear. When the law comes down, it comes down on us.”
I don’t like the feeling it gives me, thinking about that.
“Maxie.” Patrice huddles close to me. “What are we doing here?” She’s clutching the banner poles so tight her knuckles are pale.
“Shh,” I whisper. “It’s going to be okay.” Even though I’m not so sure of that myself.
Patrice glances over her shoulder, releases a tiny, desperate sigh. I don’t have to look to know. The edge of the crowd is somewhere far behind us. We’ve disappeared into the middle. Nothing but people, pressed close and jumping, rocking, chanting. I’m surrounded by the chests and shoulders of people taller than me, trying to forge a path through them. All I see are vests and beads, jeans and belts, cutoff shirtsleeves, scruffy beards. Lots of long, straight hair. All I can breathe is the scent of people sweating, the occasional sweet whiff of smoke.
“Excuse us,” I call out.
A large blond man looks down at me. Clear blue eyes, like surface of a pool. His gaze catches mine, makes me nervous. Then he steps aside an inch, which is about all he has to offer.
“Thanks.” I barely breathe the word. Shove Patrice through the small opening first and drag Emmalee through behind me. Our feet tangle with the thick layers of paper and trash littering the ground.
Raheem steers us toward a thin spot in the crowd, as close to the stage as we can get. “Let’s set up here,” he says, kicking aside some discarded food sacks to make room for our boxes.
Emmalee sets down her bags and starts unfolding the banner from my arms. Patrice struggles to angle the poles down without hitting anyone.
“Watch out,” Gumbo says. “We’ll do it.”
“We can help,” I say, but he lifts the banner from my arms, letting it loop toward the ground. Raheem leaves an opened box and takes the poles from Patrice.
My arms have been sweating under the thick fabric. The sudden breeze on my skin is refreshing, but leaves me with a bit of a chill. Now there’s nothing at all between me and the crowd. I can feel them jostling, feel them breathing. They smell strange, sound strange. Their energy is all up in the air above us, slightly floating, slightly pressing down.
The guys are tall enough to heft the banner onto the poles. They tug on it and the fabric snaps tautly into place. It reads THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY with the sprawling cat logo underneath.
They twist and twist until the poles sink into the grass, still dewy with morning mist.
“That’ll do,” Gumbo says.
“Now what?” Patrice is nervous. She keeps shifting her hand from one hip to the other, like she does on test days at school.
“Stand by the pole,” Raheem says. “Don’t let anyone knock it over.”
“That’s it?” Emmalee says. “We came all this way to stand by a pole?”
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.