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through the avenues in the last gasp of daylight. Someone has a bullhorn. “This demonstration ends at dusk. The park is closing. Please disperse. Please disperse.”
    Raheem’s warning looms large in my mind. “Promise me you won’t stay in the park after dark. Stuff tends to happen when the sun goes down.”
    The bullhorn squawks again, but the crowd’s chant has changed. A small group near me is calling, “To do what’s right, we’ll stay all night. You can’t scare us with your might!”
    Skirting the edge of things, I can see how it’s all turning bad. The cops are over here, too, lined up and helmeted with clubs out and pushing people back with their big plastic shields. I know enough to stay away from the cops, but everyone else seems to be rushing forward. It’s happening around me and I’m fighting the forward surge. You never go toward the cops.
    Shadows begin to stretch over everything. I’m afraid to stay, but more afraid to leave. I don’t want the cops to see me. That’s when it hits me. I don’t want them to see me, because I’m not allowed to do what everyone around me is doing.
    They are angry. Angry on the outside, allowed to let it show. Not like us.
    At least, not until the Panthers came along and said we can’t wait anymore. Can’t be pressed down anymore. It’s time. That’s what’s happening here. People are standing up.
    They’re protesting for peace, but they’re angry. It covers everything, this miraculous, captivating, overwhelming force that’s already thrumming in me deep. It swells in great waves, stirring the air like wind beneath a fire. I can feel suddenly how hot it’s burning, how the heat of the day didn’t start in the sky, but here among us.
    I can’t leave this place. Not yet. This place where everything is stirred out in the open. Anger, with no fear. Raheem would say it’s ’cause they’re white; he says you can do anything if you’re white, that everything’s okay if you’re white, but we’re not white and never going to be. He doesn’t come out and say the rest, but I get it. That nothing is ever going to be okay for us. Except, the Panthers—the Panthers say we gotta try harder and then maybe it can be.
    The Panthers say get angry, don’t bother to tampit down. The Panthers say get busy, trying to make the change happen ’cause it sure ain’t happening on its own. I’ve been going to Panther class long enough to understand what’s happening here tonight. The demonstrators are white, they’re screaming and bearing down on the police, but nothing more is happening.
    I want to do it too, but I can’t. “When the law comes down, it comes down on us.” I have to get out of here. Now.
    But, strangely, I find myself sliding back in among them, joining in the chant at the top of my lungs.

CHAPTER 8
    T HE FEAR RETURNS LIKE A THUNDERBOLT strike. People are running and screaming. The police have entered the park. The sky is dark, and I’ve been chanting, like a reckless fool, like some wannabe white.
    I flee.
    The protest has spilled beyond the park. Protesters have taken to the streets. Flashing lights brighten the darkness, and I stay as far as I can from the edge of things. It doesn’t stop me from seeing too much. Protesters—white ones—being handcuffed and dragged. Cops with their clubs swinging up and down, and I see it more clearly than ever, why we’re supposed to call them pigs.
    I have el tokens in my pocket and ten dollars’ worth of quarters in my hand, but neither is any use to me, because I’m not going that far out of my way. I edge out of thepark as close to the lake side as I can get, sending up a prayer that the pigs won’t see and catch me.
    It’s a long way home, on foot. A matter of hours, it seems. By the time I’m back in the neighborhood,