That’s the worst of it, really—that she had for a time escaped, living large with Gary, bringing home the kind of money that made the rest of the family sick with envy. She had felt that. She knew that they wanted her to fall, that they were happier to see her children have less, to see her back in the common denominator of the Dew Drop. They are family, and on some level she is ready to love them some for that fact alone. But to Fran, her brothers and sisters are also hostile witnesses to her condition. Their faces float at the periphery of every good high, and if she acknowledges that, or thinks about it, the blast is wasted.
It’s the same when she thinks about her mother, who left this world two years ago without ever coming to a reckoning with Fran. There would be no explanations for all of Daddy’s beatings, or for her mother’s unwillingness to shield herself or her children. Most of all, there would never be any reason for the distance between Fran’s children and her mother. It seemed like she just singled out DeAndre and DeRodd as tar babies, offering them a peculiar coldness that left Fran hurt and confused. And then there was her father, who was little more than a silent and brutal force when they were all young, though now he could be found around the corner on Baltimore Street, hanging with the old-timers, lost in his own alcoholic haze. It’s strange and depressing, this feeling of being surrounded by family but in every way alone.
Still sitting in Scoogie’s car, Fran curses herself for thinking these thoughts, then curses the radio jock for talking too much and not playing music. First, she lost everything to her high, and now, goddammit, she’s finding it harder and harder to keep the high itself. The Dew Drop Inn, the Fayette Street corners, the entire neighborhood—all of it has become an emotional minefield for her. Step off the marked path for a moment and you get blown apart by a memory. Like Gary, up the block, looking so damn bad, growing thin on that needle. Or DeRodd’s father, Michael, hanging with the regulars on Mount and looking even worse. Or even the room where she is staying—the same room in which her sister was killed in the fire, the haunted box where Fran can’t lay for a minute without thinking of Darlene dying in the hospital burn unit. For Fran, all of Fayette Street is filled with ghosts; some truly dead, others giving it their best. It’s getting so she can’t think a serious thought anymore without provoking her own anger or collapsing into depression, but still she can’t stop herself from thinking. Not even today, when Diamond in the Raw is a bomb.
Fran opens her eyes and watches Scoogie glide around the corner with Stevie. Going to get served, probably. Scoogie, though, will swear it’s only for Karen, the love of his life, a girl as hopelessly addicted as any of them. Fran gives up on WPGC, twisting the knob until she gets one of the hip-hop stations. Some crazy shit about girls wearin’ their Daisy Dukes, a dance number for the warmer weather to come. She listens to the rap from the distance of a generation, then mutters an obscenity and twists the knob back again.
James Brown. She leans back in her seat.
“Huh,” she says in poor imitation of the hardest working man in show business. “Huh. Gut God.”
“Get it, Fran.”
She opens her eyes to see DeAndre, leaning into the passenger window, vaguely amused at his mother’s performance. Fran is almost glad to see him.
“Huh,” says Fran, again. “You know that’s like the whole message from James Brown. All he say is shit like that—get down, gut God—and he write it down like it’s a real song.”
DeAndre smiles. “Nigga can dance, though.”
“Yeah, but he don’t say shit.”
DeAndre nods agreement, laughing, clearly happy to have caught his mother’s better mood.
“Yo, Ma.”
“Hmm.”
“You comin’ to court with me tomorrow.”
It’s more statement than question, and therefore irritating to Fran.
“Yeah.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Hmmm.”
“Eight-thirty.”
She closes her eyes. Now it’s DeAndre messing with her high.
“And I don’t wanna be late …”
“Goddammit, Andre. I said I be there.” She’s shouting now.
DeAndre straightens out of the car window, hurt. Fran looks over to yell some more but stops at the sight of a single piece of white paper, folded over once in her son’s hand.
“That your court paper?”
DeAndre shakes his head.
She reaches for it and he drops it on the driver’s seat with an air of indifference. She unfolds it and finds a Franklin Square job-bank form, carefully filled out, with DeAndre’s name and address in big, block letters. Under job experience, DeAndre claims to be a volunteer at the Martin Luther King rec. He comes around to the passenger window while she reads.
“Ella say she gonna try and find me work.”
Fran nods, feeling surprised and a little shamed. Since coming home from Boys Village last month, DeAndre has stayed away from the corner. He’s gone to school. He’s gone to basketball practice with that new rec team. And after that, he’s spent every night at her aunt’s on Etting Street, waiting for the home-monitoring call from his pretrial officer. She knows he’s off the corner, the proof being that there’s no money in his pocket and Easter is coming up. DeAndre’s been talking about needing a new Easter outfit, some Fila or Nike sweats, maybe. Talking now about finding himself a job. Through February and into March, DeAndre has been at his best; that much she had to admit.
“Which courthouse?” she asks, her anger almost gone.
“The big one downtown on Calvert Street. Eight-thirty in the morning is when we got to …”
“I ain’t deaf.”
DeAndre wanders off, but he’s done his damage. Fran is all the way down from the summit, and not even the radio’s offer of some sexual healing from Marvin Gaye can bring her back. She’s out of the car and back into the mix before Scoogie comes back around and drives the Pontiac away to work.
That night, she parties in the basement until well after midnight, but never gets to the heights. In the morning, DeAndre has to peel her from the sofa in the front room of the apartment, then keep her going through the motions until they roll through the doors of the downtown courthouse, their progress slowed by the line at the metal detector.
“Dre,” she asks him, “you got your toothbrush?”
Corner wisdom tells even the youngest kids to go to court with a clean toothbrush, because you might not come home and something better than a common toothbrush is hard to come by at Hickey or the Village. DeAndre shakes his head, playing it off. Still, Fran can tell that no matter how hard he fronts, his stomach is churning. He’s facing a juvenile master for the first time.
“You might gonna need it.”
“Then I deal with that too.”
“Oh, you big-time now,” says Fran, smirking. “You a man.”
“I can jail.”
Fran’s door-knocker earrings make the metal detector bleat angrily. DeAndre slips through unmolested and waits, uncomfortable, while his mother drops her adornments in the sheriff deputy’s wicker basket and walks through again, this time passing muster.
“We in Master Sampson,” says DeAndre as she joins him.
They find the master’s chambers, but a matronly clerk, who barely looks up when the door opens, tells DeAndre to go to the other end of the courthouse and find his name on the docket sheets. He does so, then walks all the way back down the corridor.
“My name is up there for Master Sampson.”
The woman nods.
“What do I do?”
“Go back there and wait for your name to be called.”
“Damn,” says Fran, looking at the early morning congestion on the juvenile floor. “Look at what you got me into.”
They find a bench and sit. DeAndre grunts, then buries his chin on his chest. Fran unzips the front of her sweatshirt, leans her head against her son’s shoulder and tries to sleep amid the comings and goings, her siesta interrupted by the calls of the
juvenile division lawyers.
“Wagstaff … Antoine Wagstaff.”
“Emmanuel Barnes. Is Emmanuel Barnes here?”
“Carter, Jerome … I need the mother of Jerome Carter.”
“Last call … Antoine Wagstaff.”
Fran yawns, stretches, then opens her eyes long enough to absorb the scene. There are a dozen wooden benches in the juvenile docket room, but those are jammed with waiting bodies and the overflow is out on a dozen other hallway pews, a sullen congregation extending in both directions around the rectangular courthouse hallway. Mothers and sons, all but a handful of them black, all waiting out their morning on the government clock, empty and listless, using up as little of their energy as can be managed under the circumstances. There is no shame to these crowded benches anymore, no sense of regret for choices made or roads not taken. For these families, time spent on the juvenile pews is as assured as time spent on those warped plastic chairs up at the social service field office on Ashburton, or in that modular waiting room at the school disciplinary office on North Avenue, or maybe on those chrome-legged boxes down at the University Hospital clinic.
The sons stare vacantly, or clown with kids they haven’t seen since middle school, or maybe even throw out an eyefuck or two for the benefit of some member of a rival crew. The mothers wait with that as-long-as-it-takes look stenciled to their faces, knowing nothing about the process save for its eventual outcome. Today the government has a leasehold on their lives, but they sense that after all is said and done, tomorrow will be just about the same. Arrests and summonses, juvenile intake workers and lawyers, probation officers and masters—a fine facsimile of the grown-up pretense of crime and punishment. Fran listens to the mother next to her on the bench, a woman not much older than herself complaining about a daughter who won’t be disciplined, who beats on her when she tries. “I’m frightened,” the woman admits, her daughter now down the hall and out of earshot. “I’m frightened of these childrens today.”
“These younger ones jus’ don’ care,” agrees another.
“They can take my child from me, I wouldn’t have no problem,” the woman says. “I can’t control her no ways.”
Three hours creep by on these benches before the word comes down that the masters have broken for lunch. Fran goes outside and brings back Newports and barbecued potato chips. It’s an hour beyond that before DeAndre hears his name.
“Are you the mother?” a pretrial worker asks Fran.
“Hmm,” says Fran.
“Come with me.”
They’re taken to a side office, where DeAndre is interviewed briefly about the charges. Stolen auto. Cocaine possesion with intent. And cocaine with intent a second time.
“Wasn’t me in the car,” he mumbles.
The pretrial worker makes a brief note and asks about the drug charges. DeAndre shrugs, then mutters something about the police finding the vials in the street and giving them to him.
“Why you?”
DeAndre shrugs.
“The police on the one charge got shot,” says Fran, interjecting. The pretrial worker looks at her curiously until Fran explains that the arresting officer got killed in a shooting a month or so later.
“That charge dead,” says DeAndre confidently.
The worker asks a few more questions, then sends them back to the benches. Twenty minutes later, they’re called down to Master Sampson’s chambers, a generous term for his shrunken imitation of a courtroom. Mother and son are directed to a pair of side benches, where they watch two other teenaged boys have their turn. The prosecutors are both young women, white and professional; the public defender is older, white, and rumpled, his glasses low on his nose, his white hair matted back into a comical cowlick. The juvenile master is a black man, middle-aged, well-dressed, and imperious. The foursome, joined by a clerk, spend ten minutes speaking in case numbers and shuffling files back and forth across two tables wedged hard against the slight rise of the bench.
Finally they locate a file and bend to the business at hand: a thirteen-year-old boy caught with a hundred bags. And caught isn’t the word for it. The kid got turned in by his own mother, who’s right there on the bench next to Fran.
DeAndre rolls his eyes at the statement of charges.
“Damn,” whispers Fran.
“A hundert bags,” says DeAndre softly. “He goin’ away.”
Instead the master remands the boy to his mother’s custody, placing him on indefinite supervised probation. The case is resolved in minutes, without even a nod toward moral discussion or remonstrance. DeAndre is incredulous.
“Nigga got to be snitchin’,” he tells Fran. “That much dope and he gets probation. Puh-leeze.”
The next kid is called to the bench, represented this time by a different public defender, and Andre and Fran both lean forward, genuinely curious as the prosecutor begins reading a statement of charges. Cocaine this time. But DeAndre doesn’t get a chance to see how it plays out.
“Mr. McCullough.”
DeAndre looks up to see the rumpled defender gesturing toward the hallway. The old man stops in the doorway, and then, almost as an afterthought, gestures to Fran as well.
“You, too, mother. You should hear this too.”
Without a moment of confrontation for DeAndre McCullough, a deal has been brokered on the three separate charges. The two drug violations—of which DeAndre is decidedly guilty—will be dropped. The stolen car charge will stand. As a first conviction, he’ll get a year’s probation, with the vague and implausible requirement that he make some restitution to the woman whose car was taken and damaged.
“Is that okay with you?”
DeAndre looks at Fran, barely able to stifle a smile.
“Mother?”
Fran nods, but a moment later, she’s thinking twice about the terms of the deal. She’s wondering whether the deal will keep him monitored, or whether the probation will be unsupervised. She wants to say something, maybe talk to the lawyer privately, without DeAndre hearing what she has to say. But the lawyer is back inside the master’s chambers and Fran says nothing else. A minute or two more and the clerk chants her son’s name, followed by a string of juvenile case numbers. The prosecutor acknowledges the dismissal of the two drug cases, then reads a brief statement of facts regarding the car theft. The statement has DeAndre being arrested in the stolen auto, although in fact, he was locked up days later.
DeAndre looks over at Fran, then at his lawyer, confused.
“I …”
The public defender leans over.
“I wasn’t in the car.”
Now it’s the lawyer who’s confused. The juvenile master, too, seems to sense the young man’s trepidation. He questions DeAndre carefully about the plea agreement. Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty? The rush of activity in the chamber seems to lapse for a moment as DeAndre struggles with it.
“Um.”
“Because by pleading guilty …”
DeAndre was in the car. He knew it was stolen. But the statement of facts is wrong and DeAndre is vaguely upset that he’s caught on a lie. The first coke charge? Guilty as sin, but it’s being dismissed because the police got killed. The second charge on Fairmount? Guilty again, but that case is being dropped without any argument at all. And then this car charge, where the evidence is exaggerated and guilt is a prearranged deal.
“You are giving up your rights …”
As the master drones on about the rights forfeited under a plea agreement, DeAndre looks at his mother. This is his first encounter with the judicial system, and he is being taught luck-of-the-draw, nothing more.
“Yes,” says Andre, interrupting.
“Yes, what?” asks the master.
“Yes. I’m guilty.”
With that minor obstacle removed, there is only the race to finish. Master Sampson gives him a year’s supervised probation, then peers out over top of his glasses, managing a few moments of righteous intimidation.
“…
and I don’t want to see you in here again or you will be dealing with all of these charges.”
DeAndre nods.
“Do you understand me?”
A weak mumble.
“What was that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right then.”
From the side bench, Fran stands up suddenly, half raising her hand to get the master’s attention.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Is this probation … Can you make it part of his probation that he has to go to school?”
DeAndre gives his mother a withering look. Fran, too, seems unsure where to go with this. The code of parenting on Fayette Street says that you stand with your children against any and all interventions; that, at least, is the standard Fran has always known. But just a moment ago, there was that mother who turned in her kid and a hundred bags.
“He’s not going to school?” asks the master.
“He has been lately, with the probation and all, he was easier to deal with and …”
“Are you saying that you’ve been having problems controlling him? Are there problems at home?”
DeAndre stares sullenly at his mother. Fran is caught. She wants him to get the deal; she doesn’t want him back at Boys Village. But she’d also like some leverage, and now, with the master leaning on her, she can’t think of any way to ask for one thing without risking the other.
“No,” she says, “no trouble.”
“I can’t make him go to school,” the master says. “But he knows what it is he’s supposed to be doing.”
Fran sits back down and waits for the clerk to complete the paperwork. Supervised probation it will be, meaning a trip to see a juvenile P.O. once a week, coupled with an occasional home visit. By the time they leave, DeAndre is so delighted to be back on Fayette Street that he’s even forgiven his mother’s betrayal.
The Corner Page 26