Riot Baby

When you have a purpose that doesn't involve hurting someone else, it changes the way you walk.

It's not till she's outside that she realizes what she was looking for in there. What she's been looking for all these years. What she realizes now she no longer needs. Permission. I am the locusts, Ella sends the thought out like a concussive wave, so that it hits every surveillance orb in the neighborhood, every wired cop, every crabtank in the nearby precinct. I am the locusts and the frogs and the rivers of blood. I'm here now.

Look at outside. We don't have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can't remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My church-goers can come and go in peace." "When there isn't a curfew. Pastor, this isn't peace. This is order

And outside Watts, a dozen more shootings produce a dozen more weeping families that have to struggle stoically through their black grief or that can stand behind microphones and declare their black anger, and the bodies pile higher and higher and higher, and so does the frustration with the impunity 'because,' says the district attorney in St. Louis in Kansas City in Staten Island in Dayton in Gary in Albuquerque in Oakland, 'you can’t indict an algorithm.

We don’t have drug dealers on the corners anymore. I can’t remember the last time someone was shot on this block. My churchgoers can come and go in peace.” “When there isn’t a curfew. Pastor, this isn’t peace. This is order.

She gets to the church, and it stands out like a single, manicured toenail in a gangrenous foot.

Then they get to Mississippi and Ella pauses because Mama sometimes talked about Mississippi and Ella imagines warmth and mosquitoes and tallgrass, haze more than smoke and lounging on cars with the smell of weed making a blanket and somebody’s blasting Motown music out the open doors of their beat-up four-door and everybody is everybody’s cousin and barbecue sauce is suddenly on people’s fingers and bellies bulge with plenty. Maybe Mama didn’t say all those things when she said the word “Mississippi.” Maybe she didn’t mention the mosquitoes or the music. But it was the only time Ella ever saw her not look like she was made of iron.

I am the locusts, and the frogs, and the river of blood.