Sections Above and Below This Page:

your black brothers and sisters where you belong! And the rest of you motherfuckers, get outta here 'n go to bed! Go on, it's past your bedtime! But not you, lawyer man! Not you! You're going to drive with us in your car to get something to eat in the all-night diner in Denton town and, later on, to Kalamazoo where we're going to pick up a brand-new car from the nice Hertz man. Won't that be nice, huh? Get goin'!"

Emmett awoke the midmorning of the next day stretched out on the rear seat of a fresh sedan he vaguely remembered getting from the Rent-a-Car company to replace the one he totaled the night before. He sat up to discover that he was alone and the car parked next to the curb of Wells Street in the Chicago neighborhood known as Old Town. It took him a while to figure out how to open the rear door of the car because of a jackhammer, hangover headache and because there wasn't any rear door. It was a two-door sedan and, when he couldn't find the catch to release the back of the front seat, he slammed against it hard with both feet, and it snapped free, bowing broken toward the dashboard and giving him the access he needed to climb out the front side of another moronically designed Hertz wreck-a-car.

He stood for a moment with both his legs spread wide and planted firm on the sidewalk to get his balance and let his dizzy spell pass. Thoughts of the previous night's SDS meeting and the role he and his brothers played in its disruption competed with the pain and filled his brain. "The Diggers are an avant-garde gang of a new kind of status-free people! Basically young, hip, ageless, street-wisesavvy, ballsy, macho, righteous, with chutzpah, flexible in that we can do almost everything to the degree that we are capable of doing anything, resourceful, beautiful, courageous heroes of history! Romance is the routine of our daily lives--uninhibited, unpredictable lives without fear of spontaneity! Unordinary, mystery individuals collected together in a bonded union of commitment to muscle 'n gut love of the people! Our inevitable deaths will be the products of the lives we've chosen to live with a healthy respect for both history and eternity!"

"Ooooeee!" Emmett emptied whatever other thoughts were coming up next by blowing them out of his mind with a whistling sigh, as he walked toward the two plate-glass windows of the shop in front of him. It was a bookstore, "Barbara's Bookstore" read the sign, and Emmett glanced back at all the things he'd just said to hirnself for the umpteenth time and muttered a line from one of [end page 403]