Alanna was our music-loving action figure. Music made her move. Willetha and I watched six-month-old Alanna respond to music by standing up. Before too long she was up and walking. She got around so fast that once when we weren’t looking, we heard her little toddler body tumbling end-over-end down a flight of stairs. Panic-stricken, we raced to the bottom of the stairs, not knowing what to expect. I picked her up while her mommy was screaming and squirtin’ tears. Alanna, relatively unscathed, abandoned her own trauma, reached out to cuddle us both tight. Instead of our comforting her, she coddled us.
Willetha had walked into my life out of nowhere, rescued me from a spiraling nosedive, gave me three sacred precious gifts from God, and stood by me through the bleakest, toughest of life’s storms. Fatherhood sheltered me from the outside world. I hid myself inside nursery rhymes, school field trips, kiddie movies, and makeshift forts. Feeding and burping, clothing, housing, educating, and protecting my children were my job satisfaction. Fatherhood was the main thing in life I was not going to mess up. In the process, I became the best of myself.
But dumping a career, walking away from nine years of hard-earned seniority and job security, was absolute agony. My mind interpreted the baby’s crying as What? You quit your job? With a wife and three children? We need food, clothing, and shelter! The voice beat me up and echoed in my spirit all day, every day. I tried working for Fatso’s construction business for a while, but I wasn’t cut out for construction. After precisely one year, Corky Finney showed up at my home with my exact same badge. He had cleared the way with the chief and convinced me to return to the PD.
Dumping all that seniority was an incalculable loss and a great victory at the same time. New kids now had seniority over me, and I had to return to the hated and dreaded midnight shifts. My promotability was permanently marginalized. It would be another three years before I’d even be able to take the next promotional exam. I was less likely to achieve upper management, which made me less of a target for sabotage. But I had made my choice. Being disqualified as a candidate for high promotion freed me to be the people’s cop instead of following police traditions.
A huge racial scandal hit the news about a year after my return. A Pioneer Press story described a conversation between Chief McCutcheon and a reporter in which the chief criticized the newspaper for not identifying troublemakers by race, and then said that he hoped “when someone sees a black teenager approaching, their antenna goes up.” The issue blew up. The media had a field day. So Chief Mac scheduled a damage control meeting with African American police officers at the Martin Luther King Center.
The feedback was incredible. Fellow Black officers referenced squad car call numbers being color-coded, years previously. Two officers noted that after shifts they’d return to the parking lot to find that their Cadillacs had been keyed up overnight. They complained about receiving unfair performance evaluations and getting the least backup at the most dangerous calls. Supervisors set them up to fail, giving them all the shit assignments while the white boys with less seniority got all the cush. And where the hell did they even find those old raggedy-ass squad cars with no heat in the winter and no air-conditioning in the summer? And so on. I cringed when an officer frankly told the chief that he was knocking out the next white officer who used the word nigger in his presence. I felt the same way but presumed such a statement would be used against me if something did happen.
I waited until last to speak and read from my written notes. On routine patrol, I’d located an armed and extremely dangerous felon with outstanding warrants. I found his car and the house he was staying in. The supervisors had pulled me off, waited until I was off duty, surrounded the house, and made the arrest—then took all the credit without giving me a mention. The same supervisors then gave me a marginal job evaluation. On search warrants, parades, or special details, white officers always got all the good assignments and would get relieved for lunch and breaks, and I’d be assigned to some far-off outer perimeter for hours and forgotten.
The fallout was interesting. Weeks later, to placate public opinion, Chief Mac appointed me as the St. Paul Police public relations officer. This was my first non-grunt police assignment, and I was moved off midnight street patrol to a nine-to-five cushy office job. I prepared press releases and held press conferences, which enabled me to experience the police world beyond straight-up patrol and SWAT. Certain African American officers resented me for it, calling me “the poet” in a condescending tone.
It was a good learning experience, even fun at times. I got to ride through parades on horseback. But after a year and a half, with racial tension toned down a bit, it was back to late-night patrol—which had already been stale when I left, real stale. I was desperate to get on to something else, anything else! My great need to make sergeant was mostly just to get off street patrol grunt work, not so much that I actually wanted to have the sergeant job.
Police promotions are the most competitive, antisocial affairs. Partners studied back-to-back, hiding study materials from each other. Ninety or so applicants competed for about ten positions. Most applicants had some kind of college degree; some had a master’s. All I had was a dingy-assbarely-earned-night-school-high-school diploma.
I studied like a drowning man trying to swim. I ate study material, drank it, swam it, and slept in it. And I prayed!
The day of the written promotional exam was a good day. I could feel it the moment I got out of bed. I got there early and picked out a seat in front, furthest from the door. I’d be among the last to finish, and that way, early finishers would not be a distraction.
I walked out of that test room like a baseball slugger who’d just scored a grand slam. Shortly thereafter the scores were posted, and I got the second highest. In fact, my score was so high that I was officially accused of cheating. The SPPD launched an official investigation. It was breaking news on a major TV network: “St. Paul Police Department investigates promotional exam cheating.” I counted it all flattery when Chief Mac personally interrogated me. Later it was posted in the Police Bulletin: “After a lengthy investigation, we could find no evidence of cheating on the recent promotional exam. This investigation is closed.”
The next step was the oral interview, and that was a different story. The lead SPPD supervisor found several subtle ways to sabotage my interview and knocked my overall score so low that I barely got the promotion. But I GOT IT!
27
Promoted
Transformed from Officer Carter to Sergeant-Investigator Carter, I was assigned to the robbery unit, the second most prestigious unit on the PD, located on the top floor next to homicide. We were doing detective work, but the department had retired the title “detective” so they could assign sergeant-investigators to either the detective bureau or uniform supervisor duties.
Robbers are the most dangerous predators of all the criminals who take things from people by force. The ones I went after the hardest were the robbers who stomped their victims, who beat them as well as robbing them. To lurk, stalk, and pounce was my method.
The thing I hated the most about street patrol was stopping the wrong guy, holding him at gunpoint, only to find out he was a decent person who just happened to match the description and be driving his kids home after Sunday school when a call went out. But tracking down robbers was different. There is always at least one witness, as well as lots of evidence, from fingerprints to photos, and even video records. You could be sure you had the right guy.
One night, a stickup man robbed a Super America station at gunpoint and escaped on foot. Investigations, evidence, and snitches led me to a four-story building in Minneapolis. Following “hot pursuit” procedure and courtesy protocol, I notified Minneapolis PD and proceeded to the scene. Sergeant Jay Vector, an older detective who was always very critical of me, came along to make the arrest. Upon our arrival, the bad guy took to the rooftops. While Jay covered me from the ground, I went up a ladder, made the arrest, and brought him down without incident.
We handcuffed him and brought him to justice. No big thing, right?
Toni pinned my sergeant’s badge on me. I was a little worried about getting stuck.
Back at HQ, the boss asked how it went. Cops always gather around to hear war stories. Jay took center stage. “You shoulda seen Carter climb that ladder, scale that wall, and take the rooftops like a Black banshee. I never saw nothin’ like it!” He repented from that day on, even to the point of giving me holiday gifts.
My first year as a detective, I went out into the field and personally arrested more robbers than all the detectives in the entire robbery unit combined. I got robbers in their homes and back yards, on their jobs, and even that one off a rooftop. Peers tolerated this for a while. But eventually I was ordered to simply issue warrants (“pick up and holds”) and stay in the office like all the others.
It was another training day for self-defense, and Sergeant Blockhead and I were assigned to be sparring partners in a high-impact, full-contact training drill. He was the guy with all the racial jokes about blowing my brains out back in A-3, and he had five inches and fifty pounds on me. Being assigned to spar with guys twice my size was rather routine by this time and only got me hospitalized once previously. Causing me physical injury sometimes seemed to be the motive behind the deliberate mismatches. But you know, like we say in the neighborhood, “You gotta bring some ass to kick some ass!”
Today’s exercise was a punching drill: fist strikes, to start at the trainer’s whistle. Blockhead held the thick, padded shield tightly against his chest. My fists, with muscle memory of their own, commenced to self-detonating. “Don’t take this ass whoopin’ personally,” I whispered. Hard-knuckle depth charges penetrated his body shield and ripped deep beneath his rib cage, displacing internal organs. What about all them nappy head jokes? my fist asked. POW, my fist answered. And them blowing-out-my-brains-with-the-shotgun jokes? BANG! And remember the reneging joke? WHAM!
Eventually his body went limp, slumped over, and slinked down. He lay spattered belly-up on the floor, panting for air. My foot stepped over his belly. I stood straddling his torso. “Now get up! It’s my turn. Let’s see whatchu got!” I stepped aside and picked up the pad, challenging him to come on and bring it. Instead he meekly got up without speaking and slowly exited the training area.
Now look at what you guys went and done! I scolded my fists, but they scoffed.
I never at any interval forgot my promise to myself about Officer Draggit, the guy who put chewing gum in my coffee. My efforts to bait and lure him were never successful—he always managed to slither away. But I also knew the Buddhist law of cause and effect: Good deeds bring good results. Bad deeds bring bad results. Your own deeds bring your own results. My self-appointed enemies always did something to themselves that had nothing to do with me. Draggit, dispatched to a call, got caught having sex with a woman when her husband walked in. The husband had him trapped naked in the attic with his uniform and gun downstairs. The husband called SPPD supervisors. Although I felt greatly deprived when Draggit got fired, by now I recognized and appreciated divine intervention when I saw it.
Even before my cop days, I had seen evidence of divine protection at work. Back at Bouknadel, there was that plate glass window falling on me, stopped only by the tiny, wet washcloth I had thrown across my neck just minutes before, but especially that gust of wind and broken tree limb after I snot-cried to God for a sign. Beyond that, back in the hood, three desperadoes on a shooting and terrorizing spree threatened my siblings, telling them that they were after me. I had avoided them and backed down from them twice. But my mind set: three strikes and you’re out! So the next strike shall be mine! Out of necessity, I made a private determination to permanently incapacitate the next one upon his very next encroachment. But something happened to them, one by one, without my having anything to do with it. In separate, nonrelated incidents, they made the headlines. Two of them were found executed gangland style along some dirt road out in the woods. The third disappeared into a long-term prison sentence.
I believe that vengeance belongs to God. Every now and then He assigns His sons and daughters a role as instruments in His own vengeance; I am happy that He protected me from ever having to take a life.
The advent of crack cocaine took us all to a new bottom. My ongoing private unfunny joke was that the reason it was called crack was due to where dope dealers carried it on their bodies. So then there were strip searches. Officers were cornering Black males in the street, making them pull down their pants so a search could be conducted between their legs. As the only Black officer on third floor, I argued against it. When the white boys argued for it, I said, “Let me put it this way. If somebody did that to my child, I might kill him!”
I went on vacation in about 1988, came back, and was transferred: “Clear your desk, Carter! You’re out of here.” My new assignment: the juvenile unit on the bottom floor, the absolute bottom basement of all detective work.
Crime, drugs, and guns flowed into the city. Our home got shot up in gangland crossfire by a stickup man I had once arrested. We had enough income to move to the suburbs, and we briefly put our beloved ghetto palace up for sale. But then we thought harder about it, and we yanked our house off the market.
We had seen children moving out of the community into the suburbs, attending schools where they were not understood and not wanted. Consequently, they lived in a no-man’s-land, unwelcomed in their neighborhoods and, worst of all, cut off from the love, nurturing, protection, and guidance of grandparents, uncles, and aunts.
The ghetto, to me, was as a swamp to the alligator. To outsiders, a swamp appears murky, dangerous, and unwelcoming. But the swamp has the deepest, richest, underlying, life-giving, organic soil, nurturing and protective of its natural inhabitants. Even after our house got shot up a second time, Toni and I stopped thinking in terms of “making it out of the ghetto.” Abandoning the environment that had spawned, nurtured, and protected me would be an act of betrayal, if not high treason. Instead, our biggest concern was what would happen to our neighborhood if we left.
I was always part kidding and part serious when referring to myself and Toni as “Ma ’n’ Pa Ghetto,” which Toni vehemently rejected!
In the meantime, my children were rapidly becoming themselves. This Juvenile assignment, pretty much a day job, allowed me lots of family time. I avoided working overtime, and hardly ever did any moonlighting at security jobs or even attended night school like most other officers, in order to meet the full-time demands of raising inner-city children, my children my top-favorite priority. The safe haven we built for them proved to be a hideaway from all that viciousness for me. Each child was my very favorite person, in their own light. My awesome task was to bring out the limitless potential and greatness in them—the greatness that is in every child.
Time after time, I had witnessed the waste of multitudes of such great talents. Time after time, I watched the world blindside descendants of America’s chattel slavery with superimposed academic, economic, and intellectual poverty—while earmarking drugs from South America, along with firearms, for inner-city distribution. Preparing my children for secular onslaught was, first and foremost, a spiritual and social affair. Although I had long since returned to Christianity, Buddhist influences helped to apply biblical principles and Christian values and virtues to everyday self-developmental practices—in fact, to everything in life. Our home became half monastery and half boot camp with our own cornball sense of humor.
My daughters were daddy’s girls, but I’d leave the intimate fine-tuning femininity issues between them and their mom. Every now and then, I’d try to do their hair when Willetha was not around or could not do it for whatever reason. But I was not good at it, so bad that eventually my daughters refused to let me touch their hair.
But having a son, a man-child, and knowing the challenges, pitfalls, snares, and traps set for Black males, called me out. I taught him everything I knew, withheld nothing. I pushed him to d
o push-ups daily, showed him how to put up his dukes and how to throw punches, taught him gun safety and shooting and how to take a semiautomatic apart, clean it, and put it back together. The ping-pong table downstairs turned into a special learning and bonding facility, where we’d have our Mr. Nins moments. I showed him how to plant images in the minds of opponents, set up expectations, and shoot the ball elsewhere. He finally beat me at the age of fourteen because I had taught him how to read my mind. I beat him in footraces until he became a high school track star. He was a great learner, able to surpass everything his mother and I taught him, achieving at the highest level.
Having gorgeous daughters, I’d meet and welcome young guys at the door with my subtle interrogation tactics (probably having already read their criminal histories).
I raised my children with a vengeance, taught them everything I knew, exposing them to as much as possible, withholding nothing, connecting them with mentors who could take them to the next levels, putting them in real-life learning situations from playgrounds and Disney Worlds to courtrooms.
Thank God our children were more like their mother. They did well in school, and we never had to look for them in jail, hospital, or morgue. How ain’t that a miracle? To God I give the glory. We were a hugging family. We talked and laughed about most everything. Enjoying their childhood was mandatory. My number-one rule was: “YOU WILL ENJOY YOUR CHILDHOOD OR ELSE!”
My children loved music, singing, dancing, arts, and athletics, both individual and team sports, all of which taught them interesting, sometimes conflicting aspects about themselves. Anika was a world-class speed skater. Alanna, a track star and explosive basketball point guard. And after years of hockey and speed skating, Melvin became quite the track star.
Diesel Heart Page 24