All Day

by Liza Jessie Peterson

  Okay, now my body temperature is beginning to heat up and I am on the verge of doing a praise dance in the isle. This is exactly what I shared with my rug rats at Rikers. I even gave them a handout that I compiled with information about Gary Webb’s scathing investigative report exposing the unholy alliance between the CIA, the Contras, and crack. It has always been my belief that crack was like Hiroshima to Black people, ripping our communities and families apart, and we are still struggling to recover from the chemical hit. I must sound like a deaconess, all the mmhmm, yes yes, and finger waving I’m giving from my lil’ amen corner, consisting of just me.

  Jamel is getting more and more animated, using his hands to help tell the story and conduct the electric energy shooting out of his body. “I remember hearing about unmarked vans that would drive into the hood in LA and you’d open the back of the van and it was full of guns, Uzis, AK-47s!”

  By now, the two little couldn’t-be-bothered, defiant knucklehead rug rats lift their heads from the table. Jamel is striking a chord and now they’re more interested in listening and learning than faking their resistance with phony apathy.

  “Crack makes you lose your soul,” Jamel says with a loud, impassioned whisper. “I’ve never seen a drug as deadly as crack. The level of dehumanizing and desensitizing is sick. Crack ushered in the culture of pornography to a mainstream level. I remember when brothers were rapping about love, politics, and verbally sparring with intelligence; the more facts and information you had in your rap, the doper you were. But after crack, now all you hear about is money, hoes, nigga this, drugs, and killing. We lost the concept of family and community. Money and pornography is now the dominant theme, and brothers wearing their pants sagging down—”

  At this point, I can’t contain my excitement and I shout, “Teach! Break it down!” This prompts the boys to collectively suck their teeth and grunt.

  Jamel continues. “That came right out of prison culture. Anyone without a belt was considered weak because the prison would take your belt away if they thought you might try to hang yourself, so brothers without a belt were seen as suicidal and weak. The brothers who were smart would take a sheet and tear it up to make a homemade belt to hold their pants up and not look weak. That’s where that came from. I remember I had to cut a young brother down in his cell, he was trying to hang himself, and when I cut him down I asked him, ‘Why do you want to kill yourself, brother?’ And he said because his mother’s boyfriend raped him and gave him HIV and when he told his mother, she put him out. I’ve seen some things and I carry a lot on my heart, brothers.”

  The room is silent. Jamel stops in painful recollection. “I’m sorry, y’all. I didn’t mean to go where I went. This surely wasn’t planned—in fact, I was about to leave when the young lady’s phone went missing and no one owned up to it; I was about to walk out because it took me back to an ugly place. A place where I experienced a lot of pain at C-74 Rikers Island. But something in me said, ‘No, just speak to the brothers and tell them what’s on your heart, let them know the pain I’m feeling, and impart some wisdom. I didn’t even know what I was going to say, but I knew I had to say something.”

  Kevin is nodding his head affirmatively and starts to clap. He’s a self-taught visual artist born and raised in the Bronx who was in and out of foster care most of his life and has a strained relationship with his abusive mother, whom he loves in spite of her dark rearing. A seasoned pessimist, Kevin grasps for guidance, showing signs of hope. I’m so glad he’s here for this today. His homeboy, Jason, joins in to clap and says, “Word, I’m glad you did speak. You have a lot of wisdom. I was feeling everything you was saying.”

  Jamel reaches over and shakes his hand. “Thank you, brother, I appreciate you saying that.” Then he addresses the group: “How many of y’all have younger brothers and sisters or cousins that look up to you?”

  Every hand in the room shoots up.

  “Wow! See, y’all have a responsibility for the shorties, for the younger ones coming behind you to leave them something positive. You have to make changes now to show them the way so they don’t have to suffer ignorance.”

  Jamel begins to share some of his photographs. All of the kids are laughing at the old-school images and are feeling good. It’s almost 3 p.m. and time for the workshop to end. We all gather in the main entrance to take a group photo. MoMo has stepped out for a cigarette, prompting Jamel to ask, “Wait, where’s my girl? Blue hair?”

  And, as if she heard the call through the brick walls of the building, right on cue, MoMo walks through the doors, sees us positioned about to take a picture, runs toward us, and does a baseball belly-flop slide on the floor into position, lying sprawled across our feet with her hand on her hip, as usual. In the span of two hours, the group overcame a huge obstacle, which was, ironically, the theme for the photography workshop: Overcoming Obstacles. And it’s not just a metaphor but also a reality for their lives. Overcoming. Obstacles. An Olympic category for urban kids.

  My boys at Rikers, like my current roster of rug rats at Friends, have to face a myriad of obstacles to overcome. Alongside the mega-triumvirate of poverty, racism, and violence, most of what they’ll have to overcome is self-produced and internal. Anger masking the pain: obstacle. Immediate gratification: obstacle. Hunger for fast money to catapult themselves out of poverty: obstacle. Addiction to the streets: obstacle. Finding a sense of identity and belonging outside of gangs: obstacle. Materialism: obstacle. Peer pressure: obstacle. Self-regulating emotions: obstacle. Optimism: obstacle. Visualizing and believing in a better life than they’ve experienced: obstacle. Self-love: obstacle. And for me, dealing with a coed group of hormonal trickster boys, showing off for pepper-head, potty-mouth girls: major obstacle.

  The kids at Friends and the kids at Rikers are the same peas in different pods. They both are tangled up in the criminal justice system and they’re all wounded children battling an internal struggle to be emotionally healthy and mentally free. Poverty, police brutality, gang violence, addiction, the lure of fast money, peer pressure, lack of guidance, miseducation, and greasy processed fast foods drag them down like quicksand. It’s a gravitational pull into a dark vortex of pain, fear, and survival of the fittest. The ones who make it out are genius Olympians anointed by a powerful guardian angel.

  Most urban kids have witnessed or experienced some type of trauma early in life, ranging from violence to abject neglect, poverty, abuse, and abandonment. The psychological effects of unacknowledged and untreated traumas don’t disappear but show up in behavior that is directly connected to their teenage act-outs and the inability to regulate their emotions—not always, but more often than not. I became acutely aware of this during my years at Rikers, first as a teaching artist and later as a schoolteacher, when my students would share snapshots of their childhood, like Tyquan, and others before and after him. They’re all wounded children employing different methods to mask and cover the pain.

  The girls, however, bring an added layer of intensity, an extra serving of explosive emotion along with their firecracker attitudes, which they wield like a protective shield. The tears and screaming come easy for them. The vast majority of the girls carry on their hearts the scars of sexual abuse. They hide behind their loud-mouth, eye-rolling, teeth-sucking, and neck-swerving armor of self-defense. The boys are not exempt from sexual assault by far, but rarely do they talk about it as openly as the girls do. All it takes is for one girl to disclose her experience and it is usually followed by a litany of testimonials. The girls require much more energy to deal with. My spidey-sense estimation, drawn from empirical evidence in the trenches on the front line for more than a decade, is that working with one girl is equivalent to working with four boys, energetically speaking. The girls demand more attention, time, and patience. They are what hip-hop artist Wale calls lotus flower bombs.

  Today is a scorcher. The weatherman predicted sweltering heat and, by 9 a.m., the humidity is hostile, squeezing the life-force out of the morning a
ir. Surprisingly, the class is focused and on task and, despite the trickling in of latecomers, the morning is going smooth without a hitch of drama. Nobody has been sent home, nobody came in high, and nobody needed a time-out. David and I high-five each other as the kids walk out for their lunch break, and we congratulate ourselves on what was a smooth day of instruction, so far. It’s noon and heat is rising from the concrete like hell’s furnace is beneath the surface. The kids are going to the basketball courts around the corner for lunch break. MoMo bounces out of the building with the boys, swinging her cobalt blue hair, wearing bright orange patent leather sandals to match her neon orange tank top, along with a multicolored pocketbook dangling from her arm. Her plaid poom-poom Daisy Duke shorts are way too short, making the boys gawk and drool at her kadonk-a-donk booty. I had to remind her of the dress code school rules—nothing too suggestive—and gave her a warning; next time, she gets sent home.

  As soon as the last kid walks out the door, the building immediately becomes serene and quiet, like an office should be. Not more than twenty minutes have gone by before MoMo bursts through the door, making her usual loud, dramatic entrance talking on the phone. All I hear her say is, “Let me call you back, shorty!” Shoving her phone into her purse, she plops the latter on the front reception desk and hightails it back out the front door. Strange. Her behavior gives me pause for a split second but I quickly shrug it off, leaning back in my chair to return a call to Kevin’s probation officer.

  No sooner than I hang up the call, I hear a commotion like someone bumping into the frosted windows that we can’t see out of. “Thump thump thump.” I look up toward the direction of the thumps and all I can see is a silhouette of arms flailing. Then I hear the kids yell, “Whoa… Whoa!”

  Oh shit, MoMo is fighting! I can make out her hourglass figure through the frosted windowpane. My coworker Jay leaps over his desk in a gymnast/capoeira move and beats me out the front door. He grabs MoMo and yells, “Not out here! Not out here!” Our building is located four blocks from Times Square, which is swarming with police and undercover detectives ready to arrest any natives scaring tourists and blemishing Disney, not to mention the landlord is not too thrilled about having an “urban” (read: Black and Latino) youth organization housed in his prime real estate, midtown Manhattan office building. The lease was issued to Friends on the condition there would be no security issues that would negatively affect the other business offices and tenants in the building. That meant no graffiti, no stealing, no loud loitering in front of the building, and no fighting. The program constantly stays skating on thin ice.

  Jay has MoMo pinned up against the wall while the crew of sweaty, musty boys walks inside the building, shaking their heads and uttering, “Yo, son, that’s crazy.” “MoMo be wilding; I ain’t saying nothing, son.” “I’m on probation. I just want my MetroCard and I’m out of here, son.”

  MoMo is struggling to get out of Jay’s grip. “Get the fuck off me! Let me at that motherfucker… Get the fuck off me!!!” Homegirl manages to Houdini her way out of Jay’s grip, making her way into the vestibule of the building. I block the door to the office and try to contain her in the small space. I have no idea who she is fighting or why. My first order of business is to calm her down, keep her out of the office away from the boys, and find out what the hell just happened.

  “Sista Liza, get the fuck off me! Tell that punk-ass nigga to come outside! Come outside, motherfucker! Come on, motherfucker!” Her voice has transformed into a bloodcurdling growl and there is pure homicidal venom in her eyes. I desperately try to restrain her, but her adrenaline has created a beastly superstrength that requires the help of another adult. She has turned into the Incredible Hulk. I try stroking her hair with my one free arm, while my coworker has her in a body grip. I do my best to get eye contact with her. “Baby, what happened? I need to know what happened. Who are you talking about?”

  “Kadeem! That nigga put his hands on me… Kadeem punched me in my face! Let me go!”

  I’m taken aback by this. “What? Kadeem literally punched you in the face?”

  I ask the question because if I can get her to tell me the details of what happened, hopefully that will take some of the stream out of her supernatural fury. I try to get her to talk and slow her down, engaging in the specifics.

  She struggles to breathe, panting. “Yes! That nigga punched me in my fucking face and I’m ’bout to bust him in his fucking punk-ass face! Get off me! Let me at that nigga! Come outside, you fucking pussy!”

  The Hulk has not yet waned and she is now a heat-seeking missile looking right through me, searing a hole in the door toward her target. It’s blazing hot outside; she’s sweaty and her skin is slippery like a watermelon seed, making it possible for MoMo to slither out of the grips of both me and my coworker. And, like a bionic roach, she slips through the door into the office. Oh shit! She’s in! My coworker cuts her off and thank God I am able to grab her around the waist from behind and pull her into my body as I lean against the front office desk for reinforcement. I have her in a full bear-hug grip, using every bicep and tricep I have, which are flexed beyond capacity.

  “Get the fuck off me!” MoMo is blinded with rage.

  I whisper in her ear a calm, repetitive mantra, “I got you, baby, I got you, baby… I got you…”

  “Come outside, you punk-ass nigga! Let me go!”

  She doesn’t even hear me, but I am just as relentless. “No, baby, I got you, I got you.”

  She realizes her force has met its match because my clutch is secure. There won’t be any wiggling out from me this time. Running out of steam, she begins speaking in a staccato pant, “That nigga. Punched me. In my. Face. I wanna. Fight that nigga. He put. His fucking. Hands on me!”

  I begin rocking her like a baby, side to side. “I know, and we’re gonna deal with it. Didn’t we get your phone back yesterday? I had your back then and I got your back now, but I can’t let you handle it your way, so you gotta calm down so I can get the whole story and know the facts, baby.”

  I get MoMo to agree to step outside to tell me the whole story and she gives me her word that if I let go of her and release her from my bear grip, she won’t run upstairs after Kadeem. She keeps her word. Outside, she begins telling me the dramatic details of how the fight unfolded.

  While the kids were on lunch break at the park, in typical MoMo fashion she said some disrespectful and dangerous words to Kadeem. There were some other boys in the park who were not from the program, and Kadeem went over to them to “peace the homies,” meaning he gave them the secret gang handshake. It’s akin to fraternity brothers acknowledging each other, throwing up the hand sign for their frat.

  “Nigga, you ain’t Blood,” bigmouth MoMo blurted out to Kadeem.

  I cock my head to the side and give her my why-did-you-do-that? screw-face look of disapproval. She knows she was wrong and laments, “I know, I know, Sista Liza. My mother always said my mouth always gets me in trouble. But I was just playing, we was all joking. So all right, after I said what I said, he gets upset and starts popping shit, talking ’bout, ‘Don’t ever disrespect me like that in front of the homies. I’ll spit in your face, blah blah blah.’ So I start popping shit back like, ‘Fuck you, you soft, you ain’t shit, you a fake-ass Blood slob* nigga.’”

  Sticks and stones can break your bones but those words can get you murdered. I try to assess when the actual first blow was swung. “So that’s when he hit you?” I ask.

  “No, he ain’t hit me, we was just popping shit back and forth, or whatever, while we walking back from the park to school. And I’m on the phone talking to my shorty and then that’s when the nigga cocks his fist back and punches me in the face out of nowhere.”

  I’m still confused with the sequence of events and need more specifics of the timing because it isn’t adding up. I ask, “So wait—while you were on the phone, he punches you in the face?”

  “Yes! He punches me and all the boys is like, ‘Whoa, shit!’ ’ca
use they know how I gives it up, but I keep walking. I eat that ’cause, what! That’s all you got, nigga? You think that did something? Plus I knew if I swung on him right then and there, all my shit, my phone and everything in my purse, would be all out in the street and I can’t be losing my shit over some bum-ass nigga. So I start walking fast like, ‘Let me get back to school and put my purse down, then I’mma bust his fucking ass and—’”

  I cut her off, amazed at her stealthlike ninja strategy. “So, let me get this straight. He punches you in the face while you’re on the phone, you take the blow, keep walking and talking, come into the building, and put your purse down before you went back out to fight him?”

  MoMo gives me a devilish grin and says, “Yeah, you know I keeps it sexy, Sista Liza.”

  My coworker cracks up, and I howl with laughter while MoMo reenacts the showdown, full of her animated flair. “So I put my cute lil’ brand-new pocketbook down, run back outside, squared that nigga up, and punched the mutherfucker dead in his face, like this.”

  MoMo is a sure-enough buckshot, shorty-roc, firecracker pepper-head. She begins demonstrating for us the boxing move she put on Kadeem, taking us through the fight blow by blow. “I got a brother who used to whoop my ass, so I handles mine. I got that nigga real good too, got him square in his jaw. I hooked him like a grown-ass fucking man and the nigga was shook!”

  Normally I would have shut down her flagrant use of the word nigga and interjected with my infamous “watch that word,” but I let her talk freely since it has been having a calming effect on her, and rationalizing with her might be possible now. Just like out at Rikers, knowing how and when to choose your battles is important. I try to reason with her: “Well, since Kadeem hit you and you got him back with a good one, then it should be even Steven. Let it drop.”