The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Lying in bed, Fran swears to herself that she’ll stay inside the whole weekend. She’ll keep hid and get herself well. She’ll do it by force of will, without any help from anyone else. And when she’s done feeling sick, she might clean up the house and borrow some money from Scoogie for the Thanksgiving groceries. She’ll cook for the holiday, have the whole bunch of them over. Maybe call Tyreeka and tell her to come down and spend the long weekend with her and DeAndre. And if Marvin doesn’t get his shit together by the new year, she’ll deal with that, too.

  But now, if she can, she will sleep.

  DeAnte Tyree McCullough enters this world at 4:15 P.M. on Thanks-giving Day, crying like he knows the whole story.

  By then, Tyreeka is beyond spent, her eyes glazed and fixed on the far wall of the Sinai Hospital birthing room. She is fourteen years old, equipped with a minimum of prenatal instruction and no painkillers, and she has just produced a seven-pound, twelve-ounce baby. Even now, with the boychild crying in a midwife’s arms, Tyreeka seems captive to the terror.

  DeAndre is beside her at the head of the bed, holding her hand, unable or unwilling to let go. It’s all he has been able to do for the last two hours, every other word and action having departed his mind from the moment he arrived at this life-bringing.

  “Hold your son,” Fran orders.

  DeAndre looks at his mother, bleary-eyed.

  “Hold him,” Fran insists.

  He reaches out, both arms stiff and perpendicular to his chest. The midwife gently slips the bundle to him in a cautious, slow-motion handoff, conceding the package only after she’s sure of DeAndre’s intentions.

  “He look real strong, Dre,” Fran tells him. “And all that hair, too.”

  DeAndre stares down and the child squints back. The new father says and reveals nothing—DeAndre McCullough, for once stripped of bluster, is brought to a pensive silence. The baby gives a little cry.

  DeAndre looks up expectantly and the midwife retrieves the infant from his arms. The bundle is presented to Tyreeka, but she’s beyond reaction. After a moment or two, the newborn is taken to the warmer. DeAndre squeezes Tyreeka’s hand one last time, then leaves the birthing room with his mother.

  “Damn,” he says in the hallway, offering his first words in two hours. “After seeing that, I have much respect for women.”

  By ordinary measure, the birth had come easily enough. Tyreeka had endured ten hours of labor, but only the last two of those took place at Sinai Hospital, with the midwife and Fran Boyd talking the teenager through the struggle. The medical particulars, however, don’t begin to reflect the fear and confusion of the event.

  For one thing, Tyreeka somehow got her due date wrong, so that the baby, expected some time around Christmas, instead reached full-term on the prior holiday. Early that morning, she had called the birthing center to report intermittent pain. But when questioned by the staffer on duty, Tyreeka had mentioned the Christmas due date. Take a warm bath, she was told. See if the contractions stop.

  Which is pretty much all the girl did while enduring the early and intermediate stages of childbirth. Later, when the urgency of the situation became clear to her, she tried to call friends who had offered to drive her to Sinai Hospital when the big day came. But the plan was for a December birth and on this holiday afternoon, Tyreeka had been unable to reach anyone. Finally, she had called a city ambulance, and then, begging the paramedics through the pain of her contractions, she convinced them to drive not to Liberty Medical, the closest hospital, but to Sinai, where she had been scheduled. By the time she arrived, she looked like a deer transfixed by headlights, a little girl in absolute fear of what her body was doing to her.

  When word of the impending event reached DeAndre, he was still high after a day with Preston, Jamie, and the rest of the older Fayette Street crew. Sharing a hack with his mother, DeAndre got to the birthing-room doors just as Tyreeka let out a shriek.

  “Um,” said DeAndre, eyes bloody.

  “Get in there,” ordered his mother.

  He cracked the door, poking his head inside just long enough to see Tyreeka struggling to change position, the midwife and her helpers trying to give directions.

  “I’ll be out here,” he declared.

  “No you won’t,” his mother told him.

  “Ma, there’s too many people in there already.”

  Fran didn’t bother to argue. She grabbed her son by the jacket sleeve and tossed him into the room. Once within his girlfriend’s field of vision, he had no choice; he walked meekly to Tyreeka’s side. She saw him and said nothing, but took his hand in a desperate grip.

  “Father,” said the midwife, “you can encourage her. She needs to push. She needs to push hard when the contractions come.”

  But DeAndre, paralyzed by weed and awe both, kept his hand in Tyreeka’s grip and was silent.

  In the final half hour, Fran seized the moment, going to the other side of Tyreeka and talking her through, telling her over and over again to push with all her might.

  Horrified and speechless, Tyreeka could only cry.

  “The harder you push, the sooner you can rest … Reeka, you got to listen to them. You got to start pushing. Reeka, listen to me now …”

  Even the midwife was having a hard time keeping Tyreeka focused, but Fran stayed in her face, demanding action from a lonely and frightened schoolgirl, helping the midwife and assistants as they moved her between bed and bathroom, looking for new positions to ease the pain. As DeAndre stood, mute and frozen, Fran urged Tyreeka on until the last shout of agony mingled with a wet cry.

  Now, the new mother is lost to the world, and DeAndre, dazed in an altogether different sense, goes back to Scoogie’s house on Saratoga Street with his mother, arriving a little before seven. There the Boyd clan has gathered for the holiday. Fran had been cooking all morning before the call came from Tyreeka, and with enough groceries and a decent kitchen, she has a gift for all the family recipes. Sherry, Bunchie, and Scoogie had taken up the slack when Fran left for the hospital, so that soon after she returns from the birth of her grandson, a fourteen-pound bird and a slew of side dishes hit the table.

  For every member of the Boyd family, it’s a righteous occasion. It’s also little short of astonishing—an absurd, Norman Rockwell moment for a battered tribe, a clan whose number has, in the past few hours, grown by one.

  Scoogie takes the carving knife and does the honors.

  “DeAndre thankful for his son,” he says, dishing slices of bird onto a serving plate and looking to DeRodd and Little Stevie. “What else we got to be thankful for?”

  DeRodd says nothing. Little Stevie shrugs.

  “Ain’t none of us courtside,” DeAndre deadpans.

  Big Stevie laughs. He’s in rare form tonight, having come in from his post on the Mount Street corners. He’s cleaned and shaved, adorned in a dapper sports coat. Bunchie is looking good, too; she’s rail thin, as always, but dressed in a pleated skirt and sweater for the occasion. Sherry and Kenny are present, and Alfred as well—the whole Dew Drop contingent transplanted to Scoogie’s dining room, making their way around an oak table that once belonged to their grandmother, taking turns with the serving spoons and carving knives. Bunchie’s daughter, Nicky, brings DeQuan, her four-month-old, and Corey, the child’s father and DeAndre’s slinging partner from last winter when he opened up Fairmount Avenue. At belt level or below, the children—DeRodd and Little Stevie, even Ray Ray, who has started to toddle about—are a sawed-off herd of scavengers, edging the table, grabbing at seconds, and then racing into the living room.

  Pints and half-pints of alcohol are in evidence, though by Boyd family standards, the chemistry is tame. There’s not much coke or dope to speak of before the early morning hours, when Kenny, Alfred, Stevie, and Bunchie will take their walk back up the hill and down Fayette. Instead, there is only the after-dinner lethargy that follows any preposterously large meal.

  “Fran?” moans Stevie, stretched across the sofa. />
  “What?”

  “You can burn.”

  Fran laughs.

  “No joke, Ma,” says DeAndre. “You got skills in the kitchen.”

  “It was good, Fran. Real good,” adds Bunchie.

  “Reeka missed out on a good meal,” DeAndre muses. “She gonna be mad as I don’t know what.”

  Fran snorts.

  “Andre a father,” laughs Bunchie, looking at Fran. “My gawd.”

  “And DeRodd an uncle,” adds Scoogie.

  The idea of it brings the older generation to laughter.

  “Uncle Dee-Rodd,” says Fran, trying it out. “It don’t even begin to sound right.”

  DeRodd lifts his head off the other sofa, perking up at the mention. “Ma?”

  “What?”

  “He my cousin, right?”

  “He your nephew. You an uncle.”

  “I can be that?” asks DeRodd, suddenly ennobled. “I’m an uncle like Uncle Stevie then.”

  DeAndre gets up off the sofa, stretches, looks around the living room at the sprawl of his mother’s family, all of them heavy-lidded and half-asleep, dreaming of the second wind required to tackle sweet potato pie.

  “I got a son,” he says, more to hear himself say the words than to boast. “I’m a man now. I got a man’s responsibilities.”

  Fran snorts again. “Please. You didn’t look like all that much of a man in that hospital room.”

  DeAndre laughs, unable to sustain the pretense. “Ma, I was so blunted. I couldn’t say a damn thing. I couldn’t do nuthin’ but just stand there.”

  “You did all right. You were in there,” she says charitably. “Reeka had to work, though. She a brave little girl.”

  “Most definitely,” DeAndre agrees.

  These moments for the family album continue through dessert and then the cleanup. Finding his mother alone for a minute in the kitchen, DeAndre tries to say what he feels.

  “Ma, this was good.”

  “Huh?”

  “This here. We was a family tonight. Everyone, even Uncle Stevie looked good … like he used to, you know?”

  Fran nods.

  “We should do this again for Christmas.”

  “It was good,” Fran agrees.

  “Christmas, I can bring Reeka and my son.”

  He leaves that night feeling as good about things as he can remember feeling. He goes up the hill to Vine Street to look for his father, and, not finding Gary there, he shares the good news with his grandparents instead. Then he rolls around the corners—Monroe to Mount to McHenry—to strut his new status in front of anyone willing to listen. No mere cigar for this first-time father, either: He shares one blunt with Preston, another with Dinky and Tae.

  “You next,” he tells R.C.

  For what’s left of the night, DeAndre stays with the boys, drinking and smoking, his talk crossing back and forth between ordinary, prideful bluster and something truer to the day’s experience.

  “I got to be a father to him,” he tells his crew. “I’m gonna do better for him than got done for me, and I’m gonna be up there with him so he knows who I am. My child gonna know me.”

  Later he walks back down the hill with Dinky, telling his cousin that he’ll be off the corners completely for a while. What business they have together at Gilmor and McHenry now falls to Dinky; he’ll watch the shop while DeAndre looks to his son.

  “He a tough little boy, too,” DeAndre assures his cousin. “Only cried but the one time so far.”

  The next morning, he’s up later than he means to be, tired from the previous night. Still, he and Fran arrive at Sinai by early afternoon. They split up in the lobby: Fran, on a mission to find a child-safety seat for the ride home; DeAndre, heading straight for the maternity ward.

  “Name?” asks the woman at the security desk.

  “McCullough. DeAndre McCullough.”

  “And you’re here to see?”

  “My son.”

  He says it with such obvious delight that the woman can’t help smiling. When DeAndre walks into Tyreeka’s room, she’s awake, resting, her lunch half-eaten in front of her. The baby is stirring in his bassinet—mouth open, eyes shut, arms outstretched, tiny fingers curling into air.

  Tyreeka is not the same; not by any stretch of imagination is she the same. She watches DeAndre as he negotiates around the hospital bed, leaning over to kiss her lightly on the forehead. Though drawn from the ordeal, her face is radiant. But it’s her manner, assured and regal, that conveys her new status. From the first, she had planned to hold DeAndre to her; now she believes she has means enough to do this.

  Looking down at his son, DeAndre can sense as much. He can step outside himself long enough to acknowledge that this young girl, once a plaything, will now and forever be more than that. She might hold him, she might not. But never again will Tyreeka Freamon be incidental. At this moment anyway, he accepts all claims and obligations. And for the first time ever, perhaps, DeAndre concedes to his girl.

  “You can pick him up,” she tells DeAndre.

  “He asleep.”

  “No he ain’t. He wakin’ up.”

  DeAndre reaches into the bassinet and gathers up the bundle. He sits on the edge of the hospital bed, propping the newborn on his knees at arm’s length.

  “Damn,” he says, amazed.

  He’s still there, still captivated, when Fran arrives. She walks to the bedside, takes Tyreeka’s hand, then backs off to watch her son watching his son.

  “Dre, what are you thinkin’?”

  “Huh.”

  “What are you thinkin’?”

  DeAndre shrugs. “I’m not thinkin’ about anything.”

  Fran shakes her head. “How,” she asks, “can you sit there and not think of anything?”

  “I did it in school all the time,” says DeAndre dryly.

  They all laugh, even Fran. But then she catches herself and dishes out her token disapproval: “That’s sad, Andre.”

  “It’s the truth,” he says quietly.

  Fran looks beneath the bassinet, taking stock of the hospital freebies. “We should ask them for extra. They got a baby-care package that they give if you ask for it.”

  Fran leaves to talk to the nurse, comes back arms laden with supplies, then goes back out to work the nurse for a full package of diapers, pausing in her efforts only long enough to tell DeAndre he’s not holding the baby correctly.

  “I know how to hold him,” he counters.

  “You got to support the head.”

  “I got him, Ma.”

  For the exodus from the hospital, Fran is in charge—so much so that DeAndre and Tyreeka both are bristling by the time they get to Riggs Avenue. In their eyes, Fran has standing as a grandmother only; beyond that, the child-parents intend to take full possession of their baby.

  That they set up their nursery on Riggs Avenue, rather than on Boyd Street, is telling; that they spend the first two weeks there, visiting no one and limiting Fran to occasional phone calls and afternoon visits, makes the point clear. Fran had counted her coming grandchild among the few remaining reasons to keep trying, to stay at arm’s length from the corner. She fully expected Tyreeka and DeAndre to struggle, to lean heavily on her for advice and support. But for them, the child provides an opportunity for a clear declaration of independence.

  In these early days, DeAndre settles in at Tyreeka’s aunt’s house, willingly submerging himself in a daily routine that spins around the needs of the baby. In the confines of Tyreeka’s tiny second-floor room, he is moved at the wonder of his son, and he acts toward Tyreeka in a way that exceeds even her own expectations. He defers to her in all things natal; her every pronouncement regarding the baby is gospel.

  Motherhood changes Tyreeka in ways previously unthinkable. Once a needy and lonely girl, she is now dispensing to this newborn a degree of energy and love that suggests a wisdom beyond her fourteen years. Once a corner girl, she has begun to grow into something more, finding within herself a re
servoir of maturity that is as inexplicable as it is surprising. Once, she wanted DeAndre and whatever good times he might show her. Now, for the child, she has started to think about more than that.

  When DeAndre holds the baby, changes him, or gets him to laugh or coo, she is there to encourage him. When DeAndre talks about going back to school, she tells him how smart he is, how easy it would be for him to get a general equivalency degree. When he insists that he’ll have a new job by year’s end, she is careful to show him no doubts.

  These first days on Riggs Avenue are an idyll, a time when, for once, two children of Fayette Street are able to make dreams meet expectations. Here, for an instant or two, they open up to the newborn and to each other, confident that this fresh life will not betray them or prove them inadequate. Elsewhere, a commitment turns out time and again to be the prelude to abuse and disappointment, but here, in Tyreeka’s bedroom, the baby takes what they have to offer and gives back only need and joy and meaning. Amid this, all the petty fights, the cheating, the insults of their last year together are forgiven, if not entirely forgotten.

  Their allegiance holds fast through the second weekend in December, when they finally bring the baby down to visit Fran on Boyd Street. There, they occupy the third floor of the rowhouse, with DeAndre lugging the bassinet, stroller, diaper bags, and clothing satchels up the steps and recreating the room on Riggs Avenue as best he can. But Fran remains the outsider in what has, up until now, been DeAndre and Tyreeka’s best adventure so far. They know they can do this; they are doing it. As far as DeAndre is concerned, his mother has no place other than to keep Marvin at bay and otherwise admire her son’s efforts at fatherhood.