The black. The thoroughly ignorant.
Let the combination of morality
And inhumanity begin…”
—Amiri Baraka,
“Short Speech to My Friends”
««—»»
Mom and Grandma were fighting a lot around that time. My mom had started dating again and my Grandma was none too pleased about that. She would call her a slut and say she neglected me. I guess I was partially to blame for it; getting in trouble so much and always bugging my grandmother for snack money, insisting that I was starving. My mom was miserable and I think she went out just to get away from Grandma and maybe even from me too. Whenever she tried to stay home and do what Grandma wanted it was even worse.
“What kind of job you got that you gotta leave heah at six o’clock in the morning and don’t get back ’til six o’clock at night, then still have enough energy to run the streets all night?”
“I don’t run around in the streets all night.”
“Well you damned sure ain’t here taking care of your responsibilities! That boy of yours is half starved all the time. In the streets all hours of the day and night with no supervision. You know what goes on in them streets? If it wasn’t for me you’d probably find him dead somewhere or locked up or on drugs. But I ain’t his mama. That’s your job! People gonna say the boy’s some kind of hoodlum, in the streets all the time, and you know what they gonna say about you. The way you run around it’s no wonder his daddy left.”
“His daddy ain’t leave! You know damn well that I left Darryl and you know why! Malik is well fed and well supervised he just fools you into giving him more money so he can buy junk food that he knows I don’t want him havin’. And the only one who questions my ability to raise a child is you. If it was up to you I’d still be getting my ass kicked by Darryl and then you’d have something to say about that!”
It would go on like that for hours until Mom would finally call one of her boyfriends and disappear for the night. Then one night there was a knock on the door.
“Baby? It’s me. Let me in. We have to talk.”
It was Darryl, my father. He was back and he wanted us back with him. He moved around the corner from us and came by everyday bringing Mom money and flowers and jewelry. He even brought toys for me. Pretty soon, under pressure from Grandma, Mom forgave him and we moved back in with him under promises that there would be no more beatings or drinking. His promises held for about three weeks.
When the beatings started this time they were far more vicious and didn’t just accompany the flashbacks. Anything could bring his rages on. He said that if we tried to leave him this time he would kill us all. Everytime he hit her I would run to get the knife, but I would remember how hard he had struck me last time and fear would sieze me. I would just stand there waving the sharp blade threatening and screaming at the top of my lungs.
“Stop hurtin’ my Momma!”
But I was afraid to attack him. I felt like a coward and could hardly look at either of them in the morning. I couldn’t look at my mom because I had failed her and not at Darryl because I hated him and wished him dead. Huey and Tank knew all about it. They had even been spending the night a couple of times when Darryl had flipped.
Once he kicked both of them out of the house in their pajamas in the dead of winter and their mother had to come pick them up at one o’clock in the morning. She was pissed but knew better than to say anything to Darryl. I never spent the night over at their house because I was afraid to leave Mom alone with Darryl. I was afraid I’d come home to find her tied upside down with her brains leaking out of her ears.
Huey understood. Huey and I used to sit around for hours planning ways to kill the mutherfucker. Huey seemed to take the beatings as hard as I did and was probably the only kid on the block besides myself who didn’t idolize the princely black lion that was my father. Huey and Tank had both begun to look at my mother as if she was their mom too. I guess I looked at Charlotte the same way. We were like siblings and they reacted to me and my mother’s pain as if it were their own.
“I’m glad I don’t have a father.” Huey said to me one day, “No one should have to be forced to grow up with that. It’s a shame that women have to marry men. Men only hurt them. That’s all men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Us too. That’s all we’re good for and when we get older it will only get worse.”
Huey was always saying deep shit like that. Shit that makes you think, makes you wonder, and, more often than not, makes you sad.
“It doesn’t always have to be like that. You see good dads on TV. I think white kids have good fathers don’t they? Rich kids maybe?”
“Nope. That’s why it’s on TV. Right next to Spiderman and Barney the talking dinosaur. Because that shit is just a fantasy.”
Huey was at my house the day Darryl snapped and tried to murder my mom. It wasn’t another flashback, just a fit of pure meanness. He found some cyanide capsules and tried to force my Mom to take them.
“You gonna try and leave me bitch! I’ve given you everything, you and that bastard kid of yours!”
He punctuated every sentence with another blow to my mother’s skull.
“Everything you wanted! Everything I had! I gave you everything and you wanna try and leave me? You ain’t goin’ nowhere. You hear me? You ain’t leavin’ here alive!”
“Please, baby, I ain’t goin’ nowhere! Nigga, I ain’t playin’! Don’t you hit me no more!”
She fought him hard this time, biting and clawing at his back, punching and kicking when she could get an arm or a leg free, but just like always, he threw her to the floor and sat on top of her. His knees were in her chest. He had her jaw gripped in his huge tarantula-like hands and was trying to force the pills down her throat.
“Bitch, I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, that little pussy-ass son of yours, and myself. I’ll kill us all before I let you get out of here.”
I ran and got the carving knife. Huey was right behind me. I pulled it out of the kitchen drawer and then ran into my parent’s bedroom. Then I froze. I stood there like a fool waving the blade and yelling at Darryl to stop, watching as he attempted to murder the only thing in this world, besides my grandma, that I had ever loved. Watching as he forced poison into her mouth. The only thing in this world that had ever loved me back, that had ever made me feel safe and happy.
I saw one of the pills slowly making its way into my mother’s mouth as he brutally pried her jaws apart and my vision narrowed until it was like I was watching the whole thing through a keyhole. Slowly the light began to fade and I felt my body go limp. I was losing consciousness. I felt small hands slip the blade from my hands just before my head hit the carpet. I wanted to see who the hands belonged to, but even as I fell my eyes would not leave my mother and my periphery vision was gone.
Those tiny hands entered my miniscule field of vision in slow motion. Tiny light brown hands raising a knife high into the air above a tiny light brown head with curly brown hair. The hands rose and fell and rose and fell. Each time they rose a wave of liquid red followed the blade in an arc that flew from the metal and spattered the walls. The hands rose and fell again and again until they were no longer golden brown. Until they were the blackest red I had ever seen, slick and shiny like crimson oil.
Just before my mind shut down completely I thought to myself, “Huey was right. All men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Even us.”
Then I dreamt, of concentration camps and jungles set ablaze with napalm. Darryl was burning in my dream. He was burning alive in the jungle. I saw him die twice that night.
The cops thought I had killed Darryl, but there was no evidence linking me to the crime and we never told them about Huey being there that night. They knew about the beatings so, when they ran into a dead end in their investigation, they just figured Darryl had gotten what he deserved and closed the book.
I tried to confess to the murder, but so much evidence pointed away from
me, including my mom’s own testimony that someone else had broken in and stabbed him to death, that no one believed me and those who did couldn’t prove it. The cops looked down at me like I was stupid and pitiful and when they spoke to me it was in patronizing voices that they probably thought were soothing.
“I’m sorry kid, but if you had killed your dad you’d have blood all over you. I know you probably wanted to kill him though. I know if I was you I would have wanted to.”
I cried. I wept so long and so loud that I started having an asthma attack. I didn’t even know I had asthma until then. As much as I wanted to accept the blame for ending Darryl’s life it was denied me. Deep down I resented Huey for taking that away from me. I was grateful to him for saving my mother’s life and ending her misery, but I hated him for denying me the chance to kill the bastard myself. Yet, somehow, Darryl’s murder still drew us all closer. Secrets have a way of doing that sometimes. After that, more than ever, we were like brothers. And each year brought us even closer together. I wish now that they had never met me. They would have been better off and maybe Tank would still be alive.
— | — | —
Chapter 6
“…The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.”
—W.E.B.Du Boi, “The Souls of Black Folk”
««—»»
1999. It was almost the end of summer and every kid I knew in that neighborhood was piled up on Huey’s porch, joking, bullshiting about bitches we’d never met, jumpshots we never really made, and fights that we never won, drinking Kool Aide, Colt 45, and passing around a bottle of MD 20/20 when Huey’s mom wasn’t looking.
It seemed like the entire neighborhood turned fourteen that month one birthday party after the other. In our minds we were men now and it seemed like we should have had better things to do than sit around getting drunk, but I was at a loss as to what. I looked from face to face noticing the shadows of mustaches creeping beneath noses that just a year ago seemed to have been still dripping with snot. I listened to the deep bass that now replaced the child-like tenor that had been there before and I kept wondering what kind of orgy must have gone down the year I was conceived that had led to so many women getting pregnant around the same couple of weeks.
Warlock was already blunted when he got there and the pungent musk of stale weed exuded from his pores in a great cloud that was giving us all a contact high. His homeboy Terrance was so fucked up he couldn’t even keep his eyes open. He sat in a corner on the floor grinning and nodding. Whatever he was on it was a hell of a lot stronger than weed.
“Get this junky muthafucka off my porch ’fore my Mom comes out here and sees that nigga!” Huey said, but nobody moved a muscle to comply and Huey went back to tinkering with the VCR. Everybody was so used to Huey complaining that they had learned to ignore him. Half of us were drunk already anyway and probably didn’t look a whole lot better than Terrance did.
Nikky held the bottle of MD under his T-shirt and constantly complained about its chill against his bare skin, but wouldn’t relinquish the bottle for anything. Everytime we passed it around he made sure it stopped at him before Huey’s mom came by. At fourteen years old he was an alcoholic in training.
Tank had somehow talked Fat Greg into springing for a pizza and they were both on the phone yelling at the pizza man about a free soda that was supposed to come with the pizza. The Twins, Jerome and Tyrone, who looked like two young, underfed, Muhammed Ali’s, were hogging the only two deck chairs and complaining about the heat and the long walk to the video store.
“Damn! It’s hotter than a muthafucka out here! I ain’t walking all the way back down to the Ave with ya’ll to take those videos back. That walk was long as fuck!”
“Stop cryin’ like a little bitch!” Little Drew spoke up and just as fast Jerome reached over and smacked him on the back of the neck.
Little Drew was the richest kid in the neighborhood mostly because he was the only kid we knew who still had both parents living together and two incomes coming in. He was an only child though and his parents practically paid us to hang out with him. When he was around us he liked to front like he was hard, but we all knew he was a mama’s boy. We always teased him that he should never commit a crime or else he’d wind up in prison with Kool-aide on his lips, washing drawls, braiding hair, and popping the zits on Bubba’s ass. We all knew that he would’ve rather gotten his asshole ripped open by a convict than take an honest ass-kicking. These days it was fools like him that you had to watch though. Nobody on earth was quicker to pull a trigger than a coward. He was supposed to be trying to help Huey hook up his mom’s VCR to Huey’s old black and white TV, but he kept butting into everyone’s conversation and getting abused for it.
“Damn, dog! You ain’t have to smack me in my goddamned neck!”
“Now who’s cryin’ like a little bitch?”
“I should take my damned VCR back for that shit.”
“You ain’t takin’ shit back. Now lift the TV so I can slip the VCR underneath it and stop being a little pussy before you get fucked,” Huey growled
“That’s right. You play pussy you get fucked!” Warlock co-signed, laughing his ass off.
Drew’s eyes misted over like he was about to cry as he looked around at us. He never knew when we were serious and when we were playin’ and he hated when we ganged up on him.
“Lift that shit, dog!” Huey yelled again and Drew obediently picked up the little TV.
We had planned to have a martial arts movie marathon and Drew’s mom had loaned us the VCR for the day as well as the money for the videos of course. Sometimes I think she’d have offered us some pussy to get Drew out from under her skirt for a few hours.
I was sitting on the porch railing praying the weather-beaten, termite-eaten thing wouldn’t collapse under my weight and send me tumbling down into that nest of weeds between the house and the street that we occasionally called a garden when in optimistic moods. It creaked and groaned every time I laughed and I thought I heard faint cracking and popping sounds, but everything just seemed to strike me as funny that day. There were Tasty Cake wrappers all over the porch and Huey was doing his best not to flip out about it though he had already mentioned the mess twice in five minutes. For such a sinister little thug he was almost prissy when it came to keeping things neat.
You could tell we were all from the same neighborhood at a glance. We all wore baggy shorts that hung down to our knees. Our boxer shorts stuck out the top as the shorts sagged well below our waistlines just barely covering our asses. We wore Nike, Adidas, or Reebok sneakers with matching tank-tops or t-shirts that were as oversized as our shorts. We all had baseball caps or sun visors spun backwards on our heads and of course we all wore dark sunglasses. Fat Greg was the only one wearing pants. That brother wouldn’t be caught dead in shorts; not with those overstuffed sausage-shaped legs of his.
Jerome and Tyron had started capping on each other’s moms evidently oblivious to the fact that they both shared the same mother. I laughed so hard that I could feel the decrepit railing struggling to hold me.
“Your mom’s so fat she had sex with two guys at the same time and they never even saw each other!”
“Your mom’s so dirty that she eats dinner with no panties on to keep the flies off her food.”
“Your mom’s so black that if you close your eyes you can see her better!”
“Your mom’s pussy spits tobacco!”
“Your mom’s pussy has whooping cough!”
Those brothas were crazy! I laughed so hard I dropped a forty of O.E. I had been hiding under my shirt. See, we all drank Colt 45 around the way and to drink another brand was almost treason, but I liked the way it tasted. The bottle hit the floor and exploded, sending shards of glass shrapnel spiraling across the rotting porch and beer pouring off into the garden like a miniature waterfall. I nearly fell off the railing I was laughing so hard
. I felt the wood splinter with a loud crack and I jumped from it as Huey cast an angry glance in my direction.
“Man, clean that fucking beer up before my Mom comes out here and whoops all our asses!”
I went into Huey’s house to get a broom and dustpan and Mrs. Turner shook her head when I came back in and dumped the shattered forty into the trashcan.
“Ya’ll better not be making a mess out there. And I better not smell no weed out there either. Ya’ll shouldn’t even be drinkin’!”
“Uh…we ain’t drinkin’. I mean…not really. Just a little beer.”
“Boy, get your lyin’ ass out my kitchen ’fore I slap you right upside your head!”
I held in my laugh as I ran back out onto the porch.
“Your moms is a trip, dog.”
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