Brothers (and Me)

by Donna Britt

  Whatever the rationale for these men’s “punishment,” black women knew them as guiltless, or at least worthy of the benefit of the doubt. They were ours. If we didn’t fight to preserve their innocence, who would?

  Feeling all of this, I grabbed for a tissue. And whispered to Dr. Silon, “I don’t want people to think he deserved it.”

  Regarding me with gentle eyes, she said, “The man you’ve described to me was sensitive and kind. He protected his little brother from his older brother’s attempt to make him use drugs. He counseled addicts. He appreciated you, helped you love yourself. Every day, I listen to women speak of brothers who are very different, whose behavior wasn’t loving or kind. Nothing you learn about Darrell will change who he was to you.

  “It’s okay to let him have his complexity.”

  Wiping my welling eyes, I knew she was right.

  I started where I always had: with questions. At first, they were addressed to those whose remembrances were unlikely to wound me: Bruce, with whom I often spoke but seldom about our brother; Melech, whom I barely talked with at all; and Mom, whom I had for years discouraged from bringing up Darrell. Finally, I contacted Darrell’s friends, boys-turned-men with whom I’d hadn’t spoken in thirty years.

  “Tell me what you remember about him,” I said, steeling myself.

  “Remember the blue Mustang?” Bruce asked. And just like that, I did. Royal blue, a 1970 model with an eight-track tape player from which Hendrix, Parliament/Funkadelic, and Santana blasted. Darrell drove left-handed, Bruce reminded me, and shifted with his right, a move so cool that Bruce mimicked it when he bought a car. Bruce reminded me of the pair of huge speakers, the rock-concert type as tall as I was, in Darrell’s bedroom. And he related the time Darrell approached him, his music protégé, saying, “I got some free tickets to a concert. Never heard of the group, but you wanna go?” Bruce said, “Sure. What’s their name?” When Darrell said, “Kiss,” Bruce shrugged. Whatever. “It was one of the best nights of my life,” he recalled. “The lighting, the candelabras, the makeup, the group in all-black leather with their funk moves dancing across the stage. It was Kiss’s first national tour, in a little movie theater in Hammond, Indiana.”

  Melech had never told anyone what he was doing the moment he heard Darrell had died: smoking pot with some street types when a drug dealer who also happened to be a cop arrived. “He comes in and says, ‘I think your brother has had an incident. You need to go down to the police station,’ ” Melech recalled. “That’s how I found out. I went [to the morgue] and viewed the body.” Long pause.

  “It was just shocking to see someone who’s alive… who’s not alive.”

  His closest brother’s death “tempered and bent all of our lives,” Melech continued. “You put a rock on a plant, and the plant will bend to grow around that obstacle. The rock has a steering effect that cannot be ignored.” And though he, too, wondered if drugs Darrell had taken much earlier had triggered an altered state, Melech said, “I chose the biblical perspective. My understanding of the Creator comforts me, tells me that it was Darrell’s time. I believe he made it, that he will be in the Kingdom.”

  Mom welcomed the chance to talk about her departed son. When he was killed, she said, the surreality of the circumstances made her replay everything she knew about her son through a new lens. She’d thought back to Darrell’s high school graduation, how after the ceremony he had bopped joyfully down the aisle inviting girls on either side to kiss him. “Give me some lips!” he had called to them. Had he been high, she wondered, or just excited? He’d told her he left college because he couldn’t decide on a major. But someone whispered to her that he’d fallen for a married woman. Back home from Bloomington, Darrell had stayed in his room for a week, she said, emerging only to eat. Had his heart been broken?

  Darrell’s friends were harder for me to reach out to. These men knew my brother in ways I hadn’t. What might they reveal? How would they feel about opening a long-closed wound? It took me a week to unearth their phone numbers. Yet when I considered actually dialing them, my heart’s terrified dance stopped me.

  Another week passed. Finally, I couldn’t put it off any longer.

  I called Vernon first. Vernon Williams had met Darrell in kindergarten. I can still see him back in the day, wearing thick Clark Kent glasses and oozing confidence. Now an Indianapolis public relations exec, Vernon seemed thrilled to talk about his first best friend, whom he alternately called Darrell and Chip, as in “chip off the old block.” “Block” had been Melech’s college nickname; Darrell’s had been an homage.

  “We were ‘boy boys,’ getting dirty in foxholes, Indian wrestling,” Vernon began. “We played a game called burnout: take a hardball and stand forty feet from each other and throw to each other. First at a moderate speed, then harder, until we were almost breaking each other’s hands. Invariably Darrell and I would be the last two.”

  From the time they were small, Darrell “was a little better at every sport than the rest of us,” Vernon said. As teens, they’d attended a frigid doubleheader at Comiskey Park, the Sox versus the Angels, for which their thin jackets were inadequate. Yet “neither of us considered leaving,” Vernon said. “It was a doubleheader. We stayed till both games were over and nobody was left in the stands.”

  Our former neighbor Lanel Chambers surprised me, saying he believed Darrell should have pursued a baseball career. “He was a very good hitter, very good,” said Lanel, a sportswriter for the Gary Crusader. “If I could have laid out his life, he would have made a living in baseball, as a player or coach. I wish he had gone to college near a minor league team where he could have tried out.”

  Lanel had become buddies with our family when we moved to the new house Daddy and his friends had built. He can still envision my brother on the rec diamond, where they played. “Darrell batted left-handed, and he could hit a fast pitch. If you ever see film of Ken Griffey or Barry Bonds, they’re very similar to him. When he came to the plate, people started backing up. One time in a big sandlot game, I was trying to pitch to him in a way he wouldn’t get a home run. He said, ‘That’s right, you got to be careful, pitching to this dangerous hitter!’ ”

  Each of Darrell’s friends recalled what I’d remembered most clearly about him. “Everybody was funny sometimes, but Darrell was one of the funny people who could make people burst out laughing given the slightest opportunity,” Vernon said. Because he was “a very keen observer of the world, politics and society,” said Lanel, “you couldn’t predict what he might joke about.”

  Attending Indiana University expanded Darrell’s worldliness, Lanel said. “We talked even more about current events, history.” His humor, too, seemed to expand.

  “Chip was the funniest human being I ever met,” said Yochanan Israel, whose name was John McCorkle when he and Darrell met as Alpha Phi Alpha pledges. Yet “he could turn his humor on and off like a faucet. Serious and funny, serious and funny. If you got on his bad side, he could cut you up with words, slice you to bits. He didn’t even have to cuss.”

  Cornell Collins, who also pledged Alpha with Darrell, remembers those days as “a golden era.”

  “Vietnam was winding down, but there were still protests, almost every day a different demonstration,” Collins recalled. “Most of the students from Gary hadn’t been around whites. In Bloomington there were white kids our age from all over the state and the country. Blacks could mingle with them, be friends, exchange ideas. The environment was so stimulating.”

  Dave Shelton had also joined Alpha’s eighteen-man “Sons of Satan” pledge line, living with his brothers in the organization’s very hip frat house blocks from the center of campus. Shelton remembers Darrell had a corner room; its door was always open to a wide variety of friends, male and female.

  And though Darrell had dated several women, his friends told me, none of the relationships was serious.

  “He was a constant dreamer,” Israel recalled. “Very few women could understand
him, and he could care less. They weren’t the kind of females who could peel the layers off to get to who Chip really was. So they just passed through. At that age, I was of a similar mind-set. We weren’t really trying to settle down.”

  Most of my brother’s running buddies paused before introducing the subject that most worried me: Darrell’s drug experimentation. “I suppose college is where Darrell discovered getting high” is how Lanel brought it up.

  Though Lanel saw drugs as “too scary” to explore, Darrell had no such fears. “He had this basic fascination with life, he was sampling it,” Lanel said. “But he had good sense about it. He would tell people, ‘Don’t do that drug’ or ‘Stay away from that quantity.’ He warned people against risky combinations. Darrell was a reader; he would research and make his decisions based on that. He essentially knew what he was doing,”

  Collins suggested that I put my brother’s drug dabbling “in perspective,” reminding me that he was doing it at a time in which millions of young people were getting high. “We all were doing our experimentation, and Darrell was Chipper the Tripper,” he said. “It was no secret he was into this acid thing.”

  Said Israel: “We’re talking 1977. Everybody was doing drugs on some level. Chip loved LSD, and he would get the best. He loved the fact that it could take him somewhere else, to a higher state of consciousness. When he went in his room, closed the door, put Hendrix on the box, you knew.”

  By 1974, Darrell and Vernon had returned to Gary, where they helped found a nonprofit group chartered in the state of Indiana called People’s Action Coalition and Trust, PACT, “probably the city’s foremost group of young people,” Vernon said. Somehow, I had forgotten about it.

  “The mayor, councilmen, all the movers and shakers, participated,” Vernon continued. “We wanted to give something back; we’d always talked about issues confronting black people. We had Save the Children Week, focusing on children’s health issues, a Mr. and Mrs. Senior Citizen pageant, a recreational program for kids.”

  About that time, Lanel and Darrell, both twenty-three, were lounging in our basement, sipping wine, and watching The Midnight Special on TV when Lanel suddenly said, “The Indians sure were stupid.” He’d been considering how America’s indigenous peoples had embraced the newcomers who would decimate them. “And Darrell stopped me and said, ‘No, man, that’s not true at all,’ ” Lanel recalled. “The Indians knew how to live off the land. They were into nature, really smart.’ That moment will stick with me forever.”

  When Darrell was killed, Vernon, then a reporter for the Gary Post-Tribune, poked around, heard vague suggestions that Darrell may have attended a party the previous night, though his autopsy showed no evidence of alcohol or drugs. To Vernon, only one thing seemed clear:

  “If it had been a white young man, more effort would have been made to talk him through it, even if he was belligerent.”

  What happened in the ravine “illustrated what Chip and I had talked about all the time,” Vernon continued. “When a black person tears a Stop sign down, it’s vandalism. When it’s a white kid, it’s a prank. If there’s physical contact from a black person, it’s assault. White kids are just ‘roughhousing.’ Two sets of standards. Even if there was some behavior that wasn’t ideal, cops should always think about how they can defuse the situation. I don’t think there was a clear threat to the safety of the officers. I believed then and I believe now, it was a matter of them panicking when confronted with the threat of a black man they couldn’t explain or control.”

  Vernon paused. “I will say that occasionally Darrell had a temper. And it wasn’t incredible, it wasn’t like he needed anger management. If the police were approaching him like a criminal, I can envision him challenging their position, their over-aggressiveness, their presumption that he’s doing something he’s not doing. And I could see them overreacting. That’s the best I can do to explain that bizarre set of circumstances.”

  Israel’s explanation is simpler. Darrell’s best college buddy and the man who lived with him for months in Miller believes the police account is an out-and-out falsehood. “I knew this guy. He wasn’t out there with no pot on his head in the woods,” Israel said. “I don’t care how high Darrell got, he was never stupid…. I lived with him, I knew him.” The police account, he felt certain, “was a lie. Darrell could tell you which drugs not to mess with, which was primo. He knew what he was doing. He was absolutely discriminating. It was a straight setup. It had to have been. There was no reason for the scenario the newspaper described. It didn’t make any sense.”

  He’ll never forget living with Darrell in Miller—their long, profound conversations, how Melech would stay up all night “painting these big wall murals” in their apartment. One December night, Israel and Darrell decided to walk to the beach at Lake Michigan a block away.

  “The sand was like concrete, it was so cold,” Israel recalled. “There was a full moon over the lake.” Looking out over the water, Israel couldn’t believe his eyes. Were those people marching on the water? He asked Darrell, “ ‘You see that, man?’ ” Darrell said, “ ‘Wow, look at that!’ ”

  “The waves had actually frozen in midwave,” he said, his voice still marveling. “And we stood looking at it. The frozen waves looked like people. I remember him saying, ‘That makes you think about what the possibilities are. If water can freeze like that…”

  Israel inhaled. “Darrell had a window to other stuff that other people didn’t have,” he said. “He saw through a window other people couldn’t see through. I miss him.”

  Lanel still remembers the last time he saw Darrell. About a month before he died, “we played basketball at Kennedy-King Middle School,” he recalled. Darrell “seemed to be his basic self—there were no clues that he was going through any changes.” Only one thing struck Lanel as odd: watching Darrell get into his Mustang to drive to his Miller apartment as he prepared to go the opposite way.

  “We had spent so many years getting in the same car. Going the same direction.”

  Listening to these men, I felt my brother again. Saw his quick-stepping walk, heard his palpable excitement when he spoke of anything that moved or delighted him. Darrell had been a great athlete, but his gentleness with me made me forget his strength, how formidable an opponent he was, how intensely he played on our backyard court.

  His friends’ words empowered me enough to face the plastic duvet bag. More than a year after realizing I had to write about Darrell, I’d brought the bag to Rancho La Puerta, where I could be alone with this terrifying treasure. Sitting on my bed, I unzipped it as warily as Pandora opening her box. Nestled inside were dozens of folded, wrinkled, and torn papers, most in a cardboard El Producto cigar box emblazoned with a lyre-strumming senorita. Did Darrell smoke cigars? Designed to hold fifty 15-cent cigars, the box was stuffed with the dreams, hopes, and imaginative leaps of a searching-for-itself life.

  Handling these crinkled sheets like the most fragile parchment, I lifted them one by one from the box, placing them gently beside me. Once upon a time, Darrell had touched them, spilled himself onto them. Surely some wisp of him remained. Among the gems: a bill for $163.18 from Indiana University on Darrell S. Britt’s student loan and a handwritten letter from Darrell thanking the university “for your patience.” He had just started working at Bethlehem Steel, he wrote, and would soon repay them.

  The scribbled phone number, on lined paper, of a girl named Charlene. And one for Brittany on a torn-out calendar page (April 21, 1976). And a third number written on the most detailed hand-illustrated map I’d seen. Delicately drawn, the map was clearly the work of a motivated woman, including directional arrows, bends in the road, street signs, stoplights, and squares representing a playground and her building. Everything, in fact, but the illustrator’s name.

  A receipt from Jack’s Loan Office, Licensed Pawnbrokers, for “band ring and 2 speakers.” Darrell had gotten $25 for a thirty-day loan on his gigantic speakers.

  A parking tic
ket for being “parked against traffic”—for $2 (!). A notice for a “Summer Madness” party at the Gary Armory (“Come!!! Come!!!”). Bills from three auto repair shops for work on the Mustang totaling $310.74. Designs for a logo to represent the Pipe Fitters, a rock group Darrell planned to form in which Bruce would play guitar.

  A poem or song titled “Parachute,” written in pencil on stationery from the Hollywood Young Men’s Christian Association, where Darrell must have stayed in Los Angeles. Admitting he was once “foolish” to think “higher was better,” Darrell appears to have written these words for a friend dependent on drugs:

  I’d like to be your parachute, to help and bring you down

  For no one can live for long suspended from the ground

  I know it will be hard at first to mingle ’mongst earthly crowds,

  When you’ve lived so long on the stars, and danced across the clouds.

  The poem’s conclusion states that Darrell had “flown through the skies alone, and no one broke my fall. The trip was rough and I could have died. But instead I came out strong.”

  There were dozens of white sheets torn from pads inscribed with the logo of the Indiana State Employment Service, where Mom had worked. One was filled with scribbled song titles; others held reflections labeled “Poetry.” The largest number were identified as “Comedy” and held notes for sketches that never made it onstage.

  Darrell had written one-liners, opening gambits, and what looked like reminders for longer sketches, stuff like “My hair’s so hard, Moses couldn’t part it” and “Don’t think of yourselves as an audience. Think of yourselves as my psychiatrist.” One said simply, “You don’t have to make sense to be understood.”