Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  ping away, pulled into some corner in her mind, pouting there like a petulant child. She wanted Roger dealt with. She wanted some show of aggression from him, when all he had was fear and apprehension, and the true knowledge of what his government would do to him if he wasn’t careful.

  Cynthia rolled over flat on her back, pulling her skirt down, covering her knees and every inch of open skin. The silence was there again, popping up between them like mushrooms after a hot spring storm, until there was nothing left except the sound of Otis whistling, and even that faded after a while. Given the circumstances, the police raid and his growing suspi­

  cions about a mole in their midst, Jay had half a mind to cancel the African liberation rally, which was only a couple of weeks away. Stokely, on a swing back from Guinea, was planning to make a speech, and somebody’s heard a rumor the New York 264 Attic a L o c ke

  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 Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 265

  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 266 Attic a L o c ke

  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 Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 267

  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. 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. 268 Attic a L o c ke

  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 Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 269

  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 270 Attic a L o c ke

  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 Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 271

  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.

  Jay was just diving into the first of his ten points when he heard the other group come in. It was two dozen of ’em, at least. They came in through the back door, their feet heavy on the linoleum floor, their march exaggerated to get everyone’s atten­

  tion. Cynthia was at the head, her fist in the air. At the sight of her, Jay lost his place in the speech. Behind him, he heard Marcus whisper, “What the fuck are they doing here?”

  Jay had told Cynthia to stay away. He had told SDS to stay out of it. He was sure this was another one of their stunts. Cynthia climbed onto the dais.

  Jay covered the microphone with his hand. He whispered,

  “What is this?”

  She was wearing a man’s vest over a ruffled, coral-colored blouse. She tugged at her shirt, smoothing it out. “This is our fight too, Jay.”

  Our.

  She yanked the microphone right out of his hand.

  “Brothers and sisters.”

  Bumpy grabbed Jay by the arm. “What the fuck?” he said, loud enough for the microphone to pick up the words and lob them across the room. Cynthia turned around to face Bumpy. 272 Attic a L o c ke

  “We mean you no disrespect, brother,” she said, her voice dulcet, almost cheerful. “But this is something that affects us all.”

  The spectators on the floor seemed confused. SDS had taken up positions along the walls. Jay, the organizer of the march, had seemingly lost control. The air in the room felt tight, in short supply. The cameraman from the Chronicle must have sensed the tension building. His lens cap came off for the first time. Cynthia was now addressing her comments to the black folks on the floor. “We are here today not as rivals but as compatriots, partners in struggle,” she said. “Make no mistake, we appreciate the struggle for our people in Africa.”

  OUR people.

  “But we have some domestic issues that need to be addressed first. Namely, the encroachment of the federal government and their systematic oppression of our right to peaceably assemble. They are infiltrating our groups, people, illegally tape-recording our phone conversations.”

  Jay reached for the microphone. Cynthia shoved him back.

  “We know your group has been hit,” she said, looking back at the men onstage, looking a litt
le too long and hard at Roger.

  “And we stand here in solidarity with you, to say we’re not going to take this anymore.”

  She pointed a pale white finger in Roger’s direction. “The rat must go.”

  Jay grabbed her from behind, and the microphone dropped to the floor, a loud thump echoing across the room. One of the SDS

  boys yelled, “Let her talk, man. You guys don’t own the cafeteria, you know.”

  Jay had her firmly in his arms. He pressed his cheek against her neck. He whispered in her ear. “Stop this, Cynthia. Stop this shit right now.”

  She was still glaring at Roger, calling him a rat, over and over. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 273

  Roger, a little guy to begin with, was only a few inches taller than Cynthia. He squared his shoulders and stepped to her, hopped up on the balls of his feet, peering down at her as best he could. “What the fuck you just call me?”

  “I called you a rat, motherfucker.” She took her same white finger and poked him in the chest with it. Not once, but twice. Which was all it took. Roger hit her across the mouth with his fist, knocking her so hard that her head butted back and caught Jay across the chin. When Roger raised his hand to her again, Jay pushed Cynthia aside and clocked the man himself. He got Roger good across his cheekbone, and then once in the stomach. There were flashbulbs going off every few seconds. The pho­

  tographer was snapping away. Cynthia had tumbled to the floor of the stage. Jay squatted down and asked her if she was okay. He didn’t see Roger behind him. But he felt a swift kick across his ribs and felt himself falling from the stage, dragging Cynthia with him. When he looked up from the cafeteria floor, Lloyd had Roger by the arms. Bumpy had a weapon drawn at his side, ready if need be.