When my father was growing up, his family lived on Prince Street, across the street from the Stella Wright Projects where George grew up. It was one of Newark’s toughest neighborhoods, but his parents placed him in private schools: Queen of Angels Elementary and Essex Catholic High School. He took college-preparatory courses and maintained a high-B average. When he graduated in 1971, he snagged an academic scholarship to Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was one of just a handful of black students on campus, and he had a difficult time adjusting. This was the 1970s, that life-defining time in American history when black students throughout the country were growing Afros, throwing their fists into the air, and listening to the fiery rhetoric of leaders like Stokely Carmichael. Dad felt isolated from the movement at a school where so few others looked and thought like him. But he planned to major in chemistry and earned a 3.5 grade-point average in the first semester.
My parents were introduced by a childhood friend of my father’s when he returned from college for Christmas break. Dad had been a popular basketball player in high school, and my mother, still a high-school student, was a cheerleader at a different school from the one he had attended. They began dating, but my mother didn’t know that my father was already dating a cheerleader at another nearby high school. Both girls got pregnant around the same time, and my half-sister, Quamara, and I were born in 1973, just eighteen days apart.
Everything changed for my father, though, while he was visiting a friend during the same Christmas break. When he walked into the apartment, all of his friends were getting high. Someone offered him heroin, and he accepted, desperately wanting to be part of the in-crowd.
From the day he took that first shot of heroin, my dad was hooked. He began to shoot up whenever and wherever he could. He returned to Assumption College the following semester in January, but he got into a fight with a group of white guys, dropped out of college, and returned to Newark.
He enrolled in the Army but was discharged after two years when he was arrested for committing a robbery while on furlough. There were long periods during which he managed to function and hold a decent job while still dependent on drugs. But it would take him twenty-six years to conquer the addiction that drained him of any ambition beyond life on the streets. In 1997, after many attempts at rehabilitation, he left Newark and entered two different out-of-state rehabilitation programs back-to-back and began to turn his life around. He returned to Newark but to a different life. He now works at a drug rehabilitation center as a counselor.
When I was fourteen, Dad noticed that my life seemed headed in a similar direction to his, and he tried to intervene. I wasn’t using drugs, but I was hanging out with guys who, like me, were lost and acting like little thugs, trying to define our manhood by wild, foolish behavior. My father was not yet clean, but he tried to reach me. He told me he wanted my life to be better than his. He said drugs and jail were not the life he had planned for himself. He had just gotten sucked in and couldn’t find his way out. He told me he was living a lie and was tired of watching his friends die around him.
“Don’t let the same thing happen to you,” he pleaded.
His words touched me, but I was hardheaded. It would take a short stint in juvenile jail at age sixteen for me to realize finally that I was following my friends to a place of self-destruction.
I’m not sure when I began to suspect that my mother was abusing drugs. I just pieced together the signs on my own. I was eleven when my mother had a second child, my little sister, Mecca, whose father lived with us sometimes. But like most of the men in my mother’s life, he didn’t seem to be good for her. He, too, ended up behind bars. The stress of now having two little mouths to feed must have been too much for my mother. Mom was without work for a while, and we went on welfare. The bills went unpaid more often. We spent days at a time in apartments with no lights, air conditioning, or heat when the utility company turned off our electricity. I learned how to twist my little sister’s hair in ponytails, and I made sure she had something to eat, even if I had to call relatives for help.
Many nights, I cried myself to sleep. I tried to strike a deal with God.
“God, please, just get one of my parents off drugs,” I prayed.
I figured asking Him to save them both would be too much. I swore I would never use drugs.
My mother’s drug habit messed up everything. But the thing that hurt me most was that it robbed her of something I always thought came naturally: a mother’s instinct. The kind of instinct that makes a mother dash into the path of a speeding car or rush into a burning building to rescue her endangered child. The kind of instinct that makes a child feel protected. When my mother’s drug abuse got out of control, I no longer felt protected.
I was about thirteen when my mother told me that she used drugs. She said she needed them to help her deal with her pain. She had many unfulfilled dreams. In high school, she had wanted to become a court stenographer. It seemed like such an important job, and it intrigued her. But she had gotten pregnant and never pursued it. After graduating from high school in 1974, she’d studied business administration intermittently at Essex County College for about a year and a half, but she never finished. Later, she also told me that when she was a child, a relative had molested her.
My emotions toward her swung from pity to anger and back again.
At times, my mother accused me of loving my father more than I loved her. That wasn’t true. I did, however, feel less anger toward him. It is true that my mother struggled in part because my father didn’t always do his share to support me financially. Yet I blamed her for leaving me without a shield. Perhaps I was angrier at her because I loved her so much and I wondered whether she loved me back. I couldn’t help suspecting that she loved the drugs more.
I never questioned my father’s love. If I asked him for help, he never turned me away if he had it to give. If I happened to find him on his way to buy drugs and said, “Dad, I really need five dollars,” he’d give it to me. He may have been itching and scratching because he needed a fix so badly, and he may have had only $10 in his pocket. But he would pull it out and give me half. He might lie and say he had to keep the other half for food, and he might leave me and go steal some meat from a grocery store to sell and make up the half he gave me. But through a child’s eyes, I saw a father sacrificing his needs for his son’s.
At thirteen, I got my first job, sweeping hair from the floor of Bill’s Barbershop in Plainfield. I made just $20 a week, but I saved my money to help buy the things I needed, such as school clothes. Eventually, my mother completely stopped buying my clothes. She had no money and too many bills, she said. And besides, I was working and could take care of that myself. She wanted me to be a man. So, at thirteen, I was on my own.
When I needed someone to hear my frustration, I turned to Ma.
“It’s gonna be all right,” she always said.
Ma comforted me when I needed it, but she refused to baby me. She believed it was a good thing that I had to work and take care of myself. It taught me responsibility, she said. And she rarely gave me money.
Ma was a hardworking woman who didn’t believe in waste. She was still young, just thirty-seven, when I was born. I never saw her sick, and I never saw her cry. She rose every morning at four A.M., drank a cup of coffee in the kitchen, smoked a cigarette, and headed to her job at the post office in Newark. She drove a red Caprice Classic. I loved that car because it was so comfortable.
My grandmother was, without a doubt, the head of her household. But she always told me that a woman should make her man feel as though he is in charge, even if she is running things. After Theodore Green’s death, Ma met and married a man we all called Hook. He walked with a limp and was unable to work. He collected some kind of check for his disability and drank heavily. When he was drunk, he was kinder to me, often peeling off crisp bills, $10 and $20 at a time from the wad he kept in his pocket. But he usually kept to himself, preferring to watch television in h
is room rather than participate in our family card and board games.
While visiting Ma once, I found an old, frayed black-and-white picture of her when she was a teenager. She was stunning—slender with smooth, dark-brown skin and long hair the color of coal. Ma had aged with grace, growing a bit thicker with the years. She lost much of her hair and wore short, curly brown wigs over her own graying, braided locks.
Ma was religious, though she didn’t go to church much. She prayed at home, read her Bible regularly, and was quick to remind you what the good Lord said. When family members had problems, they came to Ma to fix them. She gave good advice, always straight-up and sometimes tough to swallow.
As a working teenager, I always wanted to buy the newest and most expensive sneakers to keep up with my friends.
“Look, you don’t have that kind of money,” Ma told me bluntly. “You don’t have a pot to piss in, nor a window to throw it out. Don’t try to live high off the hog.”
What usually followed was a winding tale about the good old days when she was a girl and owned just two pairs of pants and two shirts and had to wash—by hand, no less—one of the outfits every night to have clean clothes to wear the next day. That was the last thing I wanted to hear, but even now when I’m tempted to splurge, I hear Ma’s voice: Don’t try to live high off the hog.
In junior high school, I began acting in plays. I was in the seventh grade when I first joined the cast of The Wiz with a friend to be close to some pretty girls. My friend got a major role, the Lion, while I only got to play the gatekeeper. The next year, I auditioned and got to play a main character in an original play written by a woman we knew as Miss Scott, who lived in New York and was the friend of the school’s chorus teacher. The cast did so well that we traveled to Atlanta and performed the play for seven different schools. The applause from the audience was thrilling. It was the most incredible feeling I had ever felt. I began thinking about acting as a career.
Miss Scott was so impressed with her young actors that she decided to start an acting school in New York. I enrolled and caught a train to New York every Saturday morning to study acting with her. My mother said she didn’t have the money to pay for the lessons, but Miss Scott liked me so much she allowed me to attend anyway.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “We’ll work something out.”
Later, Miss Scott explained that each of us needed a portfolio to land acting roles, and she arranged for a photographer to take our pictures. The session would cost $150. I didn’t have it. I asked Ma for help. She and one of my aunts agreed to give me the money. But Ma warned me to leave the money at her house and pick it up the next morning on my way to New York. She feared my mother would either take it or make up a sob story and I would give it to her.
Ma believed in tough love. She told me that my mother would never realize that she needed professional help as long as we constantly bailed her out.
I took the money home anyway. As soon as I walked in the door, I realized we had no electricity. My mother was upset.
“What am I going to do?” she kept asking, as if I had some magical solution.
She had gone grocery shopping earlier in the week, and the refrigerator and freezer were full of food. She was afraid the food would spoil.
“You got any money?” she asked me.
At first, I lied. I wanted the pictures for my portfolio so badly, and I knew the money in my pocket was my only shot at getting them. I wouldn’t be able to go back to Ma again if I gave her hard-earned money away.
Guilt began nipping at my conscience. My baby sister wasn’t quite two years old, and she needed cold milk. Her milk would spoil without electricity to keep the refrigerator cold. And how happy would I be with my portfolio if my sister went hungry even a day because I was too selfish to help my mother?
I gave up the money.
The same night, we moved the food in the refrigerator and freezer to a neighbor’s house. It was late Friday evening, too late for the utility company to restore power to the apartment, my mother said. We endured the weekend without power. But she held on to my money.
Three or four days later, she returned the $150, but Ma now wanted her money back. She was angry at me for defying her. But she also wanted me to understand that there are times when I have to put my needs first.
“You can’t help nobody ’til you help yourself,” she said.
I had to learn a tough lesson.
I never got the pictures for my portfolio. For that, I blamed my mother.
That was the last year I lived with her. We weren’t getting along. She tried to be strict with me, requiring me to be in by nine P.M. and always fussing about my grades. But I had little respect for her because I knew she was using drugs. I began skipping school and getting into fights while hanging out with my friends. Mom worried that my troubles would escalate if I went to Plainfield High School with them. She had instilled in me as far back as I can remember the idea that I had to go to college.
But I wasn’t thinking about college when my mother came in and announced unexpectedly one summer day that I would be attending University High School in Newark in the fall. She had confided her fears to her godmother, who was an assistant principal at University High. Unbeknownst to me, the two women had enrolled me at University High for ninth grade. When my mother told me what she had done, I was furious. I wanted to go with my boys to Plainfield High School.
As far as my mother was concerned, that wasn’t an option.
I moved to Newark to live with an uncle who had a spare room.
I met Sam and George my first day at University High. We took the same Advanced Placement courses. I was one of the few AP students who hadn’t attended University High in the seventh and eighth grades, and I stood out as the new kid.
Sam and George were already friends. I’d see them together at lunch, and we were all cordial to one another. Gradually, we started talking more, and they seemed like two smart, cool guys. But for a while, I clung to my boys in Plainfield.
In my sophomore year, my uncle moved, and I had to find another place to stay. I lived temporarily with my father, his girlfriend, her son Mike, and my sister Daaimah, then moved back to Ma’s house in Plainfield. Ma never closed her doors to me.
In the mornings, I rode to school with one of my teachers, Miss Ransom, who lived in Plainfield and picked me up at Ma’s house. She was one of the coolest teachers at University High. She was a no-nonsense kind of instructor, and I trusted her. When I later got into trouble with the law, she was one of the few people I told. I was always getting into some mischief at school, and that really baffled her.
“Rameck, you’re such a smart guy,” she said during our drive. “Why do you act this way?”
In the afternoons, I rode the bus to the Newark post office and waited for Ma’s shift to end at three-thirty P.M. We rode home together.
When I think back to some of my favorite moments with Ma, I remember those days, cruising in that red Caprice Classic, just the two of us, sharing tidbits from our day. She seemed to understand my struggles—the heartbreak I felt about my parents’ addictions, the confusion I felt about my own blossoming manhood, and the pull I felt from my friends. Like other family members, she tried gently to warn me.
“Don’t let the wrong group of friends influence you,” she said.
I wish I had listened. But that was another of Ma’s lessons that I had to learn the hard way.
4
COMMON GROUND
George
SOMETIMES PEOPLE ARE drawn together for a purpose that even they don’t recognize at the time. I am convinced that this is what happened with Sam, Rameck, and me.
Almost as soon as Sam and I met in the seventh grade, we realized we liked the same things: baseball, basketball, video games, Nike sneakers, and the latest fashions in clothes. We did our work in school, but we weren’t nerds. We didn’t allow school to consume us. It seemed that most students were either so smart that they had little or no
social skills, or they were so sociable that they goofed off during class and neglected their schoolwork. I tended to lean toward people who offered a balance. That’s what I saw in Sam. He and I often ended up sitting next to each other, learning lessons together, sharing candy and stories about our lives and the happenings in our neighborhoods.
All of the seventh- and eighth-graders at University High School had been recommended by a teacher, guidance counselor, or principal at our elementary schools and had been required to pass a test for admittance. University High, one of Newark’s three magnet high schools, had earned a solid reputation for sending a high percentage of its graduates to colleges and universities each year. The school boasts an 85- to 90-percent rate of its graduates completing college in four or five years.
The school grew out of research in the late 1960s that indicated that many of the public school system’s graduates were academically unprepared to accept jobs beyond menial labor. Corporations were complaining that they were having trouble meeting new federal guidelines for hiring more minority workers. To respond to the crisis, in 1969 the Newark system initiated a magnet program called “School Within a School” at Southside High School, which later became Malcolm X Shabazz High School. Students considered gifted were separated from the general population there and provided with a more rigorous college-preparatory curriculum.
In 1976, the program leased a building, relocated, and became the school that is now known as University High School. Two years later, it became the only public high school in Newark to begin admitting seventh- and eighth-graders. Administrators had found that students entering in the ninth grade weren’t getting the background they needed to prepare them for college in four years. Every year since, the school has selected top seventh-graders from the city’s elementary schools and started them early with college-preparatory courses that, by the eighth grade, include algebra, honors English, and a foreign language, often Latin.
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