by Jerrold Ladd
I breathed a sigh of relief as I stood and dusted the dirt from my pants. I was so glad that this rapist hadn’t succeeded, because I already had been through the experience. Before we moved into the projects, when my mother and father were still together, a young man had shown a strange interest in me. I must have been under five because I was not yet in any school.
With the promise of some candy, he took me into a shed and made me pull my pants down. I don’t recall any pain, so I don’t think he entered me physically but had his privacy between my legs. Afterward the boy said he wanted me to come back. And though I really didn’t understand, I felt something was very wrong. So I told my dad, without telling him what had happened. I didn’t want to go back. The next time my dad saw the boy, he shouted to him to leave me alone. Later we moved away.
That spring of 1978, I walked home and didn’t tell anyone what had happened between those two dark buildings. It wasn’t the first time some rapists had tried that, and it wouldn’t be the last. I went back to the safety of my closet, among the lifeless clothes. I hated living here, among all the bullies, noise, and murder. I hated starving, hated cleaning up like a maid and washing out panties in the bathroom face bowl. I hated my father for abandoning me, with an eight-year-old’s hate, which, of course, never lasted long. Just because he left my mother didn’t mean he had to leave his children, too.
3
COOL BROTHER
By the summer of 1978, I had already begun to develop strong self-reliance traits. I was coming to grips with my reality. We were children in abject poverty, separated from real America. We had parents who were trying every morning to deal with the man or woman in the mirror. The first law of nature, self-preservation, prevailed for them. They became wrapped up in big balls of grief and left us to fend for ourselves. But my mother, even in her zombielike condition, was there when I needed her the most.
She would come out of her dope trance, utter her powerful wisdom, then disappear without a trace: “Don’t hang around the wrong crowd. Don’t stay out too late.” Times like that made me wonder how my mother would have been if she had not been put through so much, if her mother had let her go to school, and if the father of her children had not abandoned her.
When she confronted me about stealing food from the shopping center, mother’s intuition, she explained in two quick sentences, nothing more, nothing less, how it could devastate my life:
“Jerrold, whatever I do, I’m not gonna raise you to be no thief. When people find out you’re a thief, they’ll never trust you again.”
But I was driven by hunger and had no concern for what others thought. I had experienced enough hunger headaches to know that you can’t do anything when you’re cramping and swelling and every cell in your body is screaming for a bread crumb or something. It almost paralyzes you.
The boy who introduced me to stealing, Bad Baby, was sixteen, short, and lean. He was aggressive, and would act quickly on his beliefs, which were good ones. The young girls loved his long Afro and the sharp clothes his mother, who had a speech defect, piled up for him. Of course they were a minimum-wage family, and they lived next door. Their apartment had nice cheap furniture, pictures, pots, plants, and wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor. The apartment also stayed cool and pleasant from the air conditioner in the window.
“Jerrold, are you coming over for dinner?” Bad Baby often asked.
“Naw, man, I’m not hungry,” my shame would say.
“Come on over and eat, Jerrold. There’s no reason to be ashamed, little brother. Ain’t nothing wrong with eating at a friend’s house.”
Bad Baby had this kind of sympathy for my brother and me because even the poorest kids now talked about how dirty and ragged we were. They had given us nicknames. They called me Dirt Dobbler and Junior Dirt Mieser. But Bad Baby wasn’t like them. Instead, he did nice things and never talked bad about me.
Bad Baby was also good at building bicycles from used parts. He also stole them. At times, when his mother let him, he would ride his bike out of the neighborhood. I didn’t have a bike of my own, like kids from the minimum-wage group, so he would carry me along on the back of his bike. We went to visit his aunt across Hampton. We ran errands to the store. But on one trip, Bad Baby took me across the Hampton bridge. It was the first time.
With Prescott, Bad Baby’s older brother, we rode alongside the traffic on busy Hampton Road until we came upon a residential area. As we turned down several different streets, Bad Baby and Prescott checking in all directions, I noticed small bikes, toys, and chairs unattended on their front lawns. They stopped at one corner, where Bad Baby ushered me off and pointed to a bike lying in someone’s front yard.
He said, “Jerrold, this is the only way you’ll ever have a bike. Go get it, man.”
“I don’t want to,” I told him.
He and Prescott stepped away for a second, talked, and returned.
“Jerrold, you’ll never have a bike unless you do it this way,” he lectured.
“Bad Baby, take me home.”
“If you don’t get the bike, we’re gonna leave you here.”
Seeing that I wasn’t budging, they sped off. I ran after them, but they were too fast. Scared, I turned back around, hopped on the bike, and pedaled in the direction they had ridden. They stood around the corner, waiting for me. We hurried back past the traffic and back across the bridge. Along the way, Bad Baby told me that the people had plenty of money and would never miss the bike. To keep me from being whooped, he told my mom he’d built it for me. And I kept it.
Bad Baby had always observed what went on at our house and had always been concerned. So it was no surprise when he found out my mother was on drugs. After he gradually became closer to my brother and me, he convinced us to run away and sneak into his house late one night, even though it was only next door. He thought things would be better if my mom was reported.
Since our mother had traded the upstairs room with Junior and me, Bad Baby had to creep onto the ledge under our window and above the back door. After he was inside, he tucked clothes under our blankets to look like sleeping people, and helped us out the window. The next day, authorities from Human Resources came. This funny-looking white man, dressed in a suit, took us to our apartment. He identified himself to our mother and told her he alone would question my brother and me. She gave him a nervous “okay” and looked at us sadly, as if she knew her wrongdoing had finally caught up with her. Before the white man started, I whispered to my brother to tell the man we were okay. My brother looked disappointed, as though I were messing up his chance to get away from the Hitler camp.
As for me, I had gone along reluctantly with Bad Baby’s plan, but this was too much. From snatches of conversations at the corners with the dope dealers I had heard about these strange white people from the state who destroy black families. I had been warned to avoid them at all costs. But more than any verbal admonishment, my instincts compelled me not to trust them, especially after the policemen. She was my mother. This was our home.
In our room with the door shut, the man began, talking with that soft, soothing voice, the kind psychiatrists use to relax people. “Now, I don’t want you to be afraid of what will happen to you boys, because no one’s gonna hurt you. I just want you to tell me the truth, and I’ll see if I can make things better for you, okay?”
“Okay,” my brother said, already falling under the spell. But I was not to be taken. The white man began his questions.
“Now, does your mother feed you?”
“Yes, sir,” I said quickly. “We eat very well.”
“How often do you attend school?”
“Ooh, we rarely miss days. I love school, my momma always helps me.”
“Does she take care of your sister?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Does she do drugs?”
“Ooh, no, sir,” I told him.
The white man started looking confused, as if he couldn’t understand why neighbors would report something wrong w
ith such happy kids and such a good mother. Before leaving, he apologized to my mother. And we never heard from the state people again.
Thereafter, I was forbidden from talking with Bad Baby. Before the summer ended, he and his family moved across Hampton to the shack houses. I later learned that Prescott, Bad Baby’s brother, was murdered there. His throat was cut.
My quiet brother, who also was experimenting with self-reliance, had learned to steal during his own adventures in the Hitler camp. And together, on days when our humger would not let us rest, we stole food from the shopping center. We stole things that were easy to conceal, like cans of sardines and small packages of rice. A bowl of rice and a tall glass of water was enough for our indiscriminate stomachs.
Another hustle we used to get food was going into the shopping center late at night to steal TV guides. The newspaper companies dumped hundreds of papers on the sidewalk. So Mark (the one who had jumped from his window to avoid the Afro hitmen), another kid named Big Mark, my brother, and I would get there about one in the morning. We would quickly sift through the piles and pick out all the TV guides. Then, when we had gathered all we could carry, we would scurry back to the lake to take the hidden trail. Back in the projects, we would go from door to door, selling our magazines for a quarter apiece.
We weren’t thieves, just hungry children. Work, when we could find it, took the place of stealing. Each morning Junior and I would rise early and go looking for jobs, walking up Industrial, up Singleton, up Hampton Road. Consumed with our attempts to find work, we would stay gone all day without eating. Most places would not hire us because we were too young, just eight and ten-year-olds. Occasionally we did stumble upon a place that needed temporary help. And my brother once landed a job for a service station that paid him about thirty dollars for a full week of work.
We worked at the shopping center, too. All day my brother and I would stand at the Tom Thumb with Syrup Head and Three Finger Willie, roaming around. We would ask customers if we could carry their groceries but would not ask for a fee. Instead we would just stand there, looking dirty and hungry. When we were done, some would tip us, others wouldn’t. We could make a good seven bucks after a long ten-hour day. We gave our mother sometimes all, sometimes half the money; the rest we spent on food or candy. We also dug through the trash cans behind the DAV store in the shopping center, looking for clothes, toys, change, and good pairs of shoes.
I still played Deadman, but not as often because a body had been found in the Deadman vacant units. Between the stealing and scavenging, though, I was managing to stay away from the house, where things weren’t getting any better. A bootleg family had moved in next door to us. They bought cases of beer from south Dallas, a wet part of the city, and stored it in their house. From their back door they sold each can for a dollar. Nighttime traffic was steady in and out of their house. On the corners, the heroin dealers were in full force.
I was on my Huffy bike all the time now. I often rode it down Fishtrap and Shaw streets, near the two candy trucks, and on Apple Grove and Morris, up and down the sidewalks and trails on the block, not stopping for the common fistfights that crowds gathered to watch or the young boys burning mattress cotton at nightfall to keep the mosquitoes away.
I would even ride my bike where the rapists had attacked me. Each time I did, a black man sitting on a porch watched me curiously. Sometimes a woman was with him. I made a mental note to keep an eye on him. If he were another rapist, I would not be his next victim.
Riding my bike on the other end of the block, I grew closer to Eric, a boy I played Deadman with. He and I were the same age and both had heroin mothers so we had a lot in common. Eric was afraid to live in his house, a problem he discussed with me. He knew something bad was going to happen there. So, he told me, he kept his bedroom window open, in case he needed to make the two-story jump to safety. He dreamed, he often said, of the day when his parents would stop selling dope and they all could leave the projects forever. To pass the time, we would sit out at night on the swings the authorities had built. We would swing our souls away late into the dark, starry nights. Both our young mothers had stopped coming home.
Eric also knew of the muscular, dark man who had been watching me. I pointed him out one day while he sat on Eric’s porch. Eric was surprised. He said that the man had been with some of the prettiest women in the projects. He was no rapist. He was one of those settled cool brothers, the smooth ones who know a lot about women.
One evening, instead of going up Morris, I rode past the man’s house, where he was sitting on the porch with his girlfriend. He stopped me and asked what my name was, said he knew about my mother and my home situation. He said he used to be just like me when he was a boy. Looking into my eyes with his own black rubies, he told me I was good-looking.
“Women will take care of you when you’re older, if you know how to move a woman’s heart,” he said. His girlfriend just sat there and smiled. The man wasn’t threatening, and he aroused my curiosity, too much for me not to go back. So I did go, all summer long.
I don’t think he had children because I never saw any. I know he didn’t work. The apartment, which belonged to his woman, was sparsely furnished and had only two dining chairs and a couch. It was still a project unit, so it had the small rooms, which stayed hot. Everything was kept tidy and clean, even the tile floors, which required a lot of mopping. His backyard had the same wire clotheslines and red ants.
He kept food, a lot of vegetables, greens, and fish, but none of the disgusting pig feet, pig ears, and things my mother cooked from time to time. He never fried his food and said he didn’t eat pork because it was worse than putting heroin in your blood. He, not his girlfriend, cooked their meals; I found that odd. Until he moved away, he gave me food, which I ate like a starved animal.
But what I recall most is his bedroom. The windows were covered by heavy blankets, forever blackening the sun. It stayed totally dark in there. A dull, red light, like one blinking on a dark stormy night atop a tall tower, revealed the shadow of a small table next to his bed. That light and the reefer smoke gave the room an enchanted setting.
While the deep rhythms of the band Parliament and Bootsy’s Rubber Band softly played out of four speakers in each corner of the room, I would sit, light-headed from his reefer smoke, absorbing the almost spiritual music, and listen to this black man, who wore a net cap over his small Afro. I clearly remember two of his imperatives: “Always love your woman’s mind,” and, “You have to take care of her, so she’ll hold you up when the white man wants to crush you.” Not until years later would I come to understand his advice or the rare kind of black man he was. Over time I grew to respect him, because unlike many of us, he seemed content and at peace, seemed to know some secrets about the projects, perhaps their purpose, perhaps why we were in them, that made him seem not subdued, at least in many ways.
After the sweet brother piqued my interest in women, it wasn’t long before I met my first female friend, Gloria*, on the day she and her family moved to west Dallas, near my unit, on the row behind Biggun’s. My friendship with Eric had been dwindling away naturally, like friendships between little kids do, so Gloria came along on time.
From the first day I saw her at the candy truck on Fishtrap, Gloria was beautiful to me. Too beautiful. She was thin, her skin gleamed with natural health, and her eyes were pearls, shadowed by shoulder-length hair. Not even her old clothes and weathered shoes could overshadow her beauty. After I gathered enough courage I introduced myself.
“My name is Jerrold, you must don’t live around here.”
“How’d you know?” she asked.
“Because you’re shopping at the high candy truck. If you want to, I’ll show you where the cheap one is.”
“That’ll be nice,” she said, looking as if she knew she had met her first friend. And from that day forward, that’s the way Gloria and I would get along, simply, openly, and cheerfully.
I walked her back home from the candy
truck and offered to help her and her family move in.
With the work of moving, Gloria was helping as much as her girlish strength would allow, carrying bags of clothes and boxes of pots over the barren ground between much needed rest periods. Her sisters, on the other hand, were bulky, strong women who could help the men carry the heavy pieces. They all worked under the admiration of the older boys, who stood around watching. Enough of them already had volunteered. And her mom, who was thin like Gloria, helped also.
Over time I learned that Gloria’s two sisters had babies and her mother was on heroin. I didn’t know much about her father—who mostly stayed to himself—except that he had a job somewhere and was the only support the family had. Gloria’s mother shouted at him all the time. He seemed to be on heroin, too.
I admired the young girls as much as I could at that age, but Gloria was beyond them all because she was kind, gentle, and sweet, all at the same time. I can’t recall ever hearing one bitter word come from her mouth or one angry expression on her face. The older boys longed for her ripeness through lusty stares. But of all, she liked scrawny me.
She was my first intimate contact with a woman. To share feelings and play games became the order of the day. And though we would not see each other for weeks or months, we would still say that we were going together. We would sit around together and talk on her back porch, of course after I climbed the tall tree back there, which was equally as important. Sometimes we held hands, being sure to stay away from the minimum-wage group, who would have teased us. We occasionally sat alone under the dark nights. We kissed only once, and I thought I experienced a little bit of that healing my cool friend had talked about, for even at that age blacks were real mature about relationships between men and women.
Sometimes Gloria would express her disappointment at her mother, who she thought could do a lot better. I would overhear Gloria questioning her mother about women things. But her mother, who didn’t want to be bothered, always responded unkindly, angrily, sometimes frantically. Something else I picked up on was Gloria’s serious weakness. She lacked self-reliance, something all the kids had learned was vitally necessary. I hoped Gloria also would gain the skill, in time.