by Ja Rule
“I turned her into a person by giving her a name: Kristen,” Moms said, longingly.
The only solid explanation that my five-year-old mind was offered was Moms’ terse words: “Kristen was stillborn.” I didn’t understand, really, but I sensed the ache of emptiness that was familiar.
As a child I didn’t understand death. I wasn’t there to grieve with my mother after my sister was stillborn. It wasn’t until later on in my life that I grieved. I talk about Kristen’s death in my song “Daddy’s Little Baby,” as well as my daughter Brittany’s birth. I always wanted a sibling. But it never happened. I carry Kristen in my heart. She’s a constant reminder that responsibility comes with being alive.
This means early on I was a survivor.
*
July 11, 2011
Today I can truly say I’ve been through it all. A young kid comes in today and they put him in the 18 cell right next to mine. He looked kinda depressed coming in but nothing out of the ordinary. A few hours go past and all of a sudden I hear someone choking. He’s trying to kill his self. We all heard it. Everyone runs to their cell doors and start kicking, banging and calling the COs. Now, I’ve seen a person get shot and I’ve even seen someone die from a drug overdose, but this was different, this was suicide. It was like I could hear the life leaving his body. The COs rush in the cell and save him. I didn’t even think some shit like this was possible in these cells. He tied his bed sheet to a pole that’s attached to a sink, which is about 3 feet off the ground. He made some sort of noose, wrapped it around his neck and then threw himself forward into a boston crab carmel clutch type position. I never understood why a person would wanna kill themselves. Life is love & love is living. It’s God’s most precious gift. After they brought him back to his cell in the suicide suit, he cried for hours. We tried to console him, telling him it’s never that bad to wanna kill yourself. Turns out he just turned 18 and got a girlfriend who is only 16. Her parents pressed charges and now he’s locked up on sex offender charges. He was in school for graphic arts to learn how to make video games. It’s sad ’cause he’s still a kid, himself—a good kid, at that. Now, he’ll be forever labeled rapist or sex offender when really he’s probably just a kid in love. Wow it’s crazy how 2 years can be so close but yet so far when you’re 18 & 16. It seems far because he’s now an adult and she’s still a teen. When you’re 10 & 12 it’s cute and innocent. When you’re 18 & 20 nobody gives a fuck.
It makes me think about Britt and her starting to date. I’m not gonna lie, at 18 & 16 I’d be at a crossroad, too, but to ruin a young man’s life & stain his future is not right. At 18 you’re legally an adult but you’re really still just a kid. I remember when I was 18, I thought I knew everything about life & living, as I look back now, as a 35 year old man, I realize I didn’t know shit. LOL I’m still learning & growing as a man. 2 years, that’s what separates me from my family right now. I look at it as short time but yet when Ish told me that Britt’s acting partner was 17 I almost had a fit, even tho she’ll be 16 soon and I’m sure he’ll be 18 soon, and BAM, there it is, a crossroad. LOL. It’s funny how God puts situations in front of you so you can see it clearly. I trust Britt. I know me & Ish raised her well. Besides she hates Kids. LOL. But I also know the intentions of a young man. I got my eyes on you, lil homie. Don’t make me come back to this motherfucker!
*
TWO
Moaning
THERE WAS A LOT OF CONFUSION AFTER MY FATHER LEFT. I was six years old when he moved to Florida. Things were tough for Moms, the bills and the pressure were crushing her. Although my parents were still in contact, my father wasn’t paying a dime of child support. Moms never bothered to take him to court, which showed her pride and strength. With only one child, she figured that she would just struggle like everyone else—never welfare, never food stamps.
Our neighborhood was filled with Black single mothers with too many kids and not enough money to feed them all. The streets were lined with men who had abandoned their children for the street. But, there were many middle-class, two-parent families sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. There were also co-ops nearby where people lived decently. Even though folks were struggling to make ends meet, there was a strong sense of community. There was hope.
Later, though, when I was nine or ten, that’s when drugs hit the neighborhood hard. That’s when the streets began to feel worn. Every day, busy mothers and their children passed back and forth through the streets, constantly praying not to be the next random victim of a stray bullet or a desperate soul. Clouds seemed to hang over the whole neighborhood, even when the sun was shining.
It was my grandparents’ virtue and love that led them to help Moms, who was struggling emotionally and financially. They suggested that I come and live with them for a while.
“We can provide a more stable home for Little Jeff,” Grandpa Cherry said.
WHEN I WAS SIX YEARS OLD, every Tuesday night was spent in the basement of 208-08 100th Avenue, Queens, New York 11429. The house was a modest two-story, three-bedroom yellow brick house on a side street, which was part of a small deceptive enclave of “suburban” homes.
Every day, when I came home from school, my grandmother’s house hugged me with the aroma of fried chicken and collard greens. My grandmother would help me with my homework while feeding me forkfuls of joy. The house was full of life. My grandmother had two more children with Cherry, my Uncle Dennis and my Aunt Dawn. They were five and seven years older than me, which made me feel like I was part of a big family.
My grandfather Ed Cherry, “Papa,” spent most of his days in that house sleeping. Cherry was a big, strict man with medium-brown skin and large hands. He wore a military buzz cut and had a distinctive gap between his two front teeth. He wanted things a certain way, his way. And whenever things weren’t like he wanted, Cherry clenched his jaw and then opened his mouth as wide as he could and yelled. Whenever he was mad, all I remembered was that gap in his teeth. It was the siren before the storm.
My grandfather worked at night at the post office and later for the New York City Transit Authority. He always held two or three jobs at one time. Grandpa Cherry hustled jobs, not money. He did plumbing, welding and was a cabbie. He showed me that I got my hustling skills naturally.
When I was growing up in the house, anyone who woke Cherry up during the day was getting an ass whooping. There is no polite way to describe what happened when Cherry was mad. He was a dragon coming out of a cave. When he came out of that room, somebody’s ass was getting lit on fire, because he was breathing it. It was as simple as that. It was usually me and Dennis getting beat. My Aunt Dawn was always spared.
Living under “Papa’s” roof provided me with my first example of a responsible man. There was always plenty of everything that we needed in the house—especially the fear that only fathers can bring. Unlike the other men that I grew up around, my grandfather was the only man who had a wife and family whom he cared for. My grandmother never worked and Cherry never minded working several jobs to take care of the household so that my grandmother could take care of us.
As I grew up, I remembered Cherry and his insistence that we stay on the straight and narrow, and follow Jehovah, always. Although Cherry’s strict discipline didn’t work on me and Dennis during those days, living under his roof helped me at least understand what men are supposed to be.
What I never understood was why we had to have Bible study on Tuesday nights. It was a rehashing of the actual Public Meeting that had just taken place on Sunday at Kingdom Hall. The Jehovah’s Witnesses typically met three or more times a week. After meeting at the Kingdom Hall, another night they met for Watchtower study so that they could discuss articles from the Watchtower magazine, and the third meeting of the week was held at an elder’s home. Each member was considered an ordained minister and eligible to run meetings.
I can still recall my heart sinking on Tuesday nights whenever the doorbell chimed. I would run upstairs and peek out of the w
indow at the hungry Jehovah Witnesses standing on the other side of our door, ready for the good news that my grandfather, the elder, would deliver straight from the mouth of Jehovah.
When we weren’t in the basement enduring those endless rants of self-righteousness and morality, we were out on the streets hand-delivering Jehovah’s message door-to-door like pizzas. Instead of pizza, we offered pamphlets and magazines called Awake! and Watchtower. Papa told me that the magazines were intended to “build confidence in the secure new world to replace the wicked, lawless system of things.”
We were always dressed neatly when we did field service. My grandfather wore his dark blue raincoat and shiny black military shoes. Even me, I was in my dress pants and my white starched-collared shirt. Grandma always made me wear my church shoes, even though they hurt my feet. When we rang the doorbells, most people reacted as though they hadn’t ordered what we were bringing. The people were polite enough, but I could tell that they were eager for us to leave. The Jehovah’s belief system clearly didn’t fit with the raggedy landscape that surrounded us, merely three blocks away on the Boulevard, where the code of the street was simple: “get money.” What we were bringing wasn’t what the people needed. Only the Witnesses thought it was worthy of their pushy persistence.
Three blocks over was the ghetto in all of its pain and splendor. It was the hood, where Black men were willing to risk everything for dollar bills. The area consisted of corner bodegas, walk-up tenements and the infamous high rises, affectionately known as “the projects.”
For the next six years, this wildlife reserve filled with horrid smells and loud voices was to be my new home. It was the wholesome environment that my grandparents had promised. The visions of heaven that the Jehovah’s were jabbering about at people’s front doors seemed too far removed from the eighties’ crack epidemic that was redefining desperation.
I just hated the thought of “field service,” which we had to do every week. Right before Cherry said, “Let’s get ready to go,” I would grab my stomach, scrunch up my face and plead the pain of stomach cramps. If that didn’t work, I would grab my throat and pretend that I had come down with laryngitis. Grandpa Cherry, the Dragon, never wavered. “Ain’t nothing wrong with you, boy! Do you want me to get my belt?” Grandpa Cherry would whip my ass with anything he could get his hands on, including belts and electrical cords.
As we walked through the neighborhood, I was in charge of holding the magazines. I could hear the distant sounds of hip-hop flooding out of every car. Although my exposure to the world was supposed to be limited, I was well aware of the songs that every boy had on the tip of their tongue. These rhymes were the first time that I heard the voices of young Black men. “My Adidas” by Run DMC was the anthem of the street. Later, I would actually get to see DMC riding through the neighborhood in his 850i BMW. He had his gold dope dookie rope chain with the Adidas hanging from it.
Papa never smiled, he always just scowled and shook his head, hating the loud booming beats of disrespect. The music seemed to get louder and louder every day. The music was drowning out the sounds of sirens that defined our lives. Cherry didn’t care for the music. I was familiar with those songs and obviously feeling them. I was forced to ignore them, as impossible as that was.
Cherry said that I was forbidden to play with kids that weren’t Jehovah’s Witnesses because those were the rules of the religion. That was cool because most of them also believed as I did: Jehovah was not for me. There were other kids in the neighborhood like Chris Black, Otha and my man E-Funk that I ended up being mad close to. I hung with the kids who were Jehovah’s Witnesses and who were just as bad as the others.
The “rebellers” and me all hung together while the elders got one step closer to heaven, which was a far climb from our basement. Rich Nealy was good friends with my Uncle Dennis and since they were older than us they tried hard to be like John and Dave, who were older than them and already in trouble. Me, Jonathan and Brent were the young guys, trying to be like Trevor, Dennis and Rich. We were all closer than homies so we called each other “cousins.” When me, Brent and Jonathan rode our bikes, the ride was always bumpy as we navigated the little red-and-green covered caps that littered the streets. We rode over them with the skill and grit of cowboys.
“Rich Nealy can’t come over here anymore,” Cherry announced one day. Something was missing from the house and Cherry swore that Rich had taken it. “That Nealy boy is no good.” My grandfather knew that Dave, Rich’s older brother, was selling drugs. I didn’t know about all the trouble they were in, I just looked up to them and tried to get into it, too. Cherry knew everything they were doing because he’s the one who disfellowshipped them all.
WHEN I WAS eight or nine, I was sent to spend the summer with my Uncle Bruce. At the time, he was one of the most successful people in my family. He was the first with some real money. He was an executive at Xerox or something. He lived in this huge house in Memphis. I knew immediately, when I saw his humongous house, that it was the life I wanted to live when I got older. Uncle Bruce had a house and a family. My cousin Smitty also had a nice house. His was in Long Island. I would go out there sometime and he’d take me to play racquetball.
Even though I was young, I recognized that every example of success in front of me was in a union of marriage and family. My immediate family, my Moms and me, were struggling. Grandpa Cherry had a structured family and he was able to make it. Early on, this taught me that I needed stability in my family first in order to have any amount of success. Even today, successful people only want to be around other family-oriented, successful people. It means that you are stable. No one wants a loose cannon around.
The union of marriage and the structure it provides is important in our society. It is sometimes frowned upon in the corporate setting when you don’t have the stability of a family unit. The single guy is not looked upon favorably. I recognized these signs early on. I didn’t want to be like my father. I was determined that I was going to be there for my kids.
WHILE I WAS LIVING with my grandparents, Moms moved from apartment to apartment. Most of the time she had a one bedroom, other times she had a studio apartment, depending on the rent. When the rent got too tough for her, she would move somewhere cheaper. Despite her instability, she always picked me up from my grandparents’ house on the weekends or on her days off.
Moms was living on 195th Street. We called it 1-9-5. Like all of the other single mothers, she, too, shuffled down the boulevard, running to get to her low-paying job on time. From time to time Moms would announce, “I’m taking a test to get a promotion.” My Moms had big dreams for us. Moms would take these state tests and she always passed them. The first time, she was promoted out of the office where she had been doing secretarial work, and then she was promoted onto the ward with the patients.
After Moms did that she took another test to become a ward supervisor with six therapists on her shift that she was responsible for. Moms even took the patients on trips to ballgames and the circus. These were all things she could have been doing with me, if things had been different. The eight-to-four shift that she originally had was okay, but Moms still wanted to do better. She decided to go back to school to study nursing. In order to do that, she needed to request the late shift so she could go to school during the day.
For six grueling months, she took nursing classes during the day and worked at night at the hospital. It was too much and soon she became overwhelmed. When she dropped out of nursing school, she asked for her day shift back, but it was no longer available. Four-to-twelve was the shift that she would have to keep.
My father tried to keep in touch. Every time he did, he just made a bigger mess of things. My father was in New York when I was about nine years old. He had called my grandparents to see if he could take me out for a slice of pizza. I was excited to see him, but sad that I didn’t know him like I should have. After I spent an hour with him, I saw who he was, and in many ways, I am just like him.
“What the hell are you doing? Don’t ever reach over my son’s food,” my father said. He proceeded to beat the hell out of that man. He was showing me that men have to protect their family.
While Moms was going through all those changes with her job, I was going through some significant changes of my own. Contrary to Cherry’s wishes, I did have some friends that were not Witnesses, because Moms had worldly friends and they had worldly sons. Tyray was one of those.
The first time I had sex, I was eleven years old and it was orchestrated by my “cousin” Tyray, who was thirteen years old. Tyray approached me one day, saying, “Yo. Jeff, do you want to do it?” I wasn’t sure what he was referring to, but I figured it must be sex. I could tell from his hushed tone, which was usually reserved for conversations about chicks. He continued, “I got two nasty little girls from around the way and they agreed to do it with us.”
“Okay.” I figured if Tyray was doing it, it would be okay for me to do it, too.
Back then, we were break-dancing and we stored cardboard boxes in the stairwells of the Woodhull projects so that we would have a flat surface to break on when we were over there. Tyray had a different idea for the flattened cardboard.
Once we collected the boxes from behind the stairwell, the four of us took the elevator to the top floor in nervous silence. Then we found the staircase that led to the roof, which was never really used. When we all reached the landing, the pungent smell of urine was almost palpable. The flicker of the broken fluorescent lights dimmed the stairwell further, creating a broken-down-disco effect. The stairs were sticky with dried piss, Old English and grape soda. Tyray laid the cardboard down as if he was preparing a bed for queens. He laid the two pieces of cardboard right next to each other on the stair landing, like two twin beds.
