“Is he okay now?”
Bobby’s gentle eyes flamed for a second. “Okay as you get after a thing like that.”
I think of the guys our age out in the yard. Imagine one of them falling. Bleeding. Cowering under the beat of a baton. “Is he here?”
“Naw. He comes to Panther class with me sometimes.” Maybe Bobby read the question in my eyes, because he added, “Political education class. That’s mostly what we do. Learn about history and politics. Economics. The way the world works.”
I thought back to the things Torry had talked about in the barn. “Like last night?”
“Pretty much.”
“So why isn’t he here with you?”
“He’s still got scars, ya know?” Bobby said. “Walks with his head down. I try to tell him chin up, but it ain’t that easy, right? That shit takes a toll.”
I nodded like I understood.
“He’s down with the Panther cause and all, though. Empowerment. Helping people around the neighborhood. Bringing people together, ya know?” He thumbed toward the backyard. “But now I’m at the next level.” Bobby juggled the pancake platter. “It takes some stones, ya know? To arm up and everything.”
“Stones?”
He looked embarrassed. “Like, courage, right?”
“Sure.”
“Yeah, you know what I mean.” He glanced me over. “You look like the courageous type of girl.”
“You think?” I wasn’t sure I’d ever done anything courageous. I always did what I was supposed to. Courage, I thought, meant breaking the rules. Putting yourself on the line. There was a line somewhere, I knew. I’d just never come up on it.
10.
“These boys,” Granny said. “These boys.” She sat at the kitchen table, wrapping and unwrapping a fistful of twine, rocking her shoulders in a slow, sad rhythm.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “They won’t be here much longer.” I would have tried to keep the strange sorrow out of my voice, but it crept in there without me knowing.
“They strung him up by the neck, you know,” Granny said.
“Who?” I said.
“My Petey.”
She was confused again. “Granddad?” I confirmed. “He died of pneumonia, remember?”
“No, baby,” she said softly. “He didn’t.”
The oven was hot. I slid in the pan with the roasts — fat and juicy. They were going to be good.
“What are you talking about, Granny?” The fump of the oven door punctuated my question.
“They strung him up,” she whispered. “Uppity, they called him. He wrote articles, you know. He riled people up something fierce in his day, my Petey. When he talked, people stood up and listened. Came from miles around.”
“Granddad was an activist?” I said. That didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before.
“The neighbors cut him down. Brung him home to me,” Granny said. “Ada and I, we wrapped him for the ground ourselves.”
Her voice was like fingers, snaking back in time. She got confused sometimes, but other times she rose above her own mind and found clarity. Here and now, I believed her.
“That’s when I moved my boys out west. You can carve your own stake out here, Petey always said. That was his dream. So we went on and lived it.” She murmured to herself, to the string. “It’s been a good life. Quiet. So quiet.”
“Not so quiet now,” I said. “But it’s only one more day.”
“And the day after that, and the day after that,” Granny said. “The tomorrows keep on coming.”
I sliced the tips off the string beans, two by two. Daddy entered the frame of the kitchen window, leading Ember out of her pen toward the barn.
How did Granddad really die? I wanted to run out to the field and ask him, but I couldn’t. I knew I couldn’t. Daddy had a wall around him, and questions like that stood no chance of getting through.
He patted Ember’s neck, whispered something in her ear. He once told me the cow was named Ember “because I always wanted something to burn.” Him saying that lit a thousand questions in me — all, to this day, unspoken.
“I wanted him to be like me,” Granny said. “But he more like his daddy.”
11.
“You’ll want to get going,” Daddy told the Panthers over dinner. “Sun’s setting in an hour or two.”
“We drive after dark,” El said.
Daddy’s leg twitched, uncomfortable. “Thought you didn’t go looking for trouble.”
“We’re citizens, abiding the law,” El said. “No curfew on the books for white America. We ought to impose one on ourselves?”
“It’s just good sense,” Daddy mumbled.
“Depends on your kinda sense,” El said. “I gotta change my life around so I don’t get wrongfully shot? What kinda sense is that? That’s the mentality we’re in this to change.”