Jumped In

by Jorja Leap

  Joanna is crying.

  “It hit me harder than losing Silent.”

  I ask her why.

  “I was trying to save Baby Girl. I think at that point it still didn’t click––maybe I was trying to save my first son—he died when he was five.”

  Joanna stops. I wait, quietly.

  “I need to think about this.” She puts her head down on the table in front of me.

  She doesn’t elaborate; I don’t probe. Maybe we will come to a point in our relationship when she’ll explain what happened to her son. Maybe not. All I know is that we’re not there yet. She raises her head and moves on.

  “I had always pretended my son was still alive. Every once in a while, Flaco—his father—would call. I would make up stories about our son, what he liked to eat, how he was doing in school. I would say he was asleep or he was out playing, lying about why he couldn’t come to the phone.”

  But after ten years hiding out in Mexico, Flaco returns to Los Angeles, wanting to see his son and daughter. Joanna is finally forced to tell him the truth. In the days that follow, Flaco grows increasingly upset that his son is dead and Joanna’s other children, including her son and daughter with Roberto, are alive. Flaco reports Joanna to DCFS, saying she is gangbanging and slanging drugs. A children’s social worker investigates, removes the children from Joanna’s custody and places all the kids with Roberto.

  “I don’t know how I got through it, but I did.” Joanna’s voice is flat.

  “When they took my kids away, I decided I was gonna concentrate on being a mother. I wanted my kids back, I was not gonna have another baby. I decided to get an IUD. The doctor told me this would guarantee I wouldn’t get pregnant.”

  Joanna is decidedly not a nun. In a few weeks, she begins a relationship with Bullet, who belongs to a neighborhood that is one of her gang’s rivals. After they break up, Joanna discovers she is pregnant.

  “I had the IUD in, and I didn’t know why I was throwing up and not getting my period. I couldn’t believe I was pregnant. All the doctor said was, ‘These things happen.’ I kept thinking, Why? Then I thought maybe this was the baby I was getting back—because my son had died. So I couldn’t get an abortion. I told Father Greg what had happened, and I asked him if he would help me. I’ll always remember what he said: ‘I’ll be there till the wheels fall off the bus, kiddo.’ And he meant it.”

  I can hear Greg’s voice speaking those words. But there is more. The baby—a little boy—is born premature with underdeveloped lungs and one kidney instead of two. His first two years are punctuated by a series of medical emergencies. He cannot breathe on his own, requiring an oxygen tank. He is undersized and the doctors doubt he will ever walk. Then his kidney begins to fail. “Why did God give me another baby who isn’t going to live?” Joanna cried.

  “These women,” Greg tells me, “their pain is so deep.”

  A week later, Joanna calls me and says she wants to talk. We meet, and she tells me about Bullet. They are back together, trying to take care of their son, whom they call Poco Marcos—Little Marcos. That morning, she found the bag of works—spoons and syringes—that he had hidden from her. Bullet loves to slam crystal meth between his fingers. He is a sad little bad boy who alternately lives with his mother and depends on Joanna. He will never take care of Joanna, which is the one thing she craves. Underneath her tattoos and her gold jewelry and her acrylics, all Joanna wants is to lay down her head. Instead, she is in charge of everyone.

  “I don’t wanna go on this way,” Joanna tells me. “I don’t know why, but when I had Marcos, that’s when I decided I had to change.”

  I know why. Little Marcos represents a chance for Joanna to try again—to have a normal family with birthday parties and friends, a life unfettered by drugs hidden in diapers or Daddy hitting Mommy. But she is not there yet. I know this because I am always meeting Joanna in public—at Homeboy, at a restaurant. Unlike the other women who ask me to visit them at home, I am never invited to Joanna’s house. I suspect it is crawling with Florencia-13.

  “Joanna won’t have anyone over,” a homie tells me. “Her house is too crazy, trust me.” I am not alone. No one is invited to kick it at Joanna’s.

  “What do you want to do about Bullet?”

  “Fuck him. He’s slamming again,” Joanna spits out. I am worried about Joanna—how on earth is she making it financially? Is she dealing again? I don’t want to ask, I don’t want to know.

  Two days later, a group of homies and their kids, including Joanna and Bullet, all go to Magic Mountain. Joanna calls to tell me there has been trouble with Bullet. She begins reading the X-ray of their relationship.

  “I love Bullet,” she tells me, “but I am not in love with him. Do you know what I mean?”

  Sadly, I do. I loved my first husband deeply—the way I would a brother. But my second marriage is different; with Mark I am truly “in love.” I try to explain.

  “See, you did it right,” Joanna says, sighing. “I was in love with Silent. I only love Bullet—not the ‘in love’ part. And we fight so much.”

  Joanna tells me that coming home from Magic Mountain, Bullet began to ridicule her. “I can kick your ass,” he taunted. She tells me that they were fighting inside of their minivan with children in the car. She looks at me anxiously.

  “You think I am a fool in the car, banging with Bullet in front of the kids,” she starts.

  “Not really. I am thinking that my husband and I bang too. Just like you and Bullet.”

  Joanna is looking at me skeptically.

  “I don’t hit him—but we bang—with words.”

  As of late, things had been tumultuous at home. A few days before, Mark had announced he was traveling to the FBI Hazardous Devices School in Huntsville, Alabama; he would be gone for a week. The whole plan made me furious—but I couldn’t say anything. Intellectually, I knew I was being unreasonable. But emotionally, I did not want to stay home and be solely responsible for Shannon. I was worried about Joanna’s stability and Big Mike’s safety and my homies’ illegal enterprises. I try to explain my rage, but I also tell Joanna that Mark and I have gone to therapy.

  “I need to get Bullet to go with me. I really love therapy. I think it would help him to talk. He never tells me his feelings.” Joanna is echoing what has been my mantra through two marriages and numerous relationships.

  “Isn’t he in the Building Positive Relationships class at Homeboy?” I ask her.

  “I kicked him out. I didn’t want him there. I think every woman should take that class alone. Without any men around. The men ruin it. They talk about themselves all the time. They should go away. We don’t need the men there. We should be able to talk openly. Bullet can go to therapy with me, but I need a place just for women.”

  I remember the first consciousness-raising group I attended in the early 1970s and how men were banned from it. I tell Joanna I will call her the next day to see how she is doing, but when I call, her cell phone is disconnected. No one knows where she is.

  A day later she calls. She is out in Chino, temporarily living at her aunt’s house.

  “Bullet came over to my apartment and we started fighting and he hit me,” Joanna explains. “I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want him to know where I am. I told him I was going to Texas to visit some of my cousins. I just don’t wanna see him.”

  Two months after this break, Joanna tells me that Little Marcos is sick. So sick that kidney surgery is scheduled for the first week in November. Joanna arranges for Marcos to be baptized at Dolores Mission Church, the tiny parish in East Los Angeles where Greg Boyle was once pastor. It is a heartbreaking ceremony. Her son looks so small and perishable, and Joanna is clearly terrified. It is the first and only time I have seen Joanna openly falling apart.

  In my wildest dreams I could never imagine feeling close to someone like Joanna. But then again, there was a time when I could not imagine being a mother. Watching Joanna gently kiss the crown of her son’s head, I th
ink about how I would feel if Shannon were endangered. We are not bitches, we are mothers. My heart cracks open.

  Eight. Poor Black Woman

  According to a panel of experts at a forum at University of California, Los Angeles, on Monday, America is just as vulnerable to attack as it was on 9/11, with street gangs funding terrorist groups and also draining resources from law enforcement agencies working to head off future attacks.

  —New York Times, May 23, 2007

  Spending time with the homies and homegirls had brought a new dimension to my research. I was deeply involved in trying to figure out what interventions truly helped gang members. I was also invested in their lives. By early 2007 I had completed several evaluations and had been asked by noted civil rights activist and attorney Constance Rice to serve as one of a team of experts for the groundbreaking report she was writing on gangs in the city of Los Angeles. Connie keeps referring to me as a “gang anthropologist.” And I want to be in the field—living with homies, learning more, filling the gaps in my knowledge. Because of this, I am in Nickerson Gardens with Saint, whose real name is Ronald, or Ronny, Dawson. Ronny grew up here, in a three-bedroom unit with twenty-nine other people.

  “It was a lot of fun. My dad was gone and when I was four my mom got addicted to crack and my granny took custody of me. I don’t know what happened with my granny—nine out of her ten kids were addicts—but she raised all the grandkids. I loved school and had great grades. I played every sport—football, basketball, swimming—up to Jordan High.”

  Ronny brags that he never missed a day of school because “I got a welfare lunch every day.” The plastic tiles stamped “subsidized lunch” were all that stood between Ronny and starvation. “My granny was poor. She never had enough money. Most times that lunch was my only food.”

  Ronny tries to portray his childhood as one continuous house party. But there is always deprivation. His life embodies the national statistic showing that more than one-third of all African American children live below the poverty line. When I ask if being poor bothered him, Ronny thinks for a moment.

  “It wasn’t that I minded being poor; everyone was poor. I just hated being poorer than anyone else in the neighborhood.” But Ronny’s family created a ready defense. They were the Marine Corps of the projects. They took their liabilities—poverty and multiple children—and turned them into strengths, organizing their own neighborhood, the Hillbilly Bloods. But this also makes it impossible for Ronny to ever leave the gang. I catch on immediately. They’re not just his neighborhood—they’re his family. Literally. How is he going to leave that?

  This sounds all too familiar. I was raised in a neighborhood that was My Big Fat Greek Wedding cut with anxiety. Every action—real or contemplated—was subjected to the litmus test of “What would the Greek community say?” The infighting and rivalry and psychological retaliation prepared me—in the most perverse way—for life with the neighborhoods. This is in no way meant to minimize gang lethality—it just means that underneath, we all get jumped into something that we’re not sure we can ever leave.

  When I was young my family’s propaganda maintained that there was nothing better than being Greek. We went to church every Sunday, not only for religion, but also for the sense of community. Our social life was exclusive—we interacted with Greek American families. My suburban neighborhood tract in Torrance, California, featured Greek households on literally every block. On top of that, my father served on the board of the directors and my mother sang in the choir of the Greek Orthodox church conveniently located fifteen minutes away. We vacationed with Greek families—usually our cousins. My brothers and I even went to Greek church camp. No aspect of our life remained Greek-free. Our doctors, our dentists, our babysitters—everyone was Greek. And the whole rationale for this existence was the expectation that we—my brothers and I—would perpetuate this pattern into the next generation. It was a gang. We had colors and a language and loyalty. And control. It was all the same—whether you grow up in a neighborhood or in the Greek community. You would be secure and someone would have your back, but you would never know freedom or independence. You would never grow. Your wings were clipped in full view of the crowd.

  I felt controlled from the moment I could walk. Of course, one of my childhood responses was to obey. But the other response was to run. I knew that I could not stay. I was going to suffocate. I was going to die. I had to get out of the gang.

  I was good at escape. When I turned four years old, I was found on a street corner about a half mile from home, holding the hand of a friendly stranger, wearing a T-shirt that said i love my daddy. I ran away from home, I ran away from Sunday school, I ran away from Greek school and the six-fingered, sadistic Greek instructor. But I always came back—first because I had to, then because I wanted to.

  I grew up and out. But still, in unguarded moments, the cunning, indirect, and manipulative Greek girl would burst forth. I wanted my family and the Greek neighborhood. I wanted the warmth, the familiarity. I insisted on taking a family vacation with my brothers, their spouses, and their children, and I attempted to control everything, quietly, behind the scenes.

  You just can’t leave the gang.

  As if listening in on my thoughts, Ronny declares, “We are not just Bloods, this is my blood. They are my family.”

  Ronny’s family has also passed down a history of violence. He traces all of it to his father, who still checks in occasionally. “My daddy was never around all the time, he still isn’t.” In his family romance, Ronny’s father juggled two wives and three sons, never living with one family full-time. But Ronny maintains, “My daddy loved my mama till she started doing crack. Then they fought. It’s ’cuz she drove him crazy. He lost control and beat her. Then he left. He had his wife, my mama had crack, and I had my granny.”

  But his father’s violence was not strictly domestic. There had been trouble in Louisiana, where his father killed a man and did time in prison. Ronny relates this story with nonchalance, adding that his father’s other two sons—his half brothers—also murdered people during the Los Angeles gang wars of the mid-1980s.

  “What happened to your brothers?” I ask.

  “They’re both dead,” he says flatly. “I’m the only son my daddy has left.”

  “So you’re the third generation of violence,” I offer.

  “Yeah, the cycle has gotta be broken.” Ronny could truly go either way. He starts to talk about what went down two nights earlier, when the LAPD showed up at his auntie’s house to arrest his cousin, Little Joey, for murder.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “Little Joey went to West LA to see his girlfriend. He was in Crips territory and they cornered him. He had to shoot his way out. The cops got him.”

  “Does he have a lawyer?” I am already looking up numbers in my cell phone.

  “Oh, he told them he did it.”

  “What?”

  “Why are you surprised? He did it. So he told the cops. But I am thinkin’ maybe he can get off on—whacha call it?—self-defense. He went there before to see that girl and some guys from the set told him, ‘Don’t come back or we gonna kill you.’ I think he could say he did it because they were gonna kill him.”

  “One little problem,” I snap. “He had a gun—that shows premeditation. And I’m sure he didn’t buy the gun at Sears.”

  Ronny is unfazed by my sarcasm.

  “You’re right. Oh well. I guess he’s gonna do time.”

  There is a resignation to Ronny that comes from years without. Without parents. Without money. Without anyone to take care of him. While I am thinking about this, we both see an eleven-year-old riding around on a bike and Ronny motions with his chin.

  “That’s me. You wanna know what I was like back in the day, look at this little homie, Darius.”

  Darius rides up to exchange greetings with Ronny, eyeing me suspiciously. Ronny responds with the same line he uses on everyone in the projects.

  “That’s J
orja, she’s my godmother.” Satisfied, Darius rides off and we walk over to a two-story unit and stand outside the security door—a heavy-duty screen made out of steel. The smell of marijuana comes wafting out. Ronny’s cousins and friends are inside smoking a combination of bud and crack and God knows what else. When they see me through the grille they start joking, then invite us in.

  “This yo’ first time at Nickerson Gardens, little mama?”

  “She’s a cute little spinner, Saint. Mama, you been here before?” Ronny doesn’t even have time to launch into introductions before I start talking and laughing with them. They offer me some of their spliff, but I decline.

  “No, I was here before any of you were born. In the ’70s and the ’80s, I worked at Martin Luther King Hospital.” I leave out the fact that most of the time I came to the projects I was there to pick up children for placement in the foster-care system.

  “You was at Martin Luther King?” One homie is suddenly interested.

  “Yeah. I loved it there.”

  “You saw me born! I came through there. I was the little baby with an Afro!” He is suddenly excited, high, and the air fills with laughter. He is choking on smoke, and Ronny and I walk him outside to breathe fresh air. As if on cue, a black-and-white pulls up and the police jump out of their car so rapidly they leave the doors open. They are running across the grass.

  “It’s the popo,” I observe, and Ronny starts laughing.

  “Yes it is. They gonna arrest someone,” he adds. His prediction comes true while Darius rides by on his bike, watching carefully, collecting data. We all witness two men who look to be in their twenties being handcuffed and pushed into the back of the police car.