7. Chapter 4 | Dom
CJ talked the whole way there.
Dom let him. She'd heard it all before — the history, the strategy, the why of it — but she never got tired of hearing CJ say it. He'd learned it the way he learned everything, all at once and completely, until it was his.
"So it's always been young people doing sit-ins," he said, walking fast to keep up with Dom's stride.
"It started in North Carolina with some college students.
And then it spread — Nashville, Atlanta, here.
Canal Street's been going for almost three years, I think.
" He glanced at Elle to make sure she was following.
"We practice first. In the back room at Papa Louie's sometimes. "
"Practice?" Elle asked.
"Yeah — how to sit, how to carry yourself. Hands flat on the counter like this—" He demonstrated mid-stride, arms out. "Don't move no matter what. Even if they—" He stopped. Glanced at Dom.
Dom nodded for him to keep going.
"Even if they hit you. Pour things on you. Whatever," he said matter-of-factly, like he was describing the weather. "You don't react. You don't fight back."
"Why?" Elle asked.
"Cameras." CJ pointed to an imaginary photographer across an imaginary street.
"If we fight back, the newspapers say we started it.
But if we just sit there—" He opened his hands.
"Everybody sees. White papers up North are paying attention now.
That's the whole point. Let them show their true faces. "
Dom watched Elle absorb this, what she could see of her under that hat — wide-brimmed, pulled low, the kind of hat that wore the woman instead of the other way around.
A shame, honestly. Underneath it Elle had on a gray-green dress cut close at the neckline and cat-eye sunglasses that would've been exactly right on any other day, and Dom couldn't properly appreciate a bit of it. The hat was too distracting.
She was going to have to work on this woman's style. Quietly. Over time. As a kindness.
"How long do you sit?" Elle asked.
"Till they close. Or till the cops arrest you." He patted his shirt pocket where the bail card was. "That's what that's for."
Elle looked at Dom. Dom looked straight ahead.
"And you just keep coming back," Elle said. Not a question exactly.
"Every day." CJ's chin came up — that pride Dom knew, the one that made her chest ache because it was real and earned and lived right next door to something that could get him killed. "Some folks say nothing's changing. But it is. More people every week. We're not stopping until they desegregate."
Elle watched him. "I'm not used to teenage boys being so..." She searched for the word. "Exuberant. Girls, maybe, but boys are usually more..."
Dom's shoulders tensed. "CJ's not really like other teenage boys." She heard the defensiveness in her own voice and couldn't stop it.
Elle's eyebrow rose, and a flicker of assessment crossed her face — cutting between Dom and CJ, clocking his clothes, his haircut, the way he carried himself, putting it together. Dom watched her face for the rejection. For the disdain.
It didn't come.
Elle just asked him another question, something Dom didn't catch, and CJ's whole face lit up.
Dom had been to the picket line a hundred times. She knew what it looked like, what it smelled like, what it cost the people standing on it. She knew the quality of the silence right before something broke, the way the air changed, the way her body tensed without her permission.
She'd forgotten she'd be watching Elle see it for the first time.
They turned onto Canal, and Dom clocked the broad street, the palm trees, the morning light on the shop windows. Beautiful, if you didn't know what was behind the glass. If you hadn't seen the signs.
Elle stopped walking.
WHITES ONLY. COLOREDS TO REAR ENTRANCE.
And then the picketers with their own signs — EQUALITY NOW and DON'T SHOP WHERE YOU CAN'T EAT.
Some of the picketers clocked Dom and nodded. Others found somewhere else to look. She knew what that meant.
Oretha was at the front of the line, sign raised, moving with that authority that made people step aside without knowing why. Dom saw her before she was seen — a quick breath, a set jaw.
Then Oretha turned, and her whole face opened up.
Dom's jaw tightened.
Oretha broke from the line, already smiling. "Didn't expect you today—"
"I'm just dropping off money for the bail fund." Dom held up the five dollars. "CJ asked me to come. I'm not joining the picket line." She did not smile back.
Oretha looked at the money. Her smile stayed, but her gaze softened with a hint of sadness.
"Of course," she said. "Thank you."
Dom handed off the money and turned back to the crowd. Kept her gaze moving. Kept herself busy.
She could feel Oretha watching her.
CJ had dissolved into the crowd immediately, greeting people by name. Fifteen years old, and he moved through this like he'd been born to it. Lately, Dom thought maybe he had.
Dom worked the edges, checking in. She knew most of the faces — the regulars, the ones who'd been here since 1960, the ones who looked a little more tired each week but kept showing up anyway. She knew which ones were close to their limit and which ones had found something on the other side of it.
She kept one eye on Elle.
Elle stood near the sidewalk, hands at her sides, looking at the lunch counter through the glass.
Dom watched her take it in — the protesters sitting with their backs straight, the white patrons moving past them like furniture, the waitress making her loop without making eye contact with a single Black face.
Watched Elle's jaw clench. Watched her hands curl at her sides.
Dom understood that. The first time was the worst. After that, you just got quieter about it.
She had stationed herself at the water table on the edge of the sidewalk.
Paper cups and a jug she'd hauled from Papa Louie's — it wasn't much, but it was April in New Orleans, and the heat was already climbing.
She wasn't going to watch people pass out from heatstroke on top of everything else; it was the most she felt comfortable doing.
She wasn't waving a sign for Oretha, not anymore.
CJ had a sign — she'd watched him paint it last week at the kitchen table, tongue between his teeth — and that was enough. Dom had her own way of being there.
She was filling cups when she felt the shift in the air. Her head turned before she decided to move it.
A big white man stood at the edge of the crowd with a Coke bottle loose in his hand, his gaze scanning the counter as if deciding something. Then he stopped.
She followed his gaze.
A boy at the counter — young, no more than sixteen, broad shoulders not yet caught up to his frame, a bad haircut that left a small bald patch at the back of his head.
His head was already down, already bearing marks from what people had thrown at him.
Hands flat on the counter, back straight, exactly as they'd practiced.
She knew him from the training sessions in Papa Louie's back room. Jerome, she thought. Or James. She couldn't place it. He'd been quiet, serious, asked good questions.
The man hadn't looked away from him.
Then he broke the bottle against the corner of a newspaper stand — the crack, then the cascade, glass on concrete bright and sharp, heads turning up and down the sidewalk.
The Coke ran down the concrete, shards catching the sun.
He looked at the jagged neck in his hand, then back up at Jerome-or-James, and an expression Dom recognized crossed his face.
Satisfaction. Before he'd done anything.
She watched him start walking. She could already see it — the jagged edge, the torn quality of a cut made with broken glass, the blood. The boy at the counter sat perfectly still, hands flat, back straight, oblivious.
Dom moved before she decided to.
She got three steps before Oretha's hand closed around her arm.
"We have nurses on standby," Oretha said, completely level, already scanning. "Get the Times reporter — where is he?"
"I don't care about the Times reporter," Dom said, pulling against her grip. "I'm going to take him out."
"You are not—"
Her mind already saw the bloody future. There was always more blood than expected with glass — it just kept coming. She saw all of it, and she could stop it. She could have that man laid out on the sidewalk before he got within ten feet of that boy, if they'd just let her go.
"He is not cutting that boy—"
"Dom." Another hand closed on her other arm — Marcus, one of the regulars, big and steady. "Dom, come on."
"Let go—"
"We got people handling it—"
"Nobody is handling it—"
More hands. Voices overlapping. Dom pulled against all of them, feeling the rage come — heat climbing up the back of her neck into her face, the edges of her vision softening and reddening, that narrowing where the whole world collapsed down to one thing.
It happened sometimes in fights, when the temperature rose past a certain point.
She knew it. Had learned to recognize it in the ring, had learned what came after it.
She couldn't stop it any more than she could stop a freight train with her hands.
The part of her that knew better went quiet. What was left just wanted to rampage.
"If you touch him, they arrest you, not him." Oretha stepped in front of her, hands up, her body a barrier. "You know how this works. Three years of this. Every person who's sat at that counter. You touch him and it's gone."
Dom knew. Her body refused to care.
She saw CJ across the crowd, sign still in hand, watching her. His face wasn't scared. It was worse.
A part of her registered what she was about to do, and what it would mean to him specifically—a distant, clear signal.
But the gears were already gone.
She was going to do it. Now. Nothing left in her would stop it.
Elle stepped into her field of vision, chest to chest, close enough to be a challenge. It wasn't. She put a hand on Dom's arm—light, just fingertips. With the other, she removed her sunglasses.
Dom tried to move around her. Pushed through the crowd to the left.
Elle moved with her. Stayed in her eyeline. Hand still there. The ridiculous wide brim of the hat shading them both, a small accidental privacy in the middle of everything.
Dom pushed right.
Elle was already there. Dom got a shoulder past her—almost through—and then Elle did something unexpected.
She stopped trying to block her.
Just stood there, close enough to touch. Took a slow breath. Opened her mouth.
"This little light of mine..."
Dom stopped.
Smoky. Low. A voice that caught the ear and wouldn't let go—the kind of voice that filled a room and made the walls feel closer.
The part of her that knew better surfaced. The part that had somewhere else to put her pain.
She stood there, hands clenched, breath hard, and Elle kept singing, her gaze on Dom's, unwavering.
"I'm gonna let it shine..."
The protesters on the line caught it first—heads lifting, mouths moving. Someone joined in. Then another. CJ's off-key warble. Oretha's strong soprano.
Over Elle's shoulder, at the edge of her vision, Dom saw two men she recognized from training step out of the crowd and position themselves between the man and the counter.
Not touching him. Not provoking. Just there—big and still enough that the man's stride broke.
He looked at the jagged neck in his hand like he'd forgotten it.
Then he looked back up at the two men, did the math, and walked off the way he'd come.
Jerome-or-James never turned around.
"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine..."
Dom's mouth was moving. She didn't decide to. The song just found her — not pretty, not by any measure, but real. Somewhere for the rage to go. Somewhere to put it that wasn't blood.
"Hide it under a bushel? NO."
Dom's hands unclenched.
She stood there in the middle of Canal Street, cracked ribs and cracked knuckles and three years of watching this and not being allowed to hit back, and she sang. Bold and rough and not caring who heard.
"Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine..."
When the song ended, the silence was different. Heavy in a different way.
Dom exhaled.
Elle was still right there. Six inches away, sunglasses in her hand, the hat still shading them both. Her gaze on Dom's, narrow and intent — still checking. Making sure the rage had really left.
And Dom stood there with that voice still moving through her, Elle's face that close, and something clicked into place so hard she almost laughed.
Dom knew that voice.
"Nightshade?"