Curfew Night

Here's what didn't happen last night: after the president held up a Bible and suggested mobilizing the United States military against the United States people, and the mayor of New York imposed a curfew of 11 PM, tanks didn't roll up Broadway, not yet, and lines of city officials with white in their hair didn't link arms to protect the young people fighting for Black life, which is all life, not yet—but at the edges of what did happen, you could feel what might, just ahead, just as you can always feel what's happened already, like the Lenape councils someone invoked in front of the Stonewall late in the gold afternoon, just before everyone knelt on the street, or the scaffolds at the end of Wall and the execution grounds where the halls of justice are now, where the land-thieves with my ancestors among them demonstrated what's to be done with rebellion.

Here's what did roll up Broadway last night: the people I don't usually see at demonstrations, who didn't pick up duplicate signs from a pile and walk along the permitted route, framed by the police barricades that always remind me of the walls of a mouse maze in someone's experiment. Before these past days, I'd forgotten the joy of moving through the city yelling for the end of state murder (this is what all demonstrations are about really, no?) without the permission of the murderers, the edges of the group fluid and alive, so people can come in and out, the people at the front deciding where next, depending on what's unfolding right now. There was none of that attitude of petition that's mysteriously persisted in “resistance” movements, even since the election of 2016, none of that insistence on speaking to some delusion of a manager—these were people who knew there's no manager, who weren't petitioning anybody, who know that this city belongs to the people who live in it, all of us, and that state murder as an everyday practice within it isn't going to end through petition. We outside, I heard more than once, from people laughing, their faces lit with a joy I haven't seen in person before. We outside.

I was by myself and biking at the edges and could hear people talking about politics and power with that lit energy of something getting born. They were angry in that way unmaimed people can be, young as they were and are, angry on behalf of life instead of death—they were playing music and laughing and saying the name of the man we all watched the police murder, as if they knew him, so of course they had to be out like this, curfew or no, how could you not get in the street if they come for somebody who's yours, somebody you love. Someone was playing NWA's “Fuck tha Police,” someone not born yet when I heard it blasting out of cars in Teaneck, New Jersey, when another cop killed Phillip Pannell thirty Aprils ago—thirty years of Confederacy not undone, and even the first Confederacy another grinding reiteration of those first colonial deathways so many of us still can't see. They were every color there is, and that New York streetlight off black pavement on a spring night wrapped all their shoulders together as they'd come up to a new intersection, where other New Yorkers would honk their horns and lean out of cars to cheer them.