Black Water Rising

Stokely came back soft, somewhat reflective. “Fred Hampton, man,” he said. “How much more you need to hear to know these cats mean business?”

Now it was Jay’s side of the line that went dead silent.

He sat there for a long time on Cynthia’s floor, running his fingers through the fringe of a Navajo blanket that was covering the concrete floor. He thought about those boys in Chicago, and he had a clear, sudden image of his mother at his own funeral. She would bring him back to Nigton, he knew. Back to Nig Town. Nigger Town. She would bury him right where he was born, and it would be done and over with, like he’d never even been here, like nothing had even changed. She would bury him right next to his twenty-one-year-old father.

No, he had to fight. But he wanted to do this right.

“I don’t know shit about this dude, man,” Jay said, meaning Roger. “I don’t know nothing for sure. Maybe I ought to talk to him first, you know.”

“They not teaching our boys over in Southeast Asia to stop and talk to the Vietcong. No, they tell those boys to shoot first, ask questions never. And that’s how we need to do things.” He said it again. His new catchphrase. A slogan for the new decade. Shoot first, ask questions never. “You hear me, brother?” he said.

“Yeah, I hear you,” Jay said, though he was not sure he com­ pletely understood what Stokely was getting at, what he was really suggesting. Jay couldn’t tell how much of this was the rhetoric talking—Stokely sped up by his own language, not able to stop himself—and how much of this was real.

Were they talking about an execution?

In theory or in practice?

“Y’all need to handle that nigger,” Stokely said gruffly. “Quick.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Jay said. His last words on the phone.

In the end, Stokely never made it to the rally.

He claimed pressing business on the coast. Brother Huey was still incarcerated at the time, and there was a growing beef between Carmichael and the Panther Party’s leadership. Stokely said he was staying in California to keep the brothers and sisters down there on point, though Jay strongly believed that Stokely’s absence was meant as a clear message to him. Clean your house, brother. It was a big blow.

They lost the Times. And the Chronicle only sent one photog­ rapher. Jay put him down front by the stage. He wanted a clean

shot of the banner: AFRICAN LIBERATION: GLOBAL UNITY, ECONOMIC PARITY.

Roger Holloway was not supposed to be there.

When Jay finally broke down and told Bumpy and Lloyd and Marcus Dupri about his suspicions and his conversation with Stokely, the founding officers unanimously voted on a course of action: Roger was not to be touched. In fact, they would act as if nothing had changed . . . and use this newfound information about Roger to their advantage. Two could play the spy game.

Lloyd was put on counterintelligence.

His job was to provide Roger with all the pussy and beer and weed he could handle, to make good friends with the boy, and, mainly, to find out where he lived. When the time was right, he was to break into Roger’s place and confiscate whatever had been taken from them; he would destroy any incriminating evidence Roger was collecting against the members of AABL.

And Lloyd was supposed to keep Roger away from the rally.

The morning of, Lloyd had Roger drunk and halfway to a cathouse west of Waco when Roger made Lloyd turn the car around. There was no way, he said, he was gon’ miss the rally. It was his deal as much as Jay’s. He found his way onto the stage in the main cafeteria at the student union, Lloyd right at his side, keeping a close eye on him. Bumpy and Marcus Dupri and Alfreda Watkins were lined up on the dais, their backs against the north wall, underneath the banner. They were dressed in all black, arms clasped behind their backs. Jay was in an olivecolored dashiki, laced with bits of chocolate and amber and rus­ set. He had an elephant’s hair bracelet on his left wrist, a used Timex on the other. It was sometime after three o’clock when he stepped to the podium. He scratched his goatee and looked out across the crowd.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, his voice echoing through the cafeteria. “Despite what our current administration would have the world think of us, we know the young people of this nation to be full of heart and grace, to be appreciators of human struggle and soldiers for justice. We are the true patriots.”

Jay’s voice was strong, sure and focused. He felt at home onstage.

Delores Maxwell, one of Alfreda’s sorors, was in the crowd passing out leaflets, glossy foldouts that had cost them fifty dol­ lars at the printers. They listed the main points of the speech, the tenets of this new call for global unity.

“We gather here today out of complete and total necessity, for we know we cannot stand down. For the first time, we intend to hold the American political establishment and American corpo­ rations to the fire on the issue of global oppression, the continued raping of Africa’s natural resources and oppression of its peoples. Injustice abroad is a threat to justice here at home.”

Jay watched Delores move through the crowd. Folks were nod­ ding and clapping, flipping through the leaflet. The doors were open and his words were pulling in people from nearby build­ ings. More students, professors too. They were curious about Jay, this young man with the booming voice and big ideas.

“We have to take this to the next level, people. We have to let these folks know that we are prepared to exercise our power beyond the ballot box or the bullet. We are prepared to exercise our political power as consumers. If big business wants us to buy, they gon’ have to show some respect for the issues we got in our hearts and minds. They gon’ have to come correct, you hear? From this point on, we take the fight for justice from the political to the economic.”

Some of the black cafeteria workers had stepped out from the kitchen. In white smocks and hairnets, they huddled at the back of the room. Jay waved them forward. Today, the floor was theirs. Delores gave them leaflets too.