by Marcus Burke
Reggie Graham
Christmas Eve the Squad Six way. All of us—me, D-roc, Buggy, Sticks, Claude, and my cousin Tony—huddled up on the corner of Lothrop, hugging the block to stay warm. Sipping Hennessy and Alizé posting up on the wall in front of Sticks’s crib, getting them bags off. It was our version of spreading the Christmas cheer ’cause that’s what us Squad Six boys do: we get money. It wasn’t too late night, something like eleven o’clock, when E-Bone Battel exploded out his crib spittin’ flames. No more than two steps behind him was Miss Ruby. She was tight too. Eddy got right about to his truck when Miss Ruby jumped in front of the driver’s-side door of his beat-ass blue Bronco.
We couldn’t call it, but they were blowing hella hard. Then Miss Ruby stopped yelling. She just stood there in front of the truck with her hand fixed high on her hip, dangling a piece of paper in his face. He bucked up and snatched it out of her hand. She stood there, arms folded. He paced back and forth in front of her, still snapping. I couldn’t make out all the bullshit he was popping off, but I caught this much through his bootleg Jamaican accent, “You think me and you are of size, huh? Woman, keep on tonight and see what takes place in these streets!”
We’d played our position from the sideline long enough, but talking all silly like that wasn’t about to work out for nobody. We broke toward them before someone hit up the jakes and we all got in hot water.
“Ayo, E-Bone, why don’t you just be out fam?” my right-hand homie Sticks yelled up the street as we strolled toward them. Buggy and his twin brother D-roc raced out a few steps ahead of the rest of us. Them two wild-ass Dominicans live across the street from me and Tony on Verndale Road, there’s no kill switch between the two of them, once one of them bucks ain’t no point in trying to stop them. But E-Bone’s a loyal customer. When he’s around the way he come to me for his bud, sometimes a little soft white, never gives me any trouble and I wasn’t really trying to fuck that up, but he was so caught up beef’n he didn’t even respond.
When we got over to their driveway I flexed up and stepped between them. E-Bone looked me in the eyes like he wanted to box. He knew better. I’da beat the brakes off his punk ass right then and there. From the yellowish-red tint in his eyes I could tell he’d been fucked up sniffing the white girl and some other shit. He stared at Miss Ruby and crumpled up the paper, then said, “Cool,” and for a second they both lowered their voices. I looked at the boys and with a few nods of the head it seemed like our business was settled. I didn’t like that look E-Bone had in his eye, but we began to roll back over to our corner anyway. We turned and I heard a loud crunch and a dense thud and I knew what was poppin’. In the corner of my eye, I saw Miss Ruby’s long brown extensions fly up in the air under the streetlights. By the time I turned fully, E-Bone was on his tippy toes with Miss Ruby yoked up on his truck. We all doubled back. Before we could get there, he landed a big-boy combo on her jaw.
“Fuck is wrong with you, nigga!” D-roc growled and then speared him from the side onto the wet concrete. “So what happens when everyone gets bagged ’cause you on some hotboy bullshit!”
Buggy spat in his face and then slid a hook across his jaw. Them two could have handled him but we all pummeled. We were really total-packaging the fool too, until I started to hear the slow rattle of wind chimes and the squeaky swings of screen doors opening. I stopped and looked around to see the neighborhood slowly waking up. By the time we composed ourselves and wrestled him away from Miss Ruby, I could already hear the howl of the jakes racing up Blue Hills Parkway. We dipped up the block and stashed off all the product. By the time we made it back, the neighborhood was already buzzing with gossip as the blue and red lights strobed around the block.
Through all the commotion, I looked up at Miss Ruby’s house and saw little Andre and Nina’s tear-swollen eyes looking out through the shades in their front window. A little farther up the way was Vernice Taft, the ringleader of the suntan ladies, standing in her driveway. Her and all her followers outside in their bathrobes and slippers, deep in a coffee klatch, all of them rocking curlers under their head wraps, weird-colored night crèmes dotted around their faces, smoking Virginia Slims, and generating rumors about the “Christmas Eve disturbance” courtesy of the Squad Six crew.
These suburban broads love to hate and call the jakes on niggas, they think they’re the neighborhood watch but they’re really the peanut-gallery-of-insignificant-opinions, that’s all. Ain’t nobody on the block two-faced like them hypocritical bitches. They hate on us from afar, but their thoughts and judgments don’t make or slow up my money none. We sit on the corner and in the summer they tan outside Vernice Taft’s house and because they’ve lived here longer than us, they think they got the right to talk shit all day. What them broads need is some hobbies and jobs. I mean, shit. We use brown paper bags. They use coffee mugs. They ain’t no better.
As the jakes were talking to E-Bone and Ruby, we all slowly slithered back to the corner and chilly-pimp’d it, panning the crowd. You always gotta be careful when folks get into little crowds. That’s when people start to drink their I-can-fuck-with-them juice. So we posted up and had our eyes lurking. I could see all the old folks leaning over their porch railings looking down to see what was going on. Nosy-ass people. Every window on the block was lit up with little dark figures peeking their heads out.
At the very top of the street, I could see Smoke and his boys standing on the high porch of his crib, a glowing doorway behind them, none of them wearing coats, shivering and fumbling all over each other, looking down the block like the pack of corny-ass classroom niggas they are. I used to go to school with them niggas, they some diet-thugs for real, Smoke’s the only one in their little crew with heart, the rest of them cats are straight pussy.
See, me and Smoke, we were cool at one point. More like business partners. Long story short: we decided to pursue our local hood pharmaceutical endeavors on different ends of the street. Lothrop Ave. and Verndale Road, that’s me and mine’s, it ain’t much but I eat good over here. Smoke, he can have all the bullshit up the block on Lothrop and Decker Street. We had some serious conflicts in morals, which is really what caused us to have to just walk our separate paths. I guess I’m more like a Robin-Hood-X-type brother. I do what I do to get by in the hustle game, but I look out for my peoples. I ride for mine’s. Smoke’s the type of nigga that’ll steal your wallet and help you look for the shit. Only looks out for himself, if your money’s green, he’s got what you need, no questions asked. The other day I saw him serve some young bucks that looked about his little brother Beezy’s age. Them little cats couldn’t be no older than ten or eleven like Andre and that’s a damn shame.
I heard the buzz of the crowd muffle down and I refocused on them. I saw the pigs cuffing E-Bone as he yelled out at everyone, “Y’all can go back inside now. Show’s over!”
The swine tussled him toward the car, then like a little beam of light Andre ran out of the house barefooted, wearing an old ratty oversized T-shirt. He stopped a few feet away from the cruiser and sounded off like a big dog, through the whimpers of his cries, “Pop, I hate you! You just gon’ leave us on Christmas, huh? Go ’head! Just leave! Don’t you ever come back!”
Papa Tanks grabbed Andre, hugging him tight and rubbing his head as he sobbed into his stomach. Nana Tanks consoled Ruby as she wept, while Nina stood arms folded next to her aunt Diamond, Miss Ruby’s younger sister. They all watched from the walkway behind their fence.
Nina looked up at Papa Tanks and asked, “So, what are we going to do now?”
He looked up the street at the jakes. “You mustn’t get involved in the grown business of a man and his woman, you understand me?”
She looked confused but nodded yes anyway.
When I heard Andre snapping, I felt them words. Way back when, I cried some tears like those too. Back when my mother told me I was going to have a sleepover with cousin Tony over at Aunty Gladys’s crib, but when she tossed me a duffel bag full of clothes, s
aid, “Have fun,” and didn’t even walk me up onto the porch, I knew she wasn’t coming back. It wasn’t the first time she’d disappeared in the streets.
I used to live over in Dorchester on Dakota Street, at my grandmother’s. My mother came around sometimes, but she had a real bad thing for the needle and anyone who could help her fill it. She was one of my father’s favorite hoes, but he cut her loose when she got too fiended-out, stopped following orders, and started messing up his money. He had a reputation for having a stable of the best-looking broads around and she was fucking up his image. Once she popped up pregnant with me and wouldn’t stop using, he stopped dealing with her.
I was born flagpole-high, premature, and super dependent on whatever my mother was using while I was inside of her. Once I stabilized, the social workers released me to my grandmother’s care. My mother was always in and out of rehab or drifting around the city. My grandmother never lied to me about who my parents were. She was the first to tell me my mother was never quite right. She ain’t have to say much about my father because his name rang bells in my neighborhood anyway. He started out just a rip-and-run stickup kid and that’s how he got his nickname “Dicey,” he liked to rob back-alley dice games when he was younger. That’s before he started pimpin’.
I heard a lot of stories about him from the old heads on the block, about the endless niggas he’d disappeared or broke bones on, for fucking around on his ho-stroll over in Codman Square. He was known for driving an all-black tinted-out Buick Electra, the old-timers called it a “Deuce and a Quarter,” his always had hundred-spoke gold rims and whitewall tires. The old-timers would tell me that I looked just like him all the time. It’s hard to say, I’ve never met him face-to-face. He sent money and toys to my grandmother’s house when I was younger. She’s the one who really raised me until she took sick when I was five while still my mother was gone chasing the high.
I saw my father’s Deuce and a Quarter cruise past me a few times but I couldn’t see through those night-black tints on his windows. I sort of knew his face from the pictures of him on my mother’s dresser, with him and her in front of his car, her poking her ass out, him gripping it, and a gang of his tricks lining both sides of them.
I think I saw him one time in the flesh while I was taking the bus home from school. He was walking out of a bodega on Blue Hill Avenue. His black Deuce and a Quarter was parked a block up the way and two tall skinny brown-skin cats with long wavy perms and three-piece suits were strolling toward it, they both looked alike, one must’ve been him and the other was probably one of my uncles, but who can tell? The bus turned and I lost sight of them.
He stopped sending money and presents and disappeared completely when I was six. This was around when my grandmother died and my mother finally came back home. Word on the streets was that he got caught up with some cats from over in Roxbury and he took a few hoes and dipped off somewhere down south, to hide out. After my grandmother died, my mother got clean for a little bit. Her Narcotics Anonymous sponsor encouraged her to go to church and she became a church lady, but I never trusted that shit.
We heard no word from my father for two years, and then randomly he started sending us envelopes with money stuffed inside a card with a picture of two dice. No words. No return address.
It was clear as day, he wasn’t really fuckin’ with us, but my mother started praying about him and meanwhile worshipped his memory. She kept all of the cards in a neat stack on the nightstand beside her bed. Every morning when she got dressed, she’d put on a couple dabs of the big bottle of Brut aftershave she had, she said she had it in her purse when he kicked her to the curb.
She took the money and the envelopes as a sign that he still loved her and that maybe he’d come back. She was a pathetic sight to see in those days. The way she’d talk about him like he’d just been over to our apartment or something. She told me she got clean just for him and for two years she stayed clean, wishing on a star. Rumors started up when I was nine that he was back in town but I never saw him or his car around. The envelopes stopped coming when I was ten and the word on the streets was that old beef had caught up to him and someone shot him while he was sitting in his Deuce and a Quarter, outside Brother’s, over in Mattapan Square. He was eating a breakfast plate. Caught slipping, should’ve known the sitting duck always gets fucked.
My mother didn’t want to believe it until she read it for herself, it made big headlines, “Notorious Gangster Remington ‘Dicey’ Graham Murdered Execution Style in Broad Daylight Outside Eatery in Mattapan Square.”
My mother was always weak, but I never knew a person could implode and crumble so fast. It’s like my mother went from marble to dust. She stayed in her room for a few days blasting Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly record, crying, screaming, and cursing at God. On the fourth day she took me over to my aunt Gladys’s crib in mild-ass Milton and I been out here ever since.
Sometimes life just ain’t ’bout shit. I know what it’s going to be like for Andre to grow up on the west side of Milton around these fake-ass people, being that kid from the broken home. All of us Squad Six boys know that struggle, being a have-not in the land of good and plenty. The object of scorn, judgment, and pity.
I heard the jakes slam their doors and they stopped flickering the red and blues as I watched Papa Tanks walk Andre back inside the house. Once the cruiser topped the hill the neighborhood slowly went back to sleep.
The next morning I woke up early and decided to spread the Christmas spirit. Since I live on the corner of Verndale Road and little Andre lives on the corner of Lothrop, we’re basically neighbors. I walked over to his spot to see how Miss Ruby was doing. I knocked and Miss Ruby answered the door, her left eye puffed out like a dragonfly, her lips swollen a deep reddish purple. She half smiled.
“Look, Reggie, you didn’t have to get all up in it last night. But thank you. I hate when he comes up in here acting like that in front of the kids, especially around the holidays. It’s just so hard sometimes, ya know? Sometimes a sister just feels like giving up.”
Her eyes began to get watery, and I wasn’t trying to get her all upset. I let her know it wasn’t a problem and that I was happy she was okay. Honestly, I wish someone had helped my mother. Maybe she would still be here. Before I left, she gave me a hug and held on tight. I reached in my pocket and whispered in her ear, “I’m glad to see you’re getting along fine on Christmas. Hope y’all have a good one.” Then I slid her a stack.
Immediately she gave me the screw face. “Reggie, do you know how much money you just gave me?” She shuffled the bills and looked up at me. “This is ten hundred-dollar bills.”
I almost laughed. “Miss Ruby, trust. I always count my money. I know Pa’s gone on that iron-lock vacation for a bit. Just hold down your household. I see you grinding out here on some legal shit and I tip my hat to ya. If you or your youngins need anything, holla.”
I breezed back to my corner.
Andre Battel
After New Year’s Day passes, Nana Tanks’s baking cycle is complete, and on the second day of the year, her and Nina begin the preparations for next year’s batch of her famous Christmas Black Cake. By the time I make it upstairs to watch Gladiators, they’re already sitting at the kitchen table listening to some old-school calypso, Nana Tanks chopping up a big pile of dried dates, raisins, and prunes, Nina sitting beside her carefully gathering all the cuttings and tossing them into Nana Tanks’s tall silver Dutch pot.
I don’t go and sit by them while they’re chopping because Nana Tanks says she’s suspicious of any boy who’d rather stay up under the women cooking in the kitchen rather than going outside to play. It’s more their thing, they got a little ritual and everything. After all the cutting is done they stand over the nearly full pot of raisins, dates, and prunes, looking down into it like an open grave. Nana Tanks holds the lid as Nina tosses in the last couple of cinnamon sticks and balls of nutmeg right before Nana Tanks douses it all in a mixture of rum, wine, and brandy
and closes the lid.
They both take it very seriously. Once the Dutch pot is closed, Nana Tanks wants it to stay that way. She’s made it very clear to me and Nina that us “curious and confounded picknies” are not to “trouble she pots.” Throughout the year she adds a couple of containers of mincemeat and some extra rum to the mixture and closes the pot back.
Sometimes in the afternoons when she’s in her bedroom watching The Young and the Restless I like to open the lid a crack and stick my nose into the pot and take big whiffs of that dank vinegary fruit smell rising out of the pot like a hot steam burning my nostrils, making me dizzy, almost like the summer nights when I’d inhale too much of Pop’s vital smoke.
The smell only gets stronger and stronger too, until around Christmastime when Nana Tanks empties the mixture in a huge glass mixing bowl and Black Cake Baking Day begins and shuts down the entire house. Both kitchens and both stoves. The whole house reeks of hot molasses, rum, and burnt brown sugar. By the end of the day the sound of the stand mixer is like a woodpecker pecking at my brain. It’s a good day to be up the street playing over at Chucky or Beezy’s crib.
It always looks like they bake hundreds of Black Cakes, some with frosting, others without. I ride in the car with Papa Tanks and we deliver plastic-wrapped bundles of Black Cake to every West Indian family or person that Nana and Papa Tanks knows in the city of Boston.
After New Year’s passes there’s always extra Black Cakes sitting around the house to get rid of, and on the first day school resumed from winter break I woke up to a note on the whiteboard in the kitchen from Ma telling me to take two Black Cakes over to Reggie’s place when I got home from school, one for Reggie and Tony, the other for his aunty Gladys. I sat down and my insides slowly began curling. I just showered, got dressed, and couldn’t even eat breakfast. I hadn’t seen any of them Squad Six boys since the day I stuck my basketball in the middle of their business when that brawl broke out.