How It Went Down: Chapters 5–6

I can't blame the women for crying like gulls. Any young boy's death is a slice across the pristine circle. It is a tragedy.

Come with us, they say. To the vigil.

The young girl comes toward me, wielding a powder puff.

Her brow furrows in concentration.

My face on television, comforting Tariq Johnson's family, will draw more voters and more campaign contributions than any stuffy old dinner with rich people I could host.

No words can describe the sorrow I felt upon hearing the circumstances of Tariq Johnson's death, and none can convey my frustration with the system that allowed his killer to walk free.

But I am, as ever, tamping down my feelings. Because how I feel shouldn't matter.

"Oh, no." She half smiles. "I'm much older."
I wonder what constitutes "much" in her mind.

Because in a moment I have to walk out there and, effectively, eulogize him. And I didn't know him at all.

In person, he seems quieter, less brusque.

On camera he's a take-charge, my-words-will-blow-you-down, blustering powerhouse of a man. He seems larger than life.

Reverend Sloan came down from Washington, it looks like. There he is, on the TV, standing right down the block on Peach Street, in the middle of this vigil. Poaching some limelight off a poor dead black boy and the hand of the white man who put him there.

Reverend Sloan came down from Washington, it looks like. There he is, on the TV, standing right down the block on Peach Street, in the middle of this vigil. Poaching some limelight off a poor dead black boy and the hand of the white man who put him there.

It's interesting, though, because not that much from outside gets these guys riled up.

As if we don't have enough problems with factions on the inside, we need to worry about what's happening on the street?

That blowhard thinks he's all that because he threw a Molotov cocktail once, back in the nineties in some kind of race riot.

Obviously, he wasn't expecting me to be sitting right there in the foyer, waiting.

The mother made no comments to the media, but an uncle had spoken: Tariq was a good student and an upstanding citizen.

Last place I saw carnations? On TV. Spread in a blurry mountain across the face of the makeshift shrine at Tariq Johnson's murder site.

"So was the Johnson boy," I retort. "It's too dangerous."

After all the clamor at the vigil—the clicking of cameras, the flashes of light, the shouted questions—the hotel room is starkly quiet.

Politically, this can only help me, no matter which way anything goes. I couldn't have dreamed up a scenario more perfect. This terrible ordeal answers my prayers.

My blood heats easy tonight, each time the Stingers roll by. I wish Jack Franklin was a friggin' yellow jacket. If they had killed Tariq, I could do anything I want as retribution.

Their backpacks hang off them like potato sacks, all lumpy and jouncing on the backs of their knees.

When Tina came along, that's where all my fretting went, I guess.

Vernesha's brother has made some statements, defending Tariq's character and decrying the general wrongness of how this whole thing went down.

I put out my hand, to shake. Tina gazes disdainfully at my open palm.

"Get inside." I glance up and down the street before I slam the door. "What the hell are you doing here? If the Kings catch you, they're liable to knife you."

He has a video camera on his shoulder hefted with one hand while he uses the other to open the door for her.

"Do you think Jack Franklin should be prosecuted?"
Yes. I shrug. "I don't know about those things."

I can't believe I kissed the Reverend Alabaster Sloan. I watch him on TV again, incredulous.

It was reckless and impulsive.

It must have flustered him, because he left his briefcase behind when he went out to the vigil.

It's fascinating, maddening, a train wreck you can't pull your eyes away from, however morbid.

"And I'm here because this type of incident deserves national attention. We need to look hard at our laws, and at the prejudice in our own hearts, so that what happened to Tariq Johnson never happens to anyone else again."