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multitudes. Velma had leaned against a tree and tried hard not to look at her feet. Two pairs of rubber thongs left on the highway, a ragged pair of sneakers abandoned by a lard can and a patch of sunflowers on some railroad crossing, her reserve pair looped around her neck, feet too swollen to torture further. The marshals dragging themselves around trying to draw people in from the trees toward the flat-truck platform. The children crying from fatigue. The students singing off-key, ragged. The elders on the ground massaging knots in their legs. And Velma clenching herthighs tight, aware that a syrupy clot was oozing down her left leg and she needed to see about herself.
    Exhausted, she was squinting through the dust and grit of her lashes when the limousines pulled up, eye-stinging shiny, black, sleek. And the door opened and the cool blue of the air-conditioned interior billowed out into the yellow and rust-red of evening. Her throat was splintered wood. Then the shiny black boots stepping onto the parched grass, the knife-creased pants straightening taut, the jacket hanging straight, the blinding white shirt, the sky-blue tie. And the roar went up and the marshals gripped wrists and hoarsely, barely heard, pleaded with the crowd to move back and make way for the speaker. Flanked by the coal-black men in shiny sunglasses and silk-and-steel suits, he made toward the platform. She carried herself out of the park in search of a toilet, some water to wash up, a place to dump her bag before her arm broke or her shoulder was permanently pulled from its socket. And rounding a bend, the dulcet tones of the speaker soaring out overhead, she’d spotted the Gulf sign and knew beforehand that the rest room would be nasty, that just getting past the attendant would call for a nastiness she wasn’t sure she could muster but would have to. Knew beforehand that she would squat over a reeking, smeared toilet bowl stuffed with everything that ever was and pray through clenched teeth for rain. Some leader. He looked a bit like King, had a delivery similar to Malcolm’s, dressed like Stokely, had glasses like Rap, but she’d never heard him say anything useful or offensive. But what a voice. And what a good press agent. And the people had bought him. What a disaster. But what a voice. He rolled out his
r’s
like the quality yard-goods he’d once had to yank from the bolts of cloth in his father’s store in Brunswick, Georgia, till the day an anthropologist walked in with tape recorder and camera, doing some work on Jekyll Island Blacks and would he be so kind as to answera few questions about the lore and legends of the island folks, and “discovered” him and launched him into prominence.
    “Leader. Sheeet.”
    And no soap. No towels. No tissue. No machine. Just a spurt then a trickle of rusty water in the clogged sink then no water at all. And like a cat she’d had to lick herself clean of grit, salt, blood and rage.
    Palma was nudging her, the click click of the cowries reminding her even more of that time and she blew her turn, someone else taking up the “And who chartered buses for …”
    MATRIARCHAL CURRENCY , the sign on the table had read. And she’d purchased the cowrie-shell bracelets for Palma less as a memento more as a criticism. Bought the cowrie shells to shame her, for she should’ve been on the march, had no right to the cool solitude of her studio painting pictures of sailboats while sisters were being beaten and raped, and workers shot and children terrorized. “Divination tools,” she had winked at the peddler who’d been too eager to rap the long rap about cowries and matriarchy. Velma’d worn them that day in the park and for the duration of the march to the state capitol to set up tents. “Little pussies with stitched teeth,” her aid on the PR committee had leered, touching the cowries. And it seemed as good a time as any for her to go draft the press releases.
    “Velma?”
    She stood up again,