Beyond Poetry

by Nathan Jarelle

“Well, who did it?” she raised her voice. “Tell me! If I have to, I’ll call Levy up here and have him suspend everybody inside that damn classroom.”

  “If somebody did do something to it, I didn’t see it. All I know is that I didn’t do anything to it, Mrs. Hawkins. I would never do that.”

  Junior’s teacher looked him up and down. With no proof that Junior was the culprit, she switched to a new topic. As Junior tried to enter back into her room, she started with him again.

  “If I was you, I’d stay away from that white girl downstairs. She’s trouble!”

  Junior coiled his head at Mrs. Hawkins like a cobra.

  “She ain’t white, she was born an albino – you’d know that if you took the time to get to know Casey instead of judging her!”

  “Dammit, I said she’s white!” she yelled at him. “And it ain’t a damn thing you can do to make me change my mind! Th’hell with her! And don’t get sassy with me! You little no-good heathen! Go’on! Get back inside!”

  As Mrs. Hawkins turned her back to walk in, Junior raised his middle finger at her.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Mrs. Hawkins made Junior’s class watch a documentary about the Victorian era in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. Nobody paid attention, especially Junior. Kids were doodling on their desks, some falling asleep and snoring. Others used the movie time to roll up marijuana or pass notes about a fight scheduled to take place after school. Junior spent the rest of the afternoon inside his journal.

  Halfway through the daunting film, Junior’s eyes became heavy as he nodded and caught himself. Of course, Mrs. Hawkins went to the front of the room, stopped the film and turned on the light to her room. She then stood over top of Junior’s desk with both hands on her hips.

  “You think I’m stupid?” she hollered at him. “Hand it over!”

  “Hand what over?” asked Junior.

  “The journal! Give it to me! I saw you writing earlier, and if you don’t give it to me, I’m gonna have you suspended and thrown out of here!”

  Pissed off, Junior threw his journal down onto the floor.

  “Thank you!” She snatched up his book. “You can have it back after the film!”

  Sulking through the movie, Junior stared at the TV set, ready to explode on his teacher. He hated Mrs. Hawkins, who picked on him endlessly, making his life a living hell on just his second day at Medgar. At her desk, she opened Junior’s journal during the movie, scowling through his body of work. Furious, Junior left his seat to confront her.

  “You can’t just read my stuff like that!” he told her. “It’s personal, Mrs. Hawkins!”

  Junior’s teacher looked back at him with rottweiler eyes, not blinking or speaking. After a short standoff, Junior returned to his chair, and Mrs. Hawkins continued reading through his journal. For the rest of the movie, Junior sat with his chin propped onto his palm, pouting.

  When the final bell of the day sounded, Junior went straight to Mrs. Hawkins’s desk and asked for his journal back. Before handing it back, she lectured him about being inattentive during class, calling Junior’s poetry “the devil’s work.” She reached into her bag, pulled out her bible, and began rebuking him. Finally, she handed Junior his journal.

  On his way down to see Casey before he left school, Junior opened his journal and noticed that Mrs. Hawkins had smeared his hard work with red ink, marking every grammatical and syntax error. Down on the main floor, he ran in to see Casey and showed her his journal.

  “What the hell is wrong with that woman, Junior?!” she gasped.

  “She’s a bitch!” he fussed. “I knew I should’ve spat her in coffee when I had the chance. Look at this!” He held up his journal. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  Casey looked into Junior’s face and saw the hurt in his eyes. As Casey turned through his journal, Junior called his teacher every name in the book; he was practically jumping out of his skin.

  “Stupid bitch. I hope she drops dead!” he said.

  “She’s got a broken spirit. Hurt people hurt other people, J.,” said Casey. “But I can fix this. If you let me borrow your book for the night, I’ll bring it back tomorrow. I promise the red will be all gone. Can you do me a favor, though?”

  “Anything.”

  “Don’t get into the habit of calling women ‘bitches’, OK? Scratch that from your vocabulary.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” she laughed. “Just wanted to make sure we checked that before moving forward. But I understand why you’re angry. I’d be pissed too!”

  Casey reached across her desk to fist bump Junior as he headed outside.

  The moment Junior exited Medgar, he walked down to his mother’s car parked at the curb. The sound of arguing emanated from the vehicle though the windows were up and the motor was running: Senior and Sandy were going at it.

  Junior barely got in a “hello” during the firefight between his parents as they tore into each other like ravenous wolves, motherfucking this, and motherfucking that. At one point, Senior banged his huge fist onto the console so hard that the radio skipped. Of course, that incited another huge fight as Sandy accused Senior of ruining her stereo. Senior claimed that Sandy’s ’85 Buick Skylark was old as dirt, just like his wife.

  From the main lot, Junior’s parents quarreled all the way back to Kennedy Street. Junior sat in the backseat pretending to be a fly on the wall, listening to his parents argue over their savings account, living in Philly, the house, groceries, and other matters. Before Lawrence passed, Junior’s parents had gotten along for the sake of their kids. After his death, they couldn’t stand to look at each other. At the house, their dispute became so volatile that Senior ran Sandy’s Buick onto the curb, threw it into park, and walked off down Kennedy street with Sandy hollering at him from the car window. During his walk, Senior punted the family’s trash bin out into the street, sending recyclable plastics hurling into the air as bystanders scurried out of his way. Sandy shot from her Buick and went after him, chasing down her husband, reprimanding him for his theatrics as neighbors looked on.

  “Where you goin’ now, huh?” She marched beside him. “You ain’t got no money, and don’t nobody want your sorry black ass! So, you might as well come back home!”

  As Junior watched his parents rage on like two pit bulls off their leashes, he reminisced about his last fight with Lawrence before his death. Their fight was similar, Junior chasing beside his brother, demeaning him as he attempted to pedal off. He remembered kneeling next to his brother as paramedics attempted to revive him. Ever since that moment, seeing his parents fight reminded Junior of how much he regretted his actions in the final moment of Lawrence’s life. Lawrence was not a “stupid dummy” as Junior recalled saying to his brother. He was a shithead kid who had done something stupid, like every other ten-year-old around the world.

  As Junior’s parents came rumbling back up the street firing away at each other, he leaned against his mother’s car, waiting for them to return. They walked up, still calling each other names as if Junior wasn’t standing there. With his arms folded, he looked on, suddenly enlightened by the regret of having to see Lawrence take his last breath. Finally, when they acknowledged him, Junior took a stance against his parents’ bickering. They were the only words Junior would have for them for the rest of that evening.

  “Lawrence and I did that just before he died.” He shook his head.

  With his bag hooked onto his shoulder, Junior picked up the spilled bin which Senior had kicked over and walked inside, leaving his parents to settle their differences.

  Love is like a Ferris wheel.

  Go up high. Go down low.

  Hang somewhere in the middle for a while.

  Get off. Get on.

  See the top of the world.

  Then back on the ground again.

  Stop. Hop off. Start at the end of the line.

  Pay for a new ticket and do it all over again.

  —LEONARD G. ROBINSON JR
.

  Six

  Money was the root of many tiffs inside the Robinson castle. Some nights, Junior would awaken to the sound of slamming doors and objects bouncing from the walls. Although both his parents would often threaten egregious bodily harm to one another during their scream fests, their threats were unsubstantiated. Arguing was Senior and Sandy’s love language. They hollered at breakfast, cussed over the line during their respective lunch breaks, raised holy hell at the dinner table, and kissed each other goodnight. Someone always lit the dynamite first.

  “What we eatin’ tonight?” Senior once asked.

  “Shit on a stick,” Sandy replied. Ka-boom. The fight was on.

  The days they didn’t tear into each other about something were because they weren’t speaking. The fights were almost always over the same thing: money. Some days, however, the subject matter was more personal: they fought over Philadelphia, Junior, Lawrence, and how their marriage was a sham from the second they met. It spiraled out of control, some days, with knife-like words hurled at each other. Usually, it was Senior who had the violent temper. Sandy once told Junior that the reason his daddy acted out so badly was due to his lack of education. “He doesn’t know how to express himself at all,” she told Junior once. “The man can’t talk worth a damn! That’s what happens when you don’t finish school.” Sandy’s words didn’t make sense to him at first. But as Junior got older, he referenced his mother’s comment.

  Five years before Lawrence passed, Junior had seen his daddy threaten to behead a neighbor back in Crawford over a late payment of twenty-eight dollars. Senior had changed the brakes in the neighbor’s Nissan truck from the prior week. For seven days, the Robinsons’ neighbor, Mr. Martin, ducked Senior, telling neighbors he had no intention of paying Junior’s daddy the rest.

  Hammer in hand, Senior drove down to the corner store where Mr. Martin liked to hang and caught him coming out of the liquor store with a case of beer. The second he saw Senior armed with a hammer, Mr. Martin walked back inside the store, returned the beer, and gave Senior the money he owed him. The scroungers who hung by the corner store cleared as they saw Senior, full of rage, exit his truck. Although on most days Senior said only a few words, he commanded respect and had no problem extracting it when necessary. “Never let nobody owe you too long,” he told Junior. “I don’t give a damn if it’s twenty-eight cents. Always collect what’s yours.”

  When Junior later told Sandy at home that his daddy almost beheaded a man over twenty-eight dollars, Sandy shook her head. According to her, Senior shaking down delinquent customers for late payments was nothing new.

  “Is that all?” Sandy asked, laughing as she folded a batch of clothes. “I saw your daddy do worse things to people for less.”

  Sandy told Junior that when she was seven months pregnant with him, she stopped Senior from pistol-whipping a man on 14th Street over ten dollars. But it wasn’t the money that got Senior hot. It was what happened afterward that sent Senior back to his car, looking for his pistol beneath the passenger seat. “Nigga, suck my dick!” the man told Senior in front of his pregnant wife.

  “I was as big as a house. I wobbled out of the car with you kickin’ inside me. Took me forever to get to him, but I did,” Sandy laughed. “I’ve seen him whoop men for looking at me too long. Once, I saw him fight two cops and take away one of their guns. It’s a wonder they didn’t kill him. He had one hell of a temper when we were younger, and he still does,” she continued, “but one thing I can’t ever deny about him, Junior. We fight. We cuss. We argue like cats and dogs, but I’ll be damned if your daddy doesn’t love me in his own little street corner way.”

  Sandy had told Junior she’d met his daddy on a cold, rainy night in March of 1971 when she was seventeen and Senior was twenty-two. Back then, Senior was part of a local street gang in North Philly – the 14th Street Gang. Known for shaking down heroin dealers and intimidating rookie cops, he was a formidable hood on the north side of town. In the trunk of his Burgundy ’66 Cadillac El Dorado, under the wheel well, was a baseball bat and pistol-grip shotgun. Beneath the passenger seat was a loaded .38 revolver. At six-foot-five, Senior rarely needed a weapon to make his point clear. Like Junior, he began his life as a quiet kid who enjoyed drawing but hated school. His father, Russell, had been dragged from his car while on the way home from work and beaten to death by racist white cops and Klu Klux Klan members when Senior was just seven years old. Senior’s mother, Gloria, died of cancer when he was ten. Before her death, she sent both Senior and his half-brother, Ossie, off to live with her sister in Whitfield, North Carolina. Aunt Odessa (or Dessie, as the boys called her) did her best to raise the boys on her own in rural North Carolina. Dessie got over easy with Ossie but failed to control Senior, the oldest and most impacted by the death of his parents. By the time Senior was twelve, he had dropped out of school. By thirteen, he stood over six-foot-one and weighed closed to two hundred pounds. At a farmers’ market in the summer of 1962, he nearly killed another man he suspected was trying to cheat Dessie on a basket of cotton.

  “Turn him loose, goddammit!” Dessie pried him off. “What in the world is wrong with you, boy?! What’d you go’on and do that for, Leonard?”

  “He was tryin’ to cheat you, Aunt Dessie!” Senior complained. “Look in his hands. Ain’t nothin’ in there but some skin. I bet it ain’t nothin’ in his pockets neither!”

  As it turned out, Senior was right. The man had no intention of paying Dessie for the basket of cotton but had somehow overlooked her six-foot-tall nephew standing behind her.

  In another instance, Senior had his way with a Whitfield police sergeant in a small river. While walking home from the store with his brother along a dirt road, the sergeant stopped the boys and accused them of robbing the store. Finding no evidence, he continued harassing the boys and reverting to racist Jim Crow rhetoric. Irritated, Senior dragged the flailing sergeant off the road, through the woods, and down to the river stream for a quick swim.

  A year later, Senior placed the manager down at the gas station upside down in the trash for calling Ossie a “nigger” and broke a neighbor’s jaw for putting the moves on his precious Dessie. When two cops showed up to arrest Senior, now fifteen, he feared no man. He bounced the cops around Aunt Dessie’s house, destroying them both until they scurried from her devastated home. Scared for her nephew’s life in the South, Dessie sent Senior off to live with an old friend in Philadelphia along with his brother. Ossie joined Senior soon after.

  Trouble didn’t come looking for Senior when he arrived in Philadelphia at fifteen. Instead, he went looking for it. With his stellar street instincts and propensity to do whatever and whenever he wanted, Senior quickly attracted the attention of neighborhood gangs.

  “Yo, where you from, big man?” a kid asked him.

  “Norf Ca-liner,” he answered in his thick country accent. By Senior’s nineteenth birthday, he’d gained a reputation as the most prolific bone breaker in all North Philly.

  And then along came Sandy…

  Lonnie Sandra Woods was on her way to night school one rainy night in March of 1971 when Senior drove by in his Cadillac. Brother Ossie was passed out drunk, snoring in the passenger seat next to him. With his window down, Senior crept beside his future wife and offered her a ride.

  “What you doin’ out here, gal?” he asked. “Need a ride?”

  Sandy didn’t say a word.

  “Gal, I said whatcha doin’ out here,” Senior repeated, cruising beside her. “It’s rainin’ like hell, and it’s cold. Ain’t you cold?”

  Ignoring him, Sandy continued to walk.

  Determined to win her over, Senior drove off up the street and whipped his big Cadillac around the block. He dragged his brother Ossie from the passenger seat, placed him inside the trunk, and returned to where he last saw Sandy walking.

  “Hey there.” He blew on the horn, “I just dropped my brother off. You sure you don’t need a ride there, Ms. Lady? I ain’t gonna hurt you.
I just hate to see such a pretty thang walkin’ in the rain. The least you can do is let me give you a ride. I’ll even let you drive if you want to.”

  “No, thank you. I can walk,” Sandy responded.

  Senior then pulled his Cadillac over, shut off the engine, threw on his leather jacket from the backseat, and began to walk with her.

  “What are you doing?” asked Sandy.

  “Well, if you won’t let me drive you, I guess we just gonna be wet together,” said Senior.

  Senior talked the whole way, boring Sandy as she attempted to walk ahead of him. At one point, he removed his leather jacket and placed it onto her back. By the time they made it down to Sandy’s school, eight blocks from where they had first met, the two were soaking wet as they exchanged names and smiles.

  “What time you get out of class?” he asked. “You got a man?”

  “About eight,” she said. “Yeah, I do,” she giggled. “He’s overseas fightin’ in that white man’s war called Vietnam.”

  “Mmmhmm.” Senior put out his cigarette and exhaled a cloud of white dust.

  “Well, I’m gonna be your new man, now,” he said. “What kind of nigga lets his woman walk halfway across North Philly in the rain? That ain’t right. I’ll be back to pick you up.”

  Shocked by his candor, Sandy laughed as she disappeared into the building. Senior then ran back to his Cadillac in the pouring rain to find Ossie pounding on the roof of his trunk.

  “Man, what the fuck is wrong with you?!” he hollered as Senior let him out. “What the fuck you put me in the truck for, Leonard?”

  “Cool out, Oz. I got a girlfriend, now. Her name is Sandy. Sweet gal.”

  “Sandy? Sweet gal?” Ossie laughed. “What girl is dumb enough to date you?”

  “Any girl dumb enough to be walkin’ by herself in a place like North Philly at night without a man like me beside her. That’s who.”

  After their riff, Senior dropped Ossie off at a friend’s house not far away. He removed his .38 revolver from the floor of his Cadillac along with his pump shotgun and baseball bat in the well of his trunk.