Another Day in the Death of America

by Gary Younge

  Greg took them in but thought moving the boys to Goldsboro at that age was a bad idea. “I said, ‘Man, you shouldn’t have brought him down here. These little niggas down here don’t want nothin’. And they got these guns. And he’s gonna get in some mess.’”

  Goldsboro (population thirty-seven thousand) sits halfway between Raleigh and the Atlantic coast, but it’s off the interstate and on the road to nowhere in particular, with a quaint downtown that is mostly closed by seven o’clock. Wikipedia lists twenty-nine notable people who have come from Goldsboro. Its most famous progeny include Chris Richardson, a contestant on the sixth season of American Idol, and Thomas Washington, a First World War admiral and hydrographer with the US Navy.

  Being from New York, Greg finds attitudes in Goldsboro limiting and backward. “This is the dirty South right here,” he says. “These people round here twenty years behind the time. They still let white people keep them in slavery round here by Uncle Tomming. I say you don’t need to Uncle Tom no more. We got a black president. That’s over with. We equal with everybody.”

  Daina says, “They didn’t care about him because he was black. He didn’t come from an affluent family. His mother and father weren’t pillars of the community.”

  Jasmin, Greg’s twenty-eight-year-old girlfriend and mother to his youngest child, agrees. “They’d get at you about the dumbest stuff here,” says Jasmin, who grew up in California. “About the color of your car, your hair longer than theirs, your house smaller than them. It’s crazy. And that’s just the black people. We ain’t even talking about the white people. We don’t mess with them.”

  Gustin had certainly had it with Goldsboro and planned to move to Raleigh the following Monday to live with his mother, who said she would let him have her apartment while he enrolled in community college. That was the plan, anyway. Greg approved. “I told him there ain’t no jobs around here. The only reason I’m still here is because I’m working at Walmart. If I didn’t work at Walmart I’d be working at Raleigh.”

  Greg was an involved and engaged father. Every other Saturday, he took the boys to the Golden Touch barbershop. When the tax rebate came every year, he would share the spoils. Daina was impressed by the home-cooked meals he would make. “I mean from scratch. Like he’d make his own biscuits. Not pop and chips. Who does that?”

  “They were like buddies,” says Jasmin. “They had their ups and downs, but they were like buddies.” Some of those downs were petty. One Thanksgiving, when Gustin could not have been more than thirteen, Greg took the kids to Daina’s house in a stinking mood. “He was flaming,” she says. “And I was like, ‘It’s Thanksgiving, what’s the problem?’ And he takes the scarf off Gustin’s neck and says, ‘That’s the problem.’ He had a hickey. The problem was the girl was eighteen, nineteen. Greg was livid.”

  Every now and then, Gustin would “borrow” Greg’s cologne or the car without permission or a license. Over the summer, Greg had promised Gustin some sneakers but hadn’t been able to afford them, which Gustin felt was justification for calling him a “liar” and chastising him for going back on his word. The “yapping with his hands” would also stoke the embers of whatever strife was in the house. “He liked talkin’ back,” says Greg. “Normal eighteen-year-old stuff. ‘Clean up your room.’ ‘I ain’t gonna clean up no room.’ Wanting to sleep all day. ‘You need to cut the grass today.’ ‘Okay, I got it.’ Come back and the grass ain’t cut. Stuff like that. Simple stuff. Basic stuff.”

  For his part, Gustin seemed to appreciate Greg, even if he felt he spread himself too thin. “My dad’s okay,” he told Daina. “He’s cool. He’s just got too many kids. He don’t even remember my last birthday.”

  But over time, the “basic stuff” accumulated into more serious conflict. As well as the girls climbing in through the window, there were the boys hanging out at the house. It was bad enough that at times Gustin was running around in the streets, but increasingly he seemed to be bringing the streets home. At one point Greg threatened to deprive Gustin of his privacy completely. “You don’t pay no rent in here, bro, so I might just take the door off those hinges and you be like in the penitentiary. No door. Every time I walk past I can look in your room.”

  “I didn’t do it,” he told me. “But I threatened to.”

  Greg liked Gustin’s best friend, Britt, who went to the same school. Britt’s house, says Gustin’s friend Hardy, was the “hangspot” where friends would meet up. But Greg was increasingly worried about other company Gustin was keeping. He would return from work or from one of his baby mama’s houses to find people he didn’t know or didn’t trust or both just lounging about. “There’d be niggas laying in his room,” he says. “I’d say, ‘Who is this?’ Every day he’s bringing niggas in here and they spendin’ nights. I come home and go into his room and there’ll be a little boy sleeping over there. I’d be like, ‘Yo, man. What’s this? A motel or something?’”

  These were the “Slocumb Street boys,” and Greg knew some were gang members, and he knew he didn’t want that for Gustin. “Every time he brought something in here that looked like it was from a gang, I’d open the door to that woodstove and burn it up. I’d tell him, ‘Don’t bring that mess up in my house, bro.’” He knew the signs, and clearly he could see that Gustin was tempted. “A couple of times he’d buy something red. I’d watch him for a little while and say, ‘You buying a lot of red every day, boy, so why you doing that? I know you ain’t in no gang.’ If I clean up and I see it, I throw it away.”

  Like Toshiba, the mother of Stanley, who’d died almost exactly twenty-four hours earlier not far away in Charlotte, Greg felt that he’d tried everything, including setting clear boundaries and accommodating Gustin’s adolescent urges. Like Gary Sr., in Newark, Greg felt that Gustin may have been bristling at the tighter rein that comes with having just a man in the house. “You have a father who’s gonna let you do most of your stuff at the house, so you need to stay at the house. Don’t hang in them streets, man, because them boys got mothers who will let them do what they want to do. You got a father who ain’t gonna let you do what you want to do, so you have to figure out which way to go. It’s a different kind of love. You got rules.”

  Greg felt some of those rules were being undermined by Gustin’s mother and sister. “My thing was if he wanted money he had to be working or in school,” says Greg. “But his mother and sister would spoil him to death. They would keep sending him money through Walmart MoneyGram. But I didn’t know. So he’s lying home all day like he ain’t got no money. And then at night, when I go to work, he jump up and he’s gone.”

  At times, these tensions got physical. “I had to junk him up a couple of times,” says Greg. “He got to thinking he could try me. While he was running his mouth, I just ran up on him and whoop. Grabbed him by the neck and told him, ‘The fight is over, baby.’ No, no, no, it ain’t gonna be like that. One time I had to chase him with a baseball bat. He started cussing at me, man, and I said, ‘Man, I’m the last one you need to be disrespecting because, push comes to shove, I’m the nigga that got your back.’”

  At one point, earlier in the fall, Greg kicked him out for two months and Gustin went to stay with Britt and his parents. In October, Daina reached out to Gustin. “I asked him if he had accepted Christ in his life,” she says. “The term they use here is saved. He said he’d given his life to Christ many years ago. And I said this is a time for you to renew your relationship. Because you need protection. You want to be a man. You’re not on the porch anymore. You’re out there in the street. You’re not at home. You’re with the big dogs. You need to be covered. And I’m really concerned now.”

  She took him to her church one Sunday and introduced him to the men in the congregation and walked away to let them talk. She has no idea what they said. Afterward, she took him to Applebee’s for lunch to discuss his future and encourage him to reconcile with his dad.

  She tried to get him to see things from Greg’s vantage point. “You�
��ve got to understand he’s trying to take care of the household and trying to make sure you have what you need. Sometimes there are disappointments. But that doesn’t mean that he’s bad. . . . When you’re responsible for someone else, because you bring them in this world, it doesn’t matter how or whatever or what you have, you do the best you can because as a parent you care. And until you’re a parent you’re not going to get it.”

  For his part, Gustin had some sympathy for his father. As Greg remembers it, after staying for about six weeks at Britt’s, Gustin approached him. “Yo, Daddy, man,” he said. “Shit. I’m tired of sleeping on that mattress.” Greg told him to come on home if he was ready to respect his rules. “I said, ‘Look, man, when I come back from work, I don’t expect to see five or six niggas waiting in my house sleeping around smoking weed and stuff. I can smell it.’”

  “I used to let Britt stay over here ’cos I knew Britt was his friend. Britt was his real friend. When he came back I told him, ‘Now Britt’s your real friend. When you got put out he took you in. That’s a friend. Where were the rest of them boys at?’”

  Gustin consented. “Some children are a little bit more mature,” says Daina. “I knew that even if his father had his ways of doing things that I didn’t always agree with, there was love there.”

  GUSTIN NEVER DID GRADUATE. Smart as he was, he wasn’t clever enough to stay out of trouble at school, even though he didn’t have long to go. In October, he’d been suspended for ten days after he and a friend were found in possession of stolen cell phones (the details of what they were doing with them and how he got them are sketchy, but no one denies he had them). When the suspension was over his friend went back to school; Gustin did not.

  Daina intervened on his behalf to talk with the school administration about getting him back on track. She knew he could apply himself. He’d occasionally worked for her and had done well, with other employees saying he was a sharp lad. But as he approached the point when he should graduate, he was struggling to reach the finish line. Following his suspension he was reluctant to go back to school because he said he’d been bullied by a teacher. He opted for independent study at home instead, but to Daina’s immense frustration the school wouldn’t cooperate. “He needed two or three credits, and he would have finished those classes in January. ‘He’s right there at the door of graduation,’” she told the school administrators. “‘He’ll be the first in his family to graduate. How are you going to deny him this? At this stage. In this time.’ They kept saying, ‘We’ll get back with you. We’ll get back with you.’” But by the time they did, it was too late.

  So Gustin was out of school and kicking his heels. “So I cut his allowance short,” says Greg. “Make him hungry.” He told Gustin, “I ain’t want to give you nothing when you ain’t working,” he told him. “Either you go to school or you work. Then you can get anything I get. And I ain’t got a lot. But I’ll work with you.” When Gustin announced his plans to move to Raleigh on Monday, Greg took this as a positive sign and decided to give him the Cadillac anyway.

  “I think where Greg messed up is that he said Gustin had to graduate first before he gave him the car,” says Jasmin. “And then he just went ahead and gave it to him.”

  “I sure did,” admits Greg. “I went against my word.” He warned Gustin, “Don’t go in the ’hood with that car. It ain’t about the fact that you better than nobody. Just ’cos you’re eighteen in a Cadillac, in this town some people gonna hate you for that.”

  Daina thought it was a bad idea, period. “I wasn’t happy about the car. He’s eighteen years old. What the hell’s he doing with a Cadillac?” But the plan had been in the works for some time. Greg had too many kids to fit in the Cadillac and had already arranged to buy a white Suburban from a friend.

  Without telling Gustin of his plans, Greg had occasionally let him drive the Cadillac to the barber’s or home from school while Greg was with him. Gustin got his driver’s license on Wednesday, November 20. Greg gave him the keys to the car on Thursday. “Okay,” he told him. “This is your car. You want it, you gonna have to work on it. I ain’t putting no more money into it. I’ll keep insurance on it. You have to buy gas.”

  The car had been in the garage for a little while and needed some work. Greg was eager for Gustin to figure it out for himself. “It was leaking a little fluid. I knew what it was. But I wouldn’t tell him.” But Gustin was smart. He figured it out for himself, and—as Jaiden’s family mourned, as Kenneth planned his last night out as a teenager, and as Tyler and Brandon played video games—Gustin worked on his Cadillac all through Saturday until it was fixed. By the evening it was ready to roll.

  “YOUTH IS ONLY BEING . . . like one of those malenky toys you viddy being sold in the streets,” says Alex, the fifteen-year-old protagonist of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange in the novel’s youth-specific language of Nadsat. “Like little chellovecks made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties, like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of those malenky machines.”5

  The thing is, it very much depends on what kind of path has been laid out for you as to what kind of thing you’re going to bang into and how much it will hurt.

  For those who are privileged, the long-term consequences of rash moments can be minimal. When former president George W. Bush was questioned repeatedly on the campaign trail about his cocaine use and heavy drinking as a young man, he responded jokingly, “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.”6 There is a wry logic to such an answer, even if Bush hardly exemplifies its most important lesson: there’s only so much maturity one can expect from those who are not fully mature.

  The Bullingdon Club, an all-male exclusive dining club at the University of Oxford, is notorious for throwing ostentatious banquets at which privileged students get very drunk and then often vandalize the restaurants in which they were eating before paying for the damage in full. Its members have included British prime minister David Cameron, chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne, and London mayor Boris Johnson—all Tories. “I don’t think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash,” wrote Johnson’s biographer, Andrew Gimson, of the club’s activities in the eighties. “A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men.”7

  Just two months after the day on which this book is set, pop star Justin Bieber was arrested at four a.m. for drunk driving and resisting arrest. He was driving sixty miles per hour in a thirty-miles-per-hour zone while drag racing against Def Jam rapper Khalil Sharieff after a day spent allegedly smoking marijuana, taking antidepressants, and drinking beer. The charges were later lowered to careless driving and resisting arrest after a plea deal in which Bieber agreed to attend twelve hours of anger-management counseling, attend a program that teaches about the impact of drunken driving on victims, and make a $50,000 donation to the organization Our Kids. The judge explained his lenient sentence thus: “Here is someone who is young. His whole life is ahead of him, and he just hopefully will get the message. He will grow up.”8

  That was a good call. But without an expensive lawyer or powerful parents, few are likely to be treated so leniently. Gustin was, in many ways, a regular teenager. He smoked marijuana, but according to Greg, “he wasn’t no big druggy”; he liked a drink, “but he wasn’t no big drinker.” “He ain’t no angel, now,” says Greg. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s the average eighteen-year-old. He do what we do when we were eighteen.” But if you’re black and working class, “average” won’t cut it. A minor mishap, even one not of your making, could spell danger.

  “I have grandchildren living in the suburbs,” says Daina. “I don’t want to say they’re shelte
red. But their comings and goings are controlled. There’s a lack of resources in this town, and their home is not like Greg’s household—with a single father, working at night.” To be caught in even a minor transgression—like marijuana possession—could have major consequences that could leave you ensnared in the criminal justice system in a way that could impact you for the rest of your life and effectively deprive your citizenship rights.

  “Once you’re labeled a felon,” writes Michelle Alexander in The New Jim Crow, “The old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”9

  The law is the law, and those who use cocaine or smash up property know it is illegal. But when the stakes are that high and the odds that skewed, poor people don’t have the luxury to learn from their mistakes. For working class youth, the great American myth of personal reinvention is elusive.10 For that, you need not only a good lawyer, but the resources for rehab, a new home in a new place away from the entanglements of your past, the chance of a new job, and the chance for new training and education. In the absence of those opportunities, you are less likely to recover from your mistakes than to repeat them.