***Excerpt***
Part One - Chapter One
Jalon Perry & The DeVonne Brothers
Harlem, April 1st, 1969.
Jalon Perry had to run away in spring, the most beautiful season for the city. He’d sorely miss the light green on the leaves of Mount Morris’ oaks. No more spliffs and cold beers while watching youngsters shooting basketball at the Rucker Playground. Events were unfolding at such a pace he couldn’t even swing by those places one last time, nor promise them that one day he would be back. But there was nothing he could do about it.
The day before, a tip came from a copper the DeVonne brothers used to bribe for information and protection. It was bad news, and Jalon couldn’t afford to waver while waiting for it to be confirmed. Not that he was guilty of anything he had done for real nor whatever they thought he was up to, but in those tense times there was no need to actually be guilty. If you were a member of the Panthers, the Feds wanted to lock you away. As simple as that.
The copper wasn’t really clued up, but said strange people were over at the 28th Precinct, up in Manhattan North. Folks he’d never seen before were going back and forth from the Captain’s office in cheap grey suits instead of standard issue uniforms, drawing signs on large urban maps of the neighbourhood wide open on the meeting room’s table. Maps with notes and symbols scribbled on 7th Avenue and 141st Street, precisely where the Party’s chapter of New York had office. Established just a year earlier, it was among the younger sections and its ranks had rapidly grown to make it one of the most important branches in the entire nation. The membership had increased exponentially, just when the hostilities with law enforcement had turned into what Jalon Perry and his crew called a guerrilla.
The assassinations of Malcolm X in '65 right there in Harlem, of Martin Luther King in April of '68 down in Memphis and, two days later, that of Bobby Hutton, had done nothing but increase fear and raise the bar of self-awareness in all American black communities. The Panthers were taking the delicate and dangerous role of being the political megaphone of the ghetto. Given the constant danger of dropping dead at the hands of some trigger-happy policeman, they also necessarily armed themselves since the very early days of their foundation.
The cop had sniffed that something was about to happen, and decided to take the chance of earning a bigger bribe than usual. It was also a means to ingratiate himself even more with the sons of that holy woman who had been Mary St. John, also known as Queenie and considered the undisputed queen of Harlem's clandestine gambling ring until the very day she died. Now Marcel and Leroy DeVonne managed the family business and the cop knew they could be very generous to anyone who proved helpful...
