Several months after he showed me around the Center for Employment Training, I visited him at home, in a faded Cleveland neighborhood, once middle class. On a corner stood his brick, two-family house, which he and his wife had bought a decade earlier for $40,000. They had nearly lost it because of financial problems. It looked run-down in a comfortable way. When I arrived, Ricky came outside, crossed the street to two young women who were talking, and gave one of them a dime for a cigarette— the sign of a man who was pretending to have quit smoking, I told him. “How did you know?” he asked with a grin.
He had just painted his living room, which was very dark, heavily curtained. He had installed a ceiling fan and was sanding and refinishing the floors. He planned to put a bathroom in the basement. He was getting things together, taking control of himself, but he had worries. He worried about his son, twenty-five, with no job besides belonging to a rap group that had just made a CD but was now disintegrating. He worried about his daughter, eighteen and unmarried, who had a five-month-old; toys and a booster seat were in a corner. He worried about his other daughter, twelve, who had a short attention span and behavioral problems in school. He was determined not to worry about himself.
“I tried the devil,” he said. “Drinking, alcohol, drugs, womanizing, you know, it just got so bad, and then I knew the next thing I’d either be dead—someone would kill me or I’d kill somebody, and I didn’t want to live that type of life.… As you’re growing up, you try things for kicks and stuff, but you’re supposed to get mature enough to move on and, you know. You try beer, or you try a joint, or you try a cigarette, you know, but as you grow up, those are things you try as you’re growing up. These are phases you go through, and you’re supposed to become mature enough to move on and learn from mistakes. Some people learn quicker than others…. You have choices.”
The choice he finally made took him to two sources of salvation, as he saw it: God and work. “Before, I was in different churches: Catholic, Islam, Lutheran. I’ve studied Masonary,” he added, putting his own twist on the word. “I’ve studied theology, philosophy.” For the last couple of years, he had found a place in a Baptist church. But work seemed his most devoted passion. After the job training, he got a starting position for $7 an hour as an apprentice machinist at a plant that made parts for lawn mowers, snow blowers, and the like. “They might make just a piece of it, a catch, a lever, a spring,” he said. “They send it back to my department, we might just drill two or three holes where it has to take a specific tolerance, and you may have to de-burr it or you might have to ream it, stuff like that.” A year later he was making $8.50 in a steel plant operating a machine that slit metal coil. As a trained machinist, he had a skill to sell, and in the depth of the recession in 2003 he had risen to $9.50 with another steel company that was sending him to school in hydraulics and industrial maintenance. If he stuck with it, he could eventually earn twice as much.
But it wasn’t just the potential pay that was making work work for him. It was the process of repair that had begun. He now had focus. He took courses at a community college to upgrade his skills. He got up every morning at 4, caught the 5:40 bus for work, arrived at the plant by 6:30 so he had a little time to read before his shift began at 7, then spent most evenings in classes until 9 or 10.
He did not seem to have time to speak respectfully to his wife, Delores, at least during my brief visit. Even in front of a stranger, his tone was brusque, condescending. When she came home from her job as a food service worker in a hospital, her head was bound in a red bandanna, her frail frame draped in a black leather jacket; she wore white slacks. She sat perched on the edge of an overstuffed couch, and offered her view of Ricky’s reform. In the worst time, she said slowly, they had been separated for two years. Then, from the bottom, he came back, and every step of job training was like the rung of a ladder upward. “When a person as he is could support his family,” she explained, “then it kind of calms him down and puts him in a better position. That program was the best thing that happened to him.” How did she explain his turnaround? “We knew that we had to get back on track with God,” she said. “As we came together with God, then God started telling him what he had to do for his family, and then He started telling me what I had to do for my family and my husband.” Didn’t she give Ricky credit? “ We give all the credit to God. We can’t even take no credit for the job, for the training, because the way he found the training, it was by God’s grace, and the way He bring us together and bless him with the job and then gonna take him another level where he can really make what he really want to make to take care of his family. Yeah.” I told her how impressive Ricky had been giving me a tour of the Center for Employment Training.
“Really?” she said, a lilt of surprise in her voice.
Ricky didn’t argue. “I take one day at a time, I talk with God, I talk with Him when I go to sleep, I talk with Him when I wake up. I say, ‘God, you know the situation I’m in. Help me and keep me straight.’ … And then He say He help fight off the devil. Now, if you don’t put yourself in that situation, you don’t have to be fighting too much. If you don’t stand around the corner with dope addicts, you won’t be tempted. You know what I’m saying? So I know that helps. At first I was hesitant, but as I kept going and going, I relied more and more on Him, and then I was able to put my life in a structure where it was just me and Him, one-on-one. And I didn’t have to put my confidence in Joe Blow or nobody.”
Leary Brock had been playing hooky, and her mother knew it. On that particular day, however, she left Anacostia High School on time, after the last class, and began to walk home through the struggling black district beyond the southeastern shore of Washington, D.C.’s grimy Anacostia River. It was less than a mile to the small house owned by her parents. A man named Earl was following.
Leary’s name was pronounced le-REE, like a small bird singing, and her spoken words sometimes had the rhythm of poetry. She had a fervent gaze, and her light skin, like her mother’s, distinguished her from most other African-Americans in her neighborhood. She was restless against the confines of school, family, community. She wanted to defy, seek, and wander, and so she crossed boundaries. “I used to try to interest her in taking law,” said her mother laughingly. “The reason I told her she’d be a good lawyer is ’cause she’s such a big liar.”
Earl, in his late twenties or early thirties, had been hanging around outside the school. He had been watching Leary. On this day, he pulled his car up beside her, jumped out, grabbed her arms, twisted them behind her back, and shoved her inside. He hit her, drove her to Washington’s red light district on 14th Street, and forced her into a grubby rooming house. “I remember this big, fat greasy Italian-looking dude signing him in and giving him a key,” she said years later. “He tied my hands to a bed top, told me I could scream as loud as I wanted and nobody would help me.” She did, and he was right. As he raped her, she heard laughter. If she told anyone, he promised, he would kill her and her parents, and she believed him. “I was pretty damaged goods.”Then he actually drove her home.
Leary did not tell, not then. She was afraid both for her parents and of her parents. She was sure that she would be blamed by her mother, Velma, who knew that she was cutting school and suspected that she was doing drugs. A wall had gone up between them, and more than thirty years later its remnants still divided their recollections. “She probably was in drugs to make her act the way she was acting,” Velma speculated. “She started going around with a white boy, and sometimes they get in drugs real early, and I think that was happening.”
“No,” Leary declared.
“She must have not been just coming from school, because she would have told me,” Velma insisted. “She knew that I would be upset, because she was where she wasn’t supposed to be.” No, Leary countered: Although she cut a lot of classes, she hadn’t that day. And if she had told her mother about the rape? “Oh, it’s hard to say now what my reaction would have been,” Velma admitted. �
��I might have been so mad at her for not being where she was supposed to be—I don’t know, really.”
“I thought it was my fault, of course, you know the scenario,” said Leary. “When I had my miscarriage because of the rape, she wouldn’t even come.” Her father did, though. He spoiled her, Velma complained with a smile.
Leary then made a choice, and like many choices that teenagers make, this one seemed less momentous than it turned out to be. Instead of finishing school, she moved to New York City. “I had every opportunity to do it another way, and I chose to run,” she observed years later. “I was running away from my mother’s scorn.”
In Manhattan, selling magazines door-to-door, “I ran into some people that invited me to stay with them, because they knew where I was going, what this thing was leading to…. That family was what introduced me to a world I did not know before.… These people was doing hard stuff, you know. They were sniffing. See, at that age, you take a young girl to an after-hours joint where everybody’s sitting around with these black lights—you remember the sixties with these black lights?—and people bringing you the drugs on a $20 bill. Oh, man, you know. I’m like, what is this? And I’m seeing how classy people are dressed and whatnot, not knowing of course, at that age, that that was not class. But that was my beginning. That’s when I took my first snort, in that club. I’ll never forget it. From snorting, I went to skin popping, from skin popping to mainlining. Heroin. At least two or three years.” The drugs helped her “escape the ghosts.”
Her parents traveled to New York to try to rescue her, but not until she got pregnant did she want rescuing. She would not do drugs while carrying a baby. “I came off of it cold turkey,” she said. “I was twenty by then, and I came home. I tried to clean up my life and did the right thing.” She was relieved to hear that Earl could do her no more harm; he had been killed by his wife. “She didn’t do no jail time.”
Leary’s old neighborhood in Washington was a bad place for kicking the habit. “Somehow or other, I started getting back into the same group, because you know once you’ve been in that lifestyle, that lifestyle is a habit,” she said. “Those are the people that you have to eliminate from your life. If you don’t want a hot dog, you don’t go around a hot dog stand, ’cause the aroma’s gonna get you—or you’re gonna run into somebody who’s gonna buy you one. So that was how it was in my life: on and off, on and off. I would stop for years and then get around people who were in that lifestyle and go right back into it.” When she went back into it in Washington, she discovered a new pleasure: crack cocaine.
The introduction came from a co-worker at a school for the mentally and physically handicapped where Leary taught food service skills. It was not a bad job, and she was good with young people, she thought. Her prospects were limited without a high school diploma, and her work record was fragmented by her repeated binges on drugs. But here she was doing well—until her associate, whose husband sold cocaine powder, invited her over one weekend. “We were sitting around having drinks just chit-chatting,” Leary recalled. “A thing came over the news about crack cocaine, and I said, ‘Why do people do that?’ Curiosity killed the cat. She said, ‘Yeah, it’s really something up there in New York. I’ve had it once or twice.’ And she said, ‘You want some?’ I said, ‘No, I’d be afraid to take it.’ She said, ‘There ain’t nothing to it.’ She went back in the back. Before the night was over she had gone through $1,200 of her husband’s cocaine powder, trying to make this crack. We wound up having to go out on the street and buy it. That was the beginning. I can pinpoint. That was the beginning. Then it was like every weekend. I had it to the point where I kept the demon at bay for a whole week, but on the weekend I had to be at her house, you know, ’cause I was beginning to get this desire, my brain was wanting it.” She was in her thirties, unmarried, with four children by four different men.
“I called it the terminator, that crack cocaine, because it didn’t have any physical hold on you. It’s a mental hold, a psychological hold, a habitual hold; you don’t physically need it. It hits a portion of the brain that has never experienced this sensation before. And when it’s awakened, you can’t put it to sleep. I’m serious. It’s ability that you didn’t know you possessed. Now you can become a fast thinker, you’re motivated to do this, that, and the other. This is only an allure, because this portion of the brain is not functioning on that level, but it’s being stimulated at that level for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then it’s really a crash. Oh, no, no, no, no. The brain wants to go back there. All right? It wants to feel that sensation again, and it will make you forget sleep, food, clothes, anything that you normally would do. It just slams that shut. You have to go THERE! It’s worse than a physical addiction. … It stripped me totally of who I was. It held my spirit in bondage, begging to come out, and it couldn’t. It arrested every part of my life and then began to terminate it. I no longer existed. It did.”
She started being late to work, then absent. “They saw a change in my behavior and they figured where there is a problem, ‘Let’s let her go,’ ” she said. “I’m glad that they got me out of there before I committed a crime.”
She did commit a crime, many times. “I sold it for a little while, me and this Italian guy,” she said, “and then we went to Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, I stopped for a whole five years, because the Amish that I lived around, they were able to give me herbs and things that were soothing enough to my lifestyle.” She worked two jobs, and felt safely removed from the world of crack. “Little did I know. That stuff is everywhere,” she said. “It’s everywhere. I’m serious, man, I’m telling you. It may be around the corner—I’m sure it is right around the corner from the Vatican. It raised its ugly head, and with this Italian guy, when we put our two heads together, we were dangerous. We drove to New York, to 143rd and Broadway, bought us a package and started our own business.”
Leary bounced relentlessly back and forth between drugs and jobs, often mixing both together. “The weekends started to overlap into Monday, and then Monday into Tuesday,” she recalled. “Next thing you know I turned around and it was Thursday and I hadn’t been to work. … I came on home to my mother’s and father’s.” She used what she had learned about horses from the Amish to get work as a groomer at a Maryland racetrack, where she thought the careful state regulation would keep narcotics out. “Little did I know, the drug is everywhere,” she said. “I’m thinking I’m running away from it.”
Her methods of financing her drug use became an index of decline. “At first, I had money in the bank,” she explained. “I had friends. Oh, I lived the high style. I didn’t know nothing about the street life until much later on. I was always catered to and given stuff. I’d be sitting around with bundles of the stuff, you know, traveling up and down from here to Florida. I was gone, I was doing things, I was a mover and a groover, and it was, again, the glamorous life—the life that I had seen when I was younger I was seeing now. That was a trap. The devil is so, so clever, OK? He disguised it with all this glamour and all this other stuff going on. There’s so much coming at you, you don’t see the snakes slither in.… When the money ran out, when the friends ran out, I had to do it on my own. And because I had a networking ability, I was able to get with people who was trying to be incognito about this drug. … I was their go-between. That was one way I was able to make my supply. They would give me the money ’cause they could not go out and get it, and I would go get it for them, and
I would get a portion from the drug dealer, a portion from them. I believe because I wasn’t larceny-hearted, is why I’m still alive.” She once had a near miss when dealers burst into a rival’s apartment where she was staying, started shooting, and hit her in the back. Ultimately, she turned to prostitution for her drug money.
Mostly, Velma took care of Leary’s children, as so many grandmothers do in such families, and when Velma’s grandchildren had children, she took care of those great-grandchildren as well. Velma was bone tired, and someti
mes angry about the generations that passed their burdens to her, but she also had an iron spine. She admired obstinacy, drawn from her earliest childhood memories in the hard South. Her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, who were born in slavery, used to reminisce about the steely resistance of their aunt, Leary’s great-great-great aunt. “The slaveowner would tell her to do something, and she said she wasn’t gonna do it, and he would beat her and beat her, and she said she still wasn’t gonna do it, and so he’d put her down in a cistern, a well,” Velma recounted. “She never would do it. She was just that stubborn. Just let him beat her.”
In its own way, Velma’s journey had been as daring as Leary’s, propelling her out of the familiar into the adventurous, though with far different consequences. One of eight children on a sharecropper’s farm in Alabama, she left in 1940, in her twenties, and made her way alone through Tennessee to Washington, where she found a good husband, a good job in the printing section of the Agriculture Department, and a place in an undergraduate class at Howard University, although she never finished. Her husband, Horace, was an electrician for the Veterans Administration. Leary, even at age fifty, imagined that he had worked in the White House.
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