All American Boys (28 page)

“I'm going,” I told Jill. I tried to be cool about it. “I mean, I did wear that T-shirt and all.”

She laughed. “All right then. Let's go together.”

The school day was a blur of chaos. Nobody was paying attention to what was happening in class—even most of the teachers were just letting the day run, so we could all get out of the building. It felt like when the last bell rang the dam would break and a flood of people would pour out of school.

And it wasn't until I got out onto the sidewalk near the gym that I remembered that, in fact, not everyone was going to the march. As I looked around for Jill, I saw Dwyer cutting across the parking lot to the gym. He was hunched forward, not looking back, trudging his way to practice, and I wondered if there'd even be enough players there to run a play. They sure as hell couldn't run “Rashad.” What would they call it instead? There'd be consequences for all of us skipping
practice, I knew that, but that would be Monday. Today—yes, Ma—I was trying to
take some responsibility
.

I was marching.

I repeated it to myself like a mantra. I was marching. I kept saying it as I scanned the crowd for Jill, pumping myself up, because some people had told me racism was a thing of the past, they'd told me not to get involved. But that was nuts.
They
were nuts. And more to the point—they'd all been white people. Well, guess what? I'm white too—and that's
exactly why
I was marching. I had to. Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who said it wasn't, and the only people who said, “Don't talk about it” were white. Well,
stop lying
. That's what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop denying. That's why I was marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it.
We!
White people! We had to stand up and say something about it too, because otherwise it was just like what one of those posters in the crowd outside school said:
OUR SILENCE IS ANOTHER KIND OF VIOLENCE
.

I found Jill, and we walked with a huge group of kids, making our slow march to Jerry's. By the time we got there, the street was a river of people—an enormous group already!—winding back from the corner store. They were chanting and waving signs. All the streets behind us were open, but the
police had cordoned off the side streets along the march route ahead of us. We were stuck in a kind of tunnel. Fucking hell! Sure, they'd let us march from Jerry's to the police station—that was the plan—but if anything went wrong, we'd be trapped. Thousands of us. Noise already echoed off the walls of the buildings on either side of the street.

There were thousands of cops, too, or what might have been cops. They looked more like an army of Robocops—black paramilitary outfits, helmets, automatic rifles. Jill and I kept squeezing our way closer and closer to the front, and when we could see beyond the first row of marchers, we could see the first line of the police guard, too. With the row of police tanks, like the one I'd seen that morning, and the rank upon rank of infantry, I swear it looked a lot less like Springfield and a lot more like Kabul. But it was the corner of Fourth Street. I held my breath for a moment, feeling again what I'd seen there.

Jill and I scooted toward the edge of the street, closer to Jerry's. I could see the black canisters of tear gas in the belt loops of the cops. I pulled out my phone and start filming them. I didn't know if I was allowed to film them or not, but I filmed them anyway. I filmed the tanks, too. I filmed the guys who had their guns raised and aimed toward the marchers. Then I tilted the phone back to me.

“Hey, Will,” I said into the picture. “This is for you. Ma's
always telling us to take responsibility. That we have to live up to what Dad died for. We need to get good grades and go to a good college and take advantage of every damn minute of our lives because he died for us. I believe that. But I believe he died for this, too. If he died for freedom and justice—well, what the hell did he die for if it doesn't count for all of us?”

Someone was blowing a whistle up front and I hit stop. People shouted instructions through a bullhorn. Jill pointed, excited. “I think I see Rashad up there! I think he's here.” We tried to edge our way a little closer to the front line, and with all the camera crews hovering, and people watching us on their TVs back home, I wondered if anybody thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American. That was bullshit. This was very American, goddamn
All-American
. I craned my head, trying to see Rashad. And seeing who I thought might be him, right next to his family and English, I couldn't help wondering how, years from now, Rashad would be remembered.

The kid at the front of a march. Speaking truth to power. Standing up for injustice. Asking only to be seen and heard and respected like the citizen he was. Would he be thought of as the “All-American” boy?

But as the march began, and we trudged forward, shouting along with the people around us, “Spring-field P-D, we don't want brutality!” I just wanted
to see Rashad, the kid who went to school with me. Rashad, English's friend. Rashad, the guy walking along with his family, the son they were probably all just grateful was alive.

The march wound its way from the West Side back into Central. The streets swelled with bodies and chants, and as we got down to Police Plaza 1, the crowd started to fan out around the square. I followed Jill and joined a cluster right near the front. Whistles blew around the square and the chanting stopped, the marching stopped, and everyone began to lie down on the ground.

“It's a die-in,” Jill told me, and I dropped like everyone else.

Somebody had a microphone and a PA speaker, and she started reciting the names that I quickly realized were of young, unarmed black men and women who had been killed by the police in the last year. I knew some of the names from the news, but many I didn't. So fucking many.

As I listened, I looked up into what should have been the dark, autumnal evening sky, but instead the haze of flashing police lights, streetlamps, giant spotlights, the headlights of cars, the kaleidoscopic reflection off the cold concrete and glass of Police Plaza 1, all obscured the sky. There were no stars. The moon was hidden somewhere behind the blinding glare, and it felt like the city itself was collapsing, pressing in, taking only the shallowest of breaths in the squeeze of lost space.

The list of names went on.

And as I heard them, my mind sort of split in two—one part listening, and the other picking up the ideas I'd been kicking around in my head all day: Would I need to witness a violence like they knew again just to remember how I felt this week? Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests? Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?

But Rashad lived. His name wasn't on the list, and thank God it didn't have to be for us all to be here in Police Plaza. I rolled my head to see if I could find him.

I
learned that the night before a protest, it's impossible to sleep. I didn't toss or turn, I just lay flat on my back staring into the darkness, my mind darting from thought to thought, from friend to friend, from brother to mother, from hashtag to hashtag. And in the morning, I wasn't groggy or grumpy, or even sleepy. I was sick. And it was a good thing that I hadn't planned on going back to school until Monday, because I spent what seemed like hours in the bathroom shitting nerves. And pizza.

Once I finally made it out to the kitchen, my mother—who had taken the day off—was sitting at the table in her robe, sipping coffee, staring at the television.

“Good morning,” she said. Then, noticing my hand rubbing soft circles on my stomach, her voice went into instant worry.
“What's the matter?”

“Not feeling too well,” I said, easing into a seat.

“Should I take you back to the hospital?”

“No, no, I don't think it's anything like that.” I hoped.

Ma got up, pressed the back of her hand against my forehead, then to my neck. “No fever. That's a good sign,” she said, relief in her voice. She grabbed the kettle off the stove, lifted it to make sure there was water in it, then set it back down. She turned on the flame. “I'll make you some mint tea,” she added, reaching up into the pantry to grab a tea bag and a mug. “I bet it's just your nerves. You keep 'em buried in your belly. Got that from your daddy.”

“What you mean?”

“I mean, whenever you get nervous, your stomach acts crazy,” she said. “Your father has the same problem. He can eat anything. Seems like his gut is made of steel when it comes to food. But when he gets nervous, he's a mess.”

I never knew this about my father, maybe because he never seemed like he was too nervous about anything. I mean, besides that story he told me about him shooting Darnell Shackleford, I had never even known my father to show any sign of fear. But this new information got me thinking. He was sick earlier in the week. Said something didn't agree with his stomach, so maybe the thing that didn't agree with his gut was . . . what happened to me. Police brutality. Maybe. Or
maybe it was just seeing me in pain. Or maybe even knowing somewhere deep in the pit of his belly that I was innocent.

Ma set the tea in front of me, then sat back down. We both sipped from our mugs and watched the news. Everybody was talking about the upcoming protest, which was scheduled to start at five thirty. Clips of military vehicles rolling past as reporters talked about “hopes for a peaceful demonstration.” Police officers already dressed in military gear. I had seen it before. I had seen it all the other times there were protests in other parts of the country, other cities, other neighborhoods. I'd heard Spoony talk about it, because he and Berry had taken buses to other cities to march. He had been tear gassed before and told me it was like someone rubbing an onion on your eyeballs, and then pouring hot gasoline down your throat. The words “riot” and “looters” were being thrown into the conversation too, my picture next to Galluzzo's flashing across the screen, the footage of the arrest, looping. Experts arguing,
This isn't the first time this has happened. But until we have an honest conversation about prejudice and abuse of power in law enforcement, it won't stop
, and,
Unless you've been a police officer, there's no way to know how difficult a job it is. Law enforcement isn't perfect, but there are more good examples than bad.

“Is Dad coming?” I asked, holding the cup up. The steam snaked up into my nose.

Ma pursed her lips. “Baby, I don't even know. I woke up in
the middle of the night, realizing he wasn't in the bed. When I got up to check on him, I found him standing at your door, peeking in at you, like he used to do when you were a baby. I didn't disturb him. I just crept back to the room. I was surprised he even made it up this morning for work, let alone a march.”

“I was awake. I wish he would've knocked,” I said, also surprised—that he had been watching me in the first place. I wondered . . . maybe he was reliving what it was like to leave me every day to be a cop. What it was like to love something enough to do anything to come back to it.

“Yeah, well, you know your father.”

“Did he say something about it this morning?”

“No. He just went to work early, didn't say much of anything. Kissed me as usual and told me to be safe, but that was it. So we'll see.”

The smell of mint suddenly turned my stomach. Or maybe it was what my mother had just said, which made me imagine that Dad had given her “the talk.” You know,
Never fight back. Never talk back. Keep your hands up. Keep your mouth shut. Just do what they ask you to do, and you'll be fine
. Dad's guide to surviving the police. Dad's guide to surviving a protest. Dad's guide to surviving . . . Dad. Whatever it was, my stomach started hiccuping again, jumping around like I was possessed by something nasty. I set my mug down on the table and ran back to the bathroom.