Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (5 page)

There was
a time, perhaps, when it could have been said King was in love with violent revolution. At eighteen she carried Che Guevara on a key chain. She read
Live from Death Row
and quoted Mumia Abu-Jamal to her growing circle of activist friends.

It started as a simple infatuation. A New York City girl, a Brooklyn transplant, rising from the cinders of the dead hamlet where she had been born, she read FBI surveillance reports on John Lennon. She studied the details of CIA assassinations in Colombia, in Congo; in Guatemala and El Salvador; in Iran and Angola and Greece.

At age nineteen she went to her first protest. The School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the American military taught Central and South American leaders how to torture their own people. One night camped in a muddy field, she slept with a towheaded gangly boy with a Southern drawl who was not her first, technically, but the sex wasn't bad and the conversation was better. She discovered to her surprise, it was sort of thrilling to fuck someone who believed what you believe.

At the age of twenty-two she learned how to hop freights and headed west. Her confidence grew. She made friends and in the high-altitude forests of Colorado they studied revolution. She read the books they gave her:
Manufacturing Consent, If They Come in the Morning,
copies of the journal
Earth First!
Her friends and her books gave voice to what had been inarticulate; they gave shape and mission to what had been a formless longing. She practiced climbing and spiking. On the western slopes of the Continental Divide, she tore distributor caps from twelve-ton Cats. She sugared tanks and hammered sharpened steel rebar into logging roads. She went camping and torched a ski resort.

The cascading whump of ignition a pleasure she felt from the flat muscles of her belly all the way to the crown of her head.

She changed her name to King and did a little hideout time in Humboldt County where she slept with a woman who called herself simply—and accurately—Red. Together they started a 'zine and distributed the anonymous black-and-white sheets of text and drawings, folded at the break, all over town. They wore gloves to keep the ink off their fingers and their fingerprints off the paper. At night they leafed through federal manuals on covert operations in Chile, hearts leaping in their chests. Together they made love among the mimeographed pages of their 'zine and the ink stained their bodies with letters and strange hieroglyph tattoos which they examined together in the moonlight drifting through the window, laughing.

When it seemed safe again—the Vail thing over and the FBI with no idea who had done it or how—she went to Portland to protest a toxic incinerator. There she fell in love with a Greenpeace guy and decided to stay awhile. Wide-eyed and cursing and slapping her knee, she listened to his tales of high heroics on the North Sea. Then one night he had tried to rape her while she slept, had come home drunk and tried to fuck her, had continued even after she woke and said no. King broke two of his fingers. One in the confused struggle. The other, afterward, in the quiet of his weeping.

Colorado and California and Oregon, finally she drifted north. At the age of twenty-six she arrived on the Olympic Peninsula, the rough and wild coast where she did tree-sits in the Olympics and slept with no one save the warm solitude of a mummy bag bivouacked eighty feet high in the trees and the sheltering morning light of liquid gold that gathered in her lap and warmed her face.

And for the first time in her life, among the quiet of the massive moss-bearded trees and the curled booming of the salt-whipped waves, she felt like she could finally hear herself
think.

Yes, there had been a time when it could be said that King felt the burning glow of violence, but no longer. Now she believed in the transformative power of militant nonviolence. Now she suffered to see so many thrown in the fire.

Which was why King could not believe that here she was fucking with a police.

This was
not
how you de-escalated. This was not nonviolence as it was practiced or preached. She saw the cop's blue eyes go hot and then his riot baton wasn't poking or prodding, it was rising and immediately King regretted what she had done, regretted not the baton which was about to come crashing down on her head, regretted not her anger which had pushed her to humiliate this man. No, she
wanted
that. Big man on his horse—she wanted to make him feel confused and small; she wanted to fill him with helplessness and the need to hurt. Yes, let him feel that electricity for a minute. Lord knows she had felt it often enough—that sad frustrated rage lighting up her brain for years now.

No, what she regretted was that her involvement in the day's direct action was about to end before it had even started.

With both hands and arms, she covered her head. She knew it would not save her. She had fucked up. She had lost control of herself, of the situation, of her own tightly wound bitterness. She waited for the heavy wooden baton to fall across her arms and head.

Royally was the word. She had fucked up royally.

But it didn't happen.

She risked a glance upward.

The commanding officer had stepped forward. The commanding officer who had earlier been calming the crowd over a megaphone, who had been pacing and calming his own agitated line. His hand was on the flank of the horse. And the look on the cop's mangled face—it was so classic she wanted to take a snapshot. He looked like a little boy whose mom just told him not to spit on the sidewalk; he knew he was caught; he looked, in fact, not unlike her mother's boyfriend the day King had slammed the trailer door while he stood there with his dick in his hand.

The Chief's hand patted the horse. “What seems to be the problem?” he said.

“Sir?” the cop said. “This woman, this citizen here, was directly—”

The Chief wasn't really looking at the cop. He was looking at King with a cool appraising glance. He wasn't smiling, but something ironic shone behind his glasses. He clearly did not like this officer as much as King had decided she didn't like him.

“Park, I want you to report to MACC.”

“Chief Bishop, sir?”

“I said I want you to report back to Command. We are not going to start beating our own citizens,” the Chief said. “Not on my watch. Now get your ass back to the MACC.”

The cop seemed about to say something, but then decided against it. “Yes, sir. Back to the MACC.”

He clicked from the side of his mouth, turning the horse.

“Hey,” the Chief said mildly. He patted the horse's rump with affection.

“Sir?”

“Did you hear me say take the horse?”

Cops all down the line were coughing into their fists, trying not to laugh.

The Chief pointed at Park and then pointed to the ground.

“But this is my
horse.
”

“You walk, my friend,” the Chief said.

His humiliation complete, Park climbed down from the saddle. The Chief wrapped the reins in his fist.

King couldn't help it. She was smiling so wide her grin could have powered a thousand cities for a thousand years. Her cheeks hurt. It just confirmed everything she believed—the Chief showing up like this. The power of love. The transformative power of nonviolence. The indisputable fact that the universe itself was on their side.

Two cops stepped aside, pointedly gazing out at the crowd, and Park stepped through the hole they had made in the line. He looked back once, marking her face, King knew, for all eternity.

She put her lips to her palm and blew him a kiss.

Bye, asshole.

As he disappeared back into the sea of black-suited riot gear, just one more anonymous storm trooper among hundreds, the crowd behind her suddenly erupted in a roar. She turned. People were applauding. Folks who had watched the whole scene play out now jumping and clapping and hooting. She waved, feeling a little queasy. This wasn't about embarrassing the cops. This wasn't about the cops at all. This was about shutting down the meetings.
Peacefully.

“Are you all right?” the Chief said. He was studying her with some care, fingers idling along the horse's mane. He seemed amused.

Now that it was over, her adrenaline was running an even race with her shame—shame starting to pull ahead, and she couldn't remember what she had come up here in the first place to do. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. Breathe, she commanded herself, and took a deep gasping breath, all the way down to the pit of her stomach. She let it out with a long sigh. She shook her head.

“Sir, all due respect, but we don't intend to provoke you or put your officers in harm's way. We are not here to riot.”

“Good,” he said.

They stood for a beat just looking at each other. This was one of those moments. The calm, the sudden sharp sense of ease. The tension was still there but different, somehow transformed into a kind of high-wire clarity King recognized from her time working with the inmates.

“Chief, I want you to know—”

King breathing steady now. They had passed out of the moment of confrontation and into a moment of human dialogue. She wasn't sure how she had accomplished it, but she was here now, exactly where she wanted to be.

“I just want to say again, this is a peaceful protest. We have trained for months. We are disciplined. We are here to shut down the meetings.
Peacefully.
I can promise you there will be no violence.”

Chief Bishop with his hand on the horse. He seemed relaxed, the Chief next to this huge animal, rubbing its neck.

“Good. I'm glad we understand each other. Because I'm going to need you to clear this intersection in fifteen minutes.”

It was like a punch to the stomach.

“What?”

The Chief waited.

“Didn't you hear what I just said? We don't want there to be any violence,” she said. “We aren't here to riot. We're here to shut down the meetings.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time. And I'm saying I need you people to clear this intersection.”

“Okay, I understand you want us to clear the intersection,” King said. “But I'm not in charge. There are tens of thousands of people here.”

“Look,” the Chief said, baring his teeth in something between a grimace and a smile, “either clear it yourself, or we will do it for you. You seem like nice enough folks, but there are larger forces at work here. We
will
bring those delegates through.”

King—for once she had nothing to say. How could that have gone so wrong so quickly? And where the fuck was John Henry?

“Don't make me hurt you people,” the Chief said. “I don't want that. Don't make me do it. This is
my
city. And I'm telling you we will bring those delegates safely through. They will make the convention center and they will have their meetings. The thing to understand is this is
my city,
not yours. Clear those intersections.”

He nodded as if they had agreed on something and gathered the reins to walk the horse back through his line of officers.

“I'll give you fifteen minutes to get it done. Then we're coming through.”

She stared dumbly at his retreating form. The horse's rump swung past and she took two blind steps to be clear of its hooves. She stumbled over something, almost ready to believe the lunatic cop with the fucked-up face hadn't really left, but had circled back and was now ready to give King the punishment she deserved. She looked down and discovered it was just the kid's backpack.

King blinked. She had forgotten completely about the kid. The young black guy with two braids and a red bandanna that she had decided on the spot she liked so much. And where the fuck was
he?
She looked up. He was halfway back to the crowd. Moving fast. Had he hidden behind the horse?

“Kid!” she called out. “Hey wait up. Your backpack!”

Which is when it hit her. The stinky reek of weed.

Later in
the day, a rumor would circulate about a lone protester who locked himself to the door of the East Precinct of the Seattle Police Department. He was a radical in his seventies, old-man-skinny with wild white hair, the kind of guy that used whatever he had on hand at home, in this case a U-shaped bicycle lock. He slid the U around his neck, then ran the bar through the handles of the double doors and locked it tight. He leaned his head against the doors, wispy hair pressed against the glass, and then he dropped the key down the front of his pants, and grinned deeply at the cops from his wrinkles, as if to say, Now what?

John Henry could vouch for the rumor because he was there and he watched it happen, and it looked like the old guy hadn't seen this much fun since Chicago '68. John Henry admired his courage, the man's earnest recklessness, but as brave as it might have been, it accomplished nothing. The police knocked the old guy in the legs with their batons. They beat him repeatedly about the shoulders and arms. They leaned down and slapped him in the face until finally, cursing, crying out in pain, he agreed to unlock himself.

In the end, the old man slowed traffic entering and exiting the police station for less than fifteen minutes. John Henry saw one kid with a digital handheld recorder, but he asked himself what would the kid do with it? Who would ever see it and what did it mean? It was a forgotten second of history, one more story among a thousand such stories today. The man reached into his saggy underwear, sobbing and swearing, and unlocked himself. The world went on its way.

John Henry knew this one-man action meant nearly nothing, but in his heart, he thought that it was beautiful in its way. In a single act, the distillation of fifty years of American protest.

You sit at the counter. You order a cheese and mayo sandwich.

They say, “We don't serve niggers here.”

You look them in the eye anyway.

Maybe they look away.

You sit at the counter and wait for the malted milk that isn't going to come. Your ass occupies the seat. Your ass controls the territory of the plastic spinning seat as you wait for your cherry soda or your BLT or some white boy's grinning fist.

And fifty, a hundred, five hundred of your friends waiting behind you, waiting just beyond the frosted glass doors, five hundred strong souls just waiting to take your place.

That was the old man's mistake. The thing he had forgotten. You don't do it alone.

John Henry wished he had known about the gutted warehouse at 420 Denny Way. The old man. The white-haired radical. They would have helped him, trained him, joined him, and loved him and fought for him, wild as feral cats. The warehouse with its cathedral ceilings and dusty high windows which was church and workshop and meeting hall—their point of convergence, where all their forces came together in a humming disjointed harmony. It was a square squat building with high walls and a paint-splattered concrete floor where they did their work—voices calling back and forth, echoing beneath the high ceiling like voices in a stone vault, young people shuttling back and forth, building and laughing, full of the high energy of community and purpose.

It was there in the burnt-out warehouse that they built their giant puppets. Caricatures of heads of state. Devils and villains and sharp-horned tricksters. It was there among those concrete walls in the dust-laden light from the high windows that they handcuffed each other and laughed, learned the meaning of civil disobedience, learned how to nonviolently accept arrest. There where they discovered the true nature of struggle. How to do it together. How to coordinate a direct action. There where they learned that courage is not the ability to face your fear, heroically, once, but is the strength to do it day after day. Night after night. Faith without end. Love without border.

It was here, too, where they first spoke the names that would carry them through the fire. Where they first felt the stories issuing forth from their lips. Where they gathered to build the family that would survive.

When he had first looked at the maps, some six months ago, he almost didn't believe it—the geography of the city was an ally they had never expected. Any other city and it would probably have been just a protest. But here in downtown Seattle, thirteen intersections formed a triangle around the convention center. The center where the World Trade Organization planned to hold their auction of the Third World. The World Trade Organization whose opening ceremonies began, John Henry checked his watch, in three hours.

Shut down those intersections and you would own the city.

A chokehold that would trap the delegates and the diplomats and the experts in their fancy hotels eating smoked salmon and Brie or whatever it is they do when they are not busy buying and selling things they have no right on earth to claim as their own.

These veterans of the anti-nuclear demonstrations of the 1980s. Tree-sits in the high Sierra and on the Redwood Coast. Who had arrest sheets that read like a timeline of American protests: Seabrook, Rocky Flats, the Nevada Test Site, who trained for months on a farm in Arlington rented by none other than himself. My people. He was lit up. They had been fighting corporate Goliaths for so long their tactics had become streamlined and beautiful and efficient.

The first wave, they lock themselves together—a lockdown at the center of each of those thirteen intersections. They would be the immovable core of the block. Surrounding them and protecting them was the second wave—standing groups to clog the streets, a buffer of faces and voices and flesh to stand between the locked-down bodies and the cops.

Surround that with a street party—the flags and the trumpets and the beating drums—and let the cops just try to figure out what was going on, let alone clear the streets.

Lockdown. Each person sat cross-legged on the pavement with both arms locked into PVC pipe, each arm locked from the inside with a chain to the person on either side. Only the person locked down could release the chain.

The pipe itself, to break the locked circle, had to be cut with a diamond-tipped saw, very carefully or you were likely to slice off an arm. The cops hated the lock-boxes. They hated having to cut so carefully. They hated that they could not force you to release.

John Henry loved the lock-box because it said everything. One PVC pipe was not enough. It was only working in concert that the lock-box became something special. Eight people in a circle; eight people with each of their arms in one of the prepared pipes. Eight people willing to lock themselves together in an unbroken circle, to sit on cold pavement, totally immobile and vulnerable, waiting for the loggers to come to reclaim their tree, for the cops to come to reclaim their city.

John Henry himself wanted to be in lockdown because it was neither
their
tree nor
their
city. But they had agreed to come as medics. That was the plan at least. Less risk for King with the Vail thing hanging over her head, although he thought that a needless worry on her part. Still, man, just standing there in the warehouse earlier this morning in the gray light of half-dawn watching those women in their cuts-offs and boots and T-shirts, watching those strong women slinging chain and preparing the pipes, he felt the nervous excitement thrumming in his blood. He felt a growing icy thrill in the pit of his stomach that was the beginning of his body's preparation for the confrontation with the police—the hours of sitting, the facing of his own fears and doubts. He had watched the girls and his heart was singing. His soul felt coiled like a spring. They needed to be medics. Fine. But John Henry, he was a man that when the spirit came a-calling, he answered. Whatever the language. Whatever the price. The words of Mahatma Gandhi inked blue-black across his chest for how many years now: