Queenie(56)

“Kyazike, you know I don’t like marches,” I reminded her. “I’m frightened of people, lots of people. I know that lots of people aren’t going to do me any harm, but I feel like I can’t escape from them. It’s too overwhelming. Carnival I can’t do, big shopping centers I can’t do, Oxford Street at any time of day I can’t do. That’s why I can never go with you there,” I explained to her.

“Queenie.”

“You’re right. This is bigger than me,” I said.

“See you there.”



* * *



I tried to meet Kyazike outside the Ritzy and failed, mainly because she is a mover and a shaker and won’t stay in one place. We finally fell into each other on the literal opposite side of where we were meant to meet. We didn’t have any placards or signs, but that was okay because Kyazike has the loudest voice I’ve ever heard. We started off in the square, Kyazike shouting “Black Lives Matter” on repeat while I surveyed who was around us, mouthing it, not confident enough to join in. I didn’t like making myself the center of attention. Roy had seen to that.

Kyazike was forced into silence when the organizer stood on a podium. She was a tall, lean black woman with dreadlocks weaved in with scarves that ran down her back and over her shoulders. When she lifted her hand, the crowd hushed. She waited for a time, lifted a megaphone to her mouth, and spoke. “The system is against us,” she said, her voice strong but close to breaking. “You cannot, you must not, brutalize the black body, but that is what we are seeing. It is all we are seeing. That is the message given. And it is traumatizing. Our people continue to suffer. The trauma is too heavy for us to bear.” The crowd shouted in agreement. “Black Lives Matter does not diminish any lives other than ours. That’s not what it’s about. What we’re saying right now is that we are the ones who are suffering.” She lowered the megaphone and stood looking across the crowd. Pain was etched across her face, and all too visible in the way she held herself.

She handed the megaphone to a woman next to her and stepped down from the podium. The second woman climbed up and spoke: “Do you know what they want? They want us to riot, they want us to cause havoc, mayhem, they want us to burn ourselves to the ground. But you know what I say? It’s not a riot, it’s an uprising. And we will continue with our uprising until we get the justice we deserve.” After her, one by one, protestors stood up on a small stage to speak into a megaphone. We all watched, being hit by bullets of sorrow and anger as family members and friends of black men and women who had been killed unlawfully stood up on that podium one by one and recounted not just how those who had been lost had died, but how they were kind, they were loved, they had children, they were children.

Then, we marched. We all walked, in droves, toward the Brixton police station, the atmosphere electric, the crowd not angry, not aggressive, but charged. Charged and wanting answers, wanting to be heard.

Cars going in the opposite direction stopped and started as protestors weaved their way around them. The drivers beeped, raised fists out of rolled-down windows.

“HANDS UP,” Kyazike shouted through a megaphone. Where had she got that from?

“DON’T SHOOT,” the crowd replied.

“HANDS UP,” she repeated, the crowd ahead shouting: “DON’T SHOOT.”

Eventually we stopped outside the police station, and again we listened. This time to tales of injustice, to acts the police wouldn’t explain, couldn’t justify. More people joined, spilling into the streets and stopping traffic. Police escorts walked out of the station and stood around us. Fear unsettled my stomach.

We walked away from the station, marching free-flow through Brixton, the crowd chanting, “NO JUSTICE! NO PEACE!” We passed the back of the market. Instead of the fruit and vegetable stalls I’d been dragged to on a Saturday morning by my grandmother and thought I’d still recognize, more white kids spilled out holding colorful cans of beer.

The shops where she’d buy Jamaican bun and bright orange cheese for our Sunday afternoon treat, the fabric stalls where she’d choose cloth for curtains, the pound shops where I was allowed to buy one thing and one thing only—these had all gone, making room for trendy new vegan bars and independent boutiques selling shockingly priced men’s fashion. When had this happened? When had the space that I had known like the back of my hand, the only area I’d ever been to that I felt like I could be myself in, the place where so many people looked like me, talked like my family—when had it gone?

Brixton. When had she been stripped of her identity? Why hadn’t I properly noticed?

“NO JUSTICE!” I shouted, a new brand of anger flooding my system. “NO PEACE!”

“Do you want the megaphone?” Kyazike asked.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, raising my right fist above my head.

We marched, and we chanted, settling finally in Windrush Square. A place named after the Windrush, a ship and a voyage where it had all begun for some of our ancestors. We sat on the ground in the streets, all being lifted out of our exhaustion when a new chant, this time a statement of truth rather than an objection to chaos, began, and echoed into the night.

“WE ARE ENOUGH.”

“WE ARE ENOUGH.”

“WE ARE ENOUGH.”