Crowds thronged the churches up Telegraph and along MacArthur, services spilling out into the streets, the people boisterous. The African Methodist Episcopalian minister preached guarded hope from a pulpit outside on the church steps to a multitude blocking the streets, their hands full of home cooked, church served family breakfast. A long line of people waited patiently at the Kaiser Permanente Center, the late morning streaking up for approaching rain.
“Lot’s of doctors didn’t stay for the Big Takeover,” one of the people in line told him, “But those that did decided, ‘specially here at Kaiser, to give people some free service.”
Down several blocks and around the corner, a company of soldiers arrayed in formation about the entrance to a vacant store front. Besides the New Afrika arm band, they also wore a black and red patch on their arms. They had cracked the building, and now a line of scruffy, destitute individuals filed in between them through the open doors. Some carried bedrolls or foam, others a shopping bag or two of possessions, perhaps even a grungy backpack.
“We’re Captain Lawson’s men,” a sergeant said, “The Captain and us don’t think the Coalition’s moving fast enough on matters benefiting the people. These homeless people for instance. The Coalition’s letting them rot in the streets, and its been more’en two days since Emancipation. So, we’re taking matters into our own hands.”
This revolution’s New Model Army had it’s Levelers then, if not it’s Diggers. Greg strolled into the park lands surrounding Lake Merritt contemplating the gist of that thought. A squadron of children on a church field trip barely listened to the Rotary Natural Science Center tour guide talk about the Lake’s unbalanced saltwater basin ecologies. Strata of kites stacked up into the clouding sky. And a group of older couples on picnic lounged about the horseshoe sand pits. The men tossed the shoes, the women attended to condiments, and both watched the barbecues. He strolled west, past the burned out shell of the County Courthouse and the intact gables of the Convention Center, out of the Rancho Peralta park. The boxy, battleship architecture of Laney College overlooked the high industrial art in Oakland’s sculpture garden, the Channel Park also filled with leisurely crowds. He walked under the now deserted freeway and over the railroad tracks, to notice that swarms of kids had turned the Oakland Fire Department’s multi-storied practice tower into one giant jungle gym. A squad of armed Liberation soldiers occupied the top floors as lookouts, their presence keeping the kids from doing too much mischief. As he climbed the tower’s stairs for a view, Greg heard the soldiers’ radio.
“And now, the latest news from Oakland. This morning a small, little known South American country called San Cristobal formally recognized Oakland’s status as New Afrika, at the same time that tiny high Andean nation also announced diplomatic recognition of the Mixtecan and Mayapan Liberated Territories.
“Representatives of the governor’s office, in conference with the New Afrika Coalition and Liberation Commander Malcolm Brown, announced this morning that talks will continue through the afternoon and evening in hopes of resolving the stalemate between the insurrectionary city and the combined US military forces surrounding Oakland.
“The President has called an emergency meeting of the National Security Council to respond to the latest developments in the Bay Area, and it is reported that the FBI Western Regional Field Office Director has been recalled to the nation’s capital to account for the Bureau’s handling of the riemanium and the Oakland rebellion under its ‘Operation Anvil.’
“The Congressional Black Caucus is holding an emergency news conference in Washington DC at this moment, to urge restraint on the President in handling the Oakland Crisis.
“In a related story, statements were anonymously faxed in to select local media by individuals claiming to be members of the Mexican Revolution Solidarity Brigade at 1 p.m. today. The Solidarity Brigade is suspected of being in possession of the two pounds of bomb-grade riemanium stolen during the Piccoli robbery. The fax claimed that the Solidarity Brigade is proceeding with plans to build the riemanium into a functional nuclear weapon unless the US military withdraws from both liberated Oakland and liberated Mexico.’ The fax also cited a brief bibliography of materials available in the public library for instruction on building such a device. The Brigade promised to forward plans for their atomic bomb.
“It is now, 3:05 p.m.”
Greg saw red. He remembered the Sunday meeting then. David, Beth, Larry, George, and Lori had gone over his head. He started back down the tower’s steps to look for a pay phone, Oakland’s industrial landscapes to the harbor behind him, when he heard the roar of approaching planes.
A wing of fighter jets, low over Nimitz Field, shrieked toward Oakland. Toward Jack London Square and the dual battle laser positions on Oakland’s inner harbor. People were running around the tower then, running away from the Harbor as fast as was humanly possible. A second roar, and surface-to-air missile batteries leapt into action to lay up a defensive curtain of heat seeking rockets. The jets broke into evasive action. Battle laser auroras danced up ultraviolet into the descending sun as the weapons primed. Two jets looped back tightly and managed to let loose their own rockets before having to dodge again. The harbor erupted under the jet strike, counterpointed quickly by one jet taking a direct hit and another spinning off, minus one wing. The battle laser fired. The precise x-ray beam could not be seen. But it produced a sharp fold in the air as it pierced across the bay and stripped the top off San Francisco’s Trans America Pyramid. Two more folds in space lanced from further up the east bay to snap into the Pleiades, melting off one tower and slicing up platform decking.
He could not remember having run down the rest of the tower’s stairs.
Sirens wailed all around the city. Military sirens. Panic assailed the streets. People ran down the middle of the streets, ducked into buildings, ignoring Liberation Forces trying to reach the harbor. Greg steered for the New Afrika Center, the only place he knew to go. More explosions, distant. Black smoke filigreed up to the clouds. Gunfire rattled, also off in the distance, accompanied by the locust sound of helicopters and the neon sizzle of lasers. Then, the thick rumble of dark battle thunder.
He reached the Center’s total chaos, in time for the artificial earthquake. The ground shook, an impact so sudden and so deep that Greg went to one knee.
“Flash in the west.”
“I saw it too.”
Most sounds of battle ceased. Two buildings down the block smoldered from a strike.
That was artillery, ‘bout half hour ago,” Gabe commented. “They was aiming for the center. I don’t know what just happened?”
There was no mushroom cloud on the western horizon, only the smoke of battle. The other Smoke was not to be seen anywhere around the Center. The Center itself was packed. People listened, rapt, to the radios and TV. The switchboard periodically broadcast called-in news and rumor. Liberation Force soldiers stationed at the Center had their radios as well. Piece by piece, a picture of what had happened filtered outside.
The Army’s still holding the Base. Navy and Marines couldn’t take it. Black marines are deserting left and right.”
“One of the laser’s was hit. We still got five. And San Fran’s got a new skyline.”
“They got Oakland Stadium. But they didn’t get no further. We’re holding the line.”
“We fried the Bay Bridge. They was trying to move troops in from Treasure Island.”
The Veep and NSC, they jettin to Sacto.”
“Ninety-five dead. So far.”
The civil war abated, for the moment. Apparently, the US military’s strategy had been to take the harbor and entirely surround the insurrection. They had failed, or the cost had appeared so high that they had stopped with second thoughts.
Clouds enveloped the remaining day. Dusk deepened. A news flash rippled through the crowds. The last massive explosion, that had been NAS Nimitz. Staging ground for retaking the liberated Army Base, it had gone up in one incredibly vi
olent, horizontal detonation, virtually a pancake nuclear explosion in its intensity. This had stopped the US military assault, dead. Greg realized what use had been made of the Timpo grenades he and Smoke had smuggled into New Afrika.
Once again, he helped with service at the Commons, then ate a dinner of Creole rice and chicken with his single bottle of beer. Smoke still had not made an appearance, so Greg wandered out into the evening. Music drifted to him from upstreet of the Center. The city had settled back into a nervous calm, perhaps the calm before the storm. The smell of rain was palpable on the wind. As he searched out the music’s source, he passed another warehouse between the Center and the Women’s Shelter he had visited that morning. The open doors revealed a robed man lecturing to a room full of people, some dutifully taking notes.
“Judaism, Christianity and Islam all describe the Garden of Eden as man’s original residence, a paradise which God planted and from which He exiled humanity after man’s sin of rebellion. ‘Do what you will’ was the whole of the law for Adam and Eve in Eden, apart from the divine injunction against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Ever since the Garden, humanity’s experience has been one of law, regulation and restriction, from the Jewish Torah, through the Christian New Testament, to the Moslem Koran.
The Jew, by and large, is content with his Law. Banished from the Garden, the traditional Jew has no true heaven nor hell after death. At most, both are to be found here on earth, with the ultimate heaven being a restored Hebrew Kingdom in Palestine under the Messiah’s reign. Only a shadowy sheol awaits the Jew in death. The Christian chafes under man’s exile from the Garden and therefore bridles under the Law. Heaven and hell exist for him after he dies, conditioned by whether or not he accepts Jesus as his Savior. Jesus is the Word, and the Law for the Christian, and so belief in Him supersedes even the Law. The Law, in turn, exists in heaven, but man is in the presence of God, and therefore all is bliss. Hell’s torture, of course, resides in the full knowledge of God, without His Presence for all eternity.
“Only the Moslem returns to the Garden and a state of ‘do what you will’ by his act of unconditional submission. The Law then becomes an instrument that, paradoxically, liberates the devout Moslem from the Law when he dies. The observant Moslem is given Paradise, synonymous in Islam with heaven, as his reward, and this is why he insists on absolute submission to the Will of Allah, which is one and the same with the Law. Since man has already tasted of the forbidden fruit, the Moslem’s return to Paradise then is without restriction. It is an end to banishment, a return from exile to man’s original home and state of grace. Allah resides in Paradise, and therefore, to be outside of Paradise is to be in Hell.”
Greg continued walking in the cloud heavy night, the music pulling him on. A racing Liberation Force convoy of jeeps and APVs almost ran him down crossing the next intersection. His mind snapped into the realization that he was in a war zone, the day’s events finally hitting him. He turned up the following corner and found himself in the middle of a block party. In a war zone, before an impending rain, people still danced and sang. A jazz/blues quartet cooked on an improvised stage in the middle of the street, replete with a whiskey-and-cigarette-voiced female singer. Some of the people near the band danced. Even at the worst of times, people needed to take some enjoyment from life.
People in Oakland had died during the day’s skirmish. Oakland families mourned, as did the families of the US soldiers and civilians undoubtedly killed when the Liberation Forces retaliated. The spontaneous, inevitable blood of revolutionary birth was fast becoming the cold blood of civil war. Yet, all about him, people laughed and joked and partied, if for no other reason then for having survived the day’s battle. Strange, this desire for life to continue, to go on despite war, death, addiction and suffering. He had read somewhere that there had been a band even at Auschwitz.
He sat on a stoop away from the boisterous crowd, listening and watching. Strange also the human need to transform life’s pain into justification for this desire to continue living. Whether seen as God’s test for salvation or history’s test for liberation, suffering was the condition of life, though not its essence. The human creature’s capacity to find a ray of hope, a sliver of joy, even in the Inferno’s center was only surpassed by that being’s ability to convert heaven into hell.
The band paused. A door down, a woman stepped out onto her porch, bowl in hand. She whistled sharp and clear into the anvil night. When an adult black cat spit out of the darkness, she lowered the bowl, the animal’s meal. She stood, and smiled wanly as the cat gobbled.
“Used to have ‘nother cat ‘sides this Licorice,” she said, seeing Greg eyeing the cat, “Deep orange tabby name a Red. Now Red catches his meals up the block. Licorice here ran him off. Used ta come too when rd a whistle. Still does, sometimes.”
She whistled again, then again, expecting nothing. Presently, when the black cat had greedily chunked down a third of the dinner, an orange cat tumbled out of the night.
“So, Red, you come fo’ ta’ visit?” she said.
The cat stepped wide around the black one, which had stopped eating, to butt up against the woman’s ankles. She bent down and rubbed up behind his ears. Licorice gave Red a hostile look. Seeing Greg, Red stepped saucily over to him for additional attention.
“Keep him here,” she said to Greg, “While I get him somethin’ ta’ eat.”
She went back into her house while he preened Red. Licorice threw venomous glances the other cat’s way between an occasional, deliberate bite, clearly ready to attack except for the unknown factor that Greg represented.
“Here ya’ go Red.” She returned with food for the second cat.
Red happily dug in, while Licorice glowered, no longer eating at all. Hiss, bound, snarl; black cat jumped Red, Licorice not even half done with his own meal.
“Stop that!” She slapped at the black cat but, too late, the orange tabby was gone. Licorice slunk back to his bowl, but she picked up both cat bowls. “No more for you! Can’t understand it. They was brothers. They protected each other ‘gainst the neighborhood dogs and strays when they was small. I don’t know what turned Licorice. Jealousy, I s’pose. Red, he was always the charmer. Always the clever one. Everybody loved Red. Got lotsa attention, so Licorice was jealous. That jealousy twisted Licorice. He drove Red out and to another home.”
The woman slammed back into her house with the bowls, shaking her head. Greg suddenly stood and walked into the metal tanged darkness. The quiet, mostly deserted New Afrikan streets were a convenient place for a young man to cry. Greg walked through an inner city become proud nation, one willing to take the first punch and come out even. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He had driven Janet, if not to another man, then at least out of his life with his jealousy, his possessiveness, his jailing behavior. Now he tried banishing her from his soul with his bitterness and anger. What was betrayal then? What was she responsible for and what was his blame in all of this? There had to be a better way to live through this, he thought. His acid anger kept that from happening, as his jealousy would keep him from finding a better way to live. If he let them. Greg was monogamous, deeply committed by inner conviction that such a relationship was desirable as well as possible. But monogamy was not to be policed in order to be kept. Promising monogamy was a gift; and as a gift always to be valued by the receiver.
He returned to the Center for his sleep a little after midnight. The reception foyer was modestly populated, everybody attentive to the radio and TV. Low conversations filled the spaces in the news. Cups of fragrant hot chocolate and coffee made rounds on a tray. And this morning’s cute receptionist was on the board. In getting a mug of cocoa, he picked up the latest rumor. Oakland’s rep in the House of Representatives, and the Congressional Black Caucus to which she belonged, engaged in a kind of shuttle diplomacy between Oakland, Sacramento and Washington DC even as they all sipped their drinks. A majority faction of the New Afrika Coalition, urged on principally by Liberation
Commander Johnson, was a party to the negotiations, behind the backs of the New Afrika Center, the New Afrikan Lords, and other more uncompromising elements. Greg turned to walk, mug in hand, to the switchboard to take up the receptionist’s earlier offer of friendship, when an announcement cut the news.
“Five minutes ago, our station received a fax transmission from the offices of representative Patricia Williams and the Congressional Black Caucus.” The public television reporter, a man named Burt Desmond, spoke with obvious relief. “A peace agreement has been negotiated between Oakland’s New Afrika Insurrection and the government of the United States. State and Federal authorities have agreed to fully prosecute the police involved in the murder of Daniel Logan, and to use every resource to discover the identities of his masked murderers. Oakland’s mayor and city council have agreed to dramatically beef up the powers of the city’s Civilian Police Review Board. No government, military, or police reprisal will be taken against civilians who participated prominently in the Insurrection. But only a partial amnesty has been extended to those in the military. Most ranks will be given the choice of a less than honorable discharge, or remaining in the military and facing courts-martial. The upper ranks, Commander Brown most prominently, will not be given a choice. They will plead guilty to mutiny in an instant courts-martial, eased by an immediate Presidential pardon. In exchange all levels of government will declare the death and damage on both sides of the conflict during the Insurrection a national disaster; and not an act of sedition, insurrection, war, riot or conspiracy. Congress and the President have agreed to set up a committee to plan a ‘post World War Two Marshall style’ recovery for America’s inner cities. The Congressional Black Caucus statement ends with these words: ‘It is time people all across the United States and the people of Oakland come together to bury our dead; the brave sons and daughters, men and women, fathers and mothers who died in this tragic mistake, this grave blunder in our common, national history and experience.”
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