WALTER
DEAN MYERS
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
OF MY
DEAD BROTHER
ART BY
CHRISTOPHER MYERS
Special thanks to Patrick Delisser, Reggie Forbes,
Jennifer Lewis and especially Abbas Hamad.
-C.M.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Also by Walter Dean Myers
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
When we were growing up, Rise had always been taller than me and I had to look up to him. Then last year I saw that I had caught up with him and could look him right in the eye. I stood next to him and he saw what was going on, but just sniffed at me and said I didn’t smell like a real man. We laughed about that, and I liked when he kidded me.
Now I was getting the feeling that when Rise was saying one thing, there was something else going on behind the words.
Chapter 1
Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
Lord, I am so tired
Yes, I’m weak
And yes, I’m worn…
“Lord knows we are tired today as we gather here in fellowship and sorrow, in brotherhood and despair, for the going-home ceremony of fourteen-year-old Bobby Green.” Pastor Loving rocked forward as he spoke. “Lord knows we are tired of burying our young men, of driving behind hearses and seeing the painted letters of remembrance on the walls of our neighborhoods.
“As we close this chapter of young Bobby’s life, let us send our prayers with him to the other side.” Pastor Loving, a big, dark man, wiped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. “Let us send our prayers with him so that maybe one day those left behind will finally be able to do what we hope for him—to rest in peace without the violence that blows through our community like the winds of winter. This loss chills the heart and challenges the soul, and yet we must keep on. To young Bobby’s parents I extend my hand and the promise of a just God who will heal the heavy heart and rest the weary soul. As you leave the church today, stop and pass a word to Bobby’s grieving mother, Louise, and his grieving father, John. Let them know that in the middle of darkness there is and will always be the everlasting light of Christian faith. Amen.”
The gospel choir started singing softly, and row by row they left their seats. Bobby’s mother was crying and leaning against an older man I didn’t know. It was all the same, the gentle whirring of the fans, the familiar scent of the flowers, the hymns that filled the spaces between the people mourning Bobby. I looked over to where C.J. was still sitting at the organ. He looked small in front of the dark mahogany instrument. The people in the first row had started filing past the casket. My mom took my hand and squeezed it.
“I don’t think …”
“It’s okay,” she said softly.
I slid out of the pew and made my way toward the back of St. Philip’s Episcopal.
On the steps the cool evening breeze carried barbecue smells from the Avenue. I watched as some young kids ran down the street to an ice-cream truck. It had been hot all day, and the few drops of rain that fell didn’t cool things off at all.
“It’s a shame for a child to go so young like that,” Miss Essie Lassiter was saying. “It should have been somebody old, like me. Jesse, do the police have any idea who it was who shot him?”
“No, ma’am.”
“That’s the terrible thing about it,” Miss Lassiter said. “First there’s one shooting, and then there’s a shooting getting even with that one, and people don’t know when to stop.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Bobby had a big family and they could afford only one official funeral car, so not too many people were going out to the cemetery. I watched as Miss Lassiter, who went to everybody’s funeral, got in one of the cars. A moment later they were pulling away from the church.
C.J. came up to me and he was looking teary-eyed. “You want to go over to the park?” he asked.
I said I’d go, and just then Rise came over. We told him where we were going and he said he’d come along. We walked the first part of the distance to the park in silence, and then Rise started kidding C.J. about not playing any jazz at Bobby G.’s funeral.
“You should have played like they used to down in New Orleans,” Rise said. “Everybody would have talked about it.”
“And my moms would have been all over my head,” C.J. said. “I asked her about playing some jazz, but she said that Bobby’s parents might not like it.”
“Yeah, well, he went out like a man,” Rise said.
“Yo, Rise, the brother got wasted in a drive-by,” I said. “He was chilling on his stoop when some dudes lit up the sidewalk. I don’t even think they knew who they shot.”
We got to the park and sat on a bench. C.J. was talking about how Bobby was worried about getting into a good high school.
“We were just talking about that the other day,” C.J. said. “He was saying that if he got into a good high school, he was going to bust his chops so he could go on to college. Bobby was cool.”
“When your time comes, you got to go,” Rise said. “That’s all sad and everything, but that’s the word, straight up.”
“Maybe I should have played something special,” C.J. said.
C.J. is the same age as me, fifteen. He was raised in the church and had been playing piano and organ for as long as I knew him. He wanted to play jazz, but his moms said he should stick to classical and gospel. We had talked about him sticking in a little jazz at Bobby’s funeral, and I thought it would have been cool. I really didn’t know Bobby’s parents, though. Maybe they wouldn’t have liked it. But there were so many funerals going on, it almost seemed you needed something to make them different.
“Y’all hear there’s going to be a meeting of the Counts tomorrow?” Rise asked.
“For what?” C.J. had fished half of a candy bar from his pocket and was taking the paper off of it.
“It should be about Bobby G.,” Rise said. “But Calvin is calling it, so I don’t think it’s going to be about anything, really. Dude is just swimming upstream and don’t know where he’s going.”
On the far side of the park some guys had set up steel drums. They started playing some reggae, but real soft and it sounded good, almost like a pulse coming out of the darkness.
“You know, it’s hard when somebody gets wasted,” Rise went on. “Bobby G. was good people and everything, but that’s why you have to make your life special every day. You never know when your time is up. Ain’t no use in being down about it.”
“I still wish I had played something special for Bobby,” C.J. said. “It would have made me feel good, anyway.”
An ambulance, its sirens wailing, sped past. My dad said that the main sounds in the neighborhood were sirens and gunshots. It really got him down.
“I got to get home,” Rise said, standing up. “The meeting’s at seven o’clock tomorrow. It better be short, too, because I’m not down for no all-night gabbing.”
“See you tomorrow,” I said
.
Rise has this funny way of walking with one shoulder higher than the other one, and that made him look like he was bopping as he walked out of the park. We watched him get to the entrance and then turn and head down the hill toward Frederick Douglass Boulevard, where he lived.
“You know, maybe you can’t tell when you’re going to die,” C.J. said, “but I still don’t want to get shot for nothing in a drive-by.”
“Guess what. I don’t even want to be shot for something,” I said. “When I go, I want the headlines to read ‘Oldest man in the world died peacefully in his sleep with a smile on his face.’”
“And right under that it’ll read, ‘and his friend C.J. Europe played some jazz at his funeral.’”
We gave each other five and I smiled even though I noticed that C.J. had figured a way to live longer than me. The truth was, though, that Bobby’s getting killed was scary. When we first heard about it, we were like all excited and everything, but when we got to the stoop and saw all the blood and the yellow police tape, it was still a shock. His mama was there crying and his cousin and soon everybody who knew him was messed around.
I didn’t know exactly what it was. I didn’t think that I was going to get shot in a drive-by or anything like that, but inside I was still nervous. I felt jumpy, not just when a strange car drove by, or some guys I didn’t know were on the block, but all the time—even when I was in my kitchen having breakfast or in the supermarket or at home in bed. It was a drag, and I didn’t want to talk to anybody about it.
“What are you eating?” I asked Dad.
“Watch your mouth, boy.”
“I just want to know what you’re eating,” I said.
I knew what he was eating—two soft-boiled eggs and a small bowl of cereal. That’s what the doctor had put him on and what he had said he would never eat again just the day before. I sat down at the table and looked over at his plate. I knew he wanted some bacon and fried eggs, but he was on a strict diet to get his weight down, and Moms was making him stick to it.
“You want to go bowling tonight?” he asked.
“Bowling? Do you bowl?”
“I guess I do,” Dad said, as Mom came into the room.
“The doctor tell you that you had to get more exercise?” I asked. “‘Cause I never saw you go bowling before.”
“Your father’s trying to sneak in some quality time with his son without mentioning that he’s trying to sneak in some quality time with his son,” Mom said.
“Girl, why do you have to run your mouth so much?” Dad asked.
“Because I think that you working on getting along with your son is a good thing and nothing you have to ease into as if you’re ashamed of it, Mr. Givens,” Mom said. “With the way this community is losing its way, we all need to do a little soul-searching and a lot of praying.”
“You want to go bowling or not?” Dad asked, raising his voice.
“The Counts are having a meeting tonight,” I said.
“How’s Rise doing?” Mom asked.
“He’s doing okay,” I said.
Mom got back on Dad’s case about how he and I should just be more open with each other and hang out together. She got to liking what she was saying and working it up until it sounded like a commercial. She even got into us going on a fishing trip.
“What I want to catch a fish for?” Dad asked. “You know I don’t like fish.”
“It’s not about fishing,” Mom said. “It’s about the bonding.”
“You got to use worms to catch a bond?” Dad asked, winking at me. “And how you cook it? Because if you can fry it up in some lard, maybe I’ll go for it.”
Mom flicked the tea towel at him and started putting the dishes into the sink while she checked the clock over the refrigerator.
Dad and Mom went to work together every morning. I got Mom’s usual kiss on the forehead and a handshake from Dad that made Mom smile.
I knew the bonding thing was all about Bobby G. being killed. Mom was getting upset about so many kids getting shot and had already mentioned that maybe we should move out to the burbs. She worried a lot about me, and about Rise, too.
When we had first moved to 147th Street and Mom was looking for a babysitter so she could go to work, she had seen a sign on the church bulletin board that Rise’s mother was taking care of kids. I was just one at the time, and Rise was almost three. His mother likes to tell the story that when Rise first saw me, he was scared of me. She said they had a puppy and a turtle and he liked to play with both of them, but when he saw me he started crying.
“The boy cried for the first two weeks I was keeping you,” Mrs. Davis said.
I didn’t remember any of that, but me and Rise grew up to be really close. He was more than my best friend—he was really like a brother. So when we saw an old movie on television about these two guys cutting themselves and mixing their blood to become blood brothers, we thought it was a good idea.
Rise was nine at the time and I was only seven, so it took a while to get up the nerve to cut myself. When I saw him bleeding, I chickened out and ran into the closet. Rise said I had to come out fast before the blood dried, but I was too scared. We had given up the idea, but then almost two weeks later I fell off the back of an overstuffed chair that I had been riding as if it were a horse and scraped my arm really badly. I was screaming in pain and Rise was yelling something and went into the kitchen and got a knife.
He made a small gash on his finger and then put it against my scraped arm, and that’s how we became blood brothers. His grandmother, who everybody called Aunt Celia, saw us both bleeding and took us to the hospital. A nurse sprayed us with something that stung a little and sent us home.
When I was small I liked Rise’s house better than mine, because Aunt Celia and his mother were always home and ready to make a snack or go to the park. His father wasn’t there, and he hardly ever talked about him except to say he didn’t care. I remembered once saying to Mom that I wished Dad would die so that I would have the same kind of family that Rise had. Mom said I’d get it straight after a while, and I did.
My parents both worked, but when they were home they were easy to be with. Mom kind of ran things, and me and Dad were her guys. There was a time when Rise would stay overnight at my house at least once a week, and I knew he liked it when he did. He doesn’t stay over anymore and I can understand that, too. There are things you just don’t do after a while.
Both of us had stopped collecting comic books, which we used to do big-time. When I was in the fifth grade we had gone to a comic book fair downtown and heard a collector say that the ideal number of comics to get was a thousand. You got a thousand and then you kept trading up, so that you got better and better comics instead of more and more.
Then one day Aunt Celia, who was getting strange, threw away a lot of Rise’s comics. He was pissed. He said he wouldn’t collect anymore and that it was a stupid thing to do, anyway. That made me feel bad, but I let it ride. It was just about then that we found out that Aunt Celia had Alzheimer’s disease.
By that time I had begun drawing comics as well as collecting them. I liked to draw, and I could duplicate most of the superheroes pretty closely, some from memory. The superheroes I invented weren’t great, but I was still working on the idea of getting my completely own comic book together.
Rise was like a brother to me, and also like my hero. Nobody messed with me, because they knew if they got up in my face, they would have to deal with Rise. He was smart in a deep way—not like school smart, when you know a lot of facts, but like the kind of smarts old people have. Even when I wasn’t sure he was right, I listened to him carefully. We used to have long talks on his fire escape sometimes—just rapping about what was going on in the neighborhood or with our homeys. When Rise got into his junior year and got hooked up into taking SATs and thinking about college, we didn’t hang as much as we used to. Then he started getting into trouble in school. It wasn’t a big thing, really, just missing too many day
s or sometimes not coming back after lunch.
Once I asked him what was going down with his leaving in the middle of the day. He said he had a lot of things on his mind. I figured when he wanted me to know what they were, he would tell me.
I don’t know exactly how me and C.J. started hitting it. What I think happened was that since we went to the same church and his mom knew my mom, she told him to make friends with me. He played organ and piano for the church, and he was good because he could play all the regular gospel stuff, some pop stuff, and he could read music. He was a little nerdy, but I didn’t mind that because he was always straight up. Whatever C.J. was thinking he would say. He heard about the Counts and asked me to get him into the club. Since there weren’t any rules about who got in and who didn’t, it wasn’t a big thing when he just started showing up at the meetings.
Me and Rise were friends because we had done a lot of things together and we liked each other. Me and C.J. weren’t really all that tight, but we were cool with each other.
Chapter 2
Back in the day, before there were Bloods, Crips, and other gangs, there were a lot of black social clubs. I got this from Calvin’s father, who said he had belonged to three different clubs. The Counts, the one he was trying to keep going, was supposed to be over forty years old. Even my dad didn’t remember it being around that long. But Mr. Reese, Calvin’s father, had a picture of himself and three other guys in powder-blue tuxedos and bushy Afros that was signed on the back with “The Counts” written under the signature. I guess they were supposed to be funky or something.
Calvin’s father wanted the club to live on and said that it needed some young people to carry on the traditions. Nobody was exactly sure what the traditions were, but it sounded like fun. We were meeting about once a month at different people’s houses until Mr. Reese got us a room in the armory. He gave us a long talk about how we had to respect the armory and hatnot, and it was all good to the max. We got a television and a small refrigerator for the room, which really wasn’t that big, and it was comfortable. At least it was good until Mason joined the Counts.