Since my father's death, my mother had made the tattered brown leather couch in the living room her bed. Our neighborhood was getting more and more dangerous; there had been a rash of break-ins in the houses around us. My mother slept in the living room to stand guard, she said. She didn't want me and my sisters to be the first people a trespasser ran into if they entered the house. She was determined to protect us. The fact that sleeping in the living room also allowed her to avoid the haunted bedroom she'd once shared with my father was never mentioned.
My mother still tortured herself with what-ifs concerning my father's death. Did she ask all the right questions? Should she have pushed the doctors harder for a clearer diagnosis? Could her CPR have worked better had she learned how to do it properly when she had the chance? Her protective vigilance for her surviving family had overtaken rationality. For the past two years, she'd slept on the couch listening, waiting, protecting.
The death of my father had created a major stir in the journalistic community. He was young, talented, and admired. My mother, concerned about the effects on her children of a drawn-out legal affair, opted to settle out of court, despite believing she had a larger wrongful death case. Intent to make some sense of the tragedy, she used the money to create a fund that would provide equipment and training to paramedics on a new procedure for dealing with respiratory or cardiac arrest, a technique that could have saved my father's life. At the time of my father's death, none of the first responders were trained in the technique. My mother hoped her gift would prevent other families from having to go through what we'd suffered. But her act of kindness could do nothing to ease our feelings of loss.
She rubbed her knees and grimaced as they straightened out. She had started to gain weight, and what had once been a sprightly step had begun to slow. Perpetual bags hung under her eyes. I watched her as she walked by me, looking worn, almost defeated.
After kissing me good night for the second time, she sent me up to my room and sat on the couch. With a glance back, I saw her rub her eyes again and rest her head in her hands. People around us didn't think she was coping well with her husband's death. They thought she needed help, not just in raising the kids but in raising her spirits. Although we were surrounded by her longtime friends from college and my uncles and aunts from both sides of the family, it wasn't enough. She was losing her grip. She needed help only her parents could provide.
A few mornings later, Mom woke up, made breakfast for us, and got Nikki and me off to school. Then she called her mother up in New York. Her mother had let her know that there would always be an open door for her in the Bronx if she needed it. But my mother had been determined to stick it out in the home she'd bought with her husband. Until now.
"Mom, if it's still all right, I think we need to move up there. I can't do this alone anymore."
My grandmother was thrilled. Before she even answered my mother, she called out to my grandfather, "Joy and the kids are moving up to New York!"
Three weeks later, Nikki, Shani, and I all stood outside our car, staring with something like disbelief at our now empty home. This was it. We were actually leaving Maryland.
"All right, guys, load up," my mother cheerily yelled as she threw in one final bag and slammed shut the trunk of our lime green Ford Maverick. Nikki helped me get my seat belt done while my mother secured Shani in the car seat. Even as a kid, I could tell my mother's aggressive good cheer was for our benefit. Before we took off, she paused to take one final look at our house, the house she'd lived in for six years. It already felt like a past life.
My grandparents weren't strangers to me; they'd spent quite a bit of time with us in Maryland. They were both recently retired--my grandfather from the ministry and my grandmother from twenty-six years as an elementary school teacher in the Bronx. I was excited by the idea of living with them; they spoiled us like crazy. But I was apprehensive about moving away from my friends, from the only world I'd known.
My mother prepared us for the move by telling us about her wonderful childhood and the glories of the Bronx. She told us about the neighbors who always had a hot meal for you and looked out for you if your parents weren't around. She told us about the amazements to be found at the Bronx Zoo, which was only ten minutes away from our new home. She told us it was safe, that in all the time she'd lived there as a kid, she had not once experienced crime or violence. But when we broke off the interstate and started navigating the burned-out landscape of the Bronx, we could feel her energy shifting. Things had clearly changed.
The Bronx is an amazing place, home to over a million people. The diversity of the borough is extraordinary: areas like the Italian-immigrant-settled Country Club neighborhood were among the most affluent of the city but were only minutes away from the poorest congressional district in the nation. When my grandparents moved to the United States, in the 1950s, the South Bronx had already begun its transformation from a majority Jewish borough to one dominated by blacks and Latinos. When my mother grew up in the Bronx, despite rising poverty levels, the sense of family and community were strong. With every decade that had passed since she left the area, things had gotten worse. In 1977, when President Jimmy Carter visited the Bronx, he said it looked like "a war zone." Seven years later, we were moving back.
We'd stopped at a red light at the corner of Paulding and Allerton avenues when we saw a woman walk up to a young boy standing on the corner. The woman was dressed in a blue shirt and faded blue shorts that showed off her scaly, ashy legs. She stumbled to the boy, with her right hand tightly gripping a wad of money. The boy, no older than sixteen, darted his head back and forth, apparently looking for cops, customers, or both. As she approached him and they started talking, the light turned green and my mother quickly hit the gas. Even craning my neck backward, I didn't see how that scene ended. We were now only two blocks away from our new home. When I turned back around, I could see the nervousness on my mother's face reflected in the rearview mirror. Moments later we arrived.
When my grandparents moved to the United States, their first priority was to save enough money to buy this house on Paulding Avenue. To them a house meant much more than shelter; it was a stake in their new country. America allowed them to create a life they couldn't have dreamed of in their home countries of Jamaica and Cuba. Their plan had been to return overseas once they retired, but they couldn't bring themselves to leave. They sensed that they were needed here. Today was exactly the kind of day they'd been anticipating.
The three-bedroom home always managed to somehow stretch itself when people were in need of a place to stay. The number of people who lived in the home at any given time fluctuated between five and nine, which made for tight living conditions. When we showed up that late summer day in 1984, we brought the number to seven.
I walked up the stone stairs to see the front door open and my grandparents waiting there. My invitingly plump grandmother stood in the doorway, her hair in a light Jheri curl and a smile settled so firmly across her face it seemed permanently engraved. "Welcome home!" she bellowed out to us in her Jamaican accent. She engulfed my entire body in her hug, folding me into her chest in a tight embrace. My grandfather stood directly behind her, waiting his turn to get at the grandchildren. My grandfather was a short man, no more than five foot six, but his presence dominated every room he entered. He was dark-skinned with a muscular frame that made him seem much younger than he was. People often compared him with his fellow man of the cloth Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but of course that didn't mean anything to me. His mustache tickled as he hugged me and kissed me on the cheek.
After unloading the car, my mother began to tell my grandparents about what she had seen earlier, the woman buying the drugs from the young boy. She also told them about a telephone pole she'd noticed outside their house that had been converted into a makeshift memorial. There was a picture of a young girl taped to the pole, and sympathy cards and tiny stuffed animals were scattered around it. Signs saying WE LOVE YOU and SEE YOU IN HEAVEN
were taped around the little girl's picture. Her name was April. The shrine had unsettled my mother.
My grandparents told my mother about the changes that had been taking place in the neighborhood. As I sat next to her, trying to spin a basketball on my index finger, I heard my grandparents talk about how drugs and violence had slowly crept in. Fear and apathy had become the new norm in what had once been a close-knit community. They also talked about something I'd never heard of before. Crack.
My grandmother left the table and went into the kitchen. She returned a few minutes later with a large pot of codfish and ackee, the official dish of Jamaica, and a large helping of grits. They had spent days preparing the dish in anticipation of our arrival, my grandfather serving as sous-chef, deboning the light, salty fish and chopping up the onions and peppers while my grandmother seasoned and cooked it to perfection. Retirement had been wonderfully relaxing for them. That was all over now.
My grandparents, Rev. Dr. James Thomas and Winell Thomas, met when he was an eighteen-year-old ministerial student in a small Jamaican parish and she and her parents were newly arrived parishioners from Cuba. My grandmother's parents left Havana in the 1930s in search of work; at the time Jamaica was an island of relative prosperity amid the worldwide Great Depression. My great-grandparents loaded up on a boat in Havana Harbor with six-year-old Winell and prepared to create a new life in Jamaica.
The two largest islands in the Caribbean were only ninety miles apart, and my great-grandparents planned to return quickly after a temporary stay in Jamaica to make some money. In fact, my grandmother's older sister, Lurlene, was left behind. But the family never went back to Cuba, and my grandmother never saw her sister again.
When my maternal great-grandparents arrived in Jamaica, they searched for a church home. One Sunday, they entered Mount Horeb Church in St. James Parish and were immediately impressed by the young, dynamic pastor, Josiah Thomas. My grandmother, however, was even more struck by the pastor's son. Their friendship was quick and easy. As they got older, their love for each other developed; they were married in 1948.
My grandfather had a dream to follow his father's footsteps and join the ministry. Since he could remember, he'd wanted to lead his own congregation. But to do it, he needed to complete school. His father used to tell him, "Being a leader in the faith is about more than simply proclaiming the Word, you must be a student of the Word." The first step along that road was to leave his new bride and his homeland to attend Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania.
When he arrived in the middle of November, he had his Jamaican wardrobe: shorts, short-sleeve shirts, and a few pairs of slacks for fancy occasions. On his first day on the picturesque campus, he walked briskly through the bracing Pennsylvania wind and fallen autumn leaves in open-toed sandals and shorts.
"Hey, you, come here quickly!"
The voice came from a man standing about thirty feet away. My grandfather hesitated--not only did he not know the man but also because it was too cold for small talk. The man jogged over to my grandfather, who speed-walked to meet him halfway.
"Where are you from?" the man asked. He wore an elegant black suit and black tie, and his demeanor was irresistibly cheerful, which put my grandfather at ease. His accent wasn't American, but my grandfather couldn't quite place it.
"Jamaica," my grandfather proudly responded.
"I knew you were not from here. We need to get you some appropriate clothes. Don't worry. When I first came here, I did the same thing."
The man took my grandfather to the store to buy him some warm clothes to wear until he could properly equip himself for the winter. The shopping excursion was the first of many encounters between my grandfather and this man, who would become a mentor, teacher, and friend to him. They spent many hours talking together about the changing world and the dawning of independence and liberation movements across the African Diaspora. He tried to convince my grandfather to go into politics, as he hoped to, and change the world through that means. But my grandfather insisted that God was calling him to serve through the ministry.
The two men's paths diverged over time. The man who mentored--and clothed--my grandfather followed his dreams and made history. That man, Kwame Nkrumah, became the president of Ghana, the first black African president of an independent African nation.
After completing his education, my grandfather moved to the South Bronx and brought his wife and kids with him. In 1952, my grandfather, son of a Presbyterian minister and now a Presbyterian minister himself, became the first black minister in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Dutch Reformed Church, born in the Netherlands during the Reformation, had spread throughout Europe and around the world, and even eventually became the official religion of apartheid South Africa. My grandfather's pioneering ascent to the ministry was met with many cheers but some threats as well. He battled through them and made history.
Thirty-two years later, he hadn't changed. He sat across from my mother and told her that the changes in the neighborhood had not diminished his belief in the community. He was determined to stick it out and do his part to heal what was broken in the Bronx.
I continued to spin the ball on my finger.
The first few days after the move, I became antsy. I missed my old friends and my old neighborhood. I had thought my mother's rules were strict but soon realized that my grandparents' were many times worse. They made it very clear that Paulding Avenue was their home and their rules would apply. When the streetlights went on, we had to be back home. All chores had to be done before we even thought about going outside to play. If we heard any gunfire or, as my grandmother called it, "foolishness," outside, we were to immediately return home, no matter when it was. These were not Bronx rules, these were West Indian rules. And my grandparents figured if these rules had helped their children successfully navigate the world, they would work on their grandkids too.
My restlessness was cured only by heading out into these new streets. After completing my chores one day, I got permission to play basketball at a park five blocks from our house.
"Go, play, and come right back!" were the orders I heard as I began to dribble my basketball up the concrete sidewalks toward the courts. I took my time getting to the courts, practicing dribbling the ball between my legs, but I also tried my best to absorb the new neighborhood. There were many more people on the streets, sitting on the stoops, hanging out, than I was used to. The boom-bap of early hip-hop, still young and close to its Bronx roots, tumbled out of the apartment buildings, mixed with Spanish music blaring from boom boxes. The Bronx was in its postapocalyptic phase. Whole blocks were abandoned, buildings blackened and hollowed out by fires set by arsonists--many of whom were in the employ of landlords looking to cash out of the deteriorating ghetto. I didn't have much of a frame of reference back then, though. I didn't know that drug fiends were still making use of those abandoned buildings for activities that would've blown my mind, or that the swollen hands on the man leaning against a telephone pole by himself--eyes flickering, head nodding--were telltale signs of needle injections. I walked past neighbors whose eyes overflowed with desperation and depression, people who had watched their once-proud neighborhood become synonymous with the collapse of the American inner city.
With every step on those cracked sidewalks, I passed a new signifier of urban decay. But I didn't even realize it. I was a kid, and just happy to get out of the house. The people I passed would look me up and down, and I would look back, give the traditional head nod, and then go back to practicing my crossover dribble.
I finally arrived at the courts and saw a handful of guys playing three on three. They all looked a little older than me, or at least bigger than me. I quickly realized they were all better than me, too. The red iron rims had no nets, and since there was no real give on the rims, every shot ended as either a silent swish or a high-bouncing brick. Although I was intimidated, I called "next" because I knew my deadline for going back to the house was qu
ickly approaching.
I was practicing my lefty dribble next to the iron gate that surrounded the courts when one of the guys fell hard to the ground. He had been accidentally hit in the face while driving to the basket. Blood trickled from his mouth. He quickly walked off to get some water and clean his face. No foul was called. I would soon learn that calling fouls just wasn't done.
The players realized they were short one man. The group looked at me, seemingly all at once, since I was now the only person on the sidelines.
"You good to run?" one of the boys asked me.
I dug up all the confidence I had, placed my basketball on the ground, and began to walk toward them. My oversize sneakers clopped on the court like a pair of Clydesdale hooves. My new teammates called out their names as I gave each of them a quick dap, an informal greeting of clasped hands and bumped chests.
"What's up. I'm Oz."
"What's going on. Deshawn."
I played hard, lost pretty bad, but enjoyed every minute of it. These kids were different from my friends back in Maryland. I quickly started to pick up on their lingo and style, the swagger of my new teammates and neighborhood friends.
From this first moment on a Bronx court, I could tell there was something special about it. The basketball court is a strange patch of neutral ground, a meeting place for every element of a neighborhood's cohort of young men. You'd find the high school phenoms running circles around the overweight has-beens, guys who'd effortlessly played above-the-rim years ago now trying to catch their breath and salvage what was left of their once-stylish games. You'd find the drug dealers there, mostly playing the sidelines, betting major money on pickup games and amateur tournaments but occasionally stepping onto the court, smelling like a fresh haircut and with gear on that was too fine for sweating in. But even they couldn't resist getting a little run in--and God help you if you played them too hard, or stepped on their brand-new Nike Air Force Ones.