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school just like everybody else, sister,” he said in a tight voice.
    Kenya’s mother laughed lightly. “We know, honey. You went to Lower Merion.”
    Yaya cleared her throat. “Excuse you . I went to Catholic school. My parents had ambitions for me.” Then she winked at Kenya.
    Johnbrown ignored Yaya. “Look, it was no fuckin’ picnic walking around black on the Main Line back then. Or now,” he said, trying to sound calm.
    “You didn’t hear that, Kenya,” said Yaya. “All you heard was ‘picnic.’”
    “Whoa, now. Sorry I raised these painful memories,” said Cindalou with wide eyes. “I had no idea.”
    Kenya had never met anyone like Cindalou. You wanted to laugh at almost everything she said, and though she was very earnest, it seemed as if that was her intent. Talking to her was like being tickled. All she had to say was “Hey, Kenya” to make her giggle. Kenya tried to stifle a laugh as Cindalou apologized to her father.
    “No worries,” said Johnbrown. “At least I didn’t go to school in a one-room shack with a dirt floor.”
    “Ba- ba ,” Kenya gasped.
    Cindalou laughed. “That’s okay. I did go to school just like that. We had to have a dirt floor for our teachers, who were chickens, of course.” Even Johnbrown chuckled.
    *   *   *
    Brother Camden’s presence was unpleasant, but there was only one person who could truly ruin a Seven Days gathering for Kenya.
    Johnbrown, in a certain kind of mood, would remain silent for most of a meeting. If spoken to, he would respond slowly. Then, at the end, he would ask, “Do you all really think that what we do is enough?”
    Sometimes he waited for one of the others to tell the story of someone they knew getting their head busted by the police, or harassed by white folks on the job. Just as the story seemed to wind down, he’d say, “ That’s exactly why we need to bring the fight to them Julian Carlton–style. Just burn it all down.”
    Johnbrown, before he conceived of The Key, while he was between crap jobs, was the one who had come up with the Seven Days, and later he seemed to forget that Sheila nearly had to wrestle him to the ground to get him to read the Toni Morrison novel. He thought the organized murdering in the book was brilliant, an ideal combination of what he saw as Eastern discipline and black anarchy, but, as he saw it, the times did not quite call for that.
    His original idea had been a combination of service and confrontation. In addition to the volunteering, he wanted to stage raucous demonstrations at the suburban houses of city slumlords. He wanted to block streets in the Northeast or in the Irish Catholic part of Southwest Philly, where the white people regularly harassed black pedestrians; to patrol the neighborhood borders of South Philadelphia, where black met Italian; to picket racist unions and sabotage the Mummers Parade, the white trash blackface spectacle that was the city’s sole indigenous tradition.
    Johnbrown had several ideas, but perhaps his favorite involved provoking the police. For as long as she could remember, Kenya’s father had owned a gun, which lived in the basement in a locked metal box that she had imagined but never seen. Johnbrown wanted all of the Days to own handguns—“legally, of course.” His idea was that they should take their guns to the local police station to stage their right to bear arms—but without the “fascist theatrics” of the Panthers. But no one else was interested in spending their evenings in the city jail or getting their heads cracked with billy clubs. It might have also been the case that no one trusted Johnbrown at the police station with a gun. In any case, the Seven Days had become what they were.
    When Johnbrown started his “burn it all down” talk, the others would become sullen as they listened to him rant about how even though Philly now had a bullshit black mayor, it was still Rizzoville. “And why,” he would ask, his voice climbing