After just a few days, Lola took me to a sad-looking facility for my second interview with CPS. When we were in the car on the way there, my phone rang. It was my mom. “Let me be perfectly clear,” she said calmly. “You know what you have to do. And you will do it.” Then she hung up.
Inside, I went through interview after grueling interview with different people. One after another, they asked me a series of questions. “Has your mother ever threatened to knock your head through a back window? Has your mother ever beaten you with an instrument? Has your mother ever spoken to you about sex in an inappropriate way?” Every specific thing they asked was true, but I denied it all.
As soon as I was done, I panicked. I realized that I was going to have to go back to my mom and that I was going to be made to suffer greatly. I had done the unthinkable. I had talked. And that had caused these people to go into my mother’s home and question her very competency as a parent. I knew my mother well enough to know that someone, almost definitely me, was going to have to pay for that. I couldn’t go back there.
I tried talking to my dad and telling him that I wished I could go live with him. He would never turn me away, but he knew how hard things would be for me in DC and didn’t want me to have to start over at a new school when I was doing so well at Roeper. He wasn’t about to start a custody battle with my mom just to put me in what he saw as a worse situation than the one I was already in.
But I saw it differently. I went to Reanne a few days later and said, “I need to talk to them again so I can tell the truth, but it needs to be somewhere I’m comfortable talking.” Within an hour or two, one of the women from CPS showed up at Roeper, and I finally told her the truth. I didn’t want my mom to go to jail, so I told her enough to get me out of there. I knew what was enough. In that interview, I said that I wanted to go live with my dad.
Within days, CPS made an official recommendation for me to move in with him. When I called him and said, “It looks like I’ll be coming down there,” his response was simply, “All right, cool.”
The school year was almost over, and I’d been looking forward to my eighth-grade class trip to Chicago all year. I was at the train station with all my friends, about to get on the train, when my science teacher ran up and said, “Zach, you can’t go.” I didn’t understand what was going on. “Your mom called and said you can’t go.” My friends were boarding the train, some of them calling my name to join them, when I realized that she’d done this on purpose.
It took Lola an hour to come and get me, so I had to wait there with my science teacher’s husband, watching the train pull away. I was heated. But even then, I heard my mother’s words in my head about being a black man in America and never showing anger, so I held it together and chatted politely with my teacher’s husband until Lola picked me up.
Right after the trip was my eighth-grade graduation. All my friends were excited about the summer and starting high school in the fall, but I had a sinking feeling inside. I knew all the challenges I’d be facing in DC and felt I had nothing to look forward to. Before I left, Reanne arranged for a police officer to accompany us to my house so I could get my things. I made sure to go at a time when my mom and Kevin wouldn’t be home.
After the police officer checked the house to make sure no one was there, I went inside to my room, expecting to find it the way I’d left it just a few weeks before. Instead, everything was gone. My closet, which had been full of clothes, was empty. Books were scattered across the floor, many with their pages ripped out. A trophy I’d earned from a forensics competition back at GPA was lying on my bed, snapped in half.
When I left for DC, I didn’t even have a suitcase. I had a backpack with two outfits in it and the clothes I was wearing, half of which belonged to Papa. The day before I got on the plane, my mother texted me. “I’m driving up to the house, and you’re going to come outside and get in the car,” she said.
“No, Mom,” I responded. “I’m not going to do that.” It was the first time I’d directly disobeyed my mom. I didn’t know what would happen to me if I got in that car, and I did not want to find out. I wanted her to know that she couldn’t control me anymore.
Yet in some ways, of course, she still did. I hated that she still had an effect on me, whether it was my fear that she’d show up at an unexpected moment—even after I arrived in DC—or my visceral reaction to certain words or phrases she used, or the way I second-guessed my posture and body language, knowing that if she were there she would find a way to criticize me for some small perceived infraction.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to understand and even appreciate the fact that I’ve gained a lot of positive attributes from my experiences with my mother—including my resilience, my speaking skills, and my ability to understand and connect with so many people. But as I boarded that plane, I desperately wanted to erase the memory of every moment I’d spent with her. For a moment, I even wished that I had no fear of death, because then I could have killed myself to terminate the effect she had had on me.
CHAPTER 4
Starting Over Again
My grandmother’s house was in Bellevue, a small neighborhood in Ward 8, which was well-known as the poorest ward in Washington, DC. When I was living in Detroit with my mom, poverty, crime, and violence were present in the community, but as long as I rode my bike in one direction from our condo, I could usually avoid seeing them up close. Plus, poverty was not nearly as concentrated in my former Detroit community as it was in the part of DC my grandma lived in. Now my home was in the center of a neighborhood where looking at the wrong person the wrong way could get you killed.
My biggest fear when moving to DC was that I would have to go to the local high school, Ballou. Every once in a while, there was a report on the news about a shooting at Ballou. There were metal detectors at the entrances, scant resources, and few opportunities there for real learning. It was a dead end, and I knew that, coming from a liberal private school environment like Roeper to a rough inner-city school like Ballou, I would be a target. I was pretty good at code switching by then, and as I walked the streets of my new neighborhood I got better and better at fitting in among the other guys my age, but I knew I’d never be able to fit in at Ballou. I knew how to carry myself in a way that made it easier for me to blend in, but I wasn’t hard. If I went to Ballou, I’d be asking to get jumped, ridiculed, or worse.
So my focus when moving to DC was on getting into a good school. But it was summer by then, and at that point most schools were fully enrolled for the coming year. Many even had long wait lists. Luckily, Randall Dunn, the headmaster from Roeper, was a huge help and put me in touch with the administrations at some of the best schools in the area. I was accepted at all of them, but several had no choice but to place me on the wait list. At one school, an administrator even implied during my interview that they had to put another kid ahead of me on the wait list because of who his parents were.
To get to those interviews, I had to take public transportation. For the first year and a half that I was living in DC, my dad rarely had a car. When he did, it was in poor condition and usually broke down shortly after he got it. Having to walk or take the bus everywhere made me feel exposed. It forced me to be in close proximity to and interact with intimidating people who in Detroit I would have just driven by with my mom. In our neighborhood, for every relatively quiet street like mine, there were one or two that were rowdier, full of groups of guys hanging out on the corner or in front of a liquor store. When I walked through and around these groups, I tried to fix my stance, my posture, and my face so that I would look like I belonged or at least not stand out quite so much.
One night early in the summer, I was coming home from one of my interviews. After taking the Metro to Anacostia, the closest stop, which was more than two miles from my house, I waited for the bus that would bring me closer to home. It didn’t come. I overheard someone at the station say that there had been a s
hooting and they had temporarily shut down the bus line. After waiting for two hours, I decided to walk.
Until then, I had walked within only a five- or six-block radius of my house. Now, walking for more than thirty minutes from Anacostia in the dark, I was afraid. I was wearing a suit and tie for the interview and carrying a backpack, and I was well aware of how much I stood out. Block after block, I walked quickly, but not so fast that I appeared scared, as I passed abandoned buildings, a few homeless people and drug addicts, and mostly groups of people hanging out on street corners. On one block, two guys were fighting in the center of a circle of onlookers. I did my best to stay out of everyone’s way. Sometimes I crisscrossed the same street several times to avoid groups of people.
As I walked past one corner store, I noticed a group of guys sitting on the stoop outside. “Hey, li’l nigga,” I heard one guy call out. My heart sank. I knew he was talking to me, but I wasn’t sure how to respond. What would he do if I turned around and approached him? What would he do if I ran? In the back of my head, I was thinking that at some point, I’d have to make this walk again. So if I ran now it would be even more difficult the next time. “I know you hear me, nigga. Come over here for a second, let me holler at you right quick.”
I turned and walked over to him. “What you lookin’ all scared for?” he asked me. He seemed to be high or drunk or both. He mumbled to himself for a minute and then said, “Lemme hold a dollar right quick.”
“Sorry, boss, I don’t have anything,” I told him. His face froze, and then he stood up. He was taller than I’d thought, at least three or four inches taller than me. “Lemme tell you something, li’l nigga,” he said seriously, curving his body so that he was leaning slightly over me. “You can’t let these niggas punk you, man. You just walked over to me. You don’t have to get all close like that.”
I took a breath as I realized that this guy wasn’t trying to throw hands or take advantage of me. In fact, he was trying to help me by explaining everything that I’d done wrong. He told me to keep my distance from people and loosen my grip on my backpack so I didn’t appear scared. For the rest of my walk, I took his advice, and when I finally got home, I was exhausted.
The people who lived on the quieter streets in Bellevue like mine were mostly older, working-class blacks like my grandmother, who’d made a living as a janitor and janitorial supervisor for decades. Others were more highly educated black professionals like our neighbor Ms. Brown, who was in her late sixties and still worked as a substitute teacher at a high school in Bethesda, Maryland. I often saw Ms. Brown around the neighborhood—on the bus or walking to get groceries. She was a kind and very smart woman who took a liking to me and always called me “Mr. President.”
Whenever I saw her carrying bags of groceries or walking home from the bus stop at night, I helped Ms. Brown to her door. The first few times I did this, she tried to pay me, but I refused. After a while, she told me, “I will only let you keep helping me if you accept the money,” and I relented.
As we rode the bus together and during those walks home, Ms. Brown and I had long talks about everything from the history of the neighborhood to politics and current events. Often these topics intersected. Ms. Brown had lived in Bellevue for thirty years. As we rode past dilapidated and boarded-up buildings, she told me, “This used to be such a nice shopping center. I was usually the only black woman who went there.”
“What happened?” I asked her.
“A lot of things,” she told me. She explained that until the 1960s, Bellevue and nearby Anacostia were mostly white, working-class neighborhoods. Many of the people who lived there worked across the Anacostia River in the Navy Yard. Then, in the 1960s, the city built the Anacostia Freeway, which separated Anacostia from the waterfront, and put up several public housing projects near the freeway. As many of the middle-class whites fled to the suburbs, development in the area slowed. Then existing businesses moved out during the crack era of the 1980s and early ’90s. And as the mass incarceration of blacks, particularly black men, continued to rise, families were broken apart, opportunities and conveniences grew even scarcer, and a sense of hopelessness and resentment took over.
I had already read many books about these issues and was grateful to have someone like her to talk to about them. We spent a lot of time discussing Cornel West’s book Race Matters and his concept of black nihilism. West argues that the lack of hope, meaning, and love in black communities leads to a coldhearted mentality that is both individually self-destructive and damaging to black communities. This was the best and most frequently missing explanation for the way people in my neighborhood felt and acted, and it resonated deeply with me. Hearing Ms. Brown’s explanation of our neighborhood’s history helped me see it even more clearly.
I knew how lucky I was to have found a path toward upward mobility, and it was obvious to me that nearly every time that happened to someone like me, it was because of specific exceptional circumstances that had provided a way out. For me, it was having a mother who, despite her many flaws, valued education and my ability to hold a conversation; grandparents who had traveled the world and were educators and child psychologists; and a father who was willing to sacrifice nearly everything to give me opportunities he’d never had.
Without them, my life would likely have been just like the other kids’ in Bellevue. I could have had a dad in prison, a mom who was desperately trying to make it and didn’t have the time or energy to give me love and support, and teachers who were sick and tired of my black ass and just wanted me to sit down and be quiet. The drugs, the violence, and the hostility—that was years of oppression and accumulated disadvantages coming out. I knew where that came from. Despite my relative advantages, I felt it every day. But I was also determined to make the most of my unique opportunities and hopefully use them one day to make a difference. And I could do that only by avoiding the traps that were laid at every turn for me and all the other kids like me.
So when I wasn’t working on my applications or taking public transportation to interviews, I was alone in the house, reading. My dad was rarely around because he was always working. At that point, he had three jobs. His first and main source of employment was working as an accounts-payable coordinator at Business Software Alliance. He’d been working there for six years. When he left there every day at five, he went to work as a valet until about midnight. Then he delivered newspapers from one to four in the morning before finally heading home and sleeping for a couple of hours. Then he’d wake up and start all over again.
My grandma Pearl was in a similar situation. She had been working two jobs—as a janitor and a janitorial supervisor—for twenty-six years. For most of her life, my grandmother had been able to support her modest lifestyle. Then, in the years before I moved to DC, her health declined, her diabetes medication made her gain weight, and it became harder and harder for her to get around, work, and keep the house in decent shape. She could barely walk up the stairs; there were dark stains on the wall where she had to pause and lean her shoulder as she slowly worked her way up.
The rest of the house was in bad shape, too. It had never been much; the entire house consisted of a tiny, cramped living room; a small dining area that was completely taken up by a four-person table; a galley kitchen; and two little bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs. The basement had flooded and was now full of mildew, so we couldn’t use it as a living space or even keep many of our things down there. Instead, everyone’s belongings were scattered throughout the cramped house—one corner of the living room held an ironing board, a bicycle, and piles of old clothes. The bathroom upstairs was stained from all the times my grandmother couldn’t get up the stairs quickly enough. There were holes in the kitchen floor that we had patched with plywood and a huge hole in the ceiling of the second bedroom.
That hole in the ceiling became the bane of my existence during my years in DC. We were constantly trying to patch it with new drywall or
cover it with garbage bags to keep out vermin and stop the water from leaking into the house when it rained, but nothing we did ever fixed the root problem, which was a faulty roof. Of course it would have been best to just repair or replace the roof itself, but we didn’t have the money for that. So no matter how many times we patched and repainted that ceiling, fresh water damage appeared every time it rained. It took only a few rainstorms to create another hole. That leak in the roof became a symbol to me of what it was like to live in poverty. No matter what we did to try to fix it, there was always a deeper, more insidious problem at the heart of it, causing more and more damage.
My father was working three jobs and had been for years. And his main source of income wasn’t a minimum-wage job. As an accounts-payable coordinator, he was a skilled white-collar worker. The income from that job alone should have been enough to support at least a modest lifestyle, but it wasn’t.
The thing that most people who have never lived in poverty don’t understand is how expensive it is to be poor. Making the minimum payments on everything from credit card bills to medical expenses causes interest to add up exponentially. Even something like my braces cost so much more in the long run because we couldn’t afford to pay for them up front. I had gotten braces back in sixth grade, but the process ended up taking twice as long as it should have—and costing even more than that—because I never went to my appointments consistently to keep things moving forward on schedule. My mom had set up a payment plan with my original orthodontist in Michigan, and my dad had given her extra child support to pay for it, but she often took that money to the casino.
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