Derrick must have heard I moved out from Mama. Because I’d only been in my new place a couple of weeks when he started coming back around. I tried to be strong. “I don’t need your cheating ass no more,” I said, standing in the doorway with Ashley on my hip. But he cocked his head to the side and gave me a sly smile.
“C’mon, Rabbit,” he said. “You ain’t gonna let me see my baby? I thought we was a family.”
Before I knew what was happening, he reached out his hand and touched my arm. It was gentle, like how you’d pet a sick puppy, but I felt like he’d set me on fire. My neck grew hot and my palms began to sweat. Then he was leaning forward, whispering, “You know I love you,” with his warm breath in my ear. I hadn’t felt good in so long. With my heart pounding, I opened the door and let him in.
The nurse at Grady Hospital had given me a box of condoms when they sent me home with Ashley. “You’re young,” she’d said matter-of-factly. “You can go back to school with one baby. You don’t need to have another.”
I didn’t want a second baby. But every time I handed Derrick a condom, he laughed in my face. “Look what I’m working with,” he said, waving his hand in front of his wiener like he was a Price Is Right spokesmodel and his junk was a brand-new washer-dryer set. “No way that thing’s gonna fit.”
Six months after Ashley was born, I was pregnant again.
I tried to handle the situation as best I could. I knew I’d need more money, so I got some fake ID that said I was eighteen—old enough to work—and got a job waitressing the overnight shift at the Huddle House. I paid Mama ten dollars to watch Ashley. But going to school during the day and working all night, and being pregnant, was just too much. I dropped out of eighth grade. The next month, I got fired from the Huddle House for stealing five dollars out of the till. All the waitresses were doing it, but I got caught.
My son Nikia was born in November. I was fifteen with two babies under the age of two. I wanted to look for another job but Mama said Ashley was too damn big for her to watch anymore. My welfare wouldn’t stretch the whole month. I started falling behind on the rent and the bills. It felt like I was drowning.
One night I lay on my yellow sofa with both my babies knocked out on top of me. Ashley started fussing first, that set off Nikia. Then both of them were crying their eyeballs out. I didn’t know what else to do so I closed my eyes and called on God: “Dear Heavenly Father, I know I haven’t been to church in a while, but I really need your help . . .” I prayed for strength and guidance. But mostly I prayed for money. “Please God, just enough to pay the rent, buy some Pampers, get my hair done . . .” I knew if God didn’t come through soon, I was gonna be out on the road collecting aluminum cans for change.
I was hoping God would deliver me a paper bag full of cash. That’s how I pictured my blessing coming down. But instead He sent Derrick knocking on my door.
Derrick walked into my place with a big-ass smile. When I asked him why he was so happy, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. It was more money than I’d seen anybody have since the roll of bills Granddaddy kept down his pants. Derrick peeled off a bunch of tens and twenties and handed them to me. “Here’s a little change for you and the babies,” he said.
I looked at the bills in my hand and back at Derrick. “What happened? Fish Supreme gave you a raise?”
“Nah,” he said. “I quit that bullshit.”
“So where’d you get this money from?”
“I’m working for Markee now,” he said. “Selling that shit.”
It was the spring of 1988 and Derrick’s cousin Markee had hired Derrick for his booming business distributing the fastest-selling product to ever hit the hood: Derrick was selling crack.
Chapter 13
Hustlers and the Weak
Right from the beginning it was clear to me that crack divided the world into two groups: sellers and smokers, the hustlers and the weak. Before Derrick started working for Markee, I’d only heard about crack in N.W.A lyrics. It was a West Coast thing, like gangbanging or wearing slippers with tube socks. But the minute it touched down in Atlanta, crack spread like wildfire. I started seeing signs of it everywhere, from zombie-looking addicts trolling the streets to broke-ass niggas like Derrick suddenly getting paid.
The first thing Derrick bought himself was some bling: a gold nugget ring, a thick herringbone necklace, and a gold-plated watch. Then he upgraded me and the kids, moving us out of the busted efficiency in Vine City to a nice one-bedroom across town. Derrick took care of everything; he paid my rent, electric, gas, and water bills. He got me a touch-tone, wall-mounted house phone with a spiral cord so long it stretched all over the apartment. And he bought me a queen-size bed covered in red satin sheets that he picked out himself.
Derrick had so much money that no matter how much I asked for—fifty dollars, one hundred dollars, three hundred and fifty for the rent—he would just reach into the black fanny pack he had strapped around this waist and hand it over. “I got you,” he’d say. When he had too much money to fit in his fanny pack, Derrick stored his bills in the trunk of his car in a brown paper sack inside a sneaker box. Sometimes business was so good it was like he was trying to give his cash away. “Here’s a little extra,” he’d tell me, popping the trunk and handing me a stack of paper. “Take you and the babies shopping.”
Derrick’s new job beat the hell out of Fish Supreme. After struggling to take care of Nikia and Ashley, suddenly I had everything I needed. Derrick gave me money to get my hair done, buy McDonald’s, and pay for the babies’ clothes. Thanks to Derrick, I didn’t need to worry about a thing. Then one day, right when my rent was due, he disappeared.
I looked for him everywhere. I went by his cousin Markee’s place, and searched for Derrick on the corner where he hustled. I checked for him at Jellybean skating rink, and over by his sister’s house. I blew up his pager with “911,” but he never called me back.
After two days of not being able to find his ass, I picked Nikia up from the sofa, took Ashley by the hand, and got on the city bus to go to Derrick’s apartment, where he lived with his new girlfriend, Poochie.
Derrick moved in with Poochie after his wife Evaleen finally cut him loose for having too many extramarital kids. She had put up with his cheating when the only baby-on-the-side he had was Ashley. But when Derrick got me pregnant with Nikia, and at the same time got Celeste pregnant, Evaleen kicked Derrick to the curb. Then Celeste stopped messing with him, too. I thought for sure Derrick was gonna move in with me after those two told him “bye.” But instead Poochie came outta nowhere and jumped the line.
It hurt my feelings that Derrick wanted to live with Poochie instead of me. But he told me Poochie “don’t-mean-a-thing” every time he came over to see me. He kissed my neck and told me I was special. I believed him because I wanted it to be true.
At his apartment, I knocked on the front door and waited for Poochie to answer. “Hey, Rabbit,” she said. “How you doin’?”
When I told her I was looking for Derrick, her eyes got wide. “Nobody told you?” she asked, shaking her head. Derrick had gotten busted. The cops had been watching his ass and caught him with money in his trunk and dope in his fanny pack. They were holding him at Fulton County Jail. “He don’t even have a bond yet,” said Poochie. “No telling when he’ll get out.”
All that night and into the next day, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, trying to get a plan together. How was I supposed pay my bills without Derrick? I had no money, two kids, no job, and a three hundred and fifty dollar a month apartment I couldn’t afford on two hundred and thirty-five dollars in welfare. I had just gotten used to not having to worry every second of the day, and now I was even worse off than before. I lay in bed, tossing and turning, trying to figure something out. When the answer finally hit me, it was so perfect I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before. I got out of bed and called my best friend, Stephanie. She had a car and I was gonna need a ride.
“
You sure you know what you’re doing?” Stephanie asked. The two of us were sitting in her Camry outside my apartment, with Ashley and Nikia in the backseat sucking on Blow Pops to keep them quiet. Stephanie had promised to drive me where I needed to go, but instead she was giving me the third degree.
“You sure you got this?” she asked again.
“Yeah.”
“So you don’t want to ask Shine?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m good. I seen Derrick do it a million times.”
“Okay . . .” Stephanie turned the key in her ignition. But I could tell by the look on her face she wasn’t convinced.
I tried to sound confident: “I got this.”
Stephanie and I had been friends ever since the day I saw her standing at the corner pay phone. She was wearing red pants, matching red flats, a yellow top, and big-ass door-knocker earrings. “I like your outfit,” I said. She was so vain, that’s all it took for us to hit it off.
Stephanie was twenty-two—seven years older than me—with three kids and another on the way. Most girls in her situation would have been struggling, but Stephanie had a very strict “no broke niggas” policy, which meant she and her kids were always taken care of. Her drug-dealing boyfriend, Shine, wasn’t a low-level corner boy like Derrick. He was big time, slinging dope over at Techwood Homes, a huge complex of low-rise public housing apartments filled with folks looking to forget their troubles or, as Shine called them, “good customers.” Shine was the one who bought Stephanie her car.
“So you gonna spend your whole welfare?” she asked as we pulled away from the curb.
“Yeah.”
“All of it?”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Plus the fifteen dollars you’re gonna lend me.”
“Okay,” she said, laughing. “You better not fuck this up.”
The plan was simple. I had $235 from my welfare check that I cashed at the Super Saver, plus fifteen dollars from Stephanie. That was just enough for me to buy a quarter ounce of dope from Markee. If I chopped that quarter into fifty rocks and sold each rock for ten dollars, I would make five hundred dollars, enough to cover my rent with a little extra to spare.
I’d never seen a girl selling dope before, but how hard could it be? I’d been out with Derrick when he worked his corner and, by the looks of it, you just had to stand around and wait for business to come to you.
We drove over to Markee’s mama’s house in Ben Hill. She lived on a quiet street where folks kept their porches tidy and nobody dumped their old refrigerator in the yard. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d find a stash house, but I guess that was the point. Stephanie pulled over to the curb and I paged Markee. Somebody in the front room of his mama’s house pulled back a corner of the window curtain. I gave a nod and Markee came right out.
“Hey, Rabbit,” he said, waving to Nikia and Ashley in the backseat. “The kids are getting big. That little boy look just like his daddy.”
“Yeah, he sure do,” I agreed. When I told Markee what I’d come for—to buy myself a quarter ounce—he raised his eyebrows.
“You got money?”
“Yeah, I got it right here.”
He held out his hand like we were gonna shake, and I slid the bills into his palm. Markee glanced up and down the street, checking for cops, then went back inside. When he returned to the car, he slid me a white disc, a little bigger than a silver dollar, neatly wrapped in a Ziploc bag, folded over and stapled shut.
“Be careful,” he warned. “I mean it, Rabbit. You got those kids to take care of. Don’t do nothing stupid.”
Stephanie and I had one more stop to make, at a convenience store called the BusStop. From the outside it looked like a regular corner store, with soda, chips, toilet paper, and tube socks hanging in the dusty window. But when you stepped inside, the place was like a Walmart for crack dealers. Underneath the glass counter and on shelves behind the register was everything you could ever need to cook, bag, sell, and smoke rock: triple-beam scales, baking soda, glass pipes, and sacks in every size, from one-inch dime bags to one-gallon Ziplocs. I bought a bundle of a hundred small sacks, a pack of Pace single-edge razor blades, and a box of sandwich bags. Then we headed back to my place.
At home, I gave Nikia a bottle and sat him on the sofa beside Stephanie, who was busy flipping through channels, while I got to work. The trick was to cut that piece into fifty rocks, all of them about the size of my pinkie fingernail. If I chopped them too big, I’d lose my profit. If the rocks were too small, nobody would buy them. I pulled a dinner plate from the cabinet, set it on the kitchen table, and unwrapped my product. With a razor blade in one hand, I turned the piece over, trying to figure out where to make the first cut.
“Don’t make them rocks too big, girl,” Stephanie said, looking over from the sofa.
“Yeah, I got this,” I lied. I slid my razor blade and chopped my first rock.
It took me almost an hour to cut up that quarter. Nikia finished his bottle and fell asleep while Ashley stayed busy pushing her little plastic shopping cart around the apartment and filling it with the fake fruits and vegetables that were all over the floor. She rolled her buggy into the kitchen and tried to hand me a plastic apple from her cart, but I told her, “Mama’s working,” and shooed her away.
“Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four . . .” I counted when I was done, pushing each rock to the side of the plate with the razor. There were only forty-eight rocks in all; I was two short.
“I knew you was gonna do that!” Stephanie called from the other room. “That just cost you twenty dollars.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I called back. “I wasn’t about to spend it on you.”
I bagged up the rocks, put them in a sandwich bag, and shoved them in my purse, and we all got back into Stephanie’s car. We dropped the kids off at her mama’s place. Then Stephanie and I headed to Techwood Homes to try and make some money.
We found a spot not far from a chili-dog truck that hadn’t already been claimed by a dealer. Stephanie pulled up to the curb and started fiddling with her sound system. She was listening to her favorite, Salt-N-Pepa, on repeat. Everybody said Stephanie looked just like Salt, with her stacked bob pinned back on one side, long on the other. I guess she felt it was her duty to memorize all the lyrics.
I got out of the car while Stephanie danced in her seat, rapping along, “Ooh baby baby. Bay bay bay baby, get up on this!”
It felt like a long time that I was leaning up against the hood of her ride waiting for something to happen. Finally I saw a scrawny dude walking quickly toward me, his T-shirt tucked tightly into the waist of his high-water jeans. “You looking for something?” I asked.
“Yeah, lemme get a twenty,” he said.
“I only got dimes.”
“That it?”
“Yeah, man. It’s real good, though.”
“Aiight, lemme get two.” He slid a couple of crumpled ten-dollar bills into the palm of my hand. I reached into my pocket, pulled out two dime bags and passed them back. It was that simple.
It took me three nights at Techwood to get rid of that first quarter. With the cash I made, I paid Stephanie back her fifteen, got my hair done, and took the kids to eat. I was about to take care of the rent when I had a thought: Why spend all this money when I can double it instead? So Stephanie and I put the kids back in the car and took another ride out to Markee’s mama’s place. I scored another quarter, bagged it up at my kitchen table, and headed back out to Techwood. When that dope was gone, I did it again.
Making my own money felt good. For the first time I didn’t have to depend on Mama, Derrick, or welfare. Buying, chopping, bagging, and selling, it was all on me. I was in charge. A month after I started serving at Techwood, Markee bailed Derrick out of jail. I could have gone back to the way things used to be, with Derrick making all the money and me taking care of the kids. But it was too late for that. Once I got a taste of doing for myself, there was no way I was ever going back.
; Chapter 14
Night Crawlers
The first dealer I heard about getting killed at Techwood was Silky. He was popped execution style with a bullet through his head. The next week another dealer went down, shot twelve times, his body dumped in the woods. Then a dope boy at Harris Homes was shot working his corner. Pretty soon all anybody talked about were the drive-bys and gunfights and corners getting shot up like the Wild West.
Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if it was just Atlanta dealers firing at each other with handguns. But all that crack money brought gangbangers to town. The Miami Boys invaded Atlanta in the late 1980s like rats on a garbage pile. At first it looked like there were only a few of them, then suddenly they were everywhere, armed with semiautomatics and submachine guns that could tear up a whole block in seconds.
We could spot the Miami Boys a mile away. They wore Timberland boots even in the summertime, and tan-colored coveralls—like what a car mechanic would wear—that everybody called “trap suits,” because in Atlanta, anyplace where you can buy drugs is a “trap.” Plus, they all rocked gold teeth, top and bottom, sometimes decorated with diamond studs that spelled out miami. Atlanta dealers might sport a single gold tooth. But a diamond-encrusted grill? We’d never seen anything like that before.
The Miami Boys were trying to take over all the projects: Capital Homes, University Homes, Harris Homes, and Techwood. I knew they didn’t care about a small-time nobody like me. But still, they brought so much murder and mayhem to Techwood, I was scared from the second Stephanie and I pulled up to my spot in front of the chili-dog truck until the minute we left to go home.
We hadn’t been out by the chili-dog truck for more than an hour when we heard shots firing in the distance, Pop! Pop! Pop! And then more gunfire, this time rat-a-tat-tat-tat like a jackhammer.
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