All American Boys

by Jason Reynolds

  Carlos chewed and chewed, then finally swallowed. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout.” He smiled. “But that’s a good idea!”

  Spoony shook his head. But not in the my little brother and his annoying friends way. In the proud way. “So this protest,” he said, getting down to business.

  “It’s tomorrow at five thirty,” English said. “We’re starting at Jerry’s and working our way down to the police station.”

  “Y’all are gonna miss practice?” I asked, concerned.

  “Who cares?” Shannon said, nodding to me. My boys. My brothers. “You should know, ’Shad, that Tiffany has been working with Jill and they’ve been planning the crap out of this thing. Her and Jill have been the main students organizing it from our school.”

  “But it ain’t just our school,” English explained, quick. “It’s all kinds of people. Other schools. Folks in the neighborhood. Different businesses.”

  “I called Pastor Johnson, and he said he’d round up some folks too,” Ma added. I was cool with the pastor coming, but my mother being on board, that really got me. My father, well, I wasn’t sure. He wasn’t out there with us, was he? Nope. He was in his room, hiding.

  Spoony leaned forward. “Fellas, can I make a suggestion? When we get to the station, we should have a die-in.”

  “A what?” My mother went bug-eyed, probably at the word “die.”

  “A die-in. It’s basically when you lie on the ground as a form of protest. Sorta like how the sit-ins were back in the day. But when you lie down, they can’t push you over, they can’t do anything to you, really, because you are already on the ground.”

  “They could kick you!” My mother wasn’t a fan of this idea.

  “But they won’t. Too many cameras.” Spoony looked at Ma. “I promise. It’ll be fine.” She nodded, nervously.

  “But once we lie down, then what?” I asked, because the way I saw it, putting my body back on the sidewalk wasn’t my idea of a protest. It was my idea of a nightmare.

  “Then we make the most powerful statement we can make.” Spoony dug in his bag and pulled out a stack of papers. “We read every name on this list. Out loud.”

  Friday

  Okay, look. If I thought my sudden allegiance to honesty would make me feel confident, I was wrong. If I was an honest dumbass the day before, I was a freaking piss-scared dumbass on Friday. I’d talked my game, but now I had to follow through with it.

  First things first. I called the police. I had to start from the beginning. I was there.

  I looked up the right number and extension and I made the call in the kitchen, shaking, holding the window frame with one hand and staring out into the sliver of street I could see from there. The phone on the other end rang and rang, as if the damn thing was testing me, trying to get me to hang up. But I didn’t.

  “I’d like to make a statement,” I said when someone finally picked up.

  There was a loud sigh. “Okay. About what?”

  “The Rashad Butler incident. I saw what happened, and I’d like to make a statement.”

  There was a long silence on the other end. It seemed as if he’d muffled the phone with his hand.

  When he came back on, he was quick and curt and aggressive, and rattled off a litany of questions. “Look. Were you in the store? Were you inside when it happened? Did you witness what happened inside Jerry’s?”

  “No. I was outside.”

  The officer sighed again. “Okay,” he said. “Look, we have so many statements.”

  “I was there. I need to report what I saw.”

  “Fine. I’ll take it over the phone, and someone will call you back if we need more. Name and address, please.”

  I couldn’t see the Galluzzo house from the kitchen window, but it was hovering nearby, as if it, or everyone in it, was waiting for me just beyond my view.

  He took my statement but didn’t ask any questions, and he hustled me off the phone. No, I hadn’t been inside. No, I didn’t know exactly what happened. But that wasn’t the goddamn point. I didn’t believe Paul’s story, but even if I did, it didn’t matter.

  I know what I saw after that, and that was all that mattered.

  Plans for the march were all over the news, and so were discussions about how to deal with it. Would they cordon off the sidewalks? Would they try to stop the march altogether?

  Like usual, I walked Willy to school first, and as I doubled back around to Central High, I turned the corner onto Main Street, but then I stopped and nearly ran back around the other way. About four blocks ahead, slowly making its way up the street, was an enormous black vehicle—not a tank exactly, but it had six giant wheels, and its triangular metal nose looked designed to crash through concrete walls. One cop in all-black paramilitary gear stood in the lookout turret on top, and he surveyed the street as if he were looking for snipers.

  “Holy shit!” I said out loud, as it dawned on me that it was heading straight for the high school! Was this the city’s response to the protest? A tank? What the hell would come next?

  I zipped my coat up to the neck, worried now that going to the march was more dumbass than I’d thought. It got closer—the only frigging thing in the road!—and I realized I was shaking. I couldn’t move. As it rumbled by, the concrete seemed to quake, and I stupidly ducked my head, as if that would keep me from being noticed, and steadied my hands by grabbing the straps of my backpack. Oh my God! I can’t do this. I can’t do this! Tanks? Freaking tanks are coming down the street. What the hell, are they sending in the army? It chugged by in all the thunder of its machinery, but then there was something even louder, a jeering boo rising up out of the crowd of students gathered around the front steps of the school.

  The police tank continued on, and if it had meant to scare the students, it did the opposite. By the time I snapped out of it and got up to the steps, kids were yelling after the police tank.

  “This is what a police state looks like!”

  “Serving and protecting who?”

  “Don’t shoot!”

  I found Jill, who was still at it, passing out flyers with info about the protest. “Hey, Quinn,” she said, handing me one.

  “What the hell was that?” I said, thumbing to the street.

  She kind of bounced in place, all excited. “They’re going crazy. I hear they’re gearing up for major riots. We’re not rioting. We’re protesting! We have a permit to march!”

  I looked back to the street and shook my head. “I don’t know—now that I saw that.” I mean, it was one thing to have a conviction, but to be beaten up or killed for it—was it worth it? “But is it really the right thing to do if the police are bringing in tanks? That’s frigging scary shit!”

  But even as I was saying this, another part of my brain was shouting at me. Tanks? What about Dad? Talk about a man who died for his convictions. How many times did he re-up after 9/11? Three. I was old enough now to know he wasn’t fearless. He’d probably been scared shitless every time he went back. He wasn’t strong because he wasn’t afraid. No, he was strong because he kept doing it even though he was afraid.

  Jill looked to the corner where the tank had disappeared down Spring Street—the route we were supposed to march to get to Fourth Street and Jerry’s. “I hear you,” she said. “But I was talking to Tiffany, and she was telling me about the speech her parents give her younger brother all the time—the speech, she said, all boys of color get from their parents. Did you ever get that speech from your mother? Did you ever get a list of ways you had to behave if the cops stop you?”

  “But this is different, isn’t it?”

  Jill waved out over the crowd. “And it isn’t just guys who fear the cops, and families with boys. There’s a whole movement for the girls too. Hashtag SayHerName. It’s big. This is about everyone who fears cops.”

  I adjusted my backpack, pulled the straps tighter against me. “Jesus,” I moaned. Jill gave me a look. “No,” I said. “I mean, that’s real. I’m saying i
t sucks that there even has to be that hashtag, you know?”

  “Look, if there are people who are scared of the police every day of their lives,” Jill said, determined, “I’m going to live in fear of them for at least one day to say that I don’t think that’s right.”

  I grunted.

  “Quinn, come on.” She pushed my shoulder. “You said you want to do something. This is the something. Join the march. Look, Paulie, Guzzo, my mom—they all hate me now. But it’s like it says on the flyer—” She pointed down to the paper in my hands. A block quote from Desmond Tutu covered the top half of the sheet:

  IF YOU ARE NEUTRAL IN SITUATIONS OF INJUSTICE, YOU HAVE CHOSEN THE SIDE OF THE OPPRESSOR.

  Jill curled a soft smile and glanced at the crowd, and then back up at me. “This is like a real moment in history, Quinn,” she said, not yelling, not shouting out over the crowd, but almost shyly, like she was sharing something that meant the whole world to her. “I want to make sure I’m on the right side of it.”

  I gazed out over the crowd of students around us. There were other white kids like me and Jill, and black kids like Tiffany and Tooms, and Latino kids and Vietnamese kids, and multiracial kids, and kids I didn’t know at all and didn’t know how they identified, and I thought about what English had said to me and how many times I’d been a dick without knowing it, and it made me wonder how many times I’d remained neutral in the past too, and what that meant. What did Dad do? He ran right into the face of history. I couldn’t duck now, just because I was scared.

  “I’m going,” I told Jill. I tried to be cool about it. “I mean, I did wear that T-shirt and all.”

  She laughed. “All right then. Let’s go together.”

  The school day was a blur of chaos. Nobody was paying attention to what was happening in class—even most of the teachers were just letting the day run, so we could all get out of the building. It felt like when the last bell rang the dam would break and a flood of people would pour out of school.

  And it wasn’t until I got out onto the sidewalk near the gym that I remembered that, in fact, not everyone was going to the march. As I looked around for Jill, I saw Dwyer cutting across the parking lot to the gym. He was hunched forward, not looking back, trudging his way to practice, and I wondered if there’d even be enough players there to run a play. They sure as hell couldn’t run “Rashad.” What would they call it instead? There’d be consequences for all of us skipping practice, I knew that, but that would be Monday. Today—yes, Ma—I was trying to take some responsibility.

  I was marching.

  I repeated it to myself like a mantra. I was marching. I kept saying it as I scanned the crowd for Jill, pumping myself up, because some people had told me racism was a thing of the past, they’d told me not to get involved. But that was nuts. They were nuts. And more to the point—they’d all been white people. Well, guess what? I’m white too—and that’s exactly why I was marching. I had to. Because racism was alive and real as shit. It was everywhere and all mixed up in everything, and the only people who said it wasn’t, and the only people who said, “Don’t talk about it” were white. Well, stop lying. That’s what I wanted to tell those people. Stop lying. Stop denying. That’s why I was marching. Nothing was going to change unless we did something about it. We! White people! We had to stand up and say something about it too, because otherwise it was just like what one of those posters in the crowd outside school said: OUR SILENCE IS ANOTHER KIND OF VIOLENCE.

  I found Jill, and we walked with a huge group of kids, making our slow march to Jerry’s. By the time we got there, the street was a river of people—an enormous group already!—winding back from the corner store. They were chanting and waving signs. All the streets behind us were open, but the police had cordoned off the side streets along the march route ahead of us. We were stuck in a kind of tunnel. Fucking hell! Sure, they’d let us march from Jerry’s to the police station—that was the plan—but if anything went wrong, we’d be trapped. Thousands of us. Noise already echoed off the walls of the buildings on either side of the street.

  There were thousands of cops, too, or what might have been cops. They looked more like an army of Robocops—black paramilitary outfits, helmets, automatic rifles. Jill and I kept squeezing our way closer and closer to the front, and when we could see beyond the first row of marchers, we could see the first line of the police guard, too. With the row of police tanks, like the one I’d seen that morning, and the rank upon rank of infantry, I swear it looked a lot less like Springfield and a lot more like Kabul. But it was the corner of Fourth Street. I held my breath for a moment, feeling again what I’d seen there.

  Jill and I scooted toward the edge of the street, closer to Jerry’s. I could see the black canisters of tear gas in the belt loops of the cops. I pulled out my phone and start filming them. I didn’t know if I was allowed to film them or not, but I filmed them anyway. I filmed the tanks, too. I filmed the guys who had their guns raised and aimed toward the marchers. Then I tilted the phone back to me.

  “Hey, Will,” I said into the picture. “This is for you. Ma’s always telling us to take responsibility. That we have to live up to what Dad died for. We need to get good grades and go to a good college and take advantage of every damn minute of our lives because he died for us. I believe that. But I believe he died for this, too. If he died for freedom and justice—well, what the hell did he die for if it doesn’t count for all of us?”

  Someone was blowing a whistle up front and I hit stop. People shouted instructions through a bullhorn. Jill pointed, excited. “I think I see Rashad up there! I think he’s here.” We tried to edge our way a little closer to the front line, and with all the camera crews hovering, and people watching us on their TVs back home, I wondered if anybody thought what we were doing was unpatriotic. It was weird. Thinking that to protest was somehow un-American. That was bullshit. This was very American, goddamn All-American. I craned my head, trying to see Rashad. And seeing who I thought might be him, right next to his family and English, I couldn’t help wondering how, years from now, Rashad would be remembered.

  The kid at the front of a march. Speaking truth to power. Standing up for injustice. Asking only to be seen and heard and respected like the citizen he was. Would he be thought of as the “All-American” boy?

  But as the march began, and we trudged forward, shouting along with the people around us, “Spring-field P-D, we don’t want brutality!” I just wanted to see Rashad, the kid who went to school with me. Rashad, English’s friend. Rashad, the guy walking along with his family, the son they were probably all just grateful was alive.

  The march wound its way from the West Side back into Central. The streets swelled with bodies and chants, and as we got down to Police Plaza 1, the crowd started to fan out around the square. I followed Jill and joined a cluster right near the front. Whistles blew around the square and the chanting stopped, the marching stopped, and everyone began to lie down on the ground.

  “It’s a die-in,” Jill told me, and I dropped like everyone else.

  Somebody had a microphone and a PA speaker, and she started reciting the names that I quickly realized were of young, unarmed black men and women who had been killed by the police in the last year. I knew some of the names from the news, but many I didn’t. So fucking many.

  As I listened, I looked up into what should have been the dark, autumnal evening sky, but instead the haze of flashing police lights, streetlamps, giant spotlights, the headlights of cars, the kaleidoscopic reflection off the cold concrete and glass of Police Plaza 1, all obscured the sky. There were no stars. The moon was hidden somewhere behind the blinding glare, and it felt like the city itself was collapsing, pressing in, taking only the shallowest of breaths in the squeeze of lost space.

  The list of names went on.

  And as I heard them, my mind sort of split in two—one part listening, and the other picking up the ideas I’d been kicking around in my head all day: Would I need to witness a violence
like they knew again just to remember how I felt this week? Had our hearts really become so numb that we needed dead bodies in order to feel the beat of compassion in our chests? Who am I if I need to be shocked back into my best self?

  But Rashad lived. His name wasn’t on the list, and thank God it didn’t have to be for us all to be here in Police Plaza. I rolled my head to see if I could find him.

  I learned that the night before a protest, it’s impossible to sleep. I didn’t toss or turn, I just lay flat on my back staring into the darkness, my mind darting from thought to thought, from friend to friend, from brother to mother, from hashtag to hashtag. And in the morning, I wasn’t groggy or grumpy, or even sleepy. I was sick. And it was a good thing that I hadn’t planned on going back to school until Monday, because I spent what seemed like hours in the bathroom shitting nerves. And pizza.

  Once I finally made it out to the kitchen, my mother—who had taken the day off—was sitting at the table in her robe, sipping coffee, staring at the television.

  “Good morning,” she said. Then, noticing my hand rubbing soft circles on my stomach, her voice went into instant worry. “What’s the matter?”

  “Not feeling too well,” I said, easing into a seat.

  “Should I take you back to the hospital?”

  “No, no, I don’t think it’s anything like that.” I hoped.

  Ma got up, pressed the back of her hand against my forehead, then to my neck. “No fever. That’s a good sign,” she said, relief in her voice. She grabbed the kettle off the stove, lifted it to make sure there was water in it, then set it back down. She turned on the flame. “I’ll make you some mint tea,” she added, reaching up into the pantry to grab a tea bag and a mug. “I bet it’s just your nerves. You keep ’em buried in your belly. Got that from your daddy.”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean, whenever you get nervous, your stomach acts crazy,” she said. “Your father has the same problem. He can eat anything. Seems like his gut is made of steel when it comes to food. But when he gets nervous, he’s a mess.”