by Curtis Bunn
“We painted the walls. We had candles,” said Jacobs. “We made it our home.”
His father worked for a city councilman and took his sons to political rallies.
“We met Jesse Jackson and Bishop Desmond Tutu—and had a car,” said Jacobs.
Then things began to change again. Jacobs remembers watching four people at a time go into the tiny bathroom and stay for what seemed like hours. Eventually, after seeing his father sit in a chair and nod all day, he came to know that the people he saw were shooting up heroin in their bathroom and that his father had started shooting drugs again. The house fell apart, and his sons were neglected. Jacobs grew angry with his father.
“I thought he chose drugs over us. But now I think: He put a roof over our heads and taught us to not let anything come between us. I don’t know what his demons were.”
Jacobs’s father was born to a teenage mother and a father who was married to someone else and didn’t acknowledge him. The elder Jacobs was a teenager when he met his father. He grew up with three siblings in a Philadelphia high-rise housing project, hustling—first legally—from the time he was in first grade, stocking store shelves and shining shoes, then later turning to illegal hustles, selling fake gold rings, picking pockets, and burglarizing.
But Wayne Jacobs had one experience in seventh grade that would hint at the potential he possessed and the joy it could bring him. He joined a local civil rights leader in protesting at a construction site where Black people were not being hired. This was during the Black Power movement, and Jacobs was struck by the possibilities and power he possessed even as a kid when fighting for Black advancement.
But the senior Jacobs dropped out of school in the tenth grade when he wasn’t allowed to wear an Afro for class photos. He increased his hustle, went to prison for a break-in. By twenty, he was hooked on heroin, and life turned into a revolving prison door.
“I got busted fifty-two times,” he said.
His last stint ended in 1997. He was forty-seven and finally drug-free. He has since become a noted community activist in Philadelphia and has worked in some successful political campaigns. He co-founded X-Offenders for Community Empowerment with his friend Steve Blackburn, also a formerly incarcerated person. The nonprofit group works to empower convicted people to become “change agents” and helps them in securing pardons from the governor.
But when Qadree Jacobs was growing up, it was the block he called “family” that fed him.
“I used to go to our neighbors—get bread from one, sugar from another,” said Jacobs. “Oatmeal from another. Butter. Another lady, her husband worked at the Slim Jim factory and she gave me Slim Jims.
“I’d get up and hustle—go to the store for people, dig pennies out the street tar and go to the store and get penny cookies for a meal,” said Jacobs. “I went to school for breakfast and lunch. I went to school for heat.”
But his father taught him that they were doing better than some neighborhood people because they were clean. It didn’t matter that they washed their clothes in the bathtub or put cardboard in the bottom of their shoes when they had holes. Most of the other kids in the neighborhood were doing the same.
It was his North Philly community that was saving the Jacobs boys. The adults held block party talent shows, made a stage, hired a deejay, and served food, featuring toddlers modeling in a fashion show and performances by the youth of the community. Qadree Jacobs and his friends formed groups to sing R & B songs and dance.
It was the neighborhood ice-cream man, who used to give Jacobs free ice cream for watching his truck, who finally called child protective services about Jacobs and his brothers being hungry all the time and their father being on drugs.
Qadree always understood that the neighbor was doing what he thought was right to help him and his brothers.
Another neighbor tipped off his grandmother, who came to get the boys, who did not want to be separated, and take them to her house.
He moved a lot after that and went to three schools in sixth grade. At times he and his brothers had to split up between relatives. His father had another son and a daughter by a woman he dated, and Jacobs and his brothers considered them siblings.
But Jacobs was lost, falling into hopelessness despite the help of the adults in his community. He began to act out in school.
“I just wanted attention from my father,” he said.
When he was twelve, Jacobs and five other friends chipped in money, which they had earned hustling, shooting dice, and running errands, to buy a .22 automatic pistol. Jacobs had already sneaked and held his oldest brother’s gun and played with it a little bit. The first night he and his friends had their .22, one friend shot another friend they all considered a bully.
“The gun was in a brown paper bag on a tire, and we were shooting dice,” Jacobs recalled. “My friend, the shooter, had the dice and the guy was talking trash, saying stuff like, ‘I heard you got a gun. I’ll make y’all eat that gun.’”
When the trash talker turned his back, the other friend got the gun.
“The guy turned, and he tried to shoot him in the face, but the gun didn’t go off.”
The victim fell, though, and when Jacobs’s friend shot again, he hit the guy in his shoulder. Wounded, the boy nevertheless got on his bike and left with the shooter chasing him and still trying to fire the gun. Jacobs never saw that gun again, and the bully stopped bullying.
“A few years later my friend with the gun got shot in the head by someone who tried to shoot him in the chest, but he had on a vest. He had become a menace by that time. He had shot other people.”
Witnessing one friend shoot another didn’t scare him, Jacobs said. It was more like watching a cartoon or something that wasn’t real. Eventually, carrying a gun and witnessing shootings became normal.
He was arrested for the first time after being caught with a gun at school. He was fifteen. He had taken his uncle’s .38 Long Smith & Wesson Police Special, an old service gun, and planned to use it to threaten a kid who had stolen money from a cousin. But he didn’t get past the school’s metal detector. He was expelled and sent to a detention center.
Once back home, he tried to return to school, but he just didn’t have the discipline or desire to attend classes anymore. He dropped out in tenth grade, just like his dad. To provide regular meals for themselves and to buy popular expensive sneakers and clothes, the Jacobs boys began selling crack.
“The decision to turn to the streets hits kids in some neighborhoods at a certain age,” Jacobs said. “Before that, a kid has dreams. Once they lose their dreams, that’s it. They look outside and see poverty. At some point, I had no hope.”
In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin wrote of the summer he was thirteen: “Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear. It was absolutely clear that the police would whip you and take you in as long as they could get away with it, and that everyone else—housewives, taxi-drivers, elevator boys, dishwashers, bartenders, lawyers, judges, doctors, and grocers—would never, by the operation of any generous human feeling, cease to use you as an outlet for his frustrations and hostilities.”
That was the summer Baldwin chose to become a child preacher, which surely gave him a sense of purpose and power. He later chose writing. But neither of those choices is available to every child suffering from hopelessness.
Jacobs said, “It felt good to be able to buy food and clothes.” Soon he knew the cops who worked his neighborhood, and they knew him. He didn’t find them particularly racist because he’d experienced Black cops lying and planting guns and dope on people in his neighborhood.
The Jacobs brothers also became neighborhood “Robin Hoods,” giving money to kids, elders, and other neighbors when they needed help.
He was eighteen when his girlfriend got pregnant. Jacobs stopped hustling for a brief time and went to night school to get his GED and tried working as a dishwasher at Olive Garden. But he was used to making way more money selling drugs, so he returned to the streets.
He admits he was running the streets and hustling on the day his son, nicknamed Lil Qad, was born June 19, 1997. Qadree was nineteen. A relative called to tell him he was a father.
A couple of years later, early one afternoon, Jacobs walked out of the house, headed toward the block, where some friends stood. He heard what he thought was banging from construction at a nearby store.
Then somebody said, “No, that’s gunshots. Weasel just walked that way.”
Weasel was a friend, somebody Jacobs used to share conversations with about what they were trying to do for their families. He’d drop off Weasel at home and on the way, they’d smoke weed and talk.
Now he saw Weasel lying in the street. Jacobs fell to the ground, grabbed him, and held his head in his lap. He talked to Weasel, saying, “Keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes open. Talk to me.”
Another guy opened Weasel’s shirt.
“I saw blood coming out of bullet holes in his chest. He had a pager in his hand.
“I kept talking to him. I said, ‘Weasel, you all right. Breathe! Breathe! Keep your eyes open, man.’”
Weasel’s hand opened. The pager fell.
“I knew he died at that moment,” said Jacobs.
It was the first dead body he’d seen in the street; it wouldn’t be the last.
Jacobs and the two friends with him ran, but the cops caught him and took him to the station for questioning.
“They said, ‘How do you know Walter Bryant?’ I said, ‘I don’t know no Walter Bryant.’”
That’s how he found out Weasel’s real name.
“That was a rough time,” he said of the period after Weasel was killed. “I had a few friends from North Philly get killed.”
He started drinking cough syrup and popping pills to escape. Then on June 5, 2000, police charged Jacobs and his brother with running a crack cocaine operation. Jacobs maintains they were lone street dealers and not part of a large drug organization, and that co-defendants lied to get themselves better deals.
“In the streets, you already have it in your mind you’re going to prison one day,” Jacobs offered. “We had accepted that this is part of life. I knew there was a chance I’d get killed or go to prison. But there’s also the real slim chance you can make some money and get out of the game. Everybody is counting on that real slim chance.”
Some of his co-defendants were sentenced to life. Jacobs received thirty-five years. His middle brother, Rashid, was sentenced to thirty-one years, and his elder brother, Mark, got thirty-three years.
For some of his sentence he was incarcerated with Rashid in FCI Allenwood Medium in Allenwood, Pennsylvania. He would not see his older brother for sixteen years.
From prison, Jacobs did everything he could to continue fathering his son.
His son Qadree Jones, “Lil Qad,” said, “He sent me money, poetry, taught me lessons and sent cards.”
The son said he didn’t understand where his father was until second grade.
“I realized I wouldn’t see him for a while,” said Jones. “It was tough because he called me every day, and I wanted him to be there with me.”
Though it was against the rules to have a cell phone in prison, Jacobs had one that he used to call his kid. In prison, inmates were given 300 minutes a month on a pay phone, “which is nothing when you are trying to keep your family together and maintain a bond,” Jacobs said.
Eventually, the prison discovered his cell phone, and his punishment was severe: Jacobs was transferred from Pennsylvania to a prison in Minnesota. He wrote letters to his son, called when he could, and sent him money earned on his prison job.
Both father and son called this their hardest time. Lil Qad spent a lot of time with his fraternal grandfather, which helped him. From prison, the father organized a tenth birthday party for his son.
“It was the birthday that I missed him most,” Jones said. “My grandfather’s house was decorated, there was a cake from him [his father].”
In Minnesota, as part of his punishment, Jacobs was also put in solitary, but he had inherited his own father’s love of books. While “in the hole” he read voraciously and wrote poetry. Though his father was Muslim, Jacobs had not practiced the faith. In prison, he read the Quran—in one facility even serving as imam, the leader of the Muslim worshippers.
While the brothers were away, their youngest half-brother, Solomon, was killed at nineteen. He was caught between two worlds.
“He was always going back and forth from college to North Philly,” said Jacobs quietly. “He wanted to make his own name. He started hanging around guys we used to hang around with.”
Jacobs was freed on August 11, 2015, after fifteen years. He was the first of his siblings to return home. At thirty-seven, he was vastly different from the young man who entered prison at age twenty-two.
He calls his release day “glorious but bittersweet” because he left his brother Rashid in the prison and his older brother also still incarcerated. And he was scared without them. Since childhood, they had depended on one another.
One of his best friends picked him up. Jacobs walked outside and got on his knees, bowing to touch his forehead and nose to the ground in a Muslim prayer position.
“On the way to Philly I was looking at everything,” he said. “I was in the mountains and behind a wall so long, and all I saw was green grass, trees, windmills, and open land. Now I saw abandoned houses, trash everywhere, drug addicts, desolation. I saw poverty all over again. I saw what I was returning to.”
His first stop was to visit Lil Qad. “When I walked in and hugged him for the first time as a free man I cried,” said Jacobs. “He was eighteen. I admitted to him I fucked up. I never wanted him to think me not being there had anything to do with him.
“He said, ‘We all right, Dad. We all right.’”
Even today, Jacobs’s eyes fill with tears when he recounts that visit.
“For him to not hate me and see me as a role model, someone to look up to, that’s a major thing to me.
“That took a weight off me.”
Unlike thousands of returning citizens, Jacobs had a place to live and people to support him. A cousin gave him a place to stay. His father, drug-free and working for his own nonprofit, told him to take a year to adjust instead of going directly to work.
Still, there was a lot to get used to, like walking past a group of young guys and not carrying a gun for protection.
“I was viewing life from how I used to be,” said Jacobs.
He got into a fight with his son’s stepfather, a violation of his parole. He faced a return trip to prison, but the judge considered his efforts to create a new life for himself and sentenced him to three months of confinement at a halfway house.
He found a job at Avis Car Rental, where he was given a chance despite his record. A year later, he went to work for the Philadelphia Water Department as a repair helper, going deep into the ground to fix water main breaks.
Mark got home in 2016. One of the best days of his life was when his last brother, Rashid, came home in February of 2017. Finally, the brothers were together again. That April, for the first time ever, they went to the mosque together to celebrate Ramadan, fasting together, sharing prayers and meals.
Now, each day, at least one of the brothers checks on their father and they meet as often as possible to share a meal with him.
Jacobs believes he had to serve at least fifteen years to learn to think differently and straighten out his life. But Jacobs could not answer this question: If he were institutionalized in a system that focused on rehabilitation, would it have taken hi
m fifteen years to change?
“In some way the young guys on the street are mentally in prison before we go into institutions,” he said. “I don’t blame prison for anything that has happened to me. I’m grateful in a way…I would have been dead, or my brother Rashid would have been dead. It gave me a chance to grow up, to see life differently.”
But, of course, Jacobs has had to make sense of his life. Perhaps justice advocates are the ones to ask this: Should any child grow up in a country where he looks to prison as a place to save his life?
The Injured Child Thought: “At Least the Drugs and Money Were Safe”
Reverend Michelle Simmons remembers being a little girl standing on the red leather bar stools in her father’s dark, smoky bar. Patrons repeatedly dropped coins in the jukebox to play “Misty Blue,” a song about a woman grieving a lost love. And always, strangers came over to her to compliment her with things like, “What a cute little girl.”
Her mother and father never married and did not live together. Even as a child, Simmons thought the bar scene and hanging with her father was much more exciting than staying at her mother’s house. But she had no way of knowing that she’d become hooked on her father’s “fast” life, as well as on drugs, or that her relationship with her father would become abusive and cause her to nearly destroy her own life.
It was Simmons’s aunt Jean, her father’s sister, who used to take her to the bar. Simmons lived with her single mom in Germantown, where she was the middle of three siblings. But on her father’s side, she was a rarity, a girl, adored and spoiled. Her dad had twelve sons—and she was the baby—and only girl.
He lived in a duplex in Mount Airy, but he went to the projects a lot to do business.
“I loved going down to those projects,” Simmons said.
She would find out as she got older that her father was selling drugs there.
She treasured hanging with her brothers also.
