ourselves somewhere on the picket line and chat it up for half an hour. She’d bring those little patriotic-looking packages of Bazooka Bubble Gum, and we’d chomp noisily while I taught her the lyrics to songs I’d learned from my big brother Sam (“Baby Got Back,” “Santeria,” etc.).
At the sound of the third siren, my mother’s anxiety shifted to alarm and we took off in the family van. The scene in front of the Vintage was chaos, the small parking lot filled with curious bystanders, half a dozen patrol cars with red and blue flashing lights, EMTs, and cops taking statements from my aunts and uncles, and from mean-looking men in sweats. We’d been attacked again, I saw, but worse than usual. Dad and I stayed in the van while Mom jumped out to help. She picked up a sign lying askew on the ground, which I sounded out—ABSTINENCE NOT CONDOMS—but didn’t understand. Here, my memory of staring out the van window gets fuzzy, fusing with images I got from photographs and home videos later: my uncle Tim, neck braced and nose bleeding, being treated by EMTs on the running board of a big red fire engine; my skinny cousin Ben, seventeen years old, strapped onto a gurney with a series of black belts, a white brace around his neck and a white strap across his forehead, his left hand outstretched to hold on to our aunt Margie. As Ben was being wheeled away, Margie seemed beside herself with outrage and grief. “Never, Jerry!” she bellowed across the parking lot. “Never. We’re never—gonna—stop—picketing!”
Sitting at our family Bible reading the next day, my mother explained it all. Jerry Berger, “the Jew lawyer” who owned the Vintage—the same guy we’d later see in a photo with his hands around my uncle’s neck, choking him unconscious—had hired a dozen bouncers from his strip club to come and beat us up for picketing his restaurant. A local priest had witnessed the attack from the bank next door, and wrote a letter to the mayor: “The attackers walked with deliberate speed and apparent determination toward the picketers. Then I saw the signs falling like sunflowers being cut down by cornknifes and bodies being knocked down and into Gage Boulevard.” Eight of our people were taken to the hospital that night. Three were teenagers.
As tensions with the city continued to mount in the months following what Gramps called “The Vintage Massacre,” my mother helped me piece everything together. She liked for pickets to do double duty as preaching and exercise, so I’d listen to her stories as we walked the picket line from end to end. There was a new prosecutor in our county, my mom told me, a woman who had campaigned on the promise that she would get us off the streets. We were bad for the city, bad for its image, bad for commerce, bad for children, and she represented a community that was as determined to shut us up as we were to be heard.
Ever since this woman had taken office as district attorney, my mother explained, she was doing everything in her power to stop us. It was her encouragement that had the cops arresting us so often now, it was she who charged us with crimes we hadn’t committed. And now people were attacking us more frequently because of her refusal to file charges when we were victims, like at the Vintage. The prosecutor had gotten search warrants so that sheriff’s deputies could beat down the church doors with battering rams and confiscate our property—even though we hadn’t done anything wrong and the officers had had to give it all back. They raided the law office, as well, even though the vast majority of Phelps-Chartered’s work involved representing individual members of the public—criminal cases, personal injury, family law—and had nothing to do with Westboro. No matter how careful we were to follow the law, the DA could have us arrested, and Mom would have to run downtown and bail our loved ones out of jail again.
The attacks at Topeka protests and the vandalism of our homes grew worse during the term of that prosecutor. I woke up one summer morning and followed my mom into the backyard we shared with the church, only to find that it had been torn apart. There was patio furniture at the bottom of the pool, the seat cushions slashed open and strewn across the yard. The weights my uncle used to benchpress had been