by K'wan
“Yvette, Mama said you need to help me get dinner started before she gets home.” Sweets ignored Juan.
“Let Anette help you. I’ll be upstairs in a few.” Yvette tried to brush her off.
“You know that girl doesn’t know how to clean chicken. I’d just have to go behind her and do it again. I need you to do it,” Sweets insisted.
Seeing that her sister wasn’t going to let it go, she relented. “I gotta go, Juan. I’ll be back down to get the juice later on.”
“Yeah, the juice will be waiting on you as soon as you’re ready for it. As soon as you’re ready,” Juan said suggestively.
“I don’t like him,” Sweets said when they were out of earshot of Juan.
“Who? Juan? Girl, he’s harmless,” Yvette downplayed it.
“He’s a pervert, and if you know like I do, you’ll stay away from him . . . or else,” Sweets insisted.
Yvette stopped and folded her arms defiantly. “Or what? You’ll beat my ass? Don’t forget who the older sister is, Claudette.”
“I’ll remember who the older sister is when you start acting like it,” Sweets shot back. “Would it kill you to help out once in a while instead of running the streets all the time?”
“Why should I? Ain’t nothing for me in that house but a bunch of stress and some crying-ass kids that I didn’t lay up and have,” Yvette snaked her neck.
“They’re still our brother and sisters. We’re supposed to look out for them.”
“Sweets, you can spend the rest of your life cleaning up Janette’s messes, but I got other plans. In a year and some change, I’ll be 18. That means I can get the fuck out of that nuthouse we live in, and when I leave, I ain’t looking back,” Yvette said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“You’re so freaking selfish.” Sweets shook her head sadly.
“I got it honest. Look who my mama is!” Yvette capped and sashayed toward the building.
“You should’ve punched her,” Jonas said, startling Sweets. She hadn’t even noticed him standing there.
“Family don’t fight with family. Our true enemies live beyond our walls, not within them,” Sweets told her little brother.
“I guess sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.” Jonas shrugged before heading toward the building.
Chapter Two
The Raffertys lived on the fifth floor of a walk-up tenement building on 139th and Lenox Avenue. It was one of the oldest buildings in the neighborhood and one of the few that hadn’t yet been touched by the hand of renovation, but its time was coming. Already, most of the low-income tenants in the neighboring buildings had been pushed out and replaced by residents who could pay triple the rate. The landscape was changing.
As soon as they got inside the apartment, Yvette stormed off to the room she shared with her sisters and slammed the door. She was still angry with Sweets for butting in when she was talking to Juan, but it was for her own good. Though Yvette talked tough and could handle herself in the streets, she was still just a child. Juan was a predator, and Sweets had no illusions about what his plans for her sister were. Whether or not Yvette saw it, Sweets was only trying to protect her. Sweets would try to talk to her again once she had cooled off, but right then, she had work to do.
“Y’all take them good clothes off and let’s start getting this house ready for Santa,” Sweet instructed the rest of her siblings.
“I hope he brings me my Barbie Dream House this year. I’ve asked for it three times in a row and still haven’t gotten it,” Josette pouted.
“I think this year will be different,” Sweets winked. She knew this to be true because she had put one on layaway at the department store. It had taken her three months of scraping together money from doing odd jobs around the neighborhood and braiding hair to pay for it, but it would be worth it to see the smile on Josette’s face when she opened it. “Now, go get changed so you can help me in the kitchen.”
“I don’t know why you still pump that girl’s head full of fantasy,” Jonas said once Josette had gone.
“Because it makes her happy. Don’t act like you didn’t just stop believing in Santa last year,” Sweets reminded him.
“He’d probably still believe if it hadn’t been for Slick,” Anette added.
This was a sour memory for Jonas. That Christmas there was nothing Jonas wanted more than a BMX bike with the wheel pegs. He didn’t care about anything else on his Christmas list but that, and he went out of his way to make sure he’d get it. He stopped mouthing off in school, did his homework, and even helped out with chores around the house. He was a lock to make Santa’s Nice List! When Jonas got up on Christmas morning and found that Santa had finally honored his request and gifted him the bike, he was over the moon with joy. He hadn’t even bothered to open any of his other gifts before he was out the door to take the bike for a test ride.
Jonas was on top of the world riding the bike up and down the block. Even his mother had roused herself to sit on the stoop and watch him enjoy his gift, which was a feat in itself because Janette rarely rose before noon unless she had to go to court. It was the happiest day of Jonas’s life . . . until Slick showed up and ruined it.
It was obvious from the scowl on Slick’s face that he was in a pissy mood. He’d probably been out all night gambling and gotten himself trimmed again. Still, it was Christmas, and Jonas wanted him to share in the cheer. “Yo, Slick, check out what Santa brought me!” He showed off the bike proudly.
His mother’s boyfriend’s drunken eyes glared at the bike as if it were something vile. When he spoke, there was an unmistakable cruelty to his tone. “Li’l nigga, you’re too old to still be so naïve. Only white people who come around here are police, and they damn sure don’t give a fuck about yo’ Christmas.”
“But Santa—”
“Ain’t real,” Slick cut him off. “The only reason you got that stupid bike is because your mama stayed out all night hustling.”
Jonas wanted to curse Slick and call him a liar, but the horrified look on his mother’s face confirmed it. Jonas was devastated, much to Slick’s pleasure.
“Merry fucking Christmas,” Slick laughed and shambled into the building. A few weeks later, Slick took the bike out for a ride and never brought it back. He claimed that someone had stolen it while he was inside the store, but the more likely scenario was that he had sold it. It didn’t matter. The magic that had once surrounded the bike was gone, along with Jonas’s Christmas spirit.
“Evil bastard,” Jonas recalled. “I don’t know what Mama sees in him.”
“You know all the Rafferty women have a thing for bad boys,” Anette said slyly, cutting her eyes at Sweets.
“What?” Sweets asked as if she didn’t know what Anette was implying.
“I see the way you and Drew look at each other,” Anette accused.
“Girl, stop. Ain’t nobody thinking about Drew,” Sweets lied.
“Drew got mad girls. Why would he be interested in Sweets?” Jonas asked, which stung Sweets a bit. He hadn’t said it to be cruel; he was just pointing out the obvious. Drew did mess with quite a few girls in the neighborhood, but it still made Sweets feel good when he flirted with her. She knew nothing would ever come of it, but a girl could dream, couldn’t she?
“As much energy as I put into looking after y’all, I don’t have time for Drew, or anybody else, for that matter!” Sweets said and stormed off into the kitchen.
Jonas stood there, dumbfounded, wondering what he had done wrong.
* * *
Jonas walked into his bedroom and hung his coat on the hook on the back of the door. He was the only one, besides his mother, who had his own room. It was hardly bigger than a closet, but it was still his—the only place where he could go to find peace in the house.
His bedroom walls, like bedrooms of most teenagers, were papered with posters. Some he had torn out of magazines, while others he boosted from stores. Some were posters of rappers Jonas liked, but most were of football players. H
anging in a place of honor over his bed was a large poster of Deion “Prime Time” Sanders from back in his Atlanta Falcons days. He looked menacing, arms folded across his chest in his black uniform and a red bandanna tied snugly about his Jeri curl. Deion’s career was on the decline by the time Jonas had gotten a chance to see him play, but he would sit for hours watching his old highlights on the internet. He had it all: the flash, the charisma, and the skill. Jonas wanted to be just like him. His school didn’t have a team, but he played tackle football on the streets with the older kids whenever they organized a game and played defensive back in a peewee league out in Queens when his mother could afford to pay the fees. He wasn’t half bad either. Though Deion Sanders was who he molded his game after, it was from a local talent where he drew his motivation.
Hanging beside the poster of Sanders was a picture Jonas had clipped from a magazine. It was of a relatively unknown pro named Willie Green Jr. Jonas had had the pleasure of seeing him record his first and only NFL interception one Thanksgiving while watching the game at his uncle’s place. Willie’s was a face Jonas recognized from the neighborhood. He wasn’t a player in the game, nor was he a spectator. Willie was just a kid from the hood who was good at football. Willie was hardly the superstar that Deion was. In fact, his NFL career was an unremarkable one that lasted only two and a half seasons before he faded into obscurity, but he had made it out! Willie was that one-in-a-million shot that got to see what was behind the curtain of success, even if it was only a brief glance. Willie’s story gave Jonas something that was in short supply in the ghetto . . . hope.
Jonas fished around under his bed and slid out a dusty wooden box. He flipped the lid and revealed that it was a record player, once owned by his father. His name had been Ezekiel, but everyone called him Zeke. Someone put a bullet in his head when Jonas was younger. Outside of a few faded memories and some pictures, it was the only connection that remained between Jonas and Zeke.
He’d inherited the record player in a most unusual way. A few months after Zeke’s body was found, a woman showed up at their apartment. She was pulling a shopping cart of things that had belonged to Zeke. Initially, they thought the woman had been another one of Zeke’s mistresses coming out of the woodwork, but as it turned out, she had been his landlady. Unbeknownst to Janette, her man had been renting a room across town for the last few years. It was where he kept his secrets. The landlady had found Janette’s address on some mail while cleaning out the room and figured she might want to claim the few things he had left behind. Janette wanted nothing that reminded her of Zeke’s infidelities and was going to burn everything, including the record player, but Jonas had pleaded with her not to. He wasn’t sure why he wanted the record player, other than be something to remember the man who had given him life.
Reluctantly, Janette had allowed the boy to keep the record player. Most of the records that had been packed in with it were either cracked or scratched so badly that they wouldn’t play without skipping, but there was one that had been kept in relatively good condition: King of the Delta Blues Singers. It had been recorded by a musician named Robert Leroy Johnson who had died in 1938 under questionable circumstances. Rumor had it that as a young man, Johnson had sold his soul to a demon in exchange for success. At the height of his career, the demon had come to collect on the debt. Jonas’s favorite song was a tune that his father liked to listen to whenever he got drunk: “Cross Road Blues.” Jonas could remember that whenever his father would have too much to drink, he’d get to humming the tune, so whenever Jonas played the song, it made him feel like his father was still with him. He was just about to lower the needle onto the record and give it a spin when Yvette walked into his room unannounced.
“Jesus, haven’t you ever heard of knocking?” he asked, startled.
“For what? You don’t pay no bills in here,” Yvette capped. Her eyes then landed on the record player. “I don’t know why you’re holding on to that old thing.” She plucked the record from the player and examined it.
“Be careful with that!” Jonas reached for the record, but Yvette jerked it away.
“Relax; ain’t nobody gonna break it. Who the hell is Robert Johnson anyhow? I’ve never heard of him.”
“That’s because all you listen to is rap music,” Jonas told her.
“Is there any other kind of music?” It was a rhetorical question. She tossed the record like a Frisbee and watched Jonas damn near break his neck making a leaping catch for it.
“Dumb ass,” he mumbled, checking the record to make sure she hadn’t damaged it. She knew the record meant a lot to Jonas and was being mean to him because she was mad at Sweets. “What do you want, Yvette?”
“Sweets said you gotta clean the bathroom,” Yvette informed him.
“I cleaned the bathroom the other day. It’s Anette’s turn,” he said.
“Anette is helping us in the kitchen, so you gotta do it. And hurry up. I don’t want to hear her mouth.” Yvette was about to leave when Jonas stopped her.
“Did you mean what you said earlier?” he asked.
“What?”
“About leaving us and never looking back.”
“It’s not like anybody would miss me if I did.”
“I’d miss you,” Jonas said sincerely.
Yvette took in her little brother. His eyes looked so sad. Jonas was always such a vulgar little spitfire that she often forgot that he was just a kid. Yvette sat on the edge of his bed and placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes people say things out of anger that they don’t really mean. You little shits get on my nerves, but we’re still family, and family is all we have in this world, right?”
Jonas simply nodded in answer. He was happy that his family wasn’t going to be broken up, at least not yet, but there was also something else on his mind. “She was right, you know.”
“Who?”
“Sweets,” he explained. “The stuff she was staying about Juan.”
“And what do you know about it?” Yvette folded her arms challengingly.
“I know Tat and them Red-T boys from Edgecombe were gonna give him the business when Juan tried to force his way into Tat’s little sister Tina’s pants.” The Red-T boys were a neighborhood gang of dudes. They called them Red-T because every summer they turned somebody’s white T-shirt red with blood. They were a small crew but quite vicious.
“Tina’s little ass is fast. I don’t think it’d take much forcing to get between her legs,” Yvette laughed.
“I’m serious, Yvette. You need to stay away from that dude,” Jonas said seriously. “If Juan was to ever try something with one of y’all, I’d—”
“You’d what? Tell Mom?” She laughed as if the idea of her mother coming to her defense was the most absurd thing she had ever heard. “I appreciate your concern, little brother, but I can take care of myself. You worry about cleaning the piss from under the toilet seat and let me worry about Juan.” She patted his cheek and left.
Yvette may not have taken Jonas seriously, but it was only because she didn’t understand how much Jonas loved his sisters. He may have been young but not too young to understand that he was the man of the house. Slick may have occupied his mother’s bed, but it was on Jonas to protect his family. His sisters were all he had, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do to keep them safe. This was something that the Rafferty girls wouldn’t learn until much later in life.
Chapter Three
The rest of Jonas’s afternoon and evening was spent helping Sweets and the others get the house in order for Christmas, which proved to be a far more difficult task than it should’ve been. One thing about having over half a dozen people living in cramped quarters was that the house always seemed to be a wreck. This was especially true when the two resident adults were resident addicts and fuckups.
Jonas tackled the bathroom, cleaning the sink, tub, and toilet. He even got on his hands and knees and scrubbed the grout from the corners around the sink and toilet with an old tooth
brush. Calling the floor clean enough to eat off would’ve been a stretch, but it was as clean as it would get. Next, he moved to the living room to tidy it up. Josette was supposed to be helping him, but she mostly got in the way. She kept accidentally tripping over the gifts under the tree, which was one of the oldest tricks in the book. She just wanted to tear the wrapping paper to see what was in them. By the time he was done with the living room, Sweets was calling them to the table to eat. She had spent all afternoon prepping the turkey, cutting the greens, and peeling yams, but that was for Christmas dinner. Their meal for the Eve consisted of fried chicken and French fries. Neither Janette nor Slick were anywhere to be found, so the children ate alone, which they didn’t mind. Things were less chaotic when the adults were out.
After dinner, Jonas put Josette to bed and helped Sweets and Anette wrap the rest of the gifts and put together Josette’s doll house. It was a lot of work because they didn’t have any tools and had to improvise with butter knives instead of screwdrivers and an old shoe in place of a hammer, but they managed to get it done. Yvette was supposed to pitch in, but at some point, she had snuck out of the house. Jonas thought Sweets was going to get mad when she found out, but she didn’t. She was too tired to stress over it. Instead of going out to look for her, as she normally would’ve, Sweets just went to bed. She was tired. Mentally and physically, her siblings were draining her, and it wouldn’t be long before the girl didn’t have anything left to leech.
It was after midnight when Jonas finally retired to his bedroom. He was so beat that he didn’t even bother to take his clothes off before crashing across his bed. He dropped the needle on his King of the Delta Blues record and drifted to sleep listening to Robert Leroy Johnson singing about that damn crossroad.
Jonas found his sleep fitful that night. He was plagued with a series of peculiar dreams. One that stood out was about his father. In all the years Zeke had been gone, Jonas had never once dreamed of him; yet, there he was that night posted up on his favorite corner, 137th and Seventh. That was the block his dad sold a little coke on when he was between jobs. Only his father wasn’t selling drugs in the dream. He was perched on a milk crate with a bass guitar across his lap. His fingers plucked the cords of “Crossroad Blues,” while people passing by tossed change into the open guitar case. This struck him as odd because he had never known his father to play an instrument of any kind.
