We walk across the park toward his parents’ East London flat. Another spring. Flowers in bloom. Sunlight warms the wet grass. Cherry blossoms. Wilde’s poem accompanies me as we walk.
This too I know—and wise it were if each could know the same—that every prison men build is built with bricks of shame.
I imagine my student’s literature professor would become one of Thatcher’s targets if he assigned Wilde. Teachers corrupting the young with the work of queers. With poems that possess the power to haunt. This one has haunted me since the revelation that Lily’s Uncle Alton is in a jail cell. Possibly forever. For doing nothing but existing. Just as Wilde was imprisoned for existing. But no, they were bothliving. This was their true crime. Daring tolivewhen the world needed them merely to exist.
Society grants the few life and the many mere existence.
“You’re home early.” The boy’s mother wears an apron around her wide waist. Stained with some sort of red sauce. She has kind eyes. Overworked hands. Teeth that need fixing.
“It’s Poet’s Day!” My student says it gleefully.
His mother wraps her arms around her boy. “Is that a holiday I don’t know about?”
I answer fast. “It just means we focused on poetry today. He’s doing fantastic. He has a rich understanding of language. Next time we’ll focus on Latin, which he’s still struggling with.”
“We’re very grateful to you, Bram. You have a way with him.” She pulls a fiver from her apron pocket. Hands it to me.
I hear a police dispatch from within the flat. Her husband is home. He works for the Metropolitan Police. The Black Rats. He’s some sort of commander or deputy commander. I can’t hear every word. Perhaps every third word.Emergency...Brixton...now...riot. Like a redacted poem.
“It’s my day off.” His father’s voice. Husky and authoritative. The voice of a man wearing the mask of what he thinks a man must be. A voice like my own father’s.
Reinforcement...Railton...Operation Swamp 81.
An association. The prime minister’s words:People are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture. The way she deployed the wordratherto soften the revulsion in her statement. To make the fear she speaks of feel soft and rational.
A memory. Long buried. James’s uppity mother, after she found me atop her precious son:Go back to your vile country. Stop swamping ours with your savage ways.
“I’ll be going, then. Till next week.” I feel dread as I walk to the Tube station to head back to Brixton. The rumbling train seems to speak the words from the dispatch to me:Emergency. Brixton. Riot. Reinforcement. Railton. Operation Swamp 81.
I get off at the Brixton station. Ascend the staircase into the open air. Something feels different. The smell. Not the heat of spices being cooked but the heat of fire burning. The sound. Not joyful reggae but frightened desperation. Police everywhere. Their bodies upright. Primed for battle.
I grow increasingly frightened as I near Railton Road. I clutch the bottle of poppers in my pocket. Lily recently had Archie give us each a bottle of poppers to carry with us at all times. To throw in someone’s eyes if they ever try to mess with us. She got the idea when some guy accidentally spilled poppers in Archie’s eyes while Archie was on his knees. Azalea was called in to care for Archie. To convince him he wouldn’t go blind. Archie worried that the amyl nitrate entering his mucous membranes meant he had broken his sobriety. We all laughed about it at the time. Teased Archie untilhe laughed too. But the incident led to Lily’s revelation: “Cheaper than pepper spray, and more inventive. Anybody fucks with you, you throw this at their eyes and run.”
I walk past a burning police car. A tornado of fire. Across the street: young Black boys stand next to a group of white queers. They cheer and clap. One of the queers wears red heels and long silk gloves. He holds what looks like a box of chocolates. I recognize him. He was in one of the Brixton Faeries shows we saw. He offers me a chocolate. I realize they’re not sweets. My God, he’s handing out petrol bombs!
“I-I’m headed home.”
At first I feel disgusted by this violence. Petrol bombs? Is this what it’s come to?
But then I wonder why we didn’t do this in London in 1895 when Wilde was on trial?
And why we didn’t do this in Boston in 1920 when Harvard destroyed our community?
Why do we always shrug off the establishment’s violence toward us?
I rush away. Gripped by fear. On the street is an old copy ofGay Noise. I step on its front page. The wordRAIDin big block letters. Raids. Arrests. Just like London in 1895. Just like Boston in 1920. Same as it ever was. People taken to prison for no reason but their difference. Increasing day by day. Week by week. The state is fighting back. Just as Oliver warned they would. A little over a month ago: fifteen thousand marched in the Black People’s Day of Action. We were among them. All but Oliver. He was still too afraid. He was also right. Maybe he knew this would happen because he stayed in Boston longer than I did. Watched them crack down on us. Police presence in London has multiplied since theBlack People’s Day of Action. Arrests have increased. The whole neighborhood has felt like it could ignite. And now it has.
“Let us through. Please let us through.” A mother holds her toddler in her arms. Pleads with the police to let her across a barricade. My eyes land on the fear in the toddler’s eyes. Too young to make sense of the flames. Of the cries. Of the police wielding their weapons against the neighborhood faces the toddler has grown up with. The same people she sees dancing on the street. Browsing the market for fresh produce. Her community is now a war zone.
Wilde’s poem swirls around in my brain:For they starve the little frightened child. Till it weeps both night and day. And they scourge the weak, and flog the fool. And gibe the old and gray. And some grow mad, and all grow bad. And none a word may say.Wilde. Our imperfect icon. He warned us all the way back then. We can’t let them scourge and flog us this time. We must not let them win again.
Lily is waiting for me by the front door as I turn onto Chaucer Street. She pulls me in. Locks the door. “They diverted the number two. That’s when I knew.”
In the living area: Maud with fire in her eyes. Oliver with sadness in his.
“They don’t divert a bus for no reason. They’re preparing for war. Against us.” Lily pulls a machete out of the front closet.
I hear myself gasp. “Lily, what is that? Is that a... amachete?”
