To Raise a Clenched Fist to the Sky, page 1
To Raise a Clenched Fist to the Sky
The Panther Chronicles, Book One
T. Thorn Coyle
“Serve the light and seek the truth resting in darkness. Aid those in need, to the utmost of your power. Learn the avenues of magic and protect the secrets of the Association whenever possible. Risk your own life before putting the life of another in danger.”
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– The Oath of the Association of Magical Arts and Sorcery
Copyright © 2017
T. Thorn Coyle
PF Publishing
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Cover Art and Design © 2020
T. Thorn Coyle
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Editing:
Dayle Dermatis
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, or locales is coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.
“When Black people really unite and rise up in all their splendid millions,
they will have the strength to smash injustice.”
—Huey P. Newton
* * *
“…the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat
to internal security of the country.”
– J. Edgar Hoover
Prologue
Jasmine
July 15th, 1968. Oakland.
I stepped off the Greyhound from Los Angeles, stinking of body odor, barbecue chips, and the beer the old man spilled all over my green corduroy bell bottoms.
I was a long way from the quiet streets of Crenshaw.
My mouth was foul. Fuzzy teeth and a tongue coated with nasty. Chips and Coke didn’t taste so good once they were three hours gone.
I badly needed a bath. And to wash my clothes. Some things you just couldn’t magic away. Dirty clothes and stinky armpits were on that list.
If I could’ve magicked myself up here without getting on that bus, I would’ve done that too. Believe me.
The bus depot was dingy, the gray walls smeared with layers of grime and a bloodstain that I didn’t want to know anything about. The place smelled like old coffee and piss. I wanted the hell out of there, but had to admit that I felt a little nervous being on the street in a strange city by myself.
I was starting to regret packing books in my Army Surplus duffel with my clothes. How in the world was I going to make the walk to Aunt Doreen’s with all of this weight on the back?
Then I remembered: I could adjust the physics just a small amount. I magicked the bag a little bit lighter. There was nothing I could do about the long-sleeved navy T-shirt tied on the handle, smelling like old beer.
The bus trip had been a dance of staving off boredom and keeping grabbing hands off my breasts and thighs.
I’d started with a seat to myself, curled against the scratched-up window, reading Langston Hughes. When we stopped in Fresno, this old white dude got on and made straight for the skinny black girl traveling alone.
Of course.
You’d think after the first time I sent a jolt of magic to bite his pink sausage fingers, the old dude would’ve given up. But no.
The second time he tried, the blue spark of magic burned his hands and I sent a jolt to his balls at the same time.
That’s when his brown-paper-wrapped beer spilled all over me.
But at least it got him to change his seat, as I mopped myself up as best I could with an old navy T-shirt from my bag, then tied around one of the duffle handles in an effort to keep the stink of cheap beer off the rest of my clothes.
My dad—who doesn’t have a magical bone in his body, bless him, and doesn’t understand protection spells—hadn’t wanted to put me on that bus, but how else was I supposed to get up to Berkeley for school?
I talked him out of Amtrak because the cost was almost double and the bus was faster, and had begun to regret it almost immediately. But I was here now, and that’s what mattered, with the rest of the summer to settle in before the semester began.
My Aunt Doreen had moved up here when I was just a girl, and had a little house between Old Oakland and Chinatown with an extra room off the kitchen. I could stay there in exchange for some housekeeping.
While my parents could pay my tuition just fine, they just couldn’t really afford a dorm, not without more juggling than I felt okay with. I wasn’t sure I wanted to live surrounded by strange white folks like that anyway. School was going to be adventure enough, I thought, without having to figure out if I could trust the people across the hallway when I fell asleep at night.
Sure, I could magic the doorknobs every day. And my mother taught me several protections for situations involving rape or assault. But no one has enough magic for the daily little jabs and comments, the coffee spilled on class notes, or the toothpaste tube squeezed out in your toiletries bag. I’d heard the stories.
I was sure to figure all that stuff out, too, eventually, but it’d be nice to acclimate to it all bit by bit, instead of all at once, by force.
It had been a long-ass ride through the Central Valley and on up the state, and here I was, about to step outside the big Deco doors banded with metal.
Nothing to do but move on through.
The breeze hit me, frizzing out my afro, carrying some of the bus stink away. The air was warm, and smelled like ocean. Different than Bay Street Beach in Santa Monica. The beach of my childhood smelled like ocean, sunny sand, and barbecue, this smelled a little more earthy. Brackish.
Then I remembered the water would be coming off the bay, and not the ocean, accounting for the difference in the smell. Just the same, it was a little slice of home. Some of the tightness in my belly eased up and I felt my magic boost.
Exiting the station, I looked around. A lot of parking lots and warehouses. Not much right here. The driver had told me to walk down Taylor, which I was on, heading to Uptown. A right on Broadway would take me near where I needed to go.
Waiting to cross the street, I saw a weathered white paper, wheat-pasted to the crumbling bricks of an industrial-looking building. “The Ten-Point Program of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.”
The name alone electrified me.
The country was still reeling from the assassination of Dr. King and the Panthers were stepping up their game. Black Power was fueled by Black Rage.
My parents had tried to steer me as far away from the Panther materials as possible, though I’d heard their murmured, worried conversations about the Panthers showing up on the State Capitol steps, rifles slung across their shoulders. And the fact that there was only one beach in Southern California we could enjoy during the summer? My parents tried to protect me from that news as well.
My parents, and the rest of the Association—The Association of Magical Arts and Sorcery, or AMAS—had no truck with revolution. Magic was the only important thing to my mother, and our family was the main thing that concerned my dad.
Though I knew they’d started organizing in LA, the Panthers had seemed so far away from the neat houses and small, trimmed lawns of Crenshaw. Less than five minutes after my pulling up in Oakland, here they were.
Standing on that dirty sidewalk stained with grease and garbage, I was frozen in place by the first point: “We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community.”
The points went on, each one more radical than the next. An end to capitalist exploitation. An end to incarceration. Trial by a jury of our peers… And then, point number ten: “We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace.”
The boom of voices came toward me, echoing between the canyons of buildings. I couldn’t make out what they were saying at first, but they were coming from the direction I needed to walk, so I headed that way.
Maybe not a smart move, but here I was. The rumbling and shouting finally resolved into words.
“Free Huey! Free Huey!” The words were punctuated by claps and stomps. I magicked the duffel slightly lighter and hurried toward the shouting, ducking down what I thought was a street but what was really an alley.
Shit. My parents were going to kill me. Sweat was running down my sides by now, but I didn’t want to let the voices get past me without figuring out what they were shouting for.
I reached the spot right where the alley hit the street. Broadway.
And there they were. The voices that had sounded so loud to me. Around thirty people, mostly black, with some Latino faces in the mix. A couple of white folks brought up the rear.
I ran up to one of the women, marching head high, brass earrings almost touching her shoulders.
“What’s happening?”
She glanced at me, taking in my afro and green cords.
“Huey Newton’s trial is starting at the courthouse. We’re going to support.”
Welcome to Oakland, Jasmine.
My parents were so not going to dig this. They liked their revolution at a distance. And their daughter even further from the center of it all.
I joined the group. When we hit 11th street, we marched toward a small lake. I could see the white, Art Deco rise of what must be the courthouse ahead of us.
The closer we got, the more people I saw, all heading toward that white stacked building with the flagpole spire. The blue waters of the lake shimmered just beyond.
There were thousands of people. Thousands. All shouting and holding signs. Children rode on shoulders, raising chubby arms into the air.
And then…hundreds and hundreds of Black Panthers, marching in formation. Berets and leather jackets on, despite the warm July air.
Fists raised.
They were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life.
Clutching the duffle bag straps on my shoulders, I wept.
1
Jasmine
I usually loved walking across the UC Berkeley campus. It was so different from the streets of LA. After a year up by the San Francisco Bay, I was still getting used to it.
The old Beaux Arts buildings blended with a more classical minimalist style, and they both warred with the newer construction going up around the edges. My favorite thing was the trees. There were trees everywhere, and no brown haze of smog marred the sky.
In the morning, I normally went out of my way to cross the short footbridge over Strawberry Creek that gurgled past the box elders and in between the pines. Not today though. The quiet there was the opposite of what I wanted: that route hadn’t felt quite populated enough. So my feet veered me toward the quad.
Someone was following me.
I’d felt them tracking me from the bus to campus this morning, which is why I shifted my route. The Panthers warned us all that the Man might take an interest in any of us, at any time, but it seemed strange that they would care about me. All I did so far was make breakfast and clean the big kitchen at the church.
The feeling of being watched disappeared during my statistics class. Maybe they didn’t follow me inside, or maybe stats bored them as much as it bored me.
But I felt whoever it was now, reaching out toward me as I hurried from the math building, crossing campus to my next class. It felt like a small target was painted between my shoulder blades and someone’s sights had locked on the base of my skull.
The freaked-out child in me wanted to run, but I remembered my magical training and tamped that child back down. Unless I was under active threat, and knew my target, moving quickly was not necessarily the best option.
Magical training told me: I needed to pay attention. Focus my mind.
It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to unbutton the bottom of my brocade coat though, just in case I needed to run.
Hitching my fringed purse higher on my shoulder, I slowed my steps way down as I approached the quad and the small green hills rolling gently toward the walkways. A gray stone clock tower rose above it all. The Campanile. The pointy-topped structure that symbolized the university even more than its mascot, the California Grizzly.
We’d all gotten the orientation lecture about keeping safe and alert on campus, about not walking alone at night. The “rape talk,” some of the students called it. It was all good, common sense, but wasn’t helping me now. Not in the middle of the day.
There was no way to be alone walking across the UC Berkeley quad in the middle of the afternoon. But when magic was involved, numbers didn’t always help. Sometimes they were a hindrance. The only part of the anti-rape advice that applied was the stay alert part. I needed that.
Glancing up at the tower, I saw that it was five minutes until two, meaning I was going to be late for my 2:10 class if this foolishness kept up.
Despite the chill in the air, a group of hippies were playing guitars and bongos under the big box elders. To my right was a copse of plane trees, their pollarded limbs stretching out scraggly fingers from stumpy, arthritic looking arms. The copse was nice during spring and summer, but in fall and winter, I just felt sad for the brutally pruned trees.
“They’re trying to tame you, comrades,” I muttered.
The usual crush of students was hurrying to and from the libraries and the various class buildings. Math. Music. Paleontology.
So why, in the middle of all this activity, was I still so sure I was being followed?
Call it a hunch.
“Or call it what it is, Jasmine,” I said under my breath. “It’s magic.”
I could smell it now on the crisp air, like something papery and dusty had crawled out from the shadows, dragging a patch of darkness with it. Or like a shed snake skin, desiccated, dried and crackling into nothing. It wasn’t any magic I’d encountered before.
And why in the world would a magician be stalking me?
As I slowed my steps, I decided that more investigation was in order, so I slung my heavy purse onto one of the wooden benches spaced out across campus and sat down. Rummaging past the textbooks and tissues, my fingers alighted on the pencil and pen case that also held a slim wand. I wasn’t actually looking for anything, but I wanted them to think I was.
And the wand might come in handy if I needed backup.
Okay. I cast my attention outward. First to my own edges, then beyond, three-hundred-sixty degrees.
I felt the variety of trees, talking to each other as usual, though I had no idea what they were saying. The waters of the bay beckoned to me, way off campus to the west.
All the different brainwaves, scents, and energy signatures of the students. There was a reason I didn’t usually cast attention out like this. There was always too much going on.
Here was something. There was one mind that stood out…a girl who seemed to also be casting around. I gave her a little push and felt her surprise. Ah. There she was. The white chick reading a paperback book two benches down.
She swung her dark hair off her face, looking around. I ducked my head back down to my purse.
Damn. It wasn’t her. She was just some wannabe witch, practicing her psychic skills. Nothing wrong with that. It’d be good if more folks did the same.
But her energy was too light. Floaty. She wasn’t some papery snake.
I opened my senses further, trying to taste the scent on the back of my tongue.
Shit. Snake all right. And not the good kind. Or not the kind that was doing Association magic, anyway. This magic was strictly off the books. And it never would be brought into the fold.
It wasn’t wild magic, though. And no sort of indigenous magic I’d ever come across.
It’s funny that it had that dried-out snaky feel, though, because layered on top of that was a magic that had more structure than the deepest Ceremonial cats I’d met even rolled with.
It wasn’t Hermetic. It wasn’t Egyptian. It wasn’t Mayan or Ethiopian. This was some serious Solomonic shit.
But not Association Solomonic, which tended to blend in Hermetic and Egyptian when it felt like it. This was crazy, unadulterated, First Temple shit.
Whoever snake guy was, he knew his magic.
“Gotcha,” I muttered.
The snakey stuff was his personal signature. Ceremonial magic mixed with animal totem magic was rare, but not unheard of. I just didn’t realize anyone was practicing that way these days.
The Campanile clock now read 2:05. Time to get to class.
I slipped the little wand out from among the pens and pencils and palmed it into the pocket of my coat.
Couldn’t hurt. Up against a snake like that? I’d do well with a little extra preparation and a tool pre-charged with oomph.
I swung my bag back over my shoulder and hurried on to class. Off to Moses Hall and philosophy. Utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill wouldn’t have believed in my magic, but that didn’t make it any less useful, or any less real.
Did I need any of these classes? I had no damn idea.
What I needed was to know who this magician was. I had their scent now, which was good.
Only trouble was, they also had mine and I had no idea why. But I wasn’t gonna sweat it.
Not yet.
2
