A Tyranny of Petticoats

by Jessica Spotswood

  “Ha-ha.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, his hand warming mine in the nighttime breeze. “Come to Oakland. We’ve got plenty of friends you can stay with.”

  “No,” I said. “There’s no way I could do that.” But the thought burrowed right into my mind, deep into the place of dreams and visions.

  6.

  Panthers sprawled, asleep, on our couches. Our rugs. Panthers in our barn, huddled around a blaze of sticks in a bucket.

  All the things on TV felt closer now. I could feel their presence, sleeping beneath me.

  I was not afraid of the guys themselves, but of everything they represented. The world, and all the shadow things about it.

  I got out of bed and stood at the window, looking out over the fields and the trees and the lane.

  Why don’t I go past the end of that lane? I never really gave it any thought before.

  Maybe because it’s not safe out there.

  7.

  Gunshots ringing through the fields startled me awake. I scrambled out of bed and flew into the hallway. I made it halfway down the stairs before I remembered we had houseguests. Couldn’t go running outside in only my nightie.

  I dressed quickly and ran out back. The Panthers were gathered in formation, doing target practice in the middle of our field. Tin cans were lined up on the rail fence. Bull’s-eyes were buttoned to trees.

  Daddy was out there, talking them through it. He had his coveralls on, but no chaw grass in his mouth, which was unusual. Apparently he had a lot to say to the Panthers, which was also unusual. I crept closer to try to hear, but in the open field, I couldn’t get too close without him seeing.

  This is why they had come, I realized. You couldn’t go around playing target practice in downtown Oakland. The Panthers needed guns to protect people in their community, and we had the space to learn to use them. Daddy moved along the line, helping some of them with their stance and hand position. Torry helped the others. He had served, I got the feeling, like Daddy, long ago.

  I got closer than I thought I might. Daddy was absorbed in talking through the proper function of a rifle. About half the guys had rifles. The guys holding shotguns and pistols were waiting their turn to try. Bobby pulled away from the pack and came toward me. “Hey, Sandy.” He had a shotgun in his hand.

  Daddy looked up over the rifle, through the crowd of boys, and met my eye. He didn’t say anything. Didn’t have to. I took two steps back, and I was grateful he didn’t call me out in front of the guys.

  “I can’t stay,” I told Bobby. “I’ll get in trouble.”

  He shrugged. “Can’t help trouble. When you’re a Panther, trouble finds you.” His voice contained so much right then. Sadness, resignation, excitement, terror, hope. I hugged my arms against my chest and tried to smile.

  “You wanna hold it?” he said, flipping the rifle around vertical and holding the barrel out to me. “It ain’t loaded yet.”

  “No, no,” I stammered, choking my way toward a reason. I already knew how to hold and fire a rifle, but that was beside the point. I settled for the basic truth. “Then I’ll really get in trouble.”

  8.

  I moved through the kitchen to a sound track of guns being fired. After an hour or so, it cooled from constant discharge to occasional. I fired up the griddle.

  Bobby came in while I was stirring pancake batter. I’d just cracked the eggs, so my hands were a mess. He saw me working the faucet with the edge of my palm and he reached around me. The water flowed cold. I scrubbed quickly, but not too quickly, seeing as his arm was still around my back.

  “Thanks.”

  “You got something I can eat?” he said.

  “I’m making breakfast.”

  He peered into my bowl and frowned. The batter looked, at the moment, like a lumpy white soup. “That’s gonna be a thing?” he asked.

  I gave him the look he deserved for that comment. “Haven’t you ever been in a kitchen before?”

  He scratched his head. “I brung in some groceries for a girl one time.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at that one.

  9.

  Bobby held the platter while I stacked up pancakes. He ran his mouth about a mile a minute, talking up the Panthers and all the things he was learning. Every other sentence was “Huey says this,” or “Bobby says that.”

  “You’ve got the same name as one of the founders?” I asked. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale were the founders of the Black Panther Party. Since the movement had started in Oakland, this Bobby knew them personally.

  “Yeah, but I’m way cooler,” he said. Then he laughed. The sound splashed through the air like a ripe berry bursts on your tongue, with something sharp as rhubarb behind it. “Nah, I’m not. Bobby and Huey, man —” He shook his head. “Doesn’t get cooler than them.”

  “Why are you in the Panthers?” I wondered if he would think me stupid for asking. We were black. There were enough reasons.

  He shook his head. “A hundred reasons, you know?”

  “What’s one?”

  It was strange. I could ask these things and he’d answer.

  “My best friend got beat down,” he said. “Oakland pigs.”

  “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.”

  Daddy got quiet then. We never rode in the truck at night. Never went into town at night. Why would we? You did your business in the daytime.

  I went out to the porch and looked down the lane. Crows flew low above the avocado trees, silhouettes against the sunset sky. I knew they were crows, same way I knew it was avocado trees. This was my land. My lane.

  I didn’t have to fight. Might never have to.

  But what if I wanted to?

  12.

  Bobby looked good, standing there on my porch, even though I knew it meant he was leaving.

  “I’ll see you in Oakland,” he said, and I leaned forward then, because I thought he might throw his arms around me or something. But he didn’t. He smiled, though. That broad, lazy spread of lips and teeth. Familiar now.

  He bounded down the stairs, out to the procession of waiting cars. He joined the good-natured scuffling over who got to ride shotgun. Maybe “riding shotgun” meant something different in the Panthers. Like in the Old Wild West. I pictured Bobby hanging out the window, rifle loaded and cocked.

  My veins thrummed, straining out of my skin. The cars were not so full. I could fit there, in the middle, between Bobby and El.

  Doors slammed. Engines roared.

  They drove off into the wide empty sky. No clouds. No birds. Just restless laughter through the open car windows and the sound of tires on dirt.

  Arms came out the windows. The cars honked and the passengers waved. I threw both arms over my head. My feet itched to run. I took the two steps down to the dirt road and chased after as the procession snaked away beneath the arms of the avocado trees.

  I ran until I could no longer see them, until the cars took the turn at the end of the drive.

  The walk back to the house took ages that day. I stood on the porch, looked down the lane. Waited for the churned-up dirt to settle back over the fields. I stayed and watched until the sun went down — all the way down, till the air was black and Granny started calling for her supper. I stayed out there till I couldn’t anymore, and that dust cloud never faded.

  I have researched and written about the Black Panther Party for about ten years. My novels The Rock and the River and Fire in the Streets feature teens who explore the Panther movement in 1968 Chicago. The Black Panther Party was founded in Oakland, California, in October 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, two black college students who had grown frustrated with the slow progress of civil rights change throughout the United States. They believed that the civil rights movement’s efforts to overturn segregation laws did not fully address the needs of struggling people in urban communities. Huey and Bobby developed a plan for addressing the core problems in their community, issues such as economic injustice, insufficient education, hunger, underemployment, and police brutality. They brought together a group of like-minded young men and women to organize, educate, and empower people in Oakland to defend their civil and human rights. The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Platform and Program outlined their specific goals and demands for equal treatment and opportunity for all. Each point articulated one concrete point of action within the Panthers’ overarching vision for “land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, and peace.”

  The Panthers quickly became controversial because their strategy involved armed self-defense against police brutality and white-supremacist aggression. They monitored police activity in their neighborhoods and sought to ensure that the law was being properly upheld, rather than abused by people with power. The Panthers’ values and tactics energized thousands of young people around the country who had become disillusioned by the passive-resistance approach of the traditional civil rights movement. Within a few years, the Panthers had chapters in more than forty cities around the country. They operated schools, community centers, food programs, health clinics, and more — all free of charge to people in need. Their energy changed the course of the civil rights movement significantly. My next book project, PANTHERS! The History and Legacy of the Black Panther Party in America, explores the Panther movement in depth. The issues they raised and the forces they fought against still trouble our society today, and as we continue to address these struggles in our midst, there is much we can learn from those who have gone before.

  WE’RE RUNNING. ALL OF US. THE hippies in their dirty clothes. The protesters with handkerchiefs tied around their faces. The marshals with their bullhorns. Everybody’s running.

  “Come on!” my boyfriend, Floyd, yells beside me. “The pigs are still after us!”

  I pump my legs, grass and gravel pounding through the thin soles of my loafers. I’m gasping for breath. I can’t run any faster than I already am.

  “We’ve got to keep moving, Jill!” Diane shouts as she catches up to us. Even in this madness she manages to look down and roll her eyes at where my hand is linked with Floyd’s.

  “Yeah, those pigs move faster than you’d think with those stumpy little legs of theirs!” I yell.

  Floyd laughs. Behind us, Tom chortles as he pants to keep up.

  I glance back over my shoulder. All I see behind my friends is chaos. Everyone’s scrambling to get away from the police, tripping over roots and rocks.

  Now that we’ve reached the trees, there are only a handful of officers left in the pack. The rest must have stayed back by the rally at the band shell. There were still plenty of people to club there.

  It’s been like this all week. My friends and I drove in from New York on Friday, and ever since, we’ve been running. Thousands of us are in Chicago protesting at the Democratic National Convention — it was the one real chance we might have had to stop the war in Vietnam — but to the police, “protest” means “time to beat people over the head.”

  “Look out!” Tom shouts. Diane, Floyd, and I duck just in time. A rock sails over my head.

  “What the hell?” Diane yells, looking behind us. A hippie wearing an Indian headband sees us and shrugs.


  “Shit, sorry, sister,” the hippie calls. “I was aiming for the pigs.”

  “What pigs?” I look ahead to where the hippie is pointing. Two cops are running, dodging through the trees toward a group of boys who look like they might still be in junior high school. The boys are yelling insults at the cops and holding handkerchiefs over their faces.

  “Hey!” I shout to the police. “Don’t you have anything better to do than beat up on little kids?”

  The officers ignore me, but the boys look my way. The cops see that they’re distracted and move faster, lifting their clubs to strike. The boys turn to run, the police hard on their heels.

  I had to open my big mouth.

  “Shit,” Floyd says. The boys and the officers run behind a cluster of trees and out of sight. We all slow to a stop except Diane. She takes off for the edge of the trees, her light-brown braid bouncing. For a second I think she’s going after them, but then she trots back toward us.

  “The kids got away,” she reports. “The pigs moved on to somebody else.”

  “Well, isn’t this just swell.” Floyd drops my hand and runs his fingers through his long blond hair, his eyes sweeping across the crowded park. The officers who were chasing us must have gone off after someone else too. The only police I can see now are walking toward the outskirts of the park or back to the rally site.

  Grant Park is huge, sprawling along the shore of Lake Michigan. The band shell where our rally just ended is at the north end of the park, but the cops chased us south, toward the bridges that connect the park to the rest of the city. I wonder how many people are still at the band shell now that the afternoon sun is starting to get low. The protest leaders said we were at least five thousand strong today.

  “What the hell was that about?” Floyd says. “I know the pigs don’t need an excuse, but come on, it was a damn peace rally.”

  “Something happened at the flagpole.” Tom tries to put his arm around Diane’s shoulders, but she shakes him off. “Some dude tried to take down the flag, or burn it, or something, so the bastards came down on all of us.”