All I know is that Mike-Mike was once a sweet kid who could have grown up to be somebody important. He didn’t have one mean bone in his body. Mike-Mike could have been that beacon of light that his father was to Reggie and that Reggie was to me. Instead, he stands charged with multiple murders. At age twenty-five, he seems all but doomed.
BY THE TIME I hit my teen years, I too knew what it felt like not to have a father in the house.
Our household had survived, barely, an extended period when my father found a girlfriend and everyone knew it—even my mother. It started with phone calls. The phone would ring at a certain time of evening, and Pop would race to pick it up on the first ring. This was out-of-the-ordinary behavior for him. We soon suspected something was up.
Then Pop started disappearing regularly on weekends. He’d leave on Friday night and walk back in the door on Sunday without much of an explanation. Moms didn’t take kindly to this development. “Go see that other bitch, go ahead!” she would snap at him. I once saw her throw a brick at his car as he drove away.
When I was twelve, he finally moved out for good to live with his girlfriend, Thelma, whom he married a few years later. Although I would miss my father dearly and his departure would send our household into financial chaos, I breathed a sigh of relief that day. The house was finally peaceful.
Moms got served with divorce papers a few days later. When the papers arrived, she called her children in for a serious talk. By then, my three older siblings had moved out, so it was just the three youngest boys, Andre, me, and Carlton. Sitting us down in the living room, she let us know that our lives were going to change drastically. “Your father and I are divorcing. That means we won’t have his paycheck to rely on,” she warned us. “But we will survive, and I will make a way. I promise you that.”
Moms told us that day that we would always be her first priority. “I’m going to stand by you kids, and I will never leave you. You don’t ever have to worry about me bringing another man into this house.” That had to be a big sacrifice for her, ruling out the very idea of dating, but it gave soothing reassurance to the three of us. Although we had long expected that our parents’ fiery marriage would end in divorce, we still felt lost at the idea of life without Pop. Her words that day wiped away my worries that maybe somebody would steal Moms’s affections and cause her to run away and leave us behind, the way Pop had done. I don’t think I’ve ever admired Moms more than I did that day.
It was a sink-or-swim moment for Moms, and as time went on, I could see her changing and growing. It seemed as if she finally had a mission, and she was determined to fulfill it. She did whatever she could to make ends meet. She signed up for welfare, and even scoured the streets for cans and sold them to the scrap man. She made sure we had the things we needed, from back-to-school clothes to lunch money. She could have easily rolled over and gotten depressed from all the new worries piled on her, but my tiny mom, five feet tall, responded like a champ. There were plenty of single moms up and down our block who turned to drugs when the going got tough, but for Moms, that’s when she showed her inner strength. I loved seeing her bloom. She always let me know during those tough times that I was loved. I owe her so much.
She’s not perfect, but no one is. Perhaps her biggest limitation was that she couldn’t read. Her mother died when Moms was a little girl, so she dropped out of elementary school to help her father run his farm. As a result, Moms couldn’t read the electric bill, the newspaper, or even the divorce papers when they arrived. After Pop left, I helped Moms with everything from reading letters to paying the bills. When a homework paper had to be signed, I just went ahead and signed Moms’s name myself.
I’m proud of Moms for finally learning to read, at the age of sixty. She was a grandmother by that time. In fact, being a grandma is what motivated her to do it. When Andre’s children began to read, it ate away at Moms that a new generation of children would realize she had never learned to read. So she taught herself to sound out words, and attended literacy classes at the local library. One of the first books she struggled through was The Pact. Moms wanted to get inside it and see what I had to say. She bravely tussled with the words on the printed page until their meanings became clear to her. I’m glad she got to read for herself how much I admire her.
Pop stayed in our lives peripherally. After he left, he moved into an apartment about twenty minutes away in Orange, a middle-class area. Andre, Carlton, and I saw him occasionally when he would stop by after work. Our conversations were no-frills Q&As, often with one-word answers on my part.
“How are things?”
“Good.”
“How was your day?”
I was tempted to reply, “Man, Pop, my day was awful. My life is pretty bad.” But there was no need to bother him with this. Really, what could he have done to change my situation? In order for him to help me, he would have had to step up and help improve my life, and he hadn’t done so up to that point. Now he was out of the house, and it didn’t seem as if anything good could come of talking about their divorce’s ugly aftermath.
Moms and Pop sniped about each other to us kids in a competition to destroy our respect for the other parent. “He ran out on you guys,” Moms complained. Pop would say things like “You know your mother’s crazy” when we were together. It seemed wrong when they carried on like that. I didn’t like it. But with Pop having relocated to a more well-to-do community, leaving us still stranded on Ludlow Street, I tended to side with Moms’s viewpoint.
Pop continued to pay the mortgage, but there were plenty of other expenses. At times, the electricity and phone would get cut off. I’ve seen my mother beg the public works guy to leave our lights on because she needed a few more days to scrape up a payment. Sometimes he would comply, but other times he had no choice but to cut us off. We didn’t have a working boiler, so we huddled around the fireplace for warmth and used space heaters in the bedrooms. As a kid, I thought it was normal for mothers to grab an axe and head outside to chop wood for the fireplace.
When Pop left, so did the car—which meant that to get to school, I had to walk ten minutes to the bus stop, catch the number 24 bus, ride six miles to downtown Newark, and then transfer to the number 13. Without a car, we would go grocery shopping and then borrow a shopping cart to transport our food back to the house. We went from quality meats to budget meals, from steaks to liverwurst and bologna (and I’m not talking Oscar Mayer).
My father had extricated himself from our household during a crucial time in my development. It was just in time for the thirteen-year-old-coming-of-age passage that Reggie had learned to dread. My older brothers and sisters were more independent and didn’t seem to miss our father’s presence so much. Carlton, who was also approaching his teen years, and I probably felt it the most. Carlton adored Pop, and as a child he would wait for Pop after work each day at the bottom of the driveway. It was their ritual. Pop would let Carlton sit on his lap as they motored slowly up the driveway together. During the divorce, Carlton cried through the whole court proceeding. He was eight at the time, and I could see the change in him instantly. His grades began to sink, and my mother got summoned to school regularly about Carlton’s behavioral and academic problems. She had so much going on that she depended on Carlton to resolve his own issues, but he was just a child and never truly recovered from the divorce.
At age sixteen, I woke up one summer morning feeling a searing pain in my back and abdomen. When she saw how much agony I was in, Moms called Pop. He arrived quickly and drove me to Irvington General Hospital. I remember the pain being so bad that I couldn’t help but moan and scream. At one point, a nurse showed up at my door and told me to hush my noise because I was disturbing other patients. Pop barked at her and told her to leave me alone. As it turned out, I had kidney stones that needed to be removed through surgery. I spent a week in the hospital. Eventually, the pain subsided, and it ended up becoming a blissful week because, for once, I got to bask in my father’s attention. Pop visit
ed me every day after work, bringing me ice cream and other surprises. I remember watching the clock to see when he would arrive. Just having him there gave me a sense that everything was going to be okay. Yes, I was a swaggering teenager by then, but I still responded like a little kid to my father’s attention. Looking back, I realize that I had the perfect opportunity at that moment to whisper to him, “I wish we could be like this all the time,” but I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to have to request his attention—I just wanted him to give it, unasked.
It’s only fair to say that Pop came through whenever I asked for help. He certainly helped pull me through my woes in college, when I was having the worst luck with cars. I had been the embodiment of cool in high school when I pieced together enough money to buy my first car, a used but fashionable Audi 5000. But it was a lemon, and it does nothing for your image when you have to hop out of your car and push it to the side of the road. So I sold the Audi and bought another car, which my sister Fellease promptly wrecked. Pop stepped in at that point and gave me $2,000 to help me get back on the road. He was proud of me for making it to college, and he knew I needed a car to get from Seton Hall to my part-time job. This time, I didn’t worry about driving something dazzling. I bought a used but reliable Honda Accord. That car lasted me from 1991 to 1997 and took me on many road trips to hang out and have fun with college students from different parts of the country. I traveled to Howard University’s homecoming and Atlanta’s “Freak-Nic,” and checked out the Penn Relays and spring break at Virginia Beach.
A few months later, I sent Pop a birthday card.
12/12/91
To Pop: What is the definition of a man? Who is to judge what represents a man? Well, if I was the decision maker, I would surely say you fit the description perfectly. You are there for me on a moment’s notice. I can call you anytime and you will do your best to fulfill my requests. I don’t take any of this kindness for granted. I truly appreciate all you have done for me in the past few months. You are truly the best father a son could wish for. Sometimes this is hard to say but I truly love you. If given the power to change any of your actions toward me, I wouldn’t. You are simply marvelous. Love, your son.
It’s hard to explain now why I would write something so flowery on his card. But I reliably sent my father birthday and Father’s Day cards, and I always took the time to fill them with long handwritten notes like that. My stepmother, Thelma, saved the cards faithfully and recently shared them with me.
Seeing them reminded me how hard I had tried to connect with him, in a way that he could accept. I wanted to let him know I yearned for a deeper relationship, although I didn’t know how to ask for it. I guess I believed the best route to open up a dialogue was through flattery. I wanted him to be a Cliff Huxtable kind of dad, even though I didn’t know how to come right out and say it. So I wrote out those heartfelt cards to the father I wished I had. Just maybe he’d think more about me and reflect on my words. Maybe he’d see how important he was to me, and I’d see more of him as a result. That was my strategy. But it was too subtle to be successful.
Without a father’s full-time presence to rein me in during high school, I was running the streets and coming home whenever I wanted. Moms often told me to “go to school, go to school, go to school,” and although I wondered why she would always say it three times, I did what she demanded, keeping a high grade-point average at University High. There, I spent most of my days with George and Rameck. Since we took most of our classes together, it felt natural for us to form a team. The three of us had a lot in common. We got good grades and loved having fun, from cutting class to pulling practical jokes. During our sophomore year, we started asserting ourselves as a group, coming up with a slogan, SKAT, which stood for Sophomores Kooling and Terrorizing. We even had a theme song of sorts; we would beat on the cafeteria tables while singing “Skat, skat, skat, skatadat dat,” leading our class in a rhythmic challenge to the juniors. The seniors didn’t pay us much mind since they believed themselves to be more mature. Still, we commanded their respect. As George, Rameck, and I spent our free time playing football, baseball, basketball, and blackjack, we carved a friendship that helped us see ourselves in a new light. We were cool, we were smart, we were leaders. My school family provided a marked contrast to my home life.
As I stepped off the bus into my ’ hood, I had to change my whole persona. I switched into an exterior rawness, and didn’t smile or laugh as much. Back then, it was extremely important for me to be a part of my peer group, and most of my neighborhood friends were using drugs and alcohol by high school. Many of my boys respected the fact that I had long taken a strong stance against drugs, so they didn’t push them on me. But I found that the older I got, the more the expectations escalated. All the time, every day, there were decisions I faced, as guys offered me opportunities to make some money by taking part in their drug operations.
Occasionally during high school I took part. The quarters earned from bagging groceries and selling golf balls just weren’t cutting it, and neither was the minimum wage I earned at age fifteen when I started working at Mc-Donald’s. I had to find a better way to make money. Some of the kids would steal cars and sell the rims and radios. Some had chop shop contacts and would take the vehicle to the factory for their payday. Poverty makes people resort to illegal tactics just to survive, and, now with my father out of the house, I didn’t want to be an added burden on Moms. It was tough enough for her. The monthly $400 welfare check didn’t go very far. Some can’t even imagine how tough it is to have no money in your pocket, an empty belly, and no way to satisfy that hunger.
I don’t use the economics I faced as an excuse. Every time I took part in the drug game, I knew I was making a bad decision. I don’t like to think of it as caving in as much as I think I failed to take a stand and, by default, got caught up in life-changing dilemmas. True, I didn’t initiate any of the illegal operations I took part in, but I didn’t say no when I could have. I should have been on alert to defend my values at all times. The same passive behavior I showed leads some to a death sentence.
In the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I was hanging out with some guys and we came up with the not-so-bright idea of robbing drug dealers to make some quick money. We preyed on young drug salesmen, pulling a gun on them, snatching their money, and driving off. The plan worked ridiculously well for a while. But one day we were in the middle of jacking some dope boys in nearby Montclair when a brown four-door Chevy pulled up with two plainclothed policemen inside. I knew my best bet was to act like I was a bystander. So I coolly started walking away from the scene and tried to calm my frenzied heart when one of my boys sprinted past me with police in hot pursuit. Each step he took, it seemed the cops took two. Their footrace ended a few yards from me. As I saw the police wrestle him to the ground, my face mirrored his as fear took over. I prayed he wouldn’t gesture toward me, letting the police know of my involvement. Snitching was frowned on, and I depended on our street credo at this moment. I managed to walk the rest of the short block while maintaining my composure. But as soon as I made the corner, I took off running.
When I got home, I poured out my story to Fellease. I couldn’t believe it: I was out of control, officially, and now my poor decision-making had caught up with me. I didn’t want to tell my mother; I knew she would be disappointed. Fellease suggested that I turn myself in the next morning.
When the next day dawned, I called the police department and learned that my “friends” who did get arrested had already given them my name. “You need to bring yourself in for questioning or we will come get you,” a police officer bluntly told me over the phone. Fellease drove me to the police precinct in Montclair, where the two of us were ushered into an interrogation room. The detective sat me down in the seat across from him. He insisted on calling me by my middle name, Marshall, which was the name I was known by in my neighborhood. Someone had definitely talked, I realized. I sat back as the detective described ev
ery detail of our crime. I was caught.
After the questioning, shackles and handcuffs were placed on my ankles and wrists. “He’s a juvenile. Can’t he be released into my custody?” Fellease protested. The detective let us know that since a gun was involved, I had to be detained and await trial. I asked for my phone call. I could hear the disbelief in Moms’s voice as I told her what had happened.
I was loaded into a van and taken to New Jersey’s most dangerous and notorious youth detention center, the Essex County youth house. There were eight of us in the van, all chained to one another. All the faces looked like mine: black, young, and confused. I was placed in the A unit, for teenagers accused of violent crimes or likely to be charged as adults. As I walked to my cell, I recognized faces from the Dayton Street high-rises and the nearby Seth Boyden projects. Some guys were shouting my name.
This was my new home, but I knew right away it wasn’t for me. Never have I been more miserable. I was shuffled off to my closet-sized room, which featured a urine-stained mattress on top of a rusty twin-bed frame, with a thin sheet and no pillow, and a sliver of a window. Morning couldn’t come quick enough. Although it was summer, for some reason my room was cold.
I was stunned to see a lot of guys walking around, seeming comfortable with being there. I couldn’t understand that. I met one guy who had been incarcerated three times previously for armed robbery and was familiar with the legal system. When I told him the charges against me, he said he was sure I was going to get off. About a week later, I saw the same guy beaten so badly that he had to be rushed to the hospital. A dude nicknamed Trouble had walked up to him and without any warning punched him in the face. Trouble was known for knocking people out in the facility. He would wait until you weren’t looking and blindside you with a punch to the jaw. Everyone just stared that day as blood from his victim’s mouth dripped down his shirt and formed a puddle on the floor. His jaw was hanging loosely by the skin, and although I was not a doctor yet, I knew it was broken. I knew it wouldn’t be long before someone came after me. In “juvey,” you had to show your skills as a fighter or else get victimized. The closest I came to a confrontation was one day in the recreation yard when a guy from another unit snatched the water bucket from me. He was sitting with a guy from Dayton Street who greeted me and quickly intervened to help dissolve the matter. “Chill. That’s Marshall, he’s cool,” he told the guy. I was prepared to fight, but in the end I didn’t have to.
The Bond: Three Young Men Learn to Forgive and Reconnect With Their Fathers Page 11