“Look, one day in the box is enough,” King said. “But I’ll just put my troubles in my pocket.”
“I thought I was in the box a long time,” he said. One of the men said that he’d been in solitary, too. The men from the card table stood behind him, clenching their fists. Woodfox held his new T-shirt in a plastic bag and raised his other fist.
The four Panthers posed in front of the store, next to a sandwich board advertising hot oatmeal. “Can I take a picture?” another man asked. “All right, all right,” Woodfox said, deflecting attention. “Originals?” one man said, putting out his cigarette and standing up. “We’ve got original Panthers here,” Johnson told the men at the card table. Several elderly men sat smoking at a card table in front of the shop. Then Johnson led the men four blocks south, to the original headquarters of the New York City chapter of the Party, now a bodega called Jenny’s Food Corp. Johnson sampled musks and decided on a three-dollar glassine of “Bleue Nile,” while King and Smith contemplated buying their own “Black Lives Matter” shirts. “I’ll wear it tomorrow,” he told the others. Woodfox walked by, paused, then turned around. “Black Lives Matter!” one vender shouted. Boulevard, they browsed souvenirs, T-shirts, and jewelry arrayed on tables along the sidewalk. There were pouches under Woodfox’s eyes, and a thick crease between his eyebrows. They all looked soberly at the camera and raised their arms in a black-power salute. They reached the Apollo Theatre, and Johnson told the others to stand under the marquee for a photograph. “How do you want me to know how it feels to be free?” He’d developed a stock answer to the question: “Ask me in twenty years.” “I get apprehensive when somebody asks me something I can’t answer, like ‘What does it feel like to be free?’ ” he said. He was scheduled to speak at a panel on solitary confinement the next day, and he felt exhausted by the prospect. When he talked about himself, his tone became flat. Woodfox is reserved, humble, and temperamentally averse to drama. He had never met Smith or Johnson before, and the conversation was halting and restrained they spoke of gentrification, Jackie Wilson, and the type of diabetes they had.
Johnson, members of local chapters of the Party. Woodfox, who is sixty-nine, strolled along Malcolm X Boulevard with three former Panthers: his best friend, Robert King, one of the Angola 3, as well as Atno Smith and B.