“Dear Black,” it begins.
Not DeAndre, his given name. Or Onion, the baby name he suffered through. Fran begins with the courtesy of his favorite street name, the one he wants to hear. She follows the salutation with a smiley face.
I can call you Black today with a smile because I picture your handsome face when I say it. First, I would like to say that today I’m a much better person. You’ll have a much better mother and best friend when I come home.
Andre, I love you so much I really don’t know where to start making up for the neglect and pain I’ve caused you. I can’t change the past. All I can do is accept it. But I can change to the best of my ability. This disease is so rough. I can’t believe how many years I missed out of your life. It feels like 16 years ago, I asked my mother to watch you until I came from the store and I came back 16 years later and it hurts. Even though I’ve always been there for you, I also should have been there when you didn’t need me just being your mother.
Dre, I never wanted to tell you this but you are my carbon copy. I don’t have to explain that. I know why you sold drugs. I know why you had no respect for me, because I had none for myself. Even though my addiction allowed me to be stable enough to raise you the right way, I didn’t give a fuck. What I mean is, you know right from wrong and how to respect people. I taught you that. But your attitude is so bad because I don’t perform and give you the guidance that you deserve.
I have 2 beautiful sons to live for today. Andre, you are my one and only friend today. I really want you to listen to me very carefully from now on because I don’t want you to end up dead or institutionalized as myself. I don’t know what I would do without you. Leave that shit alone, please!!! Life is beautiful and natural and you may not get another chance. I love you and we need each other. You looked very handsome when I saw you in the yard. Baby please don’t destroy your life. If you don’t need yourself, I need you.
Your loving mother
+ best friend,
Fran
XXXXXXXXXX
She comes out on a fine September morning in that spirit, graduating on the twenty-eighth day with all the faith of the newly converted. She looks wonderful, too—ten pounds heavier, with a French-cut hairstyle, new denims, and big hoop earrings that are a gift to her from a fellow graduate. To everyone on Fayette Street, Fran looks like someone else entirely.
She means it to be so. Walking back up Fayette to the Dew Drop, her appearance almost puts a stop to business as the touts and fiends, runners and dealers draw a bead on this strange new entity.
“Look at you, girl,” shouts Zena, Stevie’s girl. “You shinin’.”
They embrace and coo over each other long enough for the family to emerge on the steps. Stevie and his son, Kenny and Sherry—all of them heap congratulations on Fran for making the move, all offering the general sentiment that they would soon be doing the same themselves.
But Bunchie’s greeting is the most heartfelt. Stepping out of the Dew Drop, she wraps her arms around Fran, peeling back to look at her again, then holding her in a swaying embrace for a long while.
“You did good,” she says finally.
Fran is touched by the warmth, by the surprising willingness of her family to applaud her escape. She’ll be staying up on Saratoga Street with Scoogie—he isn’t happy for the boarder, but he doesn’t dare refuse and leave her at the Dew Drop. Meanwhile Fran is looking for a place of her own. She’s been asking around, reading the classifieds. She’s also got a line on a Section 8 voucher apartment in the 1500 block of Fayette.
But all that can wait. Right now she’s earned this triumph. She accepts compliments and plaudits from every fiend who stumbles up, promising any and all takers that she can talk to Antoinette for them, that if they want, they can get down to BRC and start on the same road.
The commotion finally brings DeAndre, shirtless and shoeless, out of the back bedroom and down the apartment stairs. He looks her over and manages a quick, affirming nod, carrying it all with an air of business as usual.
“Come here, boy!” Fran yells.
Finally her son’s smile breaks wide.
“I need a welcome home.”
Fran takes one last, long hug before going up the front stairs of the Dew Drop. But the apartment, and the bedroom in particular, seem like another world to her now. This is the hole out of which she climbed.
Bunchie’s man, Alfred, lopes across the front room on his way downstairs from the upper apartment.
“Hey Fran.”
Spoken as if she’d never really been away. As if she’d gone to the store or something. She stands there for a minute or two more, looking around, wondering why she bothered to come upstairs in the first place.
“Dre!” she shouts, making her way back down.
He’s waiting in the vestibule.
“Just get what you need,” she tells him. “I’ll come back and pack the rest of it up later. I can’t go in that place now.”
She heads back out to be rescued by sunlight. She’s on the steps where she spent all those hours, all those days and months and years, but now she can’t imagine how she lived this way and how the rest of them continue to live this way.
She shakes it off and heads up the block, resuming her victory lap.
“Lookin’ good, Fran,” says Ronnie Hughes.
“Feelin’ good,” she answers.
She walks toward the corner store, passing R. C.’ s sister, Darlene, who compliments her as well.
“Wish they’d take me,” Darlene says, smiling.
“I can call for you.”
“Would you?”
Fran buys a Snow-Kone from the Korean, then takes a quarter from the change to the pay phone beside the store. The plan is to get in touch with that lady from the rental agency, see if she can get one of the apartments in the 1500 block. It’s only a block away on the same strip, but for Fran, having control of even two or three rooms would be a vast improvement.
“Is Miss Churchill in?”
She waits for a moment, breathing softly into the phone, watching the touts hustle a short line of souls into the alley across Mount.
“Can you tell her Denise Boyd called?”
The fiends pop out of the alley one by one, each of them serviced, each now bounding away.
“B-O-Y-D … Uh huh … Thank you.”
She recrosses Mount, getting as far as the vacant house on the corner before Buster is at her heels, yapping like a crazed toy terrier.
“Gimme my shit! Gimme my shit! Gimme my shit!”
Fran laughs, thinking it’s some kind of welcome-home joke.
“You took my shit! You took my shit!”
Fran glares at him incredulously. But she knows it’s real now and keeps walking. In a moment, she’s inside the Dew Drop’s vestibule, with nowhere to go and Buster out on the stoop, barking like a mutt.
“She took my shit!” he yells.
His accusation brings the corner crowd running, creating a rogue’s gallery of twenty or thirty bystanders intent on seeing a show. The Mount Street dealers arrive; Scar and Man and two or three others. Court is in session.
“She took my shit.”
Fran steps out of the vestibule, facing the dealers down on the Dew Drop steps. “I didn’t take shit. He lyin’.”
Buster states his case. His vials were hidden in the pay phone coin return. Fran used the phone; the vials are missing. Ergo: “She got my shit. She got my shit.”
Fran is disgusted, but also at a loss for what to say. She’s no longer in the game; she no longer has the energy. She half sighs as she turns to her judges.
“I jus’ came home clean. Twenty-eight days clean. You think I’m gonna come home and the first thing I’m gonna do is steal his raggedy-ass shit? You gone crazy.”
DeAndre comes running down the stairs, a surprise witness, interposing himself between Buster and his mother. He stares the tout down, his nostrils flaring, his fists tight at his side.
The deal
ers look at DeAndre and Fran and Buster and don’t know what to think. Maybe she took it, maybe Buster is running a game. In either case, it’s neither the time nor the place.
“C’mon,” says Man.
The dealers walk away. A hung jury.
Fran is shaken. She tells DeAndre to go back upstairs and finish getting those few things together. She’s still out on the steps, gathering herself, when Darlene sidles up to offer comfort.
“Buster always lyin’ like that,” Darlene assures her. “He probably took the shit hisself.”
“He doin’ it all the time,” says Fran. “But they all lookin’ at me like the shit’s in my pocket.”
“Buster just tryin’ to have someone to blame.”
“I know it,” Fran says. “He ignorant as shit.”
Darlene wanders off and Fran needs exactly a minute to solve the riddle. If Darlene alone believes her innocent, then Darlene has reason to believe. The girl was over by the phone before Fran made the call; now she’s here with me, being so nice. Sheeeet.
“Dre!”
He comes downstairs with a few items in a plastic bag.
“Goin’ up Scoogie’s,” she says, standing up and dusting off her denims. “And I swear, I ain’t never comin’ back down here.”
FALL
EIGHT
“I understand you been losin’,” their new coach tells them. “Well my teams don’t lose.”
He pauses to let the idea echo through the gym.
“My teams don’t lose,” he says again.
On the bleachers, the Martin Luther King basketball squad falls into an uncomfortable silence. He has been talking for almost ten minutes now—longer by about eight and a half minutes than any previous coach has been allowed to talk. They are not accustomed to listening; they do it warily.
“My name, for those of you I don’t know, is Derek Shorts. But I go by Pumpkin …”
Brooks and Manny Man stumble through the doors of the gym, Manny laughing and Brooks dribbling one of the rec center balls. “Hey, hey, hey,” says Pumpkin.
Manny looks over. Brooks goes under one of the side-court baskets for a reverse layup.
“Hey,” shouts Pumpkin.
Brooks gets his own rebound.
“You two on this team?”
Manny nods.
“Then get your ass over here right now.”
Brooks takes another layup.
“Right now, got-dammit!”
Brooks lets the ball slide off his fingers and bounce aimlessly toward the other end of the gym floor. Intimidated if not entirely chastened, he braces himself with his standard smirk, then follows Manny onto the bleachers.
“My teams play a running game. We outrun everyone …”
As he talks, the squad remains silent.
“… I was playing junior college and my knee went …”
Still silent.
“… right now, I want to do this to put something back into the community …”
Not a word.
“… and what I want from you is for you to listen when I tell you something and give me your best game. You do that and we’re going to win games.”
He talks for forty minutes straight, with the entire crew sitting quietly on the bleachers before him. He’s full of all the usual coaching clichés—hard work, discipline, team—but they sit and listen nonetheless. He tells them about his days of college ball, about a career that almost came to be, about covering Patrick Ewing once in a tournament.
“What happened?” asks Tae, breaking the silence.
“With what?”
“When you went up against Ewing?”
Pumpkin shrugs. “He got a bucket or two. But he didn’t embarrass me or nuthin’. It wasn’t like I got embarrassed.”
The boys look at each other, as if to ask whether to extend more than token credibility. If Pumpkin claimed to have powered past Patrick Ewing, they might be skeptical; saying he merely stayed up with the man gave the account a hint of possibility. Pumpkin must have been big enough for college ball; he’s six-five, two-twenty, and he still has the hard build of a power forward. If he says he once played with Ewing, maybe he really did.
“… but I don’t want you if you ain’t gonna listen. I’m not talkin’ to hear my ownself talk. If I’m sayin’ somethin’, then it’s because you need to hear it …”
On this first day, at least, they give him more consideration than they’ve allotted any previous coach. Pumpkin had come to Ella a week ago, fresh from a court date up at Wabash. He used to hang at Fayette and Monroe; the boys who were working the corners at the top of the hill knew Pumpkin well enough. Now he was on a court-ordered probation and looking to fulfill his community service requirement with something a little more tolerable than sweeping a street somewhere.
“All right then,” he says in conclusion. “Let’s start with ten laps around the court.”
The grumbling starts. The boys look at each other. DeAndre offers a brief, profane comment.
“Ten laps,” Pumpkin says. “Now.”
“We usually just run a game,” says Manny.
“Ten laps now. Last man runs twenty.”
“Aw shit.”
Tae and Dewayne bolt down the court, followed by the rest. All save for DeAndre, who can’t bring himself to do anything but test the man’s authority. He half-walks, half-jogs, letting himself be lapped by the others. Then he begins running—backward. He’s lapped again.
“DeAndre.”
Pumpkin is glowering.
“Run ’em right. You got twenty laps and if you don’t want to run ’em right, you can take your ass home.”
The others suppress laughter. DeAndre, too, breaks into a smile, turns around, and begins sprinting to catch up. He runs ten, tries to sneak off, and is caught by Pumpkin, who orders him back for ten more.
“Now,” says the coach, “line up on this side.”
Windsprints. Followed by weave drills. Followed by fast-break drills. Followed by foul shooting. On this Tuesday afternoon in September, practice has actually become practice.
Lord knows they’re now ready for a little discipline, having played in the summer Cloverdale League under the M. L. K. Rec Center banner and lost every single game. From the Perkins Homes to Bentalou to Cherry Hill, squads from around the city took turns on Ella’s fledglings, running them up and down the asphalt of Cloverdale Park. True, all the other teams had one or two ringers—some of them as old as seventeen or eighteen—playing behind the birth certificates of younger boys. But the Martin Luther Kings weren’t precise about the age requirement either. Twin was seventeen, Truck was eighteen, and everyone else save for R.C., Brooks, and Manny Man, was past their sixteenth birthday.
It had been ugly and discouraging, and DeAndre gave up first, stalking off the court at the end of the first night’s debacle, unwilling to return if it meant paying the fifty cents in league fines levied against him.
“Shit,” he had shouted in the early minutes of the game, losing a rebound.
“Quarter fine on number six,” declared the scorer, invoking the Cloverdale rule that put a cost of twenty-five cents per utterance on profanity.
“Number six, come here.”
DeAndre crossed the court to the scorer’s table.
“You owe a quarter for cursing,” the league director explained.
“Ain’t got it,” DeAndre shrugged.
“You got to pay before the next game or you don’t play.”
“Man, fuck that.”
“Fifty cents.”
As far as Cloverdale was concerned, that was it for DeAndre. The rest of the team paid their fines and kept coming back for more, losing all summer long to teams from Flag House, Northeast, and lower Park Heights. They lost by thirty, by fifteen, by eighteen. Once, in a spasm of well-played basketball, they pulled even with a team that had pummeled them in an earlier tourney at the Flag project rec center. R.C. stole an inbound pass and they were up by two.
“Time ou
t,” yelled the opposing coach. “Call the time out.”
The Flag House team regrouped. The Martin Luther Kings high-fived each other and went for Dixie cups of ice water. By the end of the quarter they were once again down by a dozen.
R.C. couldn’t bear it. He played every game as if the past had no bearing on him, as if today, he would lace up, stretch his legs, and play the game of basketball that he was meant to play. Often, there would be glimpses of great ability—a steal, a perfect pass, a left-handed reverse beneath the bucket—but eventually the common denominator dragged at everyone’s individual moments. The Hilltop boys weren’t salvation enough, though Mike, Truck, and Twin played hard. Nor could R.C. get the collective engine up and running for more than a few minutes at time. The team still played run-and-gun: Tae, with graceful, no-look passes that simply sailed off the court; Dewayne, trying to dribble past both opposing guards, falling to his knees, still trying to handle the ball rather than pass; Brooks, heaving his prayerful off-balance jumper toward those unforgiving Cloverdale rims and getting only an angry, metallic brick-bounce for his trouble. R. C. fumed and cursed and paid the fines as two losses became four, then six and eight. Yet he never managed to let go of the idea that the next contest, or the next one after, would bring this rec center squad that first, elusive victory.
“They ain’t better than us,” he told Tae, walking home after another loss. “They just playin’ more together.”
They finished the summer league with a perfect 0–10 record. For the Cloverdale all-star game, Twin and Tae were chosen to represent M.L.K. Dewayne was livid; R.C. took it as an insult, too, but he carried it well. “I know my game is right,” he told people.
The Cloverdale experience ended up souring some of the original team members. Manny Man, Dinky, and Brooks were drifting from the squad by the tourney’s end, dismayed at losing playing time to the Hilltop boys; DeAndre, too, chose to miss most of the tourney over fifty cents and the insult to his First Amendment rights. But R. C. emerged from the summer of defeat by asking Ella about the team’s chances for a winter league. Ella, though, had something even better: She had Pumpkin.
The Corner Page 56