THE FEAR RETURNS LIKE A THUNDERBOLT strike. People are running and screaming. The police have entered the park. The sky is dark, and I’ve been chanting, like a reckless fool, like some wannabe white.
I flee.
The protest has spilled beyond the park. Protesters have taken to the streets. Flashing lights brighten the darkness, and I stay as far as I can from the edge of things. It doesn’t stop me from seeing too much. Protesters—white ones—being handcuffed and dragged. Cops with their clubs swinging up and down, and I see it more clearly than ever, why we’re supposed to call them pigs.
I have el tokens in my pocket and ten dollars’ worth of quarters in my hand, but neither is any use to me, because I’m not going that far out of my way. I edge out of the park as close to the lake side as I can get, sending up a prayer that the pigs won’t see and catch me.
It’s a long way home, on foot. A matter of hours, it seems. By the time I’m back in the neighborhood, I’m exhausted of running, dodging cruisers, ducking into alleys when they fishtail around corners, screaming toward something that seems to be everywhere. I thought it’d be okay, once I got far enough away, but what is far enough?
Even the neighborhood has caught the reckless spirit of the day. Fires burn ugly in the storefronts. People run in the streets, some looking for safety, others for something else to set aflame. Sirens rage against the night.
Tonight is bad enough on its own, but in the midst of it all my mind is thrown back to the day Dr. King was murdered. The terror and sadness of those nights. To be wrapped in what is awful. No way out, no chance to breathe through the smoke.
I see my building ahead, but I can’t even feel relieved yet. So much has happened between this corner of the street and my front door. It’s where Bucky was beaten. Where I found Sam throwing rocks into a storefront the night Dr. King died, which was the moment it all sank in for me that everything had changed in the most irretrievable way. It’s the sidewalk I’ve fled down a hundred times, sometimes to get home but most times to get away.
A stretch of road that sometimes brings me to tears. I don’t know why I have no tears tonight. My clothes and body are drenched with sweat, so maybe that was all the water in me.