Lincoln smiled wide. “A compliment,” he said, raising his voice. “My big brother complimented me.” He leaned over and patted me on the back. “I talk like that sometimes ’cuz I know it gets you fired up. I’m just playing with you.”
Lincoln took a breath. “I know you want to do the right thing. You’re pretending like there’s a downside, because you’re afraid of putting yourself out there. Afraid of disappointing people.” He paused, winding up his pitch. “But there is no downside. There’s some crazy stuff going on out there right now, and you can help in ways that I can’t. That’s why Dad did what he did, even though it hurt me. I get it, too.” Lincoln was actually sincere. “Remember, though, you don’t have to be like Dad. You can do your thing while you’re there and then move on, if you want. You don’t have to do it forever. Just try it out. It’s up to you.”
Our waiter came over. “One check or two?”
“Two,” I said, but Lincoln overruled me.
“One check, and it’s on me.” He pulled out his wallet and put his credit card down on the table. “Glad you called me.” He was serious, although he was, again, factually incorrect. “We gotta do this more.”
“You mean scheme?” I kidded him.
“I mean think,” Lincoln said. “Think big thoughts. Look out for each other. Like it or not, we could be good partners again, like when we were kids.”
“Dangerous partners.”
“JFK and Bobby.” Lincoln laughed. “And dangerous and good ain’t mutually exclusive.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
The march was my idea. I had to do something. For over a week, the city had burned. Every night at dusk, a militarized police force confronted young black men who had been reduced by the media to statistics: half as likely to graduate college, four times as likely to be unemployed, three times as likely to be in jail, twice as likely to be convicted of a felony, 20 percent less likely to ever marry, and so on.
I was tired of watching it happen. The news reports were caricatures—information and images manipulated to support the political priorities of either the Left or the Right. I felt the humanity fade in the numbers and the conflict. The reality was that the missing boys were sons who were thrown away, disconnected from the institutions that were supposed to care—schools, churches, the government, and even, sometimes, their own families. Where was the collective responsibility to never allow these boys to fall so far away?
Nobody talked about that, but I could.
My last name gave me a platform that I had been afraid, until now, to use. I didn’t want to be seen as a fraud, and I thought it’d be easy to dismiss me. I didn’t grow up in poverty. Half my relatives were white. I had the schooling. My family had the money, and my father had the power. When I examined my own life, it wasn’t hard to surrender to the voices in my head that sounded a lot like the bullies at Sammy’s school, questioning whether I was black enough.
It was time to silence those voices and lead.
I stood on a bench outside my law office with a bullhorn. Over a thousand people showed up. I didn’t know how they had found out about the march, but that was the Glass machine.
“Good morning.” I looked out over the crowd. “My name is Justin Glass. Like you, I wish we didn’t need to be here, but we don’t have a choice. We need to stand up. We need to march, and we need to demand answers for what has happened. We need to know what is going to happen. And we need to hold the person or people who did this responsible.”
Directly in front of me were the families of the Lost Boys, my clients. I’d gotten to know every one of them. I’d sat in their apartments. I’d shared in their grief, surprising myself and letting them get closer to me than a lawyer should probably allow.
I had made sure that each family held a sign with their son’s name. Each family also had a black coffin hoisted on their shoulders. They floated along on the sea of people. “We can’t burn our own community. We need to organize. Put pressure on the police to stop harassing us and start investigating in earnest for these families right here in front of me.”
There was more that I wanted to say, but I couldn’t put the ideas together as a coherent whole. I didn’t know the right words, and perhaps that was the problem. Everyone standing in front of me knew that something far bigger was wrong. They knew that the system was broken, but we all lacked the language to express it, and so we were here to grieve these lost boys.
But the issue wasn’t just about troubled black boys who disappeared. That was only on the surface. The real reasons lay beneath. We were people who had been wronged. We were protesting bad schools, run-down housing, high unemployment, no credit, regressive taxation, exorbitant fees for government services, unnecessary fines, and the list could go on.
Rigged.
That was the only word I could come up with to express the situation.
I put the bullhorn down, and then I looked at Lincoln, who cued the Dirty Thirty Brass Band. The drummers struck a slow beat. Then the trumpets came in, followed by the trombones, tubas, and a couple of guys on sax.
Our protest was a New Orleans–style second line—a funeral parade from my law office to the Juvenile Justice Center. At first the music was solemn, playing the classic hymns, and then, per tradition, it picked up. By the time we crossed Page Boulevard, it was an expression of life.
Schmitty hadn’t returned my phone calls. He hadn’t updated me on any information. This would, hopefully, get his attention. I was done waiting. And, looking at the crowd, I could tell that they were done waiting, too.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
The vast majority of the marchers were gone after a few hours. They had dispersed easily; some walked to the light rail station on Grand, and others had rides waiting. Lincoln had also arranged for buses to take people back to the start of the march.
About a hundred or so appeared to have set up camp on the corner of the Juvenile Justice Center’s parking lot. The police weren’t going to like the idea of a permanent protest, especially in front of the court, but I didn’t know what I was going to be able to do about it.
Emma honked her horn to get my attention. I waved at her, said a quick good-bye and thanks to a group of pastors who had spoken at the rally, and got into her car. “Thanks for the ride back.” I buckled my seatbelt as Emma pulled away from the curb. I asked, “Any coverage?”
“Every channel,” she said. “Most carried it live. I think they were hoping to see some violence, but had to settle for speeches.”
I smiled. “You’d think they’d be tired of the violence by now.”
She pulled into the left lane to go north on Grand toward the office. “Oh, Mr. Glass, they never get tired of violence.” Then she looked out the window at the sky, maybe thinking about all the violence that she’d seen in Bosnia, thinking that most Americans didn’t know how fragile things really were.
She snapped back to the present and looked back over to me. “Plus all the other stuff happened at night. This time they had good light for all their pretty photographs.”