The signs may have bounced as lightly as bodies do…in the
back of speeding pickup trucks, carried in a circle by groups that had written
on them, or held them upright to herald a fervent march. There was plenty of debating
and pontificating saturating the airwaves, regarding race and the like. But all
of it was only chatter outside the walls of the city jail; voices that echoed
at some distance from the banks of the small institutional island, saying things
that were of mild interest to the residents, perhaps.
As it turns out, the people that housed the buildings of the
city jail had seen many sons shot in the bloom of youth, and stood stoically
over the bodies of more than one brother or cousin. If a galvanization was
taking place away from shimmering, looping barbwire fences, no one had sent any
word of it. Business still conducted itself without the usual fanfare on the
inside. The occupants of the dorms were still being roused just before sunlight
to be trucked out to court, walking past lines of unmoved and unaffected faces;
following instructions…
