by Jerrold Ladd
What could she do with no knowledge, no skills, no ambition, and little support? And living in a place not unlike Hitler’s concentration camps? So she worried, worried about getting the next heroin pill, which never failed to make the unyielding hardness of her life go away.
My rage at the cops had really left with the eating of the chicken, so I went into the sparsely furnished living room, which had one couch and a picture on the wall of some dogs playing cards. Junior had spread cards in strategic positions around the living room, playing a game we called Army Man. Though muscular and strong, he was very gentle. That was his manner, caring and affectionate. He was nine, with a narrow head and scalp-short hair. He had become quiet and despondent once we entered the projects.
But Junior loved kids and kids loved him. He would push them around all day in a shopping basket from the Tom Thumb grocery. To protect them from the scorch, he would cover the basket with an old blanket held up by a stick. The kids would laugh and pretend they were on long journeys as my brother maneuvered the basket down twisted sidewalk paths, under bare trees, and along glass-littered street curbs. He and the children would play all day, until the fear of deeds done in the dark sent them hurrying home. He was remaining gentle, regardless of what my mother was doing.
My sister, Sherrie, who was the oldest, had probably left to get away from my mother and the house. She was being made into a young mother—cleaning, mending, and scrubbing, though hardly any cooking took place—when she should have been studying, maturing, preparing for life. Sherrie was very fair-complexioned, yellow, some would say, short and shapely. Her intelligence was average, her loyalty to our mother vigorous. She was even more naive than our mother about the streets but was strong-hearted and had a solid will. Trying to hustle up money, school supplies, clothes, and food kept her busy.
Past the cracked wood of the front door, the torn screen, and the porch, another ant trail, made from the muscle red kind, etched its way toward the nearby ant bed on the side of our project unit. I followed the trail of the single-minded worker ants, who were uncompromising in their drive to beat winter, to beat the insanity of failure. I sat barefoot on a lime-green pickle bucket some kid had left near the ant bed.
Like the ants, the project units were in the thousands, on the west side of the Trinity River. The Trinity River, as distinct as the former Berlin Wall, was a clear boundary between the projects and north Dallas, the white side of town. Several simple bridges allowed travel over it. Within the Trinity, marsh and grass hid stolen cars, snakes, and dumped bodies. The river smelled rotten; and the smell often drifted into the projects, settling on the buildings.
The vast projects were divided into three groups: Elmer Scott, George Loving, and Edgar Wards, with a network of trails connecting them. Eight apartments were carved from each unit and numbered like jail cells. Made of bricks, they looked as if someone took a few old dirty chimneys, molded them together, and cut out windows. Clotheslines crossed in the backyards. Inside, roaches and rats roamed throughout the night, in our iceboxes, closets, and beds. Spiders and their webs were in every corner. The toilets always flooded; we sometimes relieved ourselves outside on the ground. Hot water was rare. Didn’t matter to me: I never took baths anyway.
There was heat, but no air-conditioning. Some families had fans that they placed in wide-open windows to bring in the cooler air, when it was cooler. Others had old-fashioned blow fans that stored insulated water in small water tanks. But most families, like mine, had nothing. On long hot Texas nights, Junior and I usually tossed, turned, and sweated, unless a cool late night breeze brought us temporary relief. We would lie awake sometimes, waiting on that breeze. But when it passed us by, we would toss and sweat all night. Then the heat would wake us early in the morning.
Noise echoed throughout the units day and night, with everyone sitting on his or her porch when the apartments became unbearably hot. Radios would blare music, mostly blues and mellow jazz. Crowds of young, lusty boys and teenage girls with their babies would gather on the corners, on porches and in parked cars. But not too close to the dope dealers.
Since there were few streetlights that worked, the dark darkness gave the place an eerie, wasted look. Teenage boys roamed though the three sections late at night, to visit girls or the marijuana house in George Loving. Fights, rapes, and arguments were as common as the fear and grief that gripped this place.
Set up near the projects, across the wide fields, were rowdy gambling shacks and E-Z joints. Within these places the pimps, freeloaders, people trying to make rent money, and gamblers congregated. They gambled away hundreds of dollars, while old-timers kept card and domino games rolling through the night. Soul-food restaurants established by people who used to be in the drug business served plates of food until early morning.
Small colonies of houses shared borders with the projects. Families from the projects who had been able to scrape up extra money lived in these Mississippi wooden shacks with holes in the walls and roofs.
I lived in noisy Elmer Scott, near the lake and the grade school Jose Navarro, with babies, kids, and thousands of people. There were two distinct groups of families. The first was those who had minimum-wage jobs, who sacrificed and let their children eat daily hot meals and wear decent clothing. The second was those who had totally given up. They were thieves, hustlers, dope dealers, and lost dreamers, like my mother. Being content with day-to-day survival was a forced way of life.
But some people, like Ms. Ruthy Mae, didn’t seem to belong to either group. She was an older woman with two daughters in their early twenties and Chris, her five-year-old son. She had been in the projects a long time. She kept to herself, hardly ever going outdoors. From her house, which had junk stacked everywhere and an old-fashioned blow fan in the kitchen window, Ms. Ruthy Mae gave like Jesus. She gave us butter, bread, chicken, and anything else my mother sent us to borrow. She gave us clothes, even though they had the decadent odor of a trash mine. She never turned us down unless she just didn’t have it. She never spoke unkind words, never raised her voice. She wouldn’t be around for long, though.
Then there were people like me, who observed every word, every facial expression, and every event. I had to know how things worked, white policemen, drug addicts, project concentration camps. I bugged everyone I thought had an answer or a clue. The torture everyone endured was as much a part of me as my own fingers, as livid as the scorch vulture.
Outdoors, the ants were still nonstop near my green pickle bucket. The ant bed, dead in the middle of the several trails that branched out from it, held the ants’ harvest. No matter how far they ventured, or how difficult it was dragging a grasshopper or spider, they always faithfully returned to the nest. The ones leaving the nest seemed to be more vibrant, more energized, than the ones entering, who seemed burdened down. Antennas gesticulating, they scavenged until they found something edible to return to the queen. It was obvious that the force that drove them through death, storms, and stomps of giants was natural.
But there was a group even more loyal than the ants; and their trails to the lair were just as visible. Unlike the ants, they worked not only in the daytime, but also at night. In droves, from all directions, they would converge on the several corners where the dope dealers worked all day, pumping their product into these people. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, men mostly in their early thirties accepted TVs, food stamps, clothes, and anything of value for the dope. Unlike the ants, the dope fiends were not bothered. There was no one to stomp their heads or scatter their trails, as long as they continued to come.
From my pickle bucket, while my weak body warned me that it was time to go lie down, I looked to the corner. I saw some dope dealers working. Nearby, a boy named Mooky was practicing on his tiny drum set, which his mother had saved her money to get. His mother had four children and was from the minimum-wage group. When upset, she would viciously beat poor Kevin, Mooky’s older brother, even though she wasn’t on drugs. Her husband had left, a
nd she had to move to the projects. She stayed frustrated.
Mooky was about four years old. In his Salvation Army clothes, he had cocked his head to the side and was listening to the changing rhythms of the drums, as if they held the answers to every deep mystery. The steady thrums of the beats were echoing off the brick walls.
On the horizon, the sun was setting. On the ground, the ants were quitting. But the dope fiends were scampering in now from all directions, letting nothing keep them away.
“Mooky,” his mom said, “it’s time to stop.”
On that day, I made a personal promise that if I did nothing else, I would never become like my mother or these people. I would just say no. However, I didn’t realize that most of them had thought it was that simple, too. But no matter how intelligent, full of courage, motivated, and strong they had been, the ghettos, slums, and places like the projects had broken them all. Now, because my mother, my life guide, had birthed me right in the middle of the mud, the odds against my survival were stacked higher than the Empire State Building.
As a testimony to society’s power, the black mothers and fathers, who could have explored space, built cities, and pioneered new medicine in America, kept coming for their dope. I wondered if just for one night the steady drum of their footsteps would end.
Black parents rose in the mornings and turned into the living dead. They traveled back and forth to the corners, where they brought the harvest and purchased heroin. They locked themselves in dank bedrooms and bathrooms. They tied straps tightly around their arms, making their veins stick out. They sucked cooked pills out of bottle tops and into needles. With the injections, release eased into their veins, their precious souls. Perhaps they glimpsed happy times, strong communities. Maybe they saw themselves holding up torches of guidance, lighting the way for their children. Maybe they felt pure courage deep within, courage they had given up. Somewhere inside were men and women of intellect and capability trying to get out. Or did they see their tasks as so overbearing until they just refused to fight? So they abandoned their pride and families, their manhood and motherhood, their responsiblity to their children. And every day they hid the shame of this refusal behind the guile of dope.
2
DEADMAN
A week or two later, still in July 1977, I stood outside, just to breathe the fresh morning air. I wanted this to be a routine early morning, one when most of the evil and the people who had not gotten enough sleep during the night, like my family, were still asleep. Leonard Brown, Ugly Biggun, stood on the porch a unit down. What had brought that rascal out this early? I hated that bully, that fourteen-year-old who beat up little kids like me. He acted like he was so bad among our ranks but would act so friendly around older, bigger guys.
Biggun was slim but strong for a fourteen-year-old. He had a wide, flat chest and ripples in his stomach. His pea-size, wrinkled head, with flaming red eyes in slit sockets, was a constant joke. Several months before, when we first moved in, Biggun had been okay. The dummy had even tried to teach me something.
“It’s a simple trick,” Biggun had said one day as we walked together to the redneck store to buy a pack of Kool Lights for my mother. “All you do is take off at full speed and hold that speed until the person gets tired. Then let him get close to you. Suddenly slide into the ground, and he’ll go past you.”
I listened curiously as he continued. “Get up and go another direction. He’ll give up; they all give up. … You better learn it because you’ll need it around here,” he had warned. If Biggun had reason to run from anything, if he couldn’t scare it away with his face, I certainly had better learn the escape, I thought. I used the trick the next day, when ugly Biggun went back to being a bully and chased me down the street. But with a little improvisation of my own, I was sliding into the hard ground and kicking up a cloud of dust as he ran after me. I used his own worthless trick on him.
As I watched from my front porch, men got out of two cars and walked toward Shortleg Lee’s* apartment. They were all skinny, and they all had Afros. The Afro bandits.
No matter how many times they would do it, I could never believe that men would get out of those cars and roam through here to kill somebody. Kids were around here. But here they were again. I ran into the house and peered past the shades of the living room. I was in shock, but still excited. Ugly Biggun ran into his house, too. The Afro bandits were seven strong, with pistols and pump shotguns, and one held a jar of dark liquid. It seemed they planned to catch the dope dealer Lee while he slept. His time had finally come. His workers were not in sight. But to my surprise, the Afro bandits walked past his apartment and surrounded my young friend Mark’s house. They were going to kill Mark’s family.
They fanned out around the front door. One of them knocked. Mark’s fat, double-chinned mom answered. I ran out the door, going to get a close-up of the massacre.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Where is Lee?” said the Afro bandit.
“Lee doesn’t live here.”
“Tell Lee some friends are here to see him.”
“My kids are in here,” she moaned in a tremulous voice. “Lee doesn’t live here, I told you.”
“Well, which one of these apartments does he live in?”
She lied. “I don’t know.”
They continued to badger Mark’s mom. Meanwhile, I followed two Afros who went around to guard the back door. Soon, a third one came back there to round them up. “We’ve found Lee,” he coldly said. I trailed them loosely.
As they were reassembling in front of Lee’s apartment, two more were going around to prevent escape through the back. The head Afro knocked on Lee’s door once, then twice. He waited, then knocked again. No one answered. He signaled for his men to retreat. They slowly walked backwards, maybe ten paces. Then the man holding the jar stepped forward and threw it against the upstairs window. The smell of gasoline erupted in the air as the gangly Afro men unloaded their weapons while backing slowly toward the two cars. They left in a hurry.
The minute the gunfire began, I hit the ground facedown. All children would hit the ground when they heard gunfire, as though they had been trained in the military. The gunfire sounded like a sound track from some war movie. Mark jumped from his second-story window in fear and ran for his aunt’s house in Edgar Wards. Before rising up, I waited several minutes through the silence that comes after several loud explosions. The gunfire made people scramble from their apartments. Lee’s splintered window frame was smoking. He emerged unharmed and walked toward the parking lot with a pistol; he knew he had to show the people he wasn’t afraid, or they would lose their respect.
Shortleg Lee, a man in his early thirties, was well known, not notoriously recognized, as some dope dealers, but known, like a natural landmark, building, or park. His right leg was lame, so he dragged it when he walked. He had short napped hair and a beer belly under a flat chest. He always wore blue jeans and a T-shirt. His manner was quiet and soft-spoken, always smiling. He also was extremely secretive. Some young black woman had rented a project unit for Shortleg Lee, and that was where he spent his days.
Only his dope comrades, who worked several street corners, knew anything about him, his past, or his family. We common people were kept ignorant. But it was obvious Lee had money, a lot of money. He bought his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend a new Mercedes-Benz. But he didn’t openly flaunt his money or carry it in big wads like the few younger dealers. He captured the people’s yearning for money in another, insidious way.
For example, if you told Lee your age on your birthday, he would give you a crisp new dollar bill for each year you had lived. If you were fifteen, you would receive fifteen dollars. We kids wouldn’t utter one word when police tried to pick us for information about him. We were loyal to Shortleg Lee’s money.
One Christmas morning, Shortleg had his workers deliver fat hams to all the parents and expensive toys to all the children near his unit—about three hundred people. Our block lit up
like a street festival that day, for Lee also had his workers and their women prepare a tasty feast, with music, dancing, and drinks, on his decorated front yard. Everyone treated Lee like some sort of Godfather.
After the attempt on his life, Lee kept a squadron of men near and around him. He became more secretive than before, only staying in his project unit a few days concurrently. But he never stopped selling dope while living in the projects, and he was never caught there.
After the shoot-out, I went back home and explained what had happened to my family. My mother told me never to run toward danger again. She was high. Sherrie and Junior sensed the inevitable and darted from the room like roaches when you flip on a kitchen light. But I remained, pondering the shoot-out; I just couldn’t believe people could do that in this neighborhood. Then, my mother screamed in her early morning, rough voice: “I need someone to go to the store for me.” My sister and brother had sensed this, but I had been distracted. It tickled me to see how alert they had become about getting out of trips to the store. But there was no way I could get out of this one, which I knew would be for cigarettes.
“Can I eat first?” I asked.
“No! Now hurry up, boy, before I beat your ass.”
Unafraid, I walked to her and got the money. I went out the back door.
Another whooping probably would not have bothered me. My hide was getting used to them. Sometimes I would turn to look at her, dry-eyed, as she hammered her blows across my back, legs, and buttocks, just to let her see the anger in my face.
During times like this day, when my mother was in a bad mood, I didn’t mind going to the store. It was a way to avoid her. If avoiding her meant just hanging around all day without eating, we would do it. Beatings, accompanied by loud shouting and cursing, were a way to release frustration. Every kid I knew received these whoopings. Sometimes, up and down the noisy streets, the kids yelled and screamed, “Okay, Momma, I won’t do it no moa.”