Unlikely Brothers

by John Prendergast

  Sure enough Nikki comes around the house one day not long after. I see a nice-looking girl, nicer looking than most of the women I was currying with at the time. And sassy as a motherfucker. I could see that girl had a good head on her. I was interested, sure. But I wasn’t ready for this: That very first day I met her, Nikki says to me, “I don’t got time to be bullshitting, but I want you to be my boyfriend.” I figured she was just talking shit. She’d only just met me, and she probably knew I was a drug dealer right off. So I say, “Sure.” I’m joking around. I had so many women then. Turned out, though, she was serious. And I mean, like, serious.

  Here’s how serious: I went to jail right around then, and Nikki stood by me the whole time. What happened was, me and James were still going down to North Capitol every day to sell our drugs because we had all our crackheads down there and we knew those streets. But one day, we’re up in the new house on Georgia Avenue smoking PCP and got to fighting with each other. Sabrina, she came in and tried to bust us up, and, being all fucked up on PCP, I pulled my .38 out and cocked it. “Anybody touches me again, I’ll kill ’em,” I said. (That PCP will fuck you up.) My mother’s watching all this, her kids pulling guns on each other, and she freaks out and calls the police. I hear her doing that and run upstairs to hide the gun, but somehow it ended up on my bed all tangled up in the sheets. Well, the police show up, find the gun right off, and take me downtown. I played crazy so they sent me to St. E’s—that’s St. Elizabeth’s, the mental hospital for criminals. I was in there only three weeks, ’cause I was still a juvenile. Being around crazy people was hard. But it was better than D.C. jail, believe me.

  Not long after I got out, I was hanging with Nikki on the porch of the Georgia Avenue house. Just chilling there in my shorts, when the federal marshals drive up. “Is Mr. Mattocks home?” they ask. I figure they’re there about the gun charge, and I get up to get the paperwork inside the house, show them that that beef is already taken care of. They stop me and say, “This isn’t a gun charge; this is murder.”

  Murder? Me? Turned out they had word of a murder down on North Capitol, and they thought I could tell them about it. But I wasn’t having any part of that. So they locked me up in the D.C. jail, and man, that bitch was hard. Dirty. Filthy. Roaches. Horrible food. You got this hard-ass little mattress. You never get outdoors. Guys fighting. James was in there at the same time as me; they were holding him to make him talk about seeing Kenny murdered, even though it happened a few months before, but now Stick’s trial was coming up. They left Tyrell alone cause he was too young. A guy came up to me in there and said that three guys had jumped James—jumped him a couple of times—and he’d just laughed at them. That was James. They fucked with him a few times, he gave one of them an ass-whipping, and after that they left him alone.

  Nikki visited me every day while I was in the jailhouse, wrote me lots of letters, and accepted all my phone calls. She even sent me a little bit of money. I never had a woman do that for me before, and I didn’t hear from anybody else the whole time I’m inside. It was cold when I got out; they’d kept me in there ninety days. Nikki was waiting for me right there and took me home. I’m starting to think this is one nice girl. She wasn’t with the bullshit. Finished school. Had her a little job. Did nice things for me—even threw me a party on my birthday. Nobody’d ever done that. I said to her, “Why do you want me? I’m a no-good-ass nigger. I got nothing.” And she said, “I’m not tripping off that.” And this all before we’d even had sex! I didn’t have sex with Nikki for seven months. Seven months! I was used to getting females the first night, or the first week. Nikki was a challenge; I liked that.

  So I cut back all the other women, and I started hanging full time with Nikki. I’d never had a girl with a baby before. She said to me, “If you accept me, you have to accept my child.” And I did. From that day I treated Rolando like my own son. Nikki ended up moving out from her parents’ and into her own apartment, and she asked me, do I want to move in with her and little Rolando. I said, “No, I want to stay home with my mom.” But I helped her move, and then I never went back home.

  Still haven’t.

  Nikki’s dad, Cleo Jackson, was everything the men in my family weren’t. He worked hard at one job his whole working life, as a crane operator. He was married to one woman his whole adult life, Miss Sandy. He was very clean-cut, with dark skin and glasses, and a quiet, dignified manner. One night not long after I got out of jail, he sat me down.

  “You’ve got to straighten your life out, son.”

  “I know, sir.”

  “I don’t want to hear about you being mean to my daughter. You respect that child.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A woman is a big responsibility for a man. You need to give up these streets and get yourself a real job, that you can do your whole life until you’re old.”

  It went on like that for four hours. I think he drank maybe two Budweisers the whole time. He talked to me about man things, but not like he was talking down to me. He knew what I was doing on the street, but he wasn’t judging me. I think, like Nikki, he could see the good in me. And he knew that Nikki loved me and that I was falling in love with Nikki. He had faith in me, faith that because I loved his daughter, I’d leave the life and straighten myself out.

  That man showed me a tremendous amount of respect, and I’ve never forgotten that.

  It wasn’t like one conversation was going to completely change my life though. When I got out the D.C. jailhouse, I told James, “We’re not going back down to North Capitol anymore. We’re going to stay up here.” I could see there was more money up on Georgia Avenue. Also, there were fewer people selling, which meant less pressure, less jealousy. Plus, the ones selling up on Georgia Avenue were uptown niggers, and we were downtown niggers. We were rough. We had a style—sagged pants and a tough look. Uptown niggers are pretty boys. They knew we were from downtown, what kind of news we was.

  My buddy Fats found us this new kind of crack one day, called Fish Scale, and he brought a little bit up there. Right away, people were like, “You got more? You got more?” I called Fats and said, “We need more of this.” Now, I didn’t like people fronting me shit. If I couldn’t buy it, I did without. So I bought what I could: an eighth of a kilo. Came about the size of a tennis ball, but hard like rock. I chopped it up and put it in those teenie-weenie plastic bags—twelve-twelves and ten-tens, which is millimeters by millimeters, plastic bags the size of postage stamps. Right away people knew I had Fish Scale, and even though it was so pure, I sold it for the same price as everybody else’s. That’s how you do: Take care of your crackheads, and you make them loyal to you. Man, in no time, we took that strip over. Those uptown niggers couldn’t figure it out. I’ll tell you though: If we’d tried that shit on North Capitol, they’d have shot our ass up. Lucky for us, them up on Georgia Avenue was weak niggers.

  JOHN PRENDERGAST

  In the early to mid-nineties I was on the road almost constantly—Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola, Congo, Sudan, Rwanda, Somalia, or wherever else there was a war—which meant both Jean and the boys got very little of my time or attention. I was working for whatever NGO needed someone in Africa, based out of a little nonprofit in Northeast D.C. ambitiously named the Center of Concern. As always, getting Americans’ attention was the biggest challenge.

  I was in Somalia constantly from 1990 to 1993, and I watched the war-induced famine unfold. The needs began with the life-or-death: food and medicine for people at the edge of survival. Then there were needs that were simply urgent: bringing some semblance of peace to a country of warring factions and no functional national government. From the vantage point of a peace activist like me in Mogadishu, the situation in Somalia seemed to be what the United Nations had been founded to address. With the end of the Cold War, and the history of what the United States had done to Somalia during that period, I believed that America had a moral responsibility to act. The first President Bush decided to test out his “new world
order” ideas in Somalia, and he authorized a U.S. military intervention to deliver food and end the famine. However, despite the good intentions and early success of helping to end the famine, the intervention eventually lost its way and went awry, leading to the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident in October 1993 and the gruesome deaths of American servicemen. I was in Somalia when this happened, and I watched as the United States decided to cut and run in the aftermath of losing eighteen soldiers. These events froze the United States into inaction when an even bigger crisis struck in April 1994: the genocide in Rwanda.

  I kept hearing from refugees that something was brewing in Rwanda. The first reports were too surreal to believe—that after the Rwandan president died when his plane was shot down, the national radio station was urging the majority Hutu population to hunt down and kill the minority Tutsi population. The Hutu militias organized by the government were called Interahamwe, or “those who hunt together.” This was genocide without the concentration camps. I was in southern Sudan working for the United Nations when the nightmare in Rwanda commenced. Three months after it began, I took leave and went down to the border of Congo and Rwanda to witness one of the largest and fastest mass migrations in history: the post-genocide refugee flow from Rwanda to Congo. At one point I ran into a roadblock, and that’s where a child soldier no older than fifteen, all hopped up on some kind of drug, put the barrel of his AK-47 in my mouth. I was sure I was a dead man, but for reasons I will never know, eventually he let me go. Nearly a million Rwandans—mostly Tutsi—weren’t so lucky. They died in the space of a hundred days. The fastest recorded rate of killing in history, anywhere, ever.

  Watching the world do nothing about Rwanda, where the government itself had perpetrated a genocide against its own people, I was beside myself with outrage. For years, the world had been saying “Never Again” about the Holocaust. Yet it did happen again, with television cameras and reporters present, in full view of the world. And the world did nothing. The United States did nothing. I went to visit Don Steinberg, President Clinton’s point person on Africa, at the White House, to try to understand why nothing had happened. The explanation was a chilling but defining moment for me. “Throughout the whole thing, the whole hundred days the massacres were going on,” Steinberg said, “the White House didn’t get a single letter or phone call about it from a constituent! There were many of us inside government who wanted to take more robust actions. But whenever we sought to do these things, those who opposed them would say that the American people would never support them, especially so soon after our Black Hawks went down in Somalia.”

  I could see that Steinberg was as upset about it as I was, if not more. After all, he was the expert on Africa for the president of the United States, and one of the worst genocides since the Nazis had happened on his watch. He dropped his hands to his sides and sagged his shoulders. “The fact that we couldn’t point to cries for action, not just from voters but from Congress and the media, was damning to our case, and we lost out to those calling for inaction and to the forces of inertia. We were looking for a chorus of support that never showed up. We’re a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, remember?” he said softly. “How do you expect the U.S. government to respond if there’s no political constituency?”

  I left his office a changed man. A new light bulb had lit up above my head, flashing neon: It wasn’t going to be enough for me to learn about Africa and then convince the powerful. If American policy toward Africa was going to change, it was going to have to come from the people themselves. It sounds cynical, that many politicians will act only if they think it will win them votes or at least praise. And most of them surely wouldn’t act on an issue like this if it would bring them nothing but condemnation and recrimination. But that’s part of what representative democracy is, right? Why should we expect that policies regarding genocide would be made any differently than policies regarding health care reform? In theory, it should be easier to influence the debate on genocide than on health care reform because there presumably wouldn’t be any big lobbyist firms working in support of genocide. So the task was clear: help build a political constituency for peacemaking in Africa, and against genocide and other terrible human rights crimes.

  12. “Nonstop for the Ninjas”

  MICHAEL MATTOCKS

  We didn’t realize how fast our crack business was going to grow. From day one it was nonstop for the Ninjas, which was the name of the gang me and James started up on Georgia Avenue. I was the president, and James was the enforcer. My man Fats couldn’t keep up. I’d call and say I needed more, and he’d say he didn’t have it, so I had to go up the chain to the man who did. I can’t tell you his name because when he got locked up, a lot of motherfuckers got locked up with him, so I don’t want to mess with that.

  But he was a good dude. I’d call him up and say, “I need a loaf of bread.” Or, “I need half a loaf.” I’d call him every week without fail. He’d pull up in front of my mom’s house and come inside. We’d never talk. He’d put the crack on the table, and I’d give him a bag of cash. Half a ki was like $10,000; the price never changed for me. And it was always good quality. He asked me once how I was pumping all that crack. He thought I was working with the police. I said, “One day you’re not doing anything, you come chill with me, and I’ll show you what we’re doing. This block pumps.” He did that, and he was like, “Damn.” After that, knowing I was such a good outlet for his crack, I’d give him his $10,000, and he’d give me back $3,000. He’d say, “This is all I want for it.” Like I say, he was a good dude. It bothered me when he got caught. He’s gone for thirty years, and I’m still out here. I think about that sometimes. I am a blessed man.

  I’d take that half a ki and break it up and make $30,000, $40,000 off it. About three months after we started on Georgia Avenue, I counted my money. I had $28,000 in cold hard cash. I counted it three times, then counted it the next day. I was happy as a motherfucker. I was all about the money.

  At first Nikki used to say, “Michael, you need to stop selling them drugs. You need to get a job.” She was going to school, and working, and she didn’t want any part of the life; it’s not how she was raised. And I’d be, like, “Fuck, you know I’m going to sell my drugs. I’m going to take care of my family.” But what I did was hide it from her. She never saw the guns around the apartment we shared in Northeast. I had so many guns—a big Army Beretta nine-millimeter, two four-fives, the MAC-10, a sixteen-gauge shotgun, and a .223 sniper rifle I bought from a white guy. I’d keep them around at different places. She never saw the drugs around our apartment either, except for this one time when I brought home half a ki of coke and, having no place else to hide it, stuck it in the oven. When I got home, the whole house smelled of the mac and cheese, ribs and greens that Nikki was cooking … and then I smelled something else. I ran to the oven, and $10,000 worth of crack cocaine was nothing but a big, black, bubbling mess. I let it dry and spent all night cutting it up, and only recovered about an eighth of a ki. That was some fucked-up shit. After that, I kept my drugs at my mom’s.

  The only thing I’d bring home to Nikki’s was the money; I’d keep it in a big old garbage can. One day I get a page from Nikki, and I call her, and she’s like, “We got to talk.” I went home and she just lifted the lid on that garbage can; it was full of money—tens of thousands of dollars. So she knew what I was doing, but since she didn’t see the drugs or the guns in her own house, she didn’t beef with me about it.

  One day me and James, Sabrina, and David were down paying the phone bill at this little cash joint, and this guy says, “Look at these niggers.”

  That’s all it takes. People think the shooting and the killing in the city is all about drug turf and drug deals. But most of the time it’s just this: One guy eyefucks another guy the wrong way. Or says something. One way or another, one guy shows another disrespect, and then it’s on. James is like, “What are you looking at?” and pulls out his nine. The guy j
ust laughs. He was cool, I’ll give him that. Says, “You pull a gun on me and there’s a police right over there.” Well James, he don’t give a shit. He waits for the guy to leave and circles around to the end of the alley, and when the guy comes rolling down with a bunch of boys in a station wagon, James busts off seven or eight shots at the car, and they take off.

  Couple days later, I’m inside my mom’s house cutting up my shit, and I hear James. He’s yelling. Yelling, “Nigger, I am going to kill your fucking ass!” That nigger from the store had come ’round to solve his problem, but you weren’t going to solve no problem with James. I went out and grabbed him and said, “James, look around you. You got all these little kids around here.” James goes off on me! He’s like, “Motherfucker, I’m tired of you saving those niggers’ lives and telling me what to do!” I thought he was going to put one in me! He finally goes in the house, and I go over and talk to those dudes, trying to be all, “What’s happening?” They were such gangsters, and in two minutes I had them apologizing.

  But James, man. I learned to be real sorry I got him involved with guns because he took too much of a liking to it. One day he got in a beef over our sister Elsie. Elsie was tom-boyish, and she would get in fights, but it’s not like she could really look out for herself on those streets. She was only twelve, plus she was no Sabrina. She didn’t smoke or drink, and sure didn’t carry no .357 Magnum. When we were on Georgia Avenue, she was going to school and to church with my mom on weekends.

  So Elsie, she came along crying to James that some Five Double-O niggers had hit her. They’re the niggers from the 500 block of Georgia Avenue. James and Elsie were real close; this was all he had to hear to get that creepy little smile on his face. James gets in the car and tries to run them all over, and puts his car into a pole. Gets out with the Club, the car lock, and beats the shit out of a couple of them. But even that ain’t enough, and he runs home, gets his .380 and a bike, rides back and peels off a few at them. Hits one of them in the arm. And this is in broad daylight.