In response to the violence in Watts, the Los Angeles police militarized. L.A. recruited its first SWAT team from Vietnam vets. As governor of California, Ronald Reagan advocated strict gun control to prevent Black Panthers and other African Americans from obtaining guns. Within ten years, the Los Angeles Police Department would form the first airborne police division. Its helicopters give the city’s nighttime skies the distinctive thrum of a combat zone, a world Michael would be born into only five years later.
The Watts revolt of 1965 was followed, ripple-like, with more unrest in 1966 and 1967, this time in Cleveland; San Francisco; Chicago; Newark; Plainfield, New Jersey; Detroit; Harlem; Cambridge, Maryland; Rochester; Pontiac; Toledo; Flint; Grand Rapids; Houston; Englewood, New Jersey; Tucson; Milwaukee; and northerly Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The litany goes on.
The tide of violence continued to rise, cresting in 1968 when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on the balcony of a Memphis hotel room and rioting ensued in 125 cities, sending a tsunami of destruction from coast to coast.
As relative prosperity turned to privation, the street gangs depicted in West Side Story evolved. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s message about uniting around the table of brotherhood gave way to forceful messages about self-help. Some gangs, which had formed initially as mutual protection societies but had grown into juvenile delinquency groups, now evolved into sophisticated criminal operations seeking to capture some of the drug business. Why should the Mafia alone reap the benefits of preying on African American adversity? Why not keep the business inside the community?
In New York City, Charles Green launched the first independent black trafficking organization in the 1960s, with over one hundred distributors and couriers. His successor was a man named Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. By the time of Nicky’s arrest in 1976, he owned five homes, a Mercedes, a Maserati, and several Lincolns, Cadillacs, and Thunderbirds.
Nature red in tooth and claw shows itself in the willingness of drug sellers to see addicts as fair game. Over the course of the 1950s, the ravages of addiction turned the “dope fiend” into a figure from people’s nightmares, a villainous Hollywood trope, and the most despicable of human types. Consider again the words that Michael used to describe life in prison. “I’m trapped in a hell with whom society decrees to be the worst of living and better off dead. Robbers, rapists, child molesters, carjackers, murderers, and dope fiends who would spend their mother’s monthly rent for a quick fix.” Inspired by Dante, he offers a descending list of criminals from least bad to worst, and on his list dope fiends are the worst of the worst, the lowest of the low.
The turn by some street gangs to the drug business perverted the Malcolm X–like drive for black economic independence. But that cynicism was facilitated by a generally accepted social pattern throughout the whole country of treating addicts, and especially African American addicts, as disposable. There was little shame in preying on them, a big contrast to how heroin addicts are viewed today.
The tableaux in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Chicago are all similar to the New York story of Charles Green and Leroy “Nicky” Barnes. Starting in 1969, an African American group called the Black Mafia sought control of the drug market in Philadelphia; in Chicago the Black P. Stone Nation and Black Gangster Disciples also got their start, entering into the lucrative drug business in the 1970s. The Los Angeles Crips were founded in the 1960s with ties to the Black Panthers. Initially “a community based organization set up to help local residents,” when one of their founders was killed in 1969 by a rival organization, they transitioned to dealing in drugs and guns. The rising class of gang-based drug dealers was dubiously glamorized in the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly.
Today, as it was then, the global drug business is an ethnically structured market, whose points of transition from one ethnic group to another come largely at either the wholesale to retail transition point, or at the retail to street-level transition point. The rule of thumb about sales in the drug business is that most users buy from people who look like themselves. The drug market is fully an equal opportunity employer, and there’s a world of white distributors and independent distributors. But it’s also true that the ethnically structured street gang world of the United States was a very good fit for one part of the street-level end of an intercontinental supply chain. The largest profits, of course, accrue to those working from the production to the wholesale point of the chain, but even further down the chain there was still real money to be made.
For all the profits to be had, though, not all gangs dove into the drug business, and this is an important point to remember. Other gangs focused elsewhere: on car theft or burglary or simply on partying. A study found that in Pasadena in 1995, for instance, only two out of eighteen gangs specialized in illegal narcotics. The same study found, though, that law enforcement systematically overestimated the rate of involvement of gangs in drug transactions. “‘Almost all’ and ‘upward of 90 percent’ were not uncommon estimates of the number of drug transactions that involved gang members from both gang and narcotics experts in Los Angeles.” In fact, the percentage ranged between 30 and 50. But by 2016, gangs and drugs were surely even more intertwined than they had been twenty years earlier. When the global narcotics business and American street gangs joined forces in the late 1960s and 1970s, we commenced what I propose was a new American story. Call it the story of the rise of a parastate, an alternative universe of law and order, fundamentally at war with the legally recognized state. Unbeknownst to the adults around him, Michael grew up in that parastate.
So now we have our definition of gangbanging. The core element is this: protect yo turf. This is what gangs were about in the beginning, before the world was flat enough for drugs to flow so fluidly. But all three words matter: “protect” “yo” “turf.” So try this on for a definition. To gangbang (v.): to protect your turf and use your power to prey on the vulnerable in order to make a profit and support those whom you call your own.
AT THIRTEEN, ROSLYN WANTED nothing more than to be a cheerleader. She—a generous, fleshy girl who wore her skirt and twirled her pom-poms with supreme self-confidence, a gorgeous smile on her face—would get her chance in ninth grade. But like Nicholas, she, too, would find that she needed to join a gang. Hers was not, though, a drug-selling gang. She joined because she was routinely bullied at school for her dark skin and wanted some people who would protect her. To join, she stepped into a stall-lined bathroom at her school and fought seven girls on the cold tiles. She fought them in order to earn their protection.
Why are these things that parents don’t know about?
26.
HOW NOT TO HELP YOUR KIDS
About when Nicholas got jumped into a gang, Karen met a new man. In the fall of 1989, she had enrolled at East Los Angeles College for a certification as a medical records accredited records technician (ART), but at the end of her first semester, in her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she met Henry McAdam, a jack-of-all-trades who picked up whatever work he could in construction, maintenance, and laboring. The sex was great, and they may even have been in love. As she had for Paul, she once again dropped out of school.
Michael was ten when his mother met Henry, and Michael loved him. Henry took him fishing for trout and catfish. They did many things together and spent real time, and there was a certain kind of intimacy. When she was in middle school, Roslyn used to say that she had two dreams: one, to go to Stanford and, the other, to be a stay-at-home mom and raise a family. Michael dreamed of family, too, I’m sure of it, conjuring up a stable world in his rooftop meditations. Henry stepped into the empty place Michael’s riverine meditations must have carved in his soul.
I was back home from my first year at Princeton the next summer, working as an electric meter reader, racing from house to house in my little brown Southern California Edison shorts, just so I could steal a few hours reading Lincoln’s speeches parked beneath a shady tree in my electrical company truck. In July, Pastor Rinehart married Ka
ren and Henry in a simple but serious ceremony. Henry, Nicholas, and Michael looked handsome in their tuxes with big white carnations in the buttonholes. With her hair tightly pulled back, and pearls around her neck, Roslyn looked statuesque in pink satin. Karen wore antique ivory. I expect I wore a sundress. I vividly remember a spirit of triumph around the occasion, similar to Karen’s graduation from nursing school. After the wedding, the new family moved to Bay Springs, Mississippi, Henry’s hometown, a hamlet of about 1,500 souls, so named for mineral springs that had once been surrounded by bay trees. Here was a single mother’s dream, no? First a nursing degree, then some college; followed by marriage and a move out of the city—if not to the suburbs, at least to the country.
But the dream was not to be. Even at the wedding, other emotions were also in the air. I didn’t personally feel much warmth toward Henry. And there were other warning signs. Neither Nicholas nor Roslyn is smiling in the wedding photos. They look, in fact, as though they are steeling themselves against some coming torment invisible to the rest of us. Even Henry isn’t really smiling in the pictures. Only Michael has a grin as broad as the dawn.
After a decade in which Karen, painstakingly and methodically, had built up her resources, income, and opportunities, she was poised to lose it all. The five of them had moved to Bay Springs, motivated at least partially by a desire to extract Nicholas from growing gang entanglements. But on the first anniversary of their move, Karen and the kids were unceremoniously back in California without the groom and with nearly all of their money, energy, and joy spent. The fifteen months with Henry were, Karen says, “The Nightmare.” For all of them.
Before the wedding, Karen did not know that Henry had a criminal record and that back in his home town, he was entrapped in a dense Mississippi thicket of violence and vendetta. As it turned out, he had shot a man when he was fourteen or fifteen and had served time for it. Now that Henry was back in Bay Springs, his adversary’s grandson wanted retribution. The grandson sought it by trying to rape Roslyn. Although her family pressed charges, Roslyn, then twelve, did not in the end want to go court.
There is more. Even before this new paroxysm of personal violence, Karen had had to send Nicholas to live with his grandfather, her father, for safety’s sake. It turns out that Henry had already hit and gone after Nicholas in California, even before the wedding. Now, in Bay Springs, things only worsened. One night, after a long, languid day, Nicholas was sitting on the living room couch watching television. He thought he heard the sound of tussling coming from his mother’s and stepfather’s bedroom. Alarmed for his mother’s sake, Nicholas rose and walked to where the living room met the hallway leading to the bedroom.
It couldn’t have been a big house, nor a long distance. Suddenly, the door burst open and Henry flew out, coming straight for Nicholas. To this day, Nicholas doesn’t know why Henry charged at him, but terror struck and he turned on his heels and ran. He thinks Henry grabbed some sort of implement, maybe a frying pan. Henry was, Karen says, trying to kill Nicholas. By that time, Henry had started to drink again and was abusing Karen, especially when he was drunk. He must have been drunk that night. Nicholas ran to the neighbors and didn’t come back. So Karen had to send Nicholas away.
In exile in a strange land, Karen became focused on protecting Nicholas and then Roslyn. Ten-year old Michael wandered around on his own in the Mississippi woods. It could not have been easy for Michael, a sociable, gifted boy, to move from the urban climes of Southern California to this rural town, and to change schools after the school year had already started. But no one knows, really, what Michael’s life was like during the six or seven months under the water oaks and red maples in Bay Springs. Karen’s impression was that Mississippi was pretty much okay for Michael, the ten-year-old (soon to be eleven). He played a lot. There were plenty of trees to climb, nature’s rooftops on which to meditate. He spent a lot of time by himself out of doors, always his favorite place to be. Karen doesn’t remember with any precision what Michael was up to then. No doubt he noticed, though, when his older brother Nicholas was sent away to Georgia, like a refugee, to live with their grandfather. The boys had never before been separated.
Finally, one Mississippi evening—in April or May, not too long after the beating of Rodney King—Henry came home drunk again and in a fighting mood. This time Karen took the kids and ran. She left without her shoes. She had to sneak back to get them, her money, and their clothes. Then the three of them—Karen, Roslyn, and Michael—jumped into the car and drove.
When his mother, all of thirty-five, ran away from Henry, Michael became her boon companion. First, they escaped to his grandparents in Baxley, Georgia, yet another time-bound Southern hamlet ensconced in the deep woods. Roslyn was along for this panicked journey. Then, in June, Karen packed Roslyn off on a plane to Big Ros, to Oakland, for the summer, and took Michael, her good luck charm, to Americus, Georgia, a much bigger town with a state university 125 miles due west. She intended to reconcile with Henry, who was now staying with a brother who lived there. When Karen and Michael reconnected with Henry, though, they found that, before leaving Mississippi, Henry had matter-of-factly sold all of the children’s toys. Michael was devastated. For the first time in his life he had nothing. It was one thing to lose his toys; it was quite another to find that the man who had filled the hollow place in his heart had sold them. Living wasn’t easy that summertime.
By early autumn, as I was headed back to Princeton’s gothic halls for my junior year, Karen pressed charges in the Americus courts for domestic abuse. Determined to leave Henry, she sued for divorce, winning alimony of $25 per week. All the while, Henry’s brother stalked her, riding around in a car with a shotgun. And with this welter of violence washing over the family, Michael got into trouble for the first time. Sometime that fall, a few months shy of twelve, he stole a jar of coins, amounting to something under $10, from a white family across the street. He was starting to want things, impatiently, and he was also naïve, a little California kid, transplanted to the Deep South. Only out of naïveté could he have thought to steal anything from a white family in southern Georgia.
Rather than merely telling Karen about the theft and asking for repayment, the family pressed charges. This was the eleven-year-old’s first encounter with the law. Michael—still two year’s shy of his teens—went to court with his mother. By then Karen had her plane tickets to California. She duly showed those to the judge, who told her he would drop the charges, but only if she would get on the plane and never come back.
Once more, with the school year already having started, the family was in flight. George H. W. Bush happened to be president and was celebrating the triumph of Ronald Reagan’s family values. But the touters of marriage as the solution to the single mother’s woes neglect a fundamental point: the quality of the man makes all the difference. Henry ripped through their lives like a Mississippi twister.
Between the 1990 wedding and the summer of 1993, when Karen was finally resettled in Los Angeles with a measure of stability in a job that she would hold for more than a decade, Karen would go through four jobs and the kids through six mid-year school transitions.
These were the years that Michael grew from eleven to fourteen. This is clearly when things went wrong.
27.
THE LIMIT ON HELPING YOUR KIDS
Pre-adolescence is when the trouble started, when Michael was eleven and his mother’s brief marriage to Henry came apart before it even really began. Now began Karen’s journey through multiple jobs and the kids’ journeys through multiple schools. After Bay Springs, Baxley and Americus, now, once again, a month into the school year, in October 1991, just before his twelfth birthday, Michael moved. This time he and his family moved from Georgia to Claremont, the California college town modeled on Oxford and Cambridge, where I grew up and where my political scientist father, a Reagan appointee on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with one more year to serve, lived and taught.
My brother and I were
by then away at college, but my parents, Uncle William and Aunt Susan, a librarian at one of the local colleges, were still there and for my cousins their house was a second home, screened with laurel bushes, framed by pink-blossomed crepe myrtles, and shaded by a spreading loquat tree in front. In the back, I recall, was a glorious female ginko that burst into a bright gold blaze every year around Thanksgiving. Stinko ginko, I always called the fertile tree, for its raunchy-smelling fruits. Just past it was my mother’s rose garden, a hammock along one side.
My parents helped Karen find an apartment a few blocks away, the kind Southern California is full of, a modest two-story frame building, with walk-up apartments. Michael took piano lessons with a stern, diminutive woman who had been my own teacher and who taught us how to listen. She also taught hand position and demanded that we sit up straight, “like the Queen of England.” Michael earned money gardening for her, but resented the hectoring lessons about life that this martinet of a lady delivered standing over him as he weeded. This comfortable college town, where I went to public school, captained the track and volleyball teams, and learned how to hide my big vocabulary, is also where Roslyn fought her way into a gang to get protection from bullying.
Cuz Page 13