Black Water Rising

Guinea, was planning to make a speech, and somebody’s heard a rumor the New York Times was sending a reporter to cover the event. It was turning into a very big deal. Jay was already worried about drawing any more attention to himself. He knew the feds were watching him closely. The few times he’d traveled out of the state to deliver a speech, he’d been followed on the road, one car clipping the bumper of the borrowed truck he was driving, almost running him into a ditch. Another time, two highway patrolmen pulled him over. They searched his car and made him spend a night in lockup because his right taillight was out. He knew the govern­ ment was looking for any reason to trap him, and he was afraid of the lengths to which the feds would go to silence him.

Plus, there was no way of knowing if Roger was the only gov­ ernment informant on campus. Any fool would guess he wasn’t. As Cynthia had taken pains to point out, this was something that affected all of them. Political organizing, free speech, the whole goddamned Constitution. None of it was safe. And if Jay canceled the rally, she said, then they all might as well turn their tails in the air; they deserved every ass- fucking rape of their civil rights the government had in store for them. She said it would be a disgrace if he canceled.

Other than the general principle of the thing, he didn’t understand why Cynthia was so worked up, why she cared so much about one rally. He didn’t think Cynthia’s group, Students for a Democratic Society, nearly blinded as they were by their collective rage over Johnson’s bullshit war, gave two shits about Africa. And he didn’t want them at his rally no way. The local chapter of SDS was rancorous and full of infighting and prone to gross theatrics. They had once doused the university’s provost in pig’s blood as he was coming out of a staged production of My Fair Lady at the school’s performance hall. In an article claim­ ing responsibility for the prank in the next day’s edition of the Daily Cougar, a senior officer of SDS said they felt they needed to get people’s attention any way they could, that marches and ral­ lies weren’t making the deaths of American soldiers real enough to folks. Jay didn’t understand what the university’s provost had to do with Vietnam, or what drowning him in pig’s blood was going to do except piss him off and make it harder for everybody else to be heard.

But he did see their point about the fading power of speech. The sight of kids chanting and marching through the streets with fists raised was getting more and more common. On its face, it was no longer enough to shock, to wake up the masses, and, more important, the powers that be.

Jay was ready to try something new, a different tactic alto­ gether.

Economic boycotts. Or “consumer sanctions,” he called them.

He had already leaked the idea to the papers. But at the rally, he would make it official. He planned to call for a nationwide boycott of some of the biggest corporations in America, com­ panies that were continuing to benefit from a history of colonial and economic oppression of brown people, that made money off the continent of Africa and its people. He would name names.

Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.

Shell and Gulf Oil.

The big petroleum companies sucking the Congo dry.

He supposed Cynthia knew what all this meant to him, this push for global uplift, and he liked to think that was the reason she was behind the rally, why she kept pushing for him to protect it, to move forward with his plans.

He had no real proof of Roger’s wrongdoings. And he was afraid to get into it with Bumpy for fear of what Bumpy might do to the kid if Jay even floated the idea that Roger was on the wrong side of things. Jay needed everybody to keep a cool head. If the kid was an informant, laying so much as a scratch on his back was a colossally bad idea. And Bumpy was still fuming about his guns.

So Jay kept his fears to himself and vacillated about what to do with the rally. Up until the last thirty-six hours, he was on the fence. He kept running through the evidence against Roger in his head, all of it circumstantial:

1. Roger wasn’t even a student on campus.

2. No one was really sure where Roger lived.

3. He had offered to help Jay with the rally, offered to type up copies of Jay’s speech, his outline for corporate boycotts, and the call for global unity.

4. He’d also cozied up to Alfreda Watkins, and in the process gotten a good, long look at AABL’s fundraising roster, the names and addresses of people in the community who’d given what little money they had.

5. He’d been hanging around the duplex for months and had occasionally been by Bumpy’s girlfriend’s place out in South Park. If Roger had been snooping around, he could have easily found the guns there on his own.

Added together, it didn’t look good, and Jay had to make a decision about the rally before Stokely got on a very expensive flight from Oakland to Houston.

Because of the bugs crawling all over the Scott Street duplex, Jay made the call from Cynthia’s place. She was off campus by then, in a one-room shotgun shack in the Bottoms in Third Ward. He needed a place where he could camp out for a while. It would take hours to track down Stokely, who was back in the country by then, reportedly on the West Coast. Jay needed a secure line where Stokely could call him back if Jay had to leave a message for him. Cynthia made a pot of coffee, rubbed his shoul­ ders while he waited. When the call came, she left him alone. She kissed his forehead and walked out of the house.

Jay lit one cigarette after another and ran it down for Brother Carmichael.

The cops, the guns, the raid.

Maybe, baby, I’m just tripping out on the vibe down here.

Tell me I’m just seeing things.

But if he was looking to Stokely to cool his paranoia, he’d picked the wrong dude. Talking to a Panther about a fed in their midst was like dropping a match in a pool of black oil. The shit was gon’ blow. “This is the most elemental expression of fascism in its purest state, my brother,” Stokely said, his voice cracking like lightning. “What they cannot silence, they will exterminate. You need to open your eyes to the truth of this thing. They try­ ing to kill us, brother.”

The words poured out of the phone like tear gas, filling up every space in the room, burning, stinging, gobbling up Jay’s breath. “This ain’t no game,” Stokely said. “If you got even a hunch about this dude, get rid of him, push him out now. We in a war, brother. You got to get them before they get you.”

He was talking fast, moving at a dangerous clip.

Jay shook his head. “But that’s exactly what they want, man. We start kicking people out left and right, until there’s nothing left. And they sitting back somewhere laughing, watching us tear ourselves apart.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.