Read The Street Sweeper for Free Online Page B

help people to live the best lives they can if those laws aren’t upheld, if they aren’t enforced? It’s really like saying there are some laws you have to respect and obey and others you don’t really have to worry about. And it just so happened that the laws you didn’t have to worry about always affected the same people. Which people?’
    ‘Black people.’
    ‘Right, black people. Right from the time their ancestors were kidnapped, taken against their will – can you imagine being forcibly separated from your family to be used as a thing, not as a person, just so other people could get rich? – right from that time there was never a time when black people didn’t face discrimination, didn’t find life harder than other people, just because they belonged to a group, a group they were born into. Of course, other people have had it very hard too, including your grandparents. All sorts of people suffer for all sorts of reasonsat different times but black people are the descendants of people who didn’t even choose to come here, who were often treated like animals just so that white people could make money out of them. And what did our government, their government, do? Despite the beauty of the Declaration of Independence, despite the beauty of the Emancipation Proclamation, even despite the Supreme Court decision Thurgood fought for in
Brown versus Board of Education
, the government turned its back on black people.’
    ‘So is the government the enemy?’
    ‘No, government can be an agent of fairness. That’s what government is meant to be.’
    ‘So … who is the enemy?’ young Adam asked with one hand holding his sandwich and the other resting on his suitcase.
    ‘The enemy,’ Jake Zignelik explained, ‘is racism. But, see, racism isn’t a person. It’s a virus that infects people. It can infect whole towns and cities, even whole countries. Sometimes you can see it in people’s faces when they’re sick with it. It can paralyse even good people. It can paralyse government. We have to fight that wherever we find it. That’s what good people do.’
    So much of what his father would always too hastily tell him on those visits to New York stayed with Adam Zignelik. The names and the dates of the people associated with the struggle; and always that article of faith would come back to him again and again. As a mantra, it would come to him at times when other people might rely on a religious incantation or injunction. ‘That’s what good people do.’ It came back to him the first time right after his father had kissed him goodbye and put him on a plane to fly back to his mother. The very long flight to Australia allowed him plenty of time to repeat it over and over to himself as he sat strapped in his seat, a blanket on his knees, trying to hide the tears in his eyes from the passenger seated next to him or the flight attendants who always seemed to be on the lookout for such things from little boys who travelled alone on long flights. ‘That’s what good people do.’
    When Adam would get home to Melbourne he would tell as many people as he could everything he remembered and he remembered everything his father had told him. He remembered about the work hisfather was doing, about the people his father worked with, the places, the dates, the laws, the cases, the various decisions of the various courts and what they all meant. He told his friends who didn’t understand and didn’t care. He told all his teachers who understood more and, for the most part, could have cared more, which alternately distressed or angered him. Adam’s father was Jake Zignelik after all. Perhaps they had heard of him? Everyone young Adam met in New York had heard of him. Of course, the little boy was only meeting people his father introduced him to. Adam had met Justice Marshall, quite a few, even many, times. What were these people, adults, teachers; what were they doing with their lives? He was talking about Justice