The Pact

by Sampson Davis

  With the exception of Andre, my older brothers and sisters were all grown, in their twenties and thirties, when our parents broke up. But they never really left home for good. They would move out, live on their own for a few months or years, then move back, sometimes with their spouses and children. When it came to the family and our house, Moms had an open-door policy. She extended that policy to cousins and uncles, who also moved in with us at different times when they had no place to go. My cousin Thurmond, who lived with us off and on, was the kind of guy who lived for the moment. If he got paid on Friday, he was broke by Monday. When I got older and started working, he sometimes asked me if he could borrow $10 or $20 until his next check. He paid me back double. Sometimes I suspected that his true intention was to put a few extra dollars in my pockets. Our small house always seemed to be teeming with people. Once, I counted twelve, which included two older brothers and their wives and children, a cousin, Carlton, and me. And none of these occupants was financially stable enough to help buy food or pay the bills. Providing for so many must have put a lot of stress on my mother, but I don’t ever recall her kicking her grown children or relatives out of the house because they didn’t contribute.

  My parents had two generations of children: Kenny, Roselene, and Fellease; then Andre, me, and Carlton. When Kenny was in his twenties and I was in preschool and elementary school, I worshipped him. He was a classy guy who always wore the latest fashions and listened to good ’70s music—the Temptations, the Whispers, you name the black artists of the day and Kenny was in touch with their music. He went into the Army for a brief stint after high school and soon afterward had two sons, one my age and the other three years older. He married a woman named Ruthie and lived with her in the Seth Boyden Projects, a set of redbrick, low-rise apartments a few blocks from our house. Ruthie died suddenly in the late 1980s, and Kenny’s life seemed to plunge into despair. He drank all the time and became belligerent and mean. When he showed up at our house, he ranted and raved, cursed, and threatened our mother. I went from worshipping him to hating him. I realize now that I just hated what had become of him.

  I’ve never gotten to know the real Roselene. Moms likes to talk about how smart and productive her oldest daughter once was. She finished high school and in the early 1970s landed a job with the Mutual Benefit Company, which at the time was considered a major accomplishment for a black woman without a college degree. But that is not the Roselene I remember. I do recall trips with her to the movies and to her church. But the Roselene I remember most suffered from some kind of mental problem that made her paranoid and compulsive. She would wash her hands with Pine-Sol a hundred times a day. She wouldn’t touch a doorknob if she had seen someone touch it before her, and she wouldn’t sit on a toilet seat without scouring it if someone had sat on it since her last cleaning. She would walk around mumbling to herself, wearing the same clothes day after day. We tried many times to have her committed to the hospital for treatment of her mental condition, but she insisted she didn’t have a problem, and the hospital sent her right back home. I never knew how to talk to her or how to reach her. With age, she seems to have improved somewhat, but her illness and the twenty-one-year age difference between us created a distance that, sadly, time has yet to close.

  Of all my siblings, I was closest to Fellease, who later changed her name to Fenice. She is fourteen years older, but she always had time for me. She used to take me out for ice cream or to the movies. She was sassy and fun-loving, and she always knew the hottest song and the coolest new dance. On the street, she had a reputation as a sister not to mess with without some serious hell to pay. For me, Fel’s little brother, her rep offered a measure of protection. Fellease dropped out of high school, married young, divorced, married again, and followed her new husband to his U.S. Army assignment in Hawaii, where she returned to school and earned a high-school-equivalency diploma. They split up a few years later, and she moved home. I was about fourteen when she returned. That’s when we really grew close. We stayed up many nights until the early hours of morning, talking, playing spades, Pokeno, and Monopoly. She was a natural storyteller, and I loved listening to her talk about life in the family before I was born.

  Fel always kept a job, so she would move out for a few months, then move back in when she fell on hard times. She was functional, but she was also a drug addict. I suspected it long before I knew for sure. Once, soon after she moved back home from Hawaii, she received a package from the islands in the mail. Moms assumed it was for her and tore into it. Inside was an Alka-Seltzer box packed with a pound of weed.

  Another time, I was looking for something in the room where Fel slept and found a burnt spoon and a crack pipe. The pipe was a tiny nip bottle of Bacardi rum with a long, thin glass tube attached. I left it there and pushed what I had just confirmed to the back of mind with everything else I didn’t want to face. I had a make-believe spot in the back of my mind—I thought of it as a trunk or Pandora’s box—where I placed my bad experiences, stored them, and sealed them forever (or so I thought). When my parents argued, what I saw and heard went into that box. When my dad left, what I felt went into the box as well. I rarely cried. Later, I would meet someone who would help me open that box and for the first time deal with all that was in there. It would nearly scare me to death.

  In the years to come, my sister’s addiction and reckless ways would get the best of her. And I would be saddled with the guilt of being unable to help.

  Andre is the most stable of my older siblings. He reminds me of our mother. He’s a hardworking man quick to open his door to a struggling family member or friend. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and married at the age of seventeen, but he went to work for the city of Newark as a groundskeeper in the beautiful Weequahic Park in 1987 and has been there ever since. He and his wife were already parents by the time they got married, but the marriage ended in a bitter divorce after just five years. Andre met someone else, had a second daughter, and has maintained a steady relationship with the child’s mother for the past seven years.

  Just four years older than I am, Andre was the brother I wanted to follow around the neighborhood. But who wants a little brother tagging along? He often pulled tricks to get rid of me. He’d say, “Marshall, go to the house and get your toys while we wait for you.” When I came back, of course, he and his friends would be gone. He mostly hung out with his god-brothers, Orlando and Edwin, and other neighborhood friends, Frank, Billy, Willie, Modesto, and Leslie.

  One day I managed to end up with them at a small grass park that had several benches, basically green wooden slats held up by concrete pillars. The benches had fallen apart, and we decided to fix them. Back then we didn’t have video games and had to use our imagination and make up games for fun. I suppose we considered ourselves construction workers.

  I was told to hold the concrete slabs while the others placed the green slats into the hole to reconstruct the bench. Here I was, just six years old, trying to support a 200-pound piece of concrete. The concrete slab began to tilt. From this point everything seemed to happen in slow motion. My brother and his friends turned toward me, but they were helpless. Within seconds—but it felt like an eternity—the slab came crashing down on my Keds. Even with all my energy and quickness, I hadn’t managed to move my foot fast enough. Andre and Leslie carried me home. It was a hot summer day, and my brother and his friends were sweating even more, wondering what was going to happen to them when they got me back home. This is why Andre didn’t want me hanging with him—he would be held accountable. See, the way my mother disciplined us would be considered child abuse today. Let’s just say the belt on our behinds was a luxury. We managed to sneak into the house, bypassing the kitchen, dining room, and living room without being noticed by my mother. We were trying to perfectly time when we would tell her that my poor foot had been flattened like a flapjack. I was sitting on the couch, and I had hidden my foot with my black sneaker, now purple and red from the blood seeping through i
t and onto the side of the sofa. Moms came downstairs. She had been cleaning and had a broom in her hand. This would not have been the opportune time to tell her, but the silence was killing us, and I could hide my bloody leg only so long.

  “What the hell happened to your brother, Andre?” she asked.

  Before he could finish explaining, she was tearing his butt up with her broom.

  My parents took me to Beth Israel Hospital, where a cast was put on my foot. It was painful at first, but there were some advantages. I got to hang out in my parents’ bedroom for a few weeks while everyone waited on me. Best of all, I didn’t have to go to school. I just knew this must be what it felt like to be a king.

  Before taking me to the hospital, Moms also let Leslie’s mother, Mrs. Richardson, know what had happened. He, too, received a beating, courtesy of my foot injury. See, Mrs. Richardson had been in the Army—had even lost an eye during a war—and it was pretty well known that she would literally box her sons whenever they did something wrong.

  Carlton tried to latch on to me the way I tried to latch on to Andre. But, like Andre, I wasn’t having it. In retrospect, it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t let him hang with me, especially in my late teen years. Those were tough years in which I did many things that now make me ashamed. But I still regret not spending more time with my baby brother, who probably suffered the most when Pop left. After the divorce, Carlton’s grades dropped, and he seemed to lose interest in school. Always a chunky kid, he was the brunt of teasing among kids in the neighborhood. The constant humiliation destroyed his confidence. He was placed in a special-education program at the same high school I attended, and he graduated in 1994. He works infrequently and still lives at home with Moms. But he’s a good guy who managed to resist the seduction of drugs and easy money. Given the environment in which he was raised, that is no small accomplishment.

  Crack hit the streets of Newark like a cyclone in the 1980s, and the area around the Dayton Street Projects was swept up in it. By 1987, my freshman year in high school, drug dealers were hustling vials of the drug on every street corner. They were mostly young guys who had either dropped out of school or lost interest in it and saw a quick way to fill their pockets with wads of cash, buy expensive gold chains, Nike and Adidas sneakers, clothes and cars, and attract women who before had been out of their reach. Violent crimes—muggings, robberies, carjackings, and murders—skyrocketed. Dealers protected their turf with automatic weapons. Shootouts on the street or playgrounds sometimes sent us running for cover. A walk to the corner store in broad daylight might result in a gun pointed to your head and robbery, or worse. Bullet-riddled bodies found in abandoned stairwells, and the faces of teenagers on the obituary pages of the newspaper, became the daily toll of what felt like war.

  I saw many mothers become crack addicts, hustling their bodies to stay connected to their new white god. Burglars broke into our house four times. Each time, they tripped the lock on the window or the door, entered the house, walked right over us while we were sleeping, and left the window or door wide open on their way out. The next morning we discovered belongings missing: a television, a stereo, anything that could be pawned for quick cash.

  Once, when my uncle T.J. and aunt Doretha were visiting, burglars broke into the basement, where Carlton and I slept, made it upstairs to the kitchen, and were on their way to the living room when Uncle T.J., who was sleeping there on a pullout sofa, began chasing them. They dashed out of the closest door. He ran outside to his car, got his gun, and chased them down the street. But they managed to get away.

  My two best childhood friends, Noody and Will, lived across the street in the projects. So, despite Moms’s warnings to stay on my side of the street, I spent all of my free time there. We attended Dayton Street Elementary School, and after school and on weekends we played basketball on its outdoor court. Or we’d play football in open areas of the projects.

  One of our favorite games was sponge ball, which is played similar to baseball but with a hard, spongy ball. I would mimic different pros when we played. When I pitched I was Dwight Gooden from the Mets, when I batted I was Don Mattingly or Rickey Henderson. I went so far as to copy those guys’ batting stances. Noody, who batted left, would be Darryl Strawberry, who is also a lefty slugger, or Nolan Ryan, a power pitcher with a wicked fastball and an off-pace curveball.

  My next-door neighbor, whom we simply knew as Mr. Brown, often watched the two of us playing sponge ball from his window. He had been an avid baseball player in his day and was impressed by our dedication. Once, he even took Noody and me to a Mets game and bought us hot dogs. He didn’t know it, but that was my first time attending a professional baseball game. I had the time of my life.

  Noody and I both had dreams of someday making it to the majors. When I played on my high school baseball team, the coach told me I was one of his best players. But our sports program was seriously lacking compared to teams in some of the suburbs and surrounding areas. When we played teams from Cedar Grove, Montclair, and Bloomfield, we weren’t prepared. Those schools had their own gyms, manicured fields, and dedicated pitching, catching, and field coaches, while we had run-down fields, used equipment, and often not even enough players.

  Noody would get to live part of our dream, though. The father of a Hispanic guy who lived in his building took a liking to both of us and asked us to play on his team in the Pony League, where he was a coach. I was fourteen, one year older than the cutoff age, but Noody, who was two years younger, was able to play. It didn’t take long for me to see his skills develop. Noody would eventually get a baseball scholarship to Essex Catholic High School and, while I was away at college with George and Rameck, he would land a baseball scholarship at Fairleigh Dickinson University. But unlike me, he was without a built-in support network of friends. Homesick, Noody returned after his freshman year to what he knew, the Dayton Street Projects.

  When we were kids, sports saved us many times from the dangers in our neighborhood. We’d play ball behind the school or in the courtyard of the projects while gunshots rang out around the corner. Sometimes, though, the danger unfolded right in front of us.

  One day, Noody and I bought a sponge ball from a neighborhood store for a dollar and headed back to the projects to play. We stopped at Building 6, where Noody lived. The fading “X” spray-painted on the wall next to the stairwell marked the strike zone for the pitcher.

  As we played, we saw a familiar drug dealer enter the stair-well with a man we didn’t recognize. The man wasn’t from the neighborhood, which probably meant he was a customer. Seconds after he got inside, another drug dealer sneaked in from behind and began to beat the man with a bat. The two dealers then snatched the man’s money and ran. Noody and I watched the whole scene, then went back to playing sponge ball. We had seen it many times before.

  The sounds of gunshots and screeching cars late at night and before dawn were as familiar to us as the chirping of insects must be to people who live in the country. In broad daylight we often saw young guys, barely old enough to see over the steering wheel, speeding down Ludlow Street in stolen cars. Sometimes, a trail of speeding police cars would be on their tail.

  I was in the sixth grade when I awakened one morning to a loud crash outside. Minutes later, the wail of sirens filled my room. I jumped up and rushed outside. Down the street, about a block from my house, a car had crashed into a utility pole. The pole lay across the smashed front window and hood of the car. As paramedics pulled the driver from the car, I recognized him as a guy who had gone to my school—he was no more than twelve years old. He had been speeding down the street in a stolen car when he lost control. Now he was dead.

  This is the backdrop against which I lived. You see it enough, and it becomes normal. Some parts of the life even become exciting. How can a mother’s pleas compete with the thrill of having wads of cash handed to you when your pockets are empty and the pantry is bare? Sure, you see cats your age dying all the time, but you figure that’s the
price you pay for being born poor. And you accept your fate, unless someone or something convinces you that you have the power to change the script.

  Even as early as elementary school, the pressure was on me to do what the other neighborhood boys were doing. The pressure was subtle: participate, or feel like a chump and risk being isolated. When I was about seven, the big thing was to run into Jack’s, a neighborhood grocery, and steal Icees. My friends were always bragging about how easy it was. I was in the store one sweltering summer day with a friend and decided I wanted a large cherry-flavored Icee, which cost fifty cents. The problem was, I had no money. I opened the freezer, slipped the big, cold cup into my shorts, and walked casually toward the door with my friend. Suddenly, I felt a pair of huge hands on the back of my arm. One of the store’s owners, a big, burly Hispanic man over six feet tall, pulled my friend and me to the back of the store.

  “Open your pants,” he demanded.

  “No,” I shot back.

  He grabbed my shorts and the Icee clunked to the ground. My heart was thumping. I thought for sure I was about to die. The next thing I knew, I was face-to-face with two snarling dogs. They were German shepherds, and they looked big enough to eat me alive. I screamed for mercy. In his thick Spanish accent, the owner was shouting something about letting the dogs tear me to pieces if I ever tried to pull that trick again. I could have sworn the dogs were licking their chops when the owner suddenly let us go. We flew out of the store. I didn’t have much of a taste for stolen Icees after that.

  But it wouldn’t be the last time I followed friends into trouble. It would take years for me to learn that friendship can lift you up, strengthen and empower you, or break you down, weaken and defeat you. In the meantime, though, I kept getting mixed up with neighborhood guys who had lost all hope that their lives would ever be different from what we all saw around us every day.