Hope y’all niggers like fondue, Freddie chimed in from beyond.
Another siren. Business, orderly business, unfolded inside the walls of Carney’s Furniture, but out on the street it was Harlem rules: rowdy, unpredictable, more trifling than a loser uncle. The sirens zipped up and down the aves as regularly as subway trains, all hours, per calamity’s timetable. If not the cops on a mayhem mission, then an ambulance racing to unwind fate. A fire engine speeding to a vacant tenement before the blaze ate the whole block, or en route to a six-story building kerosened for the insurance, a dozen families inside.
Carney’s father had torched a building or two in his day. It paid the rent.
This was a radio car’s siren. Carney joined Larry and Charlie Foster at the window. On the other side of 125th, two white officers hassled a young man in a dark denim jacket and red flare trousers, their vehicle beached on the sidewalk. The cops pushed him up against the window of Hutchins Tobacco, known for cigarettes without tax stamps and for its vermin problem. The flypaper was booked all year round, no vacancies, the chocolate bars in the candy counter thoroughly weeviled. Hutchins locked his front door and glared from behind the glass with his hands on his hips.
The 125th Street foot traffic bent around this obstruction in the stream. Most did not stop; nothing special about a roust. If not here, somewhere else. But the manhunt had people edgy and off their routines. They lingered and muttered to one another, sassing and heckling the policemen even as they remained at a distance that testified to their fear.
The taller cop swept the man’s feet apart and patted the inside of his legs. An onlooker howled, “Touching his junk?”
“What’d he do?” Carney said.
“They pulled up, tackled him like he robbed a bank,” Larry said.
“Acting crazy,” Charlie Foster said. “Looking for those Black Panthers.”
“Black Liberation Army,” Larry said.
“Same thing.”
Carney didn’t want to interrupt when there was a fish on the line, but the disagreement between the Panthers and the offshoot Black Liberation Army was about more than names. The philosophical dispute encompassed the temperament of the street, law enforcement’s current posture vis-à-vis Harlem, and all the sirens. Step back and maybe it contained everything.
* * *
***
“Reform versus revolution,” Carney explained to John. Two and a half weeks earlier, May 12th. The verdict in the Panther 21 trial had come down and his son had questions.
“It’s like in my store,” Carney said. “Reform is changing what’s already there to make it better, like stain-proof upholstery, or wheeled feet, and then wheeled feet with brakes. Revolution is when you throw out everything and start new. You know the Castro Convertible?”
John nodded. The TV commercials were inescapable.
“The convertible sofa is revolution,” Carney said. “Takes every idea we have about sleeping, about space, and flips them upside down. Living room? Boom—it’s another bedroom.” He paused. “Bet you didn’t know the inventor of the convertible bed was a black man.”
John shook his head.
“Leonard C. Bailey, businessman and tinkerer. Filed a patent in 1899 that the U.S. military put into mass production. You can look it up. Revolution.”
He had entered that stage of a black man’s life when some days the only thing that got him out of bed was the prospect of sharing stories of Black Firsts and neglected visionaries of their race.
John nodded vaguely. Carney picked up the pace. “The Panthers are opening food pantries, they have that free-breakfast program, legal aid—reform. The BLA wants to overthrow the whole system.”
“If they’re for reform, then why did those Panthers try to blow up the subway?”
“Just because the cops said it, doesn’t make it so.”
That afternoon the longest and most expensive trial in New York City history had wrapped up in a surprising acquittal. The Panther 21 had been arrested two years ago, fingered by undercover cops who’d infiltrated the organization. They faced one hundred and fifty-six counts of attempted murder and arson and etc. in a conspiracy to blow up the Bronx Botanical Garden, various police precincts, a few subway lines, as well as Alexander’s, Korvettes, Macy’s, and other department stores for good measure. The retail targets were an anti-capitalism thing, presumably, but it was unclear what they had against flowers.
John asked if they wanted to blow up Carney’s store, too. Carney told him there were probably a lot of white stores to blow up before they got to his.
It took the jury ninety minutes to deliberate and twenty minutes to read out the one hundred and fifty-six Not Guiltys. “The undercover agents made up their stories out of whole cloth.” A humiliating turn for Frank Hogan, the Manhattan DA. What’s the world coming to when you can’t railroad a bunch of Negroes?
“Why would the cops lie?” John said.
“Why does anyone lie?” Some things a boy has to figure out for himself.
Carney tried to picture himself as a kid, asking his father about political action. Inconceivable. Big Mike Carney pegged the civil rights movement—“these so-called righteous brothers”—as fellow hustlers. How much were they skimming when they put their hand out for soup kitchen donations, pocketing from the overhead when they cut the ribbon for a new rec center? Work rackets for a living and you see them everywhere, the possibilities, the little crack where an enterprising soul might sneak in a crowbar.
For a black boy growing up in Manhattan, John had an inspiringly na?ve outlook. Fighting for survival made you think quick; John took the time to consider the world from every angle, claiming as his right the luxury of thoughtfulness. Sometimes Carney saw him as a version of the boy he might have been if he’d grown up in a different apartment, where there was food in the cupboard when he got home from school, with a mother to greet him, one who had not died young. A father who was not crooked. Carney liked that there was a version of that boy somewhere, even if it couldn’t be him.
May took after her mother. Strident and assured, a flinty fifteen years old. A week after the Panther 21 trial, Carney and the kids were eating breakfast in the dining room. To exercise a paternal muscle Carney skipped his Chock Full o’Nuts ritual to spend time with John and May before school.
May tapped the newspaper. “These are some heavy dudes,” she said.
Carney took the Times. Someone had claimed responsibility for the police shooting Wednesday night. Two cops guarding DA Frank Hogan’s apartment were in critical condition, machine-gunned by “two young black males” in a car. Hogan had been under guard since last summer, when the house of John Murtagh was firebombed. Who was John Murtagh? The judge in the Panther 21 case.
Last night, the shooters had dropped off packages at the New York Times Building and at the offices of WLIB in the Theresa, down the street from his store. The packages contained a .45-caliber bullet, license plates from the car identified in the attack, and a note:
May 19, 1971
All Power to the People,
Here are the license plates sought after by the fascist state pig police. We send them in order to exhibit the potential power of oppressed peoples to acquire revolutionary justice.