Autobiography of My Dead Brother

by Walter Dean Myers

  When I got to the stoop, Benny was already there running his mouth to C.J. Rise had called them both. I was a little nervous, but I was ready to say good-bye to Rise and to tell him that he was the one who had to finish the book, not me. He had to get his own images together and his own style and decide who he wanted to be. It didn’t matter if he couldn’t draw well, because only he knew what the person he wanted to be would look like. I knew who I wanted him to be and so did a lot of other people, but that wasn’t good enough.

  I was excited and only half listening to what Benny was talking about as I tried to get my words together. I was going to give Rise the book with all my drawings and explain how he was the only person in the world who could finish it, and that would be my last gift to him. I could imagine him understanding where I was coming from and feeling the love I was showing him.

  I had the book with the loose pages inside the cover when the white limo pulled up to the curb.

  “Yo, don’t tell me my man got a limo to go to the airport!” Benny said. “He’s stepping in style!”

  Sure enough, when the chauffeur came around and opened the door, who came out but Rise. He was dressed down in a gray suit with a pink shirt and some bad patent leather shoes. He could have been an entertainer.

  Rise crossed his arms against his chest and leaned against the car so everybody could scope how fine he looked.

  “Yo, my peeps!” he said, holding up his hands with his fingers spread apart. “Peace and salutations to the hood. Peace and salutations to the good. May the hood and the good always walk together!”

  “You own that stretch?” Benny asked, pointing to the car.

  Rise didn’t answer. He saw me on the top of the steps and pointed toward me with two fingers. I didn’t know what to do, to turn away from him or to go and shake his hand one last time as I said good-bye. I didn’t have to make up my mind.

  “Yo, Rise!”

  We turned and saw Little Man standing on the sidewalk. He had his hand in a brown paper bag. When he took it out there was only a second between seeing the glint of the metal and hearing the pop! pop!of the bullets being fired at Rise.

  We were running again, dodging into buildings, running into hallways, screaming. Up and down the block old women were slamming windows shut and moving away from them, men were looking for something solid to get behind, kids were lying flat against the concrete sidewalk, covering their heads.

  It was over in a minute. People were shouting something about Little Man and pointing down the street. A girl was screaming. Another one was crying.

  Then I saw Rise. He was lying in the street at the back of the limo. He was reaching up as if he was trying to reach the bumper. I ran over to him and knelt down in the street. There was blood on his shirt, and his chest was heaving.

  “Oh, Jesse!” he said. “Oh, man, it’s so bad! It’s so bad! Jess, don’t let me go, man. Don’t let me go!”

  “You’ll be okay,” I said, getting down on my knees next to him. “Hang on, man.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t think so. Yo, man, I’m crazy scared. Yo, call somebody!” He took my hand and squeezed it for a moment. Then he was calling my name over and over and his eyes were searching my face. They looked so wild and desperate.

  “Yo, Jesse. I’m scared, man. I’m so scared!”

  I was crying and trying to hold on to him and looking around hoping somebody would come and do something. I held Rise close to my chest and we were crying together. And then he went limp in my arms.

  Chapter 23

  Precious Lord, take my hand

  Lead me on, let me stand

  Lord, I am so tired

  Yes, I’m weak

  And yes, I’m worn…

  “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord, and blessed be those who live in the righteousness that he has bestowed upon us. Brothers and sisters, truly it is a sorrowful thing for us to gather here in yet another going-home ceremony for a young man not yet reached his prime. We will miss Rise Davis and mourn his passing. But we are assured today that our God is a living God and a forgiving God and a God willing to take into His loving arms all those who have laid their heads down for that final and eternal rest.

  “The book of life does not close after one page or one chapter. It goes on and on, and we who are left must continue the wonderful story by writing, not just with our pens, but with the moving pen of our daily lives.” Pastor Loving wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. “Let us send our prayers with Rise and lift our voices in song this evening to tell Satan that he cannot triumph as long as there is one soul willing to stand up to him. The human heart is chilled and the soul is challenged, and yet our God rolls on and comforts those who will follow. To Rise’s family I extend my hand and the promise of a just God, who will heal the heavy heart and rest the weary soul. As you leave the church today, stop and pass a word to the mother who has lost her son and the grandparents who have lost a grandson. Comfort them and find comfort in your own fellowship and the love of a just God. Amen.”

  C.J. played and the choir sang softly. The sound of shuffling feet and people singing sounded farther away than usual. It had been the worst week of my life. Nothing that I believed in seemed to matter anymore. I had stopped crying outside, but I could still feel the tears falling inside. There weren’t many people at the funeral, and the line to take a final look at Rise had soon finished. Dad put his arm around me when I started toward the front of the church.

  The crying came again, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from making a noise. The weight in the middle of my chest made me feel as if I was sinking into myself, as if I might fall at any moment. When I got to the casket, I could barely see through the tears. He looked so small. So small and helpless in his dark suit and tie.

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rise. I wish there was something I could do.

  “You want to sit next to an old lady going out to the cemetery?” Miss Lassiter asked.

  “I’m not going, ma’am,” I said.

  “That’s all right, honey,” she said. “That’s just all right. I understand how hard it is.”

  When the last of the mourners had left St. Philip’s, and it was only me and C.J. and Elder Smitty sitting in the church, C.J. started playing jazz. It wasn’t hot jazz, but real soft, and sweet, and beautiful. From where I sat, I could see C.J.’s face lit by the light from over the music. His eyes were closed as he played, and I could imagine the thoughts flooding through him and into his fingers. Rise would have liked that. I knew when I died that’s what I would want, C.J. sitting at the organ finding the right notes to send me away.

  It wasn’t just the tiredness, the deep-in-the-bone weariness that kept me sitting. It was the feeling of not knowing how to go on anymore, that all the things I had learned about living were wrong if all it led to was a few people sitting in the quiet of a church as the undertakers rolled the casket toward the side door and the waiting hearse. Mom came by, looking drawn, stray wisps of hair in her face, her eyes red and puffy, and asked if I was coming home.

  “I’d like to wait for C.J.,” I told her.

  She nodded and headed toward the back of the church, where Dad was waiting.

  C.J. played longer than I thought he would, and I was almost dozing off when he stopped. He looked and saw me and Elder Smitty still sitting in the pews and came down.

  “Boy, you can play that organ,” Elder Smitty said. “You got a real gift. Keep it up.”

  “Thank you,” C.J. said.

  Outside on the steps they were just finished getting the cars organized, and the hearse was trying to get out into the afternoon traffic. Up the street a woman was struggling carrying packages and pulling a child along by the hand.

  “She’s probably got his new school clothes in those packages,” C.J. said.

  “Yeah, probably,” I said.

  My thoughts ran for a minute to Little Man. He would have been just starting h
igh school. They hadn’t had any trouble finding him. The paper said the police found him hiding on the roof of his house. I was glad to know they got him, but I was mad when they put in that he had been crying when they took him to jail, as if crying was something to be ashamed of doing.

  Rise, my blood brother, was crying when he died. I had cried with him. And for him. Now I wanted to push it all away.

  “Yo, you okay?” C.J. asked me.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said.

  “It’s not the same anymore, right?” he asked. “When things like that happen to people you’ve been real tight with, it changes life.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we just go on and see what happens. You okay?”

  “If I tell you something—you’ll try not to be mad?”

  “Like what?”

  “I’m real sorry that Rise is gone.” C.J.’s voice lowered the way it does at times when he’s serious. “But in a way, I’m glad we’re not messing around with gangs and stuff anymore. That sounds wrong, I know.”

  “No, it don’t, man. It’s in the dark somewhere, but it’s a feeling we got to have. And you’re okay, man. Elder Smitty was right. You really do have a gift.”

  C.J. started telling me about how he had composed the tune blending Duke Ellington and some religious music from the nineteenth century. I really wasn’t interested in all that, but he was so enthusiastic as we walked up the street, I didn’t bother mentioning it. All the while I knew we were both thinking of Rise. And we were mourning. None of the sermons had eased the pain of his dying, or the mystery of his living.

  I answered C.J. when he spoke, but in my mind, and in my heart, I was still talking to Rise, too. I was telling him that I would finish his life story, and I would make it as good as I could. And I would keep it forever, and maybe, just maybe, one day it would all make a perfect kind of sense.

  As we walked, C.J. tried to push the conversation in a different direction, away from Rise. I could dig where he was coming from.

  A tale of star-crossed love from Walter Dean Myers

  The HERO

  Here we see a busy school yard

  Black, brown, and tan forms

  Painting the illusion of music

  With their bodies, ball-dancing between the

  White lines of the court.

  Young Damien Battle, comfortable in stride and gesture

  Wearing his seventeen years easily around broad

  Shoulders, saunters at the unhurried pace of

  Hero knowing that the space that

  Opens before him is his due.

  Beside him, perhaps a half step

  Behind, his friend Kevin chatters easily.

  They are young and proud and Black

  For them life is a ripe orange

  Succulent and sweet, ready to be devoured

  And here are Sledge and Chico

  Rivals from the other side of the Avenue

  Their tribe is the more familiar

  We have seen them on every corner

  Of every city in America. They make us walk

  Faster. They make us think of locked doors.

  Of differences we would like to deny.

  Do Sledge’s eyes meet Damien’s?

  Does he sneer as he spins his basketball

  On one brown finger as if it was the World?

  Does he speak?

  Does he speak?

  We listen as Sledge’s mocking voice

  Lifts itself above the background clatter

  “Yo, Chico, check it out.”

  Also by Walter Dean Myers

  Fiction

  Crystal

  The Dream Bearer

  Handbook for Boys: A Novel

  It Ain’t All for Nothin’

  Monster

  Michael L. Prints Award

  Coretta Scott King Author Honor Book

  National Book Award Finalist

  The Mouse Rap

  Patrol: An American Soldier in Vietnam

  Jane Addams Children’s Book Award

  The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner

  Scorpions

  Newbery Honor Book

  Shooter

  The Story of the Three Kingdoms

  Street Love

  Nonfiction

  Bad Boy: A Memoir

  Brown Angels: An Album of Pictures and Verse

  I’ve Seen the Promised Land: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly

  Now Is Your Time!: The African-American Struggle for Freedom

  Coretta Scott King Author Award

  The Harlem Hellfighters: When Pride Met Courage

  Awards

  ALA Margaret A. Edwards Award

  for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults

  ALAN Award

  for outstanding contribution to the field of young adult literature

  About the Author

  WALTER DEAN MYERS is the acclaimed author of SHOOTER; MONSTER, a Michael L. Printz Award winner and National Book Award finalist; THE DREAM BEARER; HANDBOOK FOR BOYS; BAD BOY; and the Newbery Honor Books SCORPIONS and SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS. His picture books include PATROL An American Soldier in Vietnam, illustrated by Ann Grifalconi; I’VE SEEN THE PROMISED LAND: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and MALCOLM X: A Fire Burning Brightly, illustrated by Leonard Jenkins; and the Caldecott Honor Book HARLEM and BLUES JOURNEY, illustrated by Christopher Myers. He makes frequent appearances with the National Basketball Association’s “Read to Achieve” program. Mr. Myers lives with his family in Jersey City, New Jersey.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  Harper Tempest An imprint of

  HarperCollins Publishers

  Autobiography of My Dead Brother

  Text copyright © 2005 by Walter Dean Myers

  Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Christopher Myers

  Hand-lettering by Touray Holland

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-04689-5

  www.harperteen.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Myers, Walter Dean.

  Autobiography of my dead brother / by Walter Dean Myers; art by Christopher Myers.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Jesse uses his sketchbook and comic strips to make sense of his home in Harlem and the loss of a close friendship.

  ISBN-10: 0-06-058293-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-06-058293-7 (pbk.)

  [1. Gangs—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Drive-by shootings—Fiction. 4. African Americans—Fiction.] I. Christoper Myers, ill. II. Title.

  PZ7.M992Au 2005 2004027878

  [Fic]—dc 22 CIP

  AC

  First paperback edition, 2006

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