Redeeming Justice

by Jarrett Adams

  One day, my mother hits my brother and me with news.

  “I’m selling the house,” she says. “We’re moving out. The neighborhood is no longer safe. The schools have gotten terrible. I want you in a better school.”

  My mother, always thinking about me, my safety, my future, vows to stay one step ahead of the violence and deterioration we see all around us. So we move. This will be our first of many moves.

  Overall, I attend five different schools in seven years. I am always the new kid. I adjust, or try to. I find my place, make friends, settle in, and then I move again and begin all over at a new school. I play down the classroom smarts. Smart kids are rarely popular. Smart kids get shunned. If you’re smart—or different—you eat alone. Even though I change schools often, I rarely eat alone. I’m social, good at sports. I survive. But I have my secret. I can retain information quickly and easily; my mind seems to allow knowledge to flow in and lock it away. I don’t let anyone know that. That would be revealing a superpower.

  * * *

  —

  One day, I bump into my father on the street. I’ve heard he works in the neighborhood. I haven’t sought him out, but I see him working construction, pouring concrete. I hesitate when I see him, and then I slowly approach. I feel awkward. As I walk, my awkwardness and hesitation turn into resentment. He looks up and stares at me, and I wonder for a split second if he even recognizes me. I want to shout at him, why did you leave? But when I reach him, I go uncharacteristically quiet. I look at the concrete he’s pouring, my eyes riveted on the sidewalk. My sudden shyness stifles me at first. Because if I’m honest, I want to know him. I hate that he left. I feel my mother’s pain, her heartbreak, her loneliness, and I blame her feelings and our struggles, financial and emotional, squarely on him. But he’s my father. I’m drawn to him. I want to know him.

  Gradually, I start to speak to him. We don’t really connect—I don’t feel particularly comfortable with him—but we talk, casually. After that first time, I find myself running into him more often. The more I see him, the more I observe his work ethic. He’s always working, hard. He reminds me of Buddy—that motor, that drive. You get up, you shake off whatever cobwebs have formed in your head from the night before, and you go to work. No matter what. You go to work.

  * * *

  —

  We move to another house on the South Side, and then to another, my mother trying to keep ahead of crime and the crack epidemic, always in search of a better school for me. We move so much I feel like an army brat. Then my brother gets his own place, and James, a good man who will become my stepfather, moves in.

  Around my junior year of high school, my mother says that she has arranged for me to attend a high school near my father, out in the suburbs, and my father will take me in. I spend my last two years of high school commuting between my parents, keeping clothes at both places, living weekdays in the suburbs with my father, our relationship tentative, our conversations minimal, and weekends with my mother. I stay on the move, meaning partying, sometimes outside the city. My mother would worry sick if she knew. So I don’t tell her. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

  * * *

  —

  I coast through senior year, as most high school seniors do, my future out of focus. I go to prom, walk at my graduation, and then, poof, high school ends and reality arrives like a slap. I have made plans for after the summer: I’ve registered for courses at a local community college, and I’ve sat down with a recruiter from the National Guard to talk about enlisting. Other than that, my future remains murky. Only two types of recruiters come to our high school, those from colleges who go after the handful of elite athletes, and those from the armed services who go after decent students from poor families. These uniform-wearing recruiters pitch us the security and adventure of life in the military. That seems to be my only choice. My path. Black kids have to be elite athletes or off the charts academically to be recruited for college. If you’re Black and a good student, if you’re smart and normal, you are ignored. I am ignored.

  After high school, culture shock slams me. I suddenly have to figure out how to make a living—and a life—immediately, without guidance, counseling, or help. I’ve gone from being a high school student to an instant adult. I haven’t had time to figure out what I want, what I want to be, or who I am—except I know I need my own place and some cash flow. All I know for sure is that I want to settle down; I want to stop moving.

  Over the summer, I work two jobs. I bag groceries at the Shop ’n Save near my father’s house, and I work for a temp agency, selling bottles of cologne wholesale with a crew of guys, including two who become my main partners on the weekend. There’s Dimitri Henley, a friend from one of my previous schools, and Rovaughn Hill. Rovaughn, a year older, has a car that works—barely—and receives the lowdown on every party within a three-hour radius. It’s the summer between the end of high school and the beginning of young adulthood, or, as I see it, my last two months to party before I have to get serious about life. So we hit every party we can; my only real concern is that on long trips Rovaughn’s car will break down in the middle of nowhere.

  But sometimes I picture my mother, my aunts, and my grandmother sitting around the kitchen table at the Big House, sipping coffee, talking, worrying, fearing—for me.

  “When you’re a young Black man, you don’t give the police a reason.”

  Disposable young Black boys.

  Those words burn into me like a tattoo.

  3.

  The Party

  September 1998

  A friend of Rovaughn’s tells him about a freshmen pre-orientation party on the campus of the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater, this knowledge as good as a personal invitation.

  Rovaughn, Dimitri, and I have spent the summer road-tripping to parties, including some on college campuses. We’ve blanketed the state of Illinois, traveling to the University of Illinois campus, two hours away in Champaign, and to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, five hours away. Driving that far for a party means nothing to us. We’d rather be on the road for half a Saturday night than stay on the South Side. We feel safer on the freeway in Rovaughn’s clunker than cruising the city streets, looking for a house party. And we prefer parties on college campuses where the beer and spiked punch flow abundantly and people pass joints freely. Let’s be honest. I’m seventeen, red-blooded, male, and like every young man my age I’m looking for fun. Meaning: women. I’m not traveling five hours to Carbondale to sit with a bunch of guys and talk about the Bears’ chances this year.

  This night in early September, we map our route and determine it’ll take a good hour and a half to get to the Whitewater campus. I pack up a few bottles of cologne, figuring I’ll pass them out as party favors. College kids like free stuff. Who doesn’t? Then we set our alibis for the night. I tell my father I’ll be sleeping at my mother’s, and I tell my mother I’ll be sleeping at Dimitri’s. We’ve planned to pull an all-nighter—drive the hour and a half to Wisconsin, slide by the party, head out by two, three, depending how it goes, stop at the all-night Waffle House on the way back. We’ll reach Chicago before dawn, at which point I’ll slip into bed at my mother’s house, nobody the wiser, no harm, no foul. Sneaking out to a party is commonplace, a rite of passage.

  * * *

  —

  We don’t speed.

  In Rovaughn’s clunker with its conspicuous red doors, you can’t. The last thing we want is for the highway patrol to notice three young Black men driving a funny-looking car on an interstate. I hear my mother’s voice: Do not give them a reason.

  “My mother would kill me if she found out about these trips,” I say to the car.

  “At least,” Rovaughn says.

  I shudder and try to laugh. But I don’t think twice about our plan to go to Whitewater. I’ll be back in my bed before my mother wakes up Sunday morni
ng. I’ve done it before. Probably do it again. Although as I flip mentally through a calendar, I think, maybe not. This road trip may be my last. A couple more weeks and I’ll be starting classes myself, trying to figure out my future.

  * * *

  —

  It takes us an hour forty to get to the Whitewater campus. We follow a sign and pull in to a parking lot near a cluster of high-rise dormitories that look like modern apartment buildings. We slowly get out of Rovaughn’s car, Dimitri scanning the grounds. I stretch, trying to shake off the ride. “That car makes me feel like an old man,” I say, bending my knees, my joints squeaking.

  “I need to locate my friend,” Rovaughn says. “Want to find out where the party’s at.”

  “The party is here,” Dimitri says, gesturing toward the edge of the parking lot.

  I see where he’s looking. A group of kids outside a dormitory, laughing, smoking cigarettes, passing a joint. Another group walks past them; then more kids emerge, everyone heading into the dorm.

  “Let’s follow them,” I say. “They look like they know where they’re going.”

  We catch up with that group, everyone friendly, talkative, all of us entering the first floor of the dorm and continuing down a hallway, where the party seems in full force. Kids lean against walls, drinking from red cups, some passing a bottle of liquor, others passing a joint. Music blares from one open dorm room. Laughter and a hum of excitement spill out of another. I take a few steps past the doorway and see people standing around a table, watching a girl trying to lob a Ping-Pong ball into a red cup. She arcs it, the ball lands with a splash, applause bursts from the crowd.

  “What is that?” The words escape from me, asked to the room.

  “Beer pong,” a guy answers, brushing past, giggling, tipsy, clutching his red cup.

  I watch the girl playing beer pong for a few more minutes, still trying to figure out the rules of the game; then I accept a joint someone passes to me. I inhale deeply, take in what I immediately identify as good college-grade weed, a cut above the usual stuff we get in our neighborhood. I take one more toke, and then somebody else offers me a red cup filled with punch. I shake my head, exhale a light brown cloud from the joint, and say, “No, thank you.”

  I admit that I like weed, but I don’t really drink, and I never mix the two. I get ill, violently ill. My system can’t handle them together. I nod to no one, feeling pleasantly light-headed, and ease out of the beer pong room. I sidestep a couple making out in the hallway and see a tall Black kid coming my way, the first Black face I see, the only Black student I see on this campus. I reflexively slap his hand, and we talk for a minute or so. He plays baseball, he says, and asks if I’m on an athletic scholarship.

  “Nah,” I say. “I don’t go here. I’m visiting. Here for the party.”

  “Good place for that,” he says. “Good party school.”

  “Nice to know,” I say, and then I hear what sounds like Rovaughn’s voice coming from a nearby dorm room. I say goodbye to the baseball player and follow Rovaughn’s voice, laughing now, and I walk into a dorm room. Dimitri sits on a chair across from a guy who’s plugging in a Sega Genesis console on his desk.

  “Hi. Jarrett Adams,” I say to the guy holding the Sega, offering my hand.

  “Shawn Demain,” he says, shaking my hand. He smiles and nods at the video setup. “You want to play?”

  “Absolutely.” I grin. “You interested in cologne?”

  I hand him a sample bottle of the watered-down crap I’ve brought along.

  “Any good?” Shawn says, opening the top, sniffing the cologne.

  “Nah,” I say.

  Shawn laughs. “Least you’re honest. Appreciate that.”

  He fires up the game, NBA Jam, and hands me a controller. We go at it, Dimitri and Rovaughn watching, urging me on, caught up briefly in the South Side of Chicago versus University of Wisconsin–Whitewater basketball championship. Shawn, of course, doesn’t know whom he’s up against. I’m good at video games, but mainly I’m good at winning. I like competition. I would’ve done well at lobbing Ping-Pong balls into red cups of beer after all those years I spent arcing shots into rickety wooden crates nailed up on light poles in alleys. It’s the drinking part I’d fail at.

  For a while, we stay like that, arranged around Shawn’s room, talking, laughing, four young men hanging out in a college dorm room, drinking a little, my attention focused on playing NBA Jam. I do see that a small plastic bag of weed has materialized. Dimitri reaches for his wallet and pulls out some rolling papers. Maybe it’s the soft buzz from the weed or the booze or the combination of the two, but the four of us talk easily, comfortably, even personally. Shawn talks about making the jump from high school to college, coming into a new environment away from home, finding your place, meeting new friends, feeling nervous, wondering if he’s up to the academic challenge. I relate, I say, and describe the adjustments I had to make every time we moved. The new kid.

  “Five times,” he says. “That’s a lot. Was it tough?”

  “I mean, yeah, but I had no choice. You have to adjust.”

  Shawn nods and Dimitri and Rovaughn cheer as my pixelated Scottie Pippen soars above the rim and executes a reverse slam dunk.

  Shawn’s room appears to be party central. Every thirty seconds someone walks in, hangs out for a minute, then walks out, looking for someone else. Shawn has a calm, genuinely patient, mellow nature. I can tell people like being around him.

  “You seem to fit in fine,” I say.

  “So far. Still. Change is hard.”

  I nod, riveted to the game.

  “All beginnings are difficult,” I say.

  I read that in a book, but even now, sitting in a dorm room on a college campus, I don’t want to let on to Shawn, or for that matter to Dimitri and Rovaughn, that I read books. A lot of them.

  We remain in Shawn’s room for a while, the party traffic never letting up, a constant flow of people coming in and out. We’re comfortable here, all of us, and for now nobody suggests we go anywhere else. I certainly don’t want to leave Shawn’s room yet. I am on this game, a terror with this controller.

  “Whoa, you keep winning,” Shawn says. “You own this game.”

  I laugh and keep playing, and I do just that, I keep winning. Then, for one moment—a glimmer, a flash—I wonder, what about me? Could I see myself here? Would I fit in? Could this be my room? Could I be starting my life here? Could this be my future?

  A commotion at the door. Laughter. Voices. I don’t look up. I’m vaguely aware of more people coming into the room. Then, of course, you can’t miss them. Their presence fills up the room. They command the room.

  Two young white women. Freshmen. Roommates. Laughing. Flirting.

  One roommate giggles, peers over my shoulder at the game, and rubs her hand over my hair. The other—I’ll call her only the young woman—is even more flirtatious. She laughs and sits on Dimitri’s lap.

  I reach the next round in the game, a round that demands concentration and dexterity, and I’m into this game, dominating it, the controller practically attached to me like part of my hand, even though behind me, in my peripheral vision, I see Dimitri, chewing on a straw, and the young woman tugging on the straw playfully, whispering something, and Dimitri laughs. I don’t know how much anyone has had to drink, but the smell of alcohol hovers in the air.

  More laughing from Dimitri and Rovaughn, and one of the girls says we should all go to her room. An invitation to a private party. I don’t say anything, but I hear movement behind me, and Rovaughn and Dimitri and the two girls move toward the door.

  “Jarrett,” someone calls, “come on.”

  “I’m still on this game,” I say. “I’ll be there in a few. I have to finish this game.”

  A trail of laughter, of voices. The girls and my friends parade out of Shawn’s room
, leaving me in a wake of perfume, of cologne, of alcohol, of flirtation, of promise.

  We hang for a while, Shawn and I, playing the game, until another ten minutes pass, and I win. I shoot my hands up as if I were signaling a touchdown.

  “Unreal,” Shawn says.

  “Beginner’s luck,” I say, and we laugh.

  “Come on, let’s go downstairs, hang out, have a smoke,” Shawn says.

  “Sounds good,” I say, pushing away from the Sega console and the desk. “Let me go get Dimitri and Rovaughn. Where they at?”

  Shawn starts tidying up his desk, putting away the controllers. “Upstairs,” he says. “Two flights up. The room is right off the exit of the stairwell.”

  “Okay, thanks, I’ll go get them.”

  “See you downstairs,” Shawn says. “And, hey, thanks for the cologne.”

  I head out of his room, bypass the elevator, and take the stairs two at a time. I come out of the stairwell at the end of a hallway. Right away, I hear music coming from the room closest to me. I knock on the door and wait. No response. Maybe they can’t hear me over the music. I knock again, hesitate, ease open the door, and walk into the room.

  I need a second to adjust to the low light. The room is dark but backlit by a pool of light spilling onto the floor from a streetlamp. I close the door behind me and take another step in. I see three people in the room—the young woman, Dimitri, and Rovaughn. What happens over the next few minutes has altered my life forever. Each one of us has a consensual sexual encounter with the young woman.

  At one point, the door suddenly opens.

  The roommate comes into the room. She gasps, then starts to speak.