You'd find the scrubs talking smack a mile a minute and the church boys who didn't even bother changing out of their pointy shoes and button-up shirts. You'd find the freelance thugs pushing off for rebounds, and the A students, quietly showing off silky jump shots and then running back downcourt eyes down, trying not to look too pleased with themselves. There would be the dude sweating through his post office uniform when he should've been delivering mail, and the brother who'd just come back from doing a bid in jail--you could tell by his chiseled arms and intense stare, and the cautious smile he offered every time a passing car would honk and the driver yell out his name, welcoming him home.
We were all enclosed by the same fence, bumping into one another, fighting, celebrating. Showing one another our best and worst, revealing ourselves--even our cruelty and crimes--as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood.
We played that first night until I saw the streetlights come on, my cue to head to the house. I asked them when they would be back out playing, and they said tomorrow, same time, same place. So would I.
THREE
Foreign Ground
1987
"Just stand next to the white people. They'll get off by a Hundred and Tenth Street."
Justin broke down his strategy for securing a seat as we shoved ourselves onto the crowded Number 2 train heading uptown. We had spent the day in Manhattan, taking a break from the Bronx, prowling the city's sneaker stores, checking for the new Nikes we couldn't afford. Now on the subway back home, we stood in a crush of executives, construction workers, accountants, and maids--a multicolored totem of hands clinging to the metal pole in the middle of the car for dear life.
Six stops later, Justin's prediction proved out. A business-suited exodus emptied the train when we hit 110th Street, the last outpost of affluent Manhattan, and we were finally able to sit down. A subway car full of blacks and Latinos would continue the bumpy ride back up to Harlem and the Bronx. Justin smiled at me just as the train's last yuppie scurried out ahead of the closing doors.
Justin and I bonded from the first time I met him. We wore the same haircut, a towering box cut made popular by rappers like Big Daddy Kane, whose elegantly chiseled high-top was the gold standard. Justin loomed over me, standing at almost five foot six in fifth grade, and his skinny frame made him appear even taller. His voice was deep, an excursion into puberty that had left the rest of us behind. He lived in the Soundview Projects, just minutes away from our house in the Bronx. We knew each other's neighborhoods, each other's friends, and each other's families. There was one other thing that helped us bond quickly: he was one of the few other black kids at my new school.
My mother decided soon after our move to the Bronx that I was not going to public school. She wasn't a snob, she was scared. My mother was a graduate of the public school system in New York herself, and the daughter of a public school teacher in the same system. She knew the public schools in the area. The schools she'd gone to were still there--same names, same buildings--but they were not the same institutions. The buildings themselves were dilapidated--crumbling walls and faded paint--and even if you were one of the lucky 50 percent who made it out in four years, it was not at all clear that you'd be prepared for college or a job. Just as the street corners of the Bronx had changed, so had the public schools. Things were falling apart, and the halls of school were no exception or refuge from the chaos outside.
But no matter how much the world around us seemed ready to crumble, my mother was determined to see us through it. When we moved to New York, she worked multiple jobs, from a freelance writer for magazines and television to a furrier's assistant--whatever she could do to help cover her growing expenses. She had to provide for us, and she was helping out her parents, who were living off two small pensions and their small monthly Social Security check. My mother would wake us up in the morning for school, and before we had even finished getting dressed, she was off to work, leaving my grandparents to get us there. My grandparents would pick us up after school, prepare dinner for the family, and get us to bed. Late into the night, my mother would come in from her last job and walk straight to our bedroom, pull the covers tight around us, and give my sister and me our kiss good night. The smell of her perfume would wake me as soon as she walked in, and then comfort me back to sleep.
My mother first heard about Riverdale Country School when she was a girl growing up in the Bronx. It was the sort of school you might find in a storybook, a fantasy for a public school kid. It sat along the banks of the Hudson River, and the rolling hills and lush quadrangles of its campus gave it the grand appearance of a university. The ivy-covered buildings were like a promise to its students of what awaited them. It was the school John F. Kennedy attended as a child.
When my mom visited the school again as an adult, she was immediately convinced that this was where she wanted my sister and me to go. Riverdale was in the Bronx but was its own little island of affluence, a fact local residents were quick to remind you of in hopes of keeping their property values from collapsing to the level of the rest of the borough. My mother saw Riverdale as a haven, a place where I could escape my neighborhood and open my horizons. But for me, it was where I got lost.
Justin and I got off the subway--covered with graffiti tags and all-city murals--at Gun Hill Road and began the ten-minute walk home. Everything about the Bronx was different from downtown Manhattan, more intense and potent; even the name of the street we walked down--Gun Hill Road--suggested blood sport. As soon as we hit the Bronx bricks, our senses were assaulted. We walked through a fog of food smells blowing in from around the world--beef patties and curry goat from the Jamaican spot, deep-fried dumplings and chicken wings from the Chinese take-out joint, cuchifritos from the Puerto Rican lunch counter. Up and down the street were entrepreneurial immigrants in colorful clothes--embroidered guayaberas and flowing kente and spray-painted T-shirts--hustling everything from mix tapes to T-shirts to incense from crowded sidewalk tables. The air rang with English and Spanish in every imaginable accent, spoken by parents barking orders to their children or young lovers playfully flirting with each other. By now, all of this felt like home.
On the way to my house, we decided to stop by Ozzie's to see if our crew was around. Ozzie was our boy, tall and dark-skinned, with a close-cropped Caesar and a soft Caribbean accent like his father's. His basketball skills transcended his years; he was only in fifth grade when high schools started to recruit him.
As expected, there they were--our little crew, sprawled along the white stone steps of Ozzie's house. Before I could properly get into the flow of conversation, Paris turned to me.
"How y'all like it up there at that white school?"
Paris was a good-looking guy with a brilliant smile that he rarely cared to share. He leaned back as he spoke--his question was a challenge.
"It's cool, it's whatever," I quietly replied, looking down at the ground. It was a sore spot. In the hood, your school affiliation was essential. Even if you weren't running with the coolest clique, you still got some percentage of your rep from your school, and the name Riverdale wasn't going to impress anyone. If anything, it made my crew kind of suspicious of me. So I quickly changed the subject.
"What's up with the Knicks this year?"
Lame, I know, but I was desperate. Most of my neighborhood friends were attending public schools in the area; a few were attending Catholic school. But Justin and I were the only two who actually went all the way across town to attend a predominantly white private school. It would take as long as an hour and a half some days, depending on traffic, stalled trains, weather, and other factors, but we would make it there. And on time. At least initially.
"Nah, for real, what's up with Riverdale?" Paris asked, bringing the topic back. His voice rose on the last word, as he made his best attempt at a proper British accent. I had to admit that Riverdale sounded a little like something out of Archie Comics. It was embarrassing. I decided to try a different tack. "Yeah,
it's cool, man, nobody messes with me over there. I have the place on lock," I started, unconvincingly. My feet shuffled and my voice lowered a few octaves. I caught Justin out of the side of my eye, shaking his head with amazement at the nonsense that was coming out of my mouth. I could feel the burn of his skeptical stare on the side of my face, but I pressed on.
"Let me tell you how I run things up there," I said and launched into the story of my recent suspension from school.
A few weeks earlier I had been suspended for fighting. I was playfully wrestling with a kid from my grade when I decided to go for a killer move: I grabbed his right arm with mine and hoisted him over my shoulder, then dropped him hard on the ground. The fall was awkward, and he landed on his head, opening a small but surprisingly bloody cut. After the boy was rushed to the school nurse and eventually to the hospital to get a few stitches, I was suspended for fighting.
That was the truth.
For my friends, I decided to juice the story up a little. Or a lot. The story I told had the boy disrespecting me and me getting in his face to respond. When he kept jawing, I picked him up over my head and slammed him to the ground. Then I stood over his bleeding body, taunting him like Muhammad Ali over Sonny Liston, daring him to get back up.
My friends looked over at Justin, who had a pained expression on his face. He knew the truth, and soon the rest of my friends did too. I became the butt of pretty unrelenting taunting. My attempt at creating a Wes Moore legend had backfired.
I was saved after about twenty minutes when a man stumbled toward us. His hair looked like it hadn't seen a comb in weeks. There were laces in only one of his filthy sneakers.
"Can you young brothers spare some change? I need to make a phone call," he stuttered. An old and unpleasant odor preceded him.
Ozzie responded first, his Jamaican accent a little thicker than usual. "Get the hell out of here, man. Nobody has any change for you."
The man slowly moved away, peeking backward a couple times, hoping one of us would overrule Ozzie's rejection.
Ozzie shook his head in disbelief. "If dude wanted to buy some rock, he should have just said it. Who the hell was he gonna call if we gave him some change?" We all laughed as the panhandler staggered back up the block to look for sympathy elsewhere.
Drugs were not new to the Bronx. Marijuana, cocaine, and heroin all took their turns as the drug of choice. But crack was different. After it officially introduced itself in the early 1980s, it didn't take long for crack to place a stranglehold on many communities. The Bronx was one of them. I was an eyewitness.
Crack was different from the drugs that preceded it. It was crazily accessible and insanely potent--and addictive. My friends and I would regularly trade the most remarkable stories we'd overheard or witnessed: A father who left his family and robbed his parents for money to buy rock. A pregnant mother who sold her body to get another hit. Someone's grandmother who blew her monthly Social Security check on crack.
The other difference between crack and other drugs was its method of distribution. There was so much money to be made that drug gangs rapidly expanded their ranks, sucking in some of our best friends, and turf wars became deadly, aided by the influx of sophisticated firearms. The mayhem spread from the gangs to the rest of the neighborhood. Everyone felt threatened. Everyone was defensive. From the early 1980s to the end of the decade, there was an almost 61 percent jump in the murder rate. When I look back now, it's almost surreal. In 2008, there were 417 homicides in New York City. In 1990, there were 2,605. Those murders were concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, and the victims were concentrated in a single demographic: young black men. In some neighborhoods, the young men would've been safer living in war zones. We laughed at the panhandler on the block, but he wasn't just an object of ridicule, he was an unsettling omen.
After sitting with the crew for a few hours, Justin and I decided to get back to the subway station so he could head home. The sun was beginning to set, so we knew we didn't have much time. We didn't need to check our watches--we were starting to feel the fear that crept around the edges of our consciousness at dusk. Justin lived a few train stops away from me, and taking the train home after dark was a different journey than the one we'd made earlier in the day. Justin knew the rules: Never look people in the eye. Don't smile, it makes you look weak. If someone yells for you, particularly after dark, just keep walking. Always keep your money in your front pocket, never in your back pocket. Know where the drug dealers and smokers are at all times. Know where the cops are at all times. And if night fell too soon and Justin was forced to go home by foot over the Bruckner Expressway overpass in the dark, he knew to run all the way.
We increased our pace; neither of our mothers would condone us coming home late. His mother and mine were kindred spirits. Both were born in 1950, both nicknamed their oldest children Nikki after Nikki Giovanni, both knew all about the public schools in the Bronx (my mother went to school in them and Justin's mother taught in them), and both were single mothers working multiple jobs to send their kids to a school outside their neighborhoods. Justin's mother looked after me like I was one of her own. The same way my mother did for Justin.
The sun continued its rapid descent. We tried to keep a bop in our step, tried to keep it cool, but by now we were pretty explicitly speedwalking. Breathing a little heavily, we did our best to keep up appearances. We laughed about our day, talked about school.
Riverdale. The pristine campus and well-dressed kids had stunned me on my first visit--the Bronx was not the homogenous ghetto I thought it was. I felt a crazy-making crosscurrent of emotions whenever I stepped onto campus. Every time I looked around at the buildings and the trees and the view of the river, I was reminded of the sacrifices my mother was making to keep me there. And every time I looked at my fellow students, I was reminded of how little I fit in.
I tried to hide the fact that my family was so much poorer than everyone else's at school. Every week I sat down to create a schedule for my clothes. I had three "good" shirts and three "good" pairs of pants. I would rotate their order, mixing and matching so that each day I had on a fresh combination. Later I even borrowed Nikki's clothes to show some further variation, thinking that nobody would notice the zippers at the bottoms of the jeans or the way the hips hugged a little tight. I would just nonchalantly say that I was trying to "bring the seventies back." This claim was usually met with polite smiles when I was in the room, but I can only imagine the hysterical laughter and conversations about my cross-dressing when I wasn't around.
When the kids would talk about the new videogame system that was out or how their family was going to Greece or Spain or France during summer vacation, I would sit silent, hoping they wouldn't ask me where my family planned on "summering." At times I would try to join in, chiming in about the "vacation home" my family had in Brooklyn, not realizing how ridiculous I sounded. The "vacation home" I was speaking about was the parsonage my grandparents had moved into when my grandfather came out of retirement to lead a congregation. Not until I got older did I learn that Flatbush Avenue inspired a lower level of awe than the French Riviera. Whenever I hung out with Riverdale kids, I made sure we went to their homes, not mine. I didn't want to have to explain. But, in the sixth grade, I broke my own rule.
My uncle Howard was my mother's younger brother. He had recently made a decision with his medical school that becoming a doctor was not in the cards for him, and he moved to the Bronx, where he worked as a pharmaceutical salesman. He came up with the idea to invite some kids from the neighborhood to play a game of baseball with the kids from my school in a park near our house. I think he sensed my frustration at living in mutually exclusive worlds and thought a game of baseball would bring together my neighborhood friends and my wealthier Riverdale classmates and broaden the horizons of both. His intentions were good. I jumped at the idea. I invited ten friends from school to come and play against my friends from the neighborhood.
In the first inning, my neighbor
hood friend Deshawn, who was playing first base, started trash-talking Randy, a lanky Riverdale kid with a mop haircut, after Randy hit a single. Innocent stuff--until Deshawn finally said one thing too many and Randy, the pride of super-affluent Scarsdale, playfully tipped the front bill of Deshawn's hat, knocking it off his head. It was as if he were a king and someone had knocked his crown into the dirt. Before we were even fifteen minutes into the game, a brawl had broken out. Three fights and four innings later, I conceded that the experiment wasn't working out. The game was called. Everyone retreated to their separate corners, to their separate worlds. Everyone except me, still caught in the middle.
I was becoming too "rich" for the kids from the neighborhood and too "poor" for the kids at school. I had forgotten how to act naturally, thinking way too much in each situation and getting tangled in the contradictions between my two worlds. My confidence took a hit. Unlike Justin, whose maturity helped him handle this transition much better than I did, I began to let my grades slip. Disappointed with Ds, pleasantly satisfied with Cs, and celebratory about a B, I allowed my standards at school to become pathetic. In third grade I was reading at a second-grade reading level. Later in life I learned that the way many governors projected the numbers of beds they'd need for prison facilities was by examining the reading scores of third graders. Elected officials deduced that a strong percentage of kids reading below their grade level by third grade would be needing a secure place to stay when they got older. Considering my performance in the classroom thus far, I was well on my way to needing state-sponsored accommodations.