His name was Jihad Ali and he was selling bean pies by the side of the road, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and red bow-tie. His head was clean-shaven and his face was serious but friendly. He’d been only too eager to talk to me when I walked up to him with my mouth still full of wires and started asking him about white people.
“See, the white man is the original trickster, the deceiver. He was created by an evil scientist named Dr. Yaccub in order to bring down the Black man from his throne of power and enslave him. That’s why we have to separate ourselves from these devils in order for our people to rise again. As long as we are living among them we are corrupted by their evil.”
“Do they all eat niggas brains?”
“No, they don’t eat your brain literally. They are parasites that eat your soul. They eat away at you every day by making you feel like less of a human being. They keep us poor and pump our neighborhoods full of drugs and alcohol and fried foods and pork to eat away at our spirits.”
Jihad’s eyes sparkled when he talked, the way my grandma’s did when she talked about Jesus.
“Then what about what I saw?”
“Maybe it was a hallucination or maybe you had a psychic premonition or something. Maybe you had a vision of what all white people are really like underneath.”
But it wasn’t all white people. That drug dealer wasn’t the first white person I’d ever seen but he was the first one I’d ever seen who killed niggas like that and ate their brains. I’d heard about the KKK and the Nazis and those White folks who’d brought my ancestors over from Africa in slave ships. They could have all been devils. But none of them ate black folk’s brains, at least not from what I had heard. That white boy was the first white person who’d ever scared the shit out of me.
I started having nightmares about getting my head blown off and being eaten alive. I soon found myself looking suspiciously at every white person I passed. Then, when I heard about Jeffrey Dahmer getting arrested and thrown in prison for eating a bunch of Black and Hispanic kids, I started to think that maybe Jihad had been right and they were all devils. Still, it didn’t make sense to me. If they were all out there killin’ niggas and eatin’ their brains there wouldn’t be no niggas left in the world, definitely not in America. Maybe that’s why we were still the minorities despite all the fucking that went on in the ghetto? Maybe white people were killing us off and gobbling us up as fast as we could make new babies? I thought about my teachers at school and I just couldn’t imagine it. They all seemed so nice. No, there was definitely something different about that White boy.
I missed a month of school following my run in with Huey but I got that nigga back.
Even though I was staying home from school I couldn’t let the other kids think it was because I was afraid. So, the next day, I left my house early and hid in an alley on Duval street between Ambrose and Burbridge streets. I picked up half a cinder block and a big piece of lumber. I waited, watching all the kids walk by on their way to school. I listened to many of them discuss how Huey had beaten me. My rage seethed within me like something alive and dangerous. Something hungry and violent. I waited until finally I saw Huey walk by. I expected to see just him and Tank and was floored with shock and grief when I saw Iesha strolling along right beside Huey, holding hands. I raised the chunk of cinder block above my head just as he passed then I stepped out of the alley behind him and brought it down on his skull with a crack that sprayed blood into the air like a geyser.
Iesha screamed and looked at me like I was some kind of monster. I wanted to punch her right in the mouth for betraying me like that, but I hadn’t been raised to hit girls. Still, when she charged me looking like she wanted to scratch my eyes from my face, I had no choice but to push her down, though I did so as gently as I could. Tank came roaring up behind me next. I turned in time to crack him upside the head with the stick I still held. He fell and clutched his head, more to ward off further blows than to ease the pain of the first strike, but I was done. I stared at Iesha who glared back at me murderously then I dropped the stick and walked back through the alley to my house. I was upset that Iesha had chosen Huey over me and that sapped all of my rage leaving only a hollow emptiness. I had gotten a little revenge on Huey and Tank, but apparently they had still won because they had the girl I loved.
My reputation was saved. I got phone calls all day from kids congratulating me on smashing up the two brothers. Huey and Tank would have to wait a while if they wanted to retaliate now because I was still not scheduled to go back to school for a month. But there would be no retaliation. Huey and Tank’s Mom came to my house that night to speak to my Mom about her son’s busted head.
“Excuse me, Miss Black, but you have a son named Malik don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Why do you want to know?” my mother asked, looking over the woman’s shoulder at the bandage on Huey’s head and the big welt in the center of Tank’s forehead and already guessing what had happened.
Mom towered over Huey’s mom, who was only 5’4” and gunmetal black like Tank. I wondered how such a dark complexioned woman could have a kid as light as Huey. Even though my Mom was taller, their mother had muscles like a man and even wore her hair shaved close to the scalp like a man. She looked as formidable as her off-spring and when she spoke it was low and raspy like that dry heat that wheezed out through the vents from those dusty old heating systems we all had. She was pit-bull ugly though and her eyes were mean. Looking at her I thought of what Huey had done to me and wondered if this little woman could do the same thing to my mom. I wasn’t really worried though. I knew that dad’s gun was still somewhere in the house and that Mom knew how to use it. He had shown her how.
“Your son hit my kid upside the head with a brick and he had to get thirteen stitches to sew it back up!”
“Whoa, before you start accusing my boy of anything you should know that that little heathen of yours broke my boy’s jaw and now he can’t even go to school because his mouth is wired shut and he can’t speak!”
“Who the hell are you calling a heathen?”
I sat in the living room listening to all of this and praying that the two women didn’t wind up fighting because of me.
Huey and Tank’s Mom may have been ugly but she had the body of a porn star. I’d never seen breasts so large on a woman so small. Despite the absence of a bra, they seemed to defy gravity. The nipples jabbed at the fabric of her shirt like little brown darts and half of her breasts swelled out from the sides of her tank-top. Her thin waist tapered down to wide full hips and an ass that was like a basketball that had been split into two equal parts and suspended high on her strong back. Her legs were as powerfully muscled as her arms and shoulders. She was built like an Olympic sprinter. Her deep chocolate skin glistened like it had been dipped in oil making her body look even more delicious. My young manhood strained against my jeans as I took her all in. Even with that mulish face she was beautiful. I wondered again how a woman with a face like that could have born a kid as comely as Huey.
As our mothers talked, Tank came walking up with a chocolate ice-cream bar that was dripping down his hand. He bit chunks out of it and chewed them up like a regular meal. In seconds the ice-cream was gone and Tank was licking the remaining chocolate from his pudgy fingers. It struck me then how much he looked like any other fat kid and not the fearsome bully who was terrorizing the whole school. Huey didn’t look like a kid at all though. He looked like the leading man in a romantic movie, but miniaturized.
It was weird, but, watching the two of them standing there huddled around their mother, I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to be their friend. I saw how they stared at my Mom, who I knew was a stunning beauty, and I knew how I could keep our moms from fighting and maybe even establish a friendship with the two thugs. I ran outside to stand by my mother’s side.
“…I don’t care what you say my kid did. It was your kid who—”
“It was my fault.” I mumbled through my
locked jaws, interrupting the two women whose tempers were just beginning to rise.
“What did you say?” my mom asked, as if unable to believe what she was hearing. It was hard for me to speak with my jaws wired shut and she was obviously hoping that she had misinterpreted my muffled mumbling.
“I started it!” I yelled and this time there was no mistaking what I had said. “I wanted to see if they were as tough as everyone was saying they were and they are. Nice kick man. That shit still hurts. You’ll have to show me how to do that sometime. I don’t want to fight them no more, but after Huey broke my jaw I couldn’t go out lookin’ like no punk. So I had to do what I had to do, you know, to maintain my rep. I didn’t really mean to hurt him.”
Everyone was amazed. Even though they could barely hear most of what I was saying, I could tell they had heard enough. Huey’s mom didn’t know what to say and the two boys looked dumbfounded. My mom was about to say something when I cut her off by stepping right up to Huey and holding out my hand.
“My fault, man. We friends now or what?”
Huey stared at my hand like something that had floated up from the bottom of a toilet. His face went from amazement to disgust then to rage and then back to wonder.
“Are you fucking kidding me, man?”
“Go ahead and shake his hand, boy! Black folks ain’t got no business fighting each other. I done told you that time and again. Now you two make up!”
Huey looked at his mother as if he was about to argue the point, but then he decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He stepped forward and shook my hand, giving me a look to let me know that if this was some kind of trick then I was as good as dead. I smiled as big as I could with my wired jaw and pumped his fist. He returned the smile with a nervous confused version that was full of unanswered questions. Savoring this minor victory, I stepped up to Tank and held out my hand. To my surprise he took my hand into his huge paw with no reservations and shook it enthusiastically, a broad grin breaking open across his face.
“Looks like I owe you an apology, Mrs. Turner.” My mother whispered bashfully.
“I’m sure there’s more to this story than either of us will ever know. No apologies needed. And call me Charlotte.”
“Then at least let me have the three of you over for supper?”
“Only if you can tell me where to find some weed in this neighborhood? I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and I don’t know nobody yet.”
“I got some shit you should try then. If you like it then I’ll tell you where you can get hooked up. Come on in.”
As unlikely as it would have seemed, a day after hospitalizing each other, Charlotte Turner and her two warrior sons became my new best friends. Our mothers soon became interchangeable. So much so that when we brought home a bad report card we were just as likely to get punished by one as the other and sometimes by both. Even though I was tall and skinny, my appetite was every bit as ravenous as Tank’s and sometimes we would eat dinner at his house and then run over to my house and have dinner again.
The three of us became the terrors of our school and neighborhood. We were like our own little gang and used to extort the kids at school for their money, sneakers, jewelry, jackets, anything we wanted and they had.
I found out why Huey looked so different from his brother too. Huey and Tank had different fathers. Tank’s dad was another victim of the war in Vietnam. He had come back from ’Nam a hopeless heroin addict who discovered, like so many others, that where the drug had been cheap and plentiful during the war, stateside it was worth more than lives. He fathered Tank just months before getting himself killed in a convenience store hold-up.
Huey never knew his Dad and his mother only knew him for a few painful hours.
Back in 1985, Charlotte Turner was snatched off the corner and whisked away in a patrol car for no apparent reason other than being a Black woman selling Black Panther newspapers at a time when militant black organizations were no longer in vogue. There were two cops in the car that day. “I Spy” cops. One white and one black.
The black cop was in the driver’s seat when they pulled the police cruiser alongside her. Charlotte stood on the corner wearing a black beret over her afro, a black leather coat and bellbottomed jeans.
“What are you supposed to be? Public Enemy or something? You trying to fight the power?”
“Fuck you pig!”
“Fuck me? No, bitch. Fuck you!”
The black cop leapt out of the car and smacked the newspapers out of her hand. The white cop slipped up behind her and jerked her arms behind her back. Charlotte fought them when they tried to handcuff her.
“What am I being arrested for? If I’m under arrest then read me my rights. I demand to know why I’m being arrested!”
“Bitch, you ain’t got no rights! Now are you going to resist?”
They began punching her and then cracking her across the thighs and buttocks with their nightsticks until her protests subsided. They nearly broke her arm getting the handcuffs on, twisting it behind her back and wedging a nightstick between her shoulder and elbow then wrenching up on it until she cried out. When she screamed and kicked the white officer pulled the club out from behind her and cracked her across the face with it. Her left eye still droops from that blow.
Once cuffed, he slid her limp bleeding body further into the vehicle and slid in beside her. He slammed the door and ordered the Black cop to drive off. Instead of driving to the police station they drove down to the train station at the end of Tulpehocken Street and took turns raping her while the other held her down.
Charlotte remembers looking up while the white cop was grunting and groaning inside her, poisoning her womb with his vile seed, and seeing the other cop, who looked like he could have been a relative, holding her arms over her head and urging the white cop on to a faster climax so that he could have his turn. When both of them had spent themselves inside of her, they raped her again, with their nightsticks. They then threw her exhausted body onto the railroad tracks assuming she wouldn’t have the strength to drag herself to safety before the train came to finish the job they had begun. But Charlotte had the strength and she passed that strength on to the son they’d planted in her belly, Huey, the son of her rapist, who she named after Huey Newton the Supreme Servant of the Black Panther Party who he remarkably resembled. She also passed on her newfound passion for the martial arts and her hatred of anything white. When I talked to her about what Elijah Muhammed said in his book about the White man being the devil she was quick to agree. I was smart enough to know that her opinion was biased though.
Huey was a shy skinny kid who was so pretty you would have thought he was queer if he wasn’t so damned spooky. The kid never smiled. He was like a man trapped inside a boy’s body. Whereas Tank looked like a pro-wrestler in miniature, Huey looked like he should have had a guitar in his hands rather than a knife or a gun. Everyone our age was scared to death of Huey and with good reason.
By the time we all became friends, Huey had already killed another kid in a fight and had just barely avoided juvenile detention, squeaking by on a self-defense plea. His Jui-Jitsu instructor had helped by testifying that Jui-Jitsu was strictly a defensive art and only works to counter attacks. No one else in the courtroom knew enough about Martial Arts to notice that the moves he’d used on the kid had not come from Jui-Jitsu but rather from Muay Thai kickboxing, a brutal offensive art. Luckily, his Muay Thai instructor had not been present to testify.
The more I got to know Huey the more I realized how lucky I had been to have escaped our fight with just a broken jaw. He’d been known to break people’s arms and legs in fights. Who knows what might have happened if I hadn’t run away. The only time I ever saw Huey smile was when I asked him what he might have done to me that day.
I pitied Huey as much as I admired him. He seemed to be perfectly bred for the streets. He was cold and hard, so tormented by the demons in his soul that the horrors on the streets couldn’t phaze him. He walked a
round like he was just barely aware of the ground under his feet. Even when he was fighting it was like he was barely interested in what he was doing. His eyes always had that far-away look.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid, but then I can’t ever really remember seeing him happy either. Anger or indifference seemed to be the only emotions he was capable of. Most of my viciousness back then was done mostly just to stay ahead of him. I mean, I couldn’t have fools more afraid of him than me. So, where Huey was fast, clean, and efficient, I was cruel and creative and would brutalize and torture anyone who fucked with me in the most gruesome ways I could think of. Tank once threw up watching me cut the ears off a fifteen year-old boy who had beaten and robbed this little retarded kid named Nate who wasn’t even quite nine yet. I was twelve. That was the same year we met Scratch face to face and also the year my father came back.
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Chapter 5
“The poor have become our creators.
New Title 1 Page 7
