Once I got locked up, forcing me to stop and take a breath, all the collective weight of the forces in my life came down hard. It was crushing me. And I couldn’t breathe.
One Saturday afternoon at Dean Street they called me downstairs to take a phone call. A staff member escorted me into the social worker’s office to receive it, rather than the intake desk, which was the norm. The social worker was speaking into the phone when I got there. I sensed something was up. Life in the streets gave me some advantages and one was picking up vibes before anyone said a word. My survival depended on it.
“Here he is,” she said into the receiver.
I took the phone and was surprised to hear my dad’s voice.
“Well, everything happens for a reason, don’t it?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Your friend you’re usually hanging out with?” I knew he meant Jigga. “Doing your thing with late night?”
“Serge?”
“Yup. Shot and killed last night. Right outside. Right there on the corner.”
My muscles tightened as I processed his words. A chill ran through my blood, and I went numb; if someone poked me with a needle, I wouldn’t have felt it. I shut down completely. The social worker hurried around from the desk, took the receiver, and helped me sit down into the chair. I don’t remember anything else about the call. Sometime later, I got the full story.
Ky-Mani had shot and killed Jigga. Ky-Mani, whom I had beaten up a couple of weeks before getting locked up, Ky-Mani who shot at us while pushing Lamar’s wheelchair past the Jewish Steps. The whole thing hit with the force of concrete: My closest friend was dead. I’d never see him again. Reuniting with Jigga was one of the main things I looked forward to when I got out; his presence was one of the few things that had kept me going. I’d encountered death before—it swirled around my world and regularly visited my block—but this time I felt it in my bones. It shook me from the inside.
I went back up to my room and lay down on the top bunk, staring at the ceiling as residents and staff came by to offer their support. Ms. Lauren was one of the regular staff who was like a mother figure to me at Dean Street. When I was angry I wouldn’t listen to anyone else but her, but now I shut even her out. Everyone’s words slid off me as my emotions stayed locked behind a door inside my brain. I was sixteen years old and my best friend was dead; I had every reason and right to openly cry—but my experience wouldn’t let me. I had to hold it back until I was alone. When everyone finally left, things started to blur and my eyes opened into a flood. I couldn’t catch my breath and my eyes stung with the salt and the heat.
There was the senselessness of it, the coldness. We were all so desensitized to violence that the permanence of it never pushed through. But I couldn’t move on. At the time, it felt like I might not ever move on. Like I’d always be frozen in that spot and that moment, with all the horrors of it washing down on me.
Had I been living at home, I would’ve been out there on that exact corner with Jigga, right next to him, right in the trajectories of those bullets. My dad knew that too; it’s why he said “everything happens for a reason.” In fact, since I had just beat Ky-Mani up, not only could it have been me, it probably should’ve been me. The guilt was overwhelming. Jigga and I were so close, and our lives were so intertwined, that I experienced his death vicariously. As I tried to process his death, it felt I was also mourning myself.
I was railing inside about the loss, the guilt, my powerlessness at being unable to prevent my friend’s murder. The questions looped through the night into the next day: Could I have stopped it? Would I have seen Ky-Mani coming? If I had been there would Jigga still be alive? Why was my friend taken? Why was I saved?
Boys Town provided me with special counseling and I was put on “one-on-one,” which meant a designated staff member shadowed me twenty-four hours a day. Even when I was in bed, a staff member was right outside my door. I was put on watch to make sure I didn’t hurt myself.
In my sessions with the counselor, I couldn’t explain how Jigga’s death upended everything in my world, what I thought I was and what I thought I’d be. It was preverbal. I couldn’t explain it with any words I knew and had little desire to try with a stranger. I sat across from this older white woman with gentle eyes, her voice floating in from a distant place. With all her years of training and multiple degrees, she couldn’t know what I was going through. I just let out one-syllable answers and tried to run out the clock. It didn’t seem possible that talking about it could do anything but leave a deeper scar.
Internally, I focused on getting out so I could seek revenge. So when, a few days later, I heard the police had picked Ky-Mani up, I was angry. Cops had nothing to do with our idea of justice; we handled it ourselves. It’s not just that I wanted to kill him myself, I was supposed to kill him myself. That had always been how it was done.
I remember as a child there was a thief, a stranger from outside La Plaine, who was murdered in broad daylight by some of our neighbors. His body stayed in the street for days and I was afraid to go outside. But it spoke to some sense of self-protection, and justice. No one would take care of us so we had to handle things on our own.
From the moment I had been arrested I treated being in the system as a punishment, something to ride out until I got back home. But things were starting to get blurry. Since the day I was arrested, I was put on a trajectory that had saved my life. Literally, it had prevented me from getting shot by Ky-Mani or going after him. On a larger level, I began to feel something else at work—the people and forces that had been protecting me. Perhaps I was there for a reason.
One afternoon after school, at one of my low points, Charles called me downstairs to the office. I assumed I was in trouble, about to be put on subsystem, a form of probation where you had to earn double points for every privilege.
“Hey, Jim, here you go,” he said, handing me a black trash bag.
“What’s this?”
“Some new clothes I got that are too small. You want ’em?” Of course I did; I wore the same white T-shirts and single pair of black jeans almost every day. But the generosity was suspicious. “You sure?”
“I gave it to you, didn’t I? You want ’em?”
My brain flashed back to roaming the streets of Haiti as a child in search of work, sweeping hair and painting houses in Brooklyn, diving into the criminal life as a teenager. It all came down to something simple: the need not to ask another man for help. My rationale was that anything given could be taken back. My pride had blocked my ability to accept things from others.
“Sure,” I said, looking inside the trash bag, the weight of the clothes stretching it low.
“Cool,” he said. “I also got these.” From behind the desk, Charles brought out a pair of deep blue Iceberg jeans. I rubbed the fine denim texture between my fingers, marveling at the thin white lines in the fabric, the brand’s signature. I’d never owned a pair but my favorite hip-hop artists sported them. Charles also gave me a pair of S. Carter Reeboks, Jay-Z’s sneaker line, gleaming white with white laces. I had always craved brand-name gear and here Charles was just handing me these sneakers. Not three months earlier, I’d been risking my life to be able to sport them. No doubt Charles knew this and was trying to subtly communicate they were no big deal.
Charles could see my excitement, but he probably didn’t understand how tough it was for me to accept those things. I didn’t take any of it for granted, treating the jeans and the sneakers like newborn babies. I would religiously scrub the S. Carters with a toothbrush to keep them sparkling white. Perhaps Charles spotted the grief hidden underneath my façade; perhaps he too was once abandoned without the shadow of any hope. What he offered went far beyond mere clothes. It was a kindness and generosity during a time when I was carrying a heavy weight around me like a chain.
For months, I went back and forth from Boys Town to court where first Christine, then Marty, argued my case. They both treated me like someone wor
th caring about. Attorneys still want to get you home, because constitutionally it’s their job to protect your freedom, but for me, there were other things at stake. The fact that my lawyers couldn’t win the case was actually a gift. While at Dean Street, waiting for my case to be adjudicated, I interviewed with a handful of long-term placement facilities: Lincoln Hall, Brookwood, then Tryon.
One of the last meetings was with an older white woman, nicely dressed, a pair of glasses on her nose. She was short and heavyset. When I walked in, she stood up to greet me.
“Hi, Jim. I’m Paula. Nice to meet you,” she said in a squeaky voice that didn’t quite fit her body. “I’m the program director at Boys Town for the residential facility. I want to talk to you a bit, see if you’re a good fit for our program. And then I can give you an opportunity to ask questions of me. Okay?” Her manner was stern but also sympathetic, making sure I was following everything.
“Sure,” I said, maintaining eye contact. I knew as program director she’d be looking for me to demonstrate the model.
“Good. Do you like it here?”
“Here? Sure.”
“Why’s that?” she said, acting like she really wanted to know. As I replied, she scribbled some notes without looking down, which I thought was a cool trick.
It was hard to explain that I just liked having somewhere safe to sleep and regular school. “I don’t know,” I said.
“Is it the people?”
“Yeah, they’re okay.”
“Can I ask you some questions about your background?”
I nodded.
“What is your relationship with your parents like?”
“Um . . . To be honest, not good. My mom’s in Haiti. I didn’t see her as much as I wish. My father and I don’t get along.”
“How so?”
I let my guard down a bit. “He’s very physical with me. Mostly because of the trouble I put the family through. Most of my family isn’t too happy with me right now.”
“What kinds of things make you angry?”
“When people disrespect me, talk bad about my background. When things aren’t fair.”
“What kinds of things do you do when you’re angry?”
“I break things, throw things. Hit people. I don’t feel better until I get physical.”
“I meant strategies.”
“Strategies?” I asked. I wasn’t sure of the word.
“To cope. To deal with your anger.”
“I don’t deal with my anger. I used to drink, get high. But I can’t do that anymore.”
“Okay. What do you like to do for fun?”
“I don’t do much for fun.”
“Nothing?”
“I used to play football but I stopped when I broke my wrist.”
“How’d you break your wrist?”
“Fell,” I lied. I rubbed it unconsciously.
“How about school?”
“Doesn’t it tell you right there?” I said, gesturing to her papers.
“I’d like to hear it from you,” she said.
“Not great? I’m struggling. I didn’t have much schooling at all so it’s hard. The math here is different. I do okay in history. I feel like I can’t catch up.”
“Why do you think that is?” she asked in a way that wasn’t condescending but seemed genuinely interested in my answer.
“In Haiti my parents couldn’t afford school for me and when I got here I really didn’t go, so it’s maybe my fault but it’s also not, you know?”
“Sure. What about your friends?”
“What about them?”
“Well, how do you know them, what kinds of things do you do, are they in gangs?”
“To be honest, a lot of them are Crip, but I never joined.”
“Why’s that do you think?”
“Well, I don’t like taking orders, plus I don’t see the gangs around when my friends got beef and I already do most things they do so, I don’t need them.”
She pulled out a file from her large handbag and started to flip through it.
“So, Jim, the Boys Town residence is more like a home. With family teachers who live there with you. They’re like parents. Do you think you would succeed in that kind of environment?”
“Oh definitely. I think I would.”
“Could you expand on that? Why would that be?”
“Well, I never had any structure, so I probably would do good if I had adults like that. Make me behave, go to school.”
Reading the situation, I knew exactly how to play it. I was soft-spoken, polite, and offered what people wanted to hear. Despite my issues at Boys Town—I was far from happy—I had no interest in exploring the alternatives.
A few weeks later, David and I got picked up by Big Pat in a minivan and rode out to the courthouse. It was my day of sentencing. David and I had gotten over our beef by then. I trusted his mix of street smarts and maturity and we had bonded.
At the courthouse, we waited on line to go through the metal detectors, went up to the third floor, and checked in with Department of Juvenile Justice staff. We found space on the hard church benches in an underlit room. The place was a zoo of court staff, DJJ staff, kids at all points of the process awaiting their fate. And we were not supposed to talk. David and I had little to do but stare at daytime television, and wait for the lunch of cheese sandwiches.
I heard more than one person whisper, “There’s the Boys Town kids.”
In a low tone, David tried to comfort me. “All right, man. I’ve done this a bunch of times. Be prepared for the worst, maybe you’ll get to go home. But be prepared in case.”
“Oh, I know what’s gonna happen. I’m not going home, I’m getting sentenced.”
“Ah shit, sorry man.”
“Naw, it’s not like that. I’m excited. Getting sentenced to Boys Town.”
“What do you mean? You want to get sentenced to Boys Town?”
That I seemed not just unworried, but almost happy about the prospect, seemed to confuse him. I was fifteen years old: Why didn’t I want to go home?
10
Inside Out
Being broken is what makes us human. . . . Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing.
—BRYAN STEVENSON, JUST MERCY 5
I was a stranger in a strange land. In a quiet, upscale block in Park Slope I shouldered my bag—the sum total of my life at that point—up the stone steps. Boys Town residential was in a beautiful three-story brownstone in the middle of one of Brooklyn’s nicest neighborhoods: clean sidewalks, tree-lined blocks, neighbors leashing dogs or driving luxury sedans.
I went inside, dropped my bag on the threshold, and slowly panned my head: a comfortable living room, long white curtains, photographs of kids on the wall, a bulky couch and a big television, a polished wood dining room table, two heavy sliding doors leading to a large kitchen. It wasn’t just the space itself that awed me but the aura: that unmistakable sense of a home.
My eyes were drawn to a silver framed group photo on the mantel: Damon and Iza Canada, the family teachers, alongside their two young daughters and six Boys Town teenagers around the perimeter. Everyone was dressed in yellow and peach short sleeves and the faded filter caught a gauzy, relaxed light. Then I braked on one of the faces: Devon. His face was frozen in a youthful smile, looking like an alternate version of himself. Though it was a recent picture, he looked years younger. It was a shock; I didn’t even know he had been there.
When someone is in the streets and then he’s gone, especially as often as Devon was, no one thinks about where he goes. He’s just gone. Like taken out of the equation. Putting those two disparate pieces together—Devon had disappeared for six months and lived here—shifted my sense of where I was. I had entered another dimension, one running parallel to life on Crown Street.
Devon was already back on the street, Jigga was dead, and I was hovering, my feet not yet grounded. Standing in that quiet family room, I could see a path being formed for me. I was not yet in the mental space to accept it, but I could recognize it for what it was. What I did, and who I would become, had not yet been written.
Soon after my interview with Paula at Dean Street, a bed opened up at the Boys Town residence. Marty emphasized how fortunate I was to land a bed in the home on Brooklyn’s Sixth Avenue—he knew how bleak the other options were. Relieved I wasn’t in something resembling jail, I was still so bottled up that I ignored my good fortune, blind to the path that God had unfurled before me.
Dean Street had been more of a way station, a purgatory where kids passed through while awaiting their fate. The Park Slope residence was something else: for one thing, Damon and Iza lived there with their two daughters. There were only six residents—all long-term—and no rotating staff. But there was something more there: the walls and roof held something intangible together.
Shuffling up the blue-carpeted stairs, I ran my hand along the polished wood railing. At the top I found the first door, the Daily Room, the bedroom where every resident started. My roommate, a compact and wiry dude whose limbs seemed to operate on their own, hopped off his bed. He was dark-skinned—darker than me—and wore oversize jeans and had waves in his hair. The thick bass line from Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” filled the space, almost shaking the walls.
“What’s up?” He came in for a dap, smiling big. “You’re Jim, right? Renaldo.” He took my hand tight and then brought me in to his body, knocking his closed fist twice on my back.
A Stone of Hope Page 13
