RUMOR HAS IT, THE DNC DEMONSTRATION today is headed in the same direction as it was yesterday. Cops all lined up and foaming at the mouth to get a piece of the crowd, and the crowd raging right back at them, taunting them. The Panthers are pulling out. We know better than those white kids that you want to be calm when you’re getting in the face of the cops. Our policers do it every day. The right way. We don’t need to get mixed up in any kind of melee, not like yesterday.
I keep my head down, keep focused on the buttons, while Lester and Leroy talk about it with Gumbo, who just walked in with a report from downtown.
“That’s it,” Lester says. “White allies are just going to mess with us. I knew it all along.”
“We have plenty of white allies,” Leroy corrects. “But maybe the anti-war crowd just needs to do its own thing. They can’t see anything but how the world looks to them right now.”
“They’re never going to see our side,” Gumbo agrees. “The street side, I mean. They’re all rich kids.”
On that note, the office falls into a moment of silence. Panther silence isn’t like total silence, though, because you can practically hear the hum of everyone thinking about things.
Into that almost silent hum walks Bucky Willis. All at once, everyone in the office cheers. Bucky has that way about him, lifting the spirits of a room.
I leap up and hug him. Others rush forward to pat him on the shoulders.
“I should come down more often, if I’m gonna get received like that,” Bucky jokes. “Heya, Maxie.” He keeps his arm around my shoulders.
I duck my face against his chest. “Hey.”
Bucky is great, and I know I hold a special place in his heart, but seeing him is kind of a mixed bag because it reminds me of everything he’s been through.
“You’re welcome anytime, man,” Lester says.
Bucky’s not a Panther, but he’s our best success story here in Chicago, so he’s something of a mascot for the office.
I know the story all too well. It was one of those afternoons that starts out normal and ends up being anything but. Sam walked me home—that was the normal part—and when we got to my street, we saw Bucky. He was running late for work, literally running down the block, and when he came around the corner he happened to bump into two cops coming the other way. It was an accident, but the cops blamed Bucky, the way that cops do. He tried to talk his way out, but they got mad and started beating him with their batons. When I close my eyes sometimes, out of nowhere, I can still see his bleeding, bruised-up face. The way he fell limp to the sidewalk, and the way the cops cursed overhead while they kicked him into the street.
Afterward, they charged him with assaulting a police officer and resisting arrest. They put Bucky in jail and held a big trial, and in the end it was Sam’s and my word against the cops’. We went to court to testify, and it was the scariest thing I could imagine.
The courtroom was very big and very gray and it was full of angry glaring white people. A whole row of cops in uniforms in the front row of chairs, looking mad like they might leap right over that railing and destroy me. Two lines of white faces in the jury box, too, and those were the people I had to look at while I was talking, the judge said. He sat up tall in the highest seat in the room, looking all-powerful, robed in black. The lawyers asked me questions and I told the whole truth, then after I was done I sat out in the hallway and cried. I thought Bucky was going to die in that room for sure. It felt like I’d only escaped by the skin of my teeth, and I wasn’t even the one on trial.
Bucky could have gone to jail for a long time, but based on our testimony, the Panthers’ legal aid lawyers got him off. It was a miracle.
So when Bucky squeezes my shoulder, I hug him back, and we don’t have to say any more about it. We don’t need any words, because for that long hour in the witness stand, the only lifeline I had was my frequent glances into his blank, helpless face, and he was always looking right back. There’s no way of erasing a connection like that.
When I get upset about not being a real Panther, Emmalee likes to remind me about the time I testified. When Raheem asked me to do it, I thought finally I was doing something that mattered. It did matter, I guess, because I showed them I was brave, but Sam’s the one whose testimony actually made a difference. He’s the one who people had heard of, because of his famous father. He’s the one they believed.
In the midst of the Bucky reception, Patrice sidles up to me. “Can we go now?”
“Okay,” I say. She helps me finish sorting the buttons, then we grab Emmalee and skedaddle.
We never spend all day there, especially now that summer is winding down. After we do our part for the day we escape. For Emmalee and Patrice, it’s escaping the office work. For me, it’s escaping the feeling that I’ll never get to do anything important.