Fire in the Streets (review)

In this gripping follow-up to The Rock and the River (BCCB 3/09), fourteen-year-old Maxie is focused on a single goal: she wants to be a member of the Black Panther Party like her brother Raheem, patrolling the streets of Chicago with a gun in her hand and making sure the police treat black people fairly and without brutality. Everyone, including her two best girlfriends, thinks she's too young to be an official Panther, but she's sure if she keeps working at the office, making calls and stuffing envelopes, they will see things her way. Even after the police attack the office with a violent drive-by shooting, where being unarmed makes her feel defenseless, the elders in the Party still won't budge. Meanwhile, things are getting bad at home; her mother has lost her job again and the yellow eviction notice has appeared on their apartment door. Raheem tells her not to worry, that he will take care of things, but she feels increasingly powerless until he finally agrees to take her to a shooting range. Maxie feels empowered with a gun in her hand, but it's not until she has to make a fateful decision that her loyalty to the Panthers is tested in the most searing way. While The Rock and the River provided an intergenerational counternarrative to the methods of the Black Panthers, this book falls solidly on the side of their message: all cops are pigs to be distrusted, and the only power worth having is the power that comes from being armed and ready to fight and die for the Panthers' cause, which is outlined in the narrative when Maxie and her friends try to memorize the Ten Point Program. The ultimate satisfaction she feels when she finally gets her own gun may require some historical contextualization for contemporary readers, but Maxie's sense of helplessness and occasional despair is made palpable through the powerfully poetic prose.