Unsuccessful Thug

by Mike Epps

  “No!” she said. “You are going home! All your cousins are going to stay here and bowl as long as they want to, but you are going back home and sitting in your room alone! Because you don’t listen!”

  I cried and cried as she hauled me back to Carrollton and Thirty-Third.

  Reggie and my mom tried to discipline me, for that and for all the other bad shit I did. I was always getting spanked, getting grounded, getting things taken away. Once I laughed at a kid who had gotten burned, and Reggie held my hand over a fire to teach me how much it hurt.

  I can’t say it made me be better. There were some nights I cried myself to sleep after getting beat. You can argue for or against spanking, but I will say, I slept so well those nights. You sleep like a baby after your mama jumps on your ass. It’s better than Valium.

  Then came the ultimate you-better-fucking-behave-now moment in my life. When I was in fourth grade, black kids started to get bused from my neighborhood to a rich white school called Stephen Decatur. An hour and a half each way.

  It might as well have been a spaceship taking us to a different planet.

  We went to school all day with white kids, and then the bus brought us back to our community and we’d have to make sense of all the shit we’d seen. It was like you were a fucking explorer returning from a trip to the New World. I made a couple of white friends: Tom Roach, Rusty Day, but still, being in that place was discombobulating.

  I really didn’t know any white people until I went to school with them. I lived in a black neighborhood, and everyone except the cops was black, so until I went to Stephen Decatur I wasn’t even really aware of racism because we just didn’t see white people that often. My mom did have one white friend she’d worked with, a nice lady named Marci. Marci brought her son, Ritchie, over to play with us, so while my mom and Marci would be talking their girl talk in the kitchen, we kids would be hanging out.

  Because Ritchie was white, he was unusual in our neighborhood, so we would bring him out and show him around, like a rare baseball card: “Step right up! Step right up! Here we have . . . a white boy!” Ritchie could hang, mostly, but eventually we would start to play rough, like swinging off of shit or starting up a game of tackle football, and he would end up running in the house crying.

  So it wasn’t until I started at the white school that I started to see what growing up black in America meant. I started to realize that kids like my guy Ritchie and I were going to have different sorts of lives. Pretty much the only time white people came in our neighborhood, it was the cops or the fucking fire department. And that wasn’t ever a good day, you know? They never showed up to bring us ice cream or tell us how great we were. They were usually coming to take away someone we liked, after they roughed him up in front of us, or to put out a fire.

  The idea of the busing was, I guess, to give us poor black kids a shot at what they call a “good education” and to show the white kids how the other half lives or something. I guess they thought it would be good for all of us in one way or another. But I don’t know that it worked out like they’d hoped.

  The black kids were so confused to be there at all. Back in our neighborhood, we all knew the teachers and we all walked to school. Then this busing experiment started and everything changed. All we’d ever heard about Decatur was that they’d had the National Guard come out because they were burning crosses.

  I can still remember the look on the white kids’ faces when we showed up. It wasn’t like they stood waiting for us with welcome signs and open arms. It wasn’t the most inclusive place in the world, you feel me?

  Stephen Decatur was basically down the road from Ku Klux Klan headquarters back in the bad old days. (Fun fact: In the 1920s, a quarter of a million people in Indiana belonged to the Klan. To get elected back then, a politician had to have the Klan’s support.) Fast-forward to 1980, when Chaney and I and some other poor black people showed up to go to school with those kids’ great-grandkids: Well, not a lot had changed. People weren’t saying they were in the Klan so much anymore, but . . .

  It shocked the hell out of me. Up until then I’d hardly left my neighborhood at all. So it wasn’t until busing that I’d ever been called a nigger by a white person. But at Stephen Decatur I heard it all the time. Girls, even, would whisper it at us.

  The few black kids from my neighborhood who went there locked eyes every day in the hallway, like, Can you believe this shit?

  That’s true anywhere where it’s mostly white people. Black people will spot each other and nod. This was different, though: This was basically an all-white school, racist as hell. We had to know where our people were at all times in case the shit went down. We weren’t going to fucking blend in, you feel me? And we were pretty sure things could get real bad any second.

  On the other hand, we were pretty excited about some parts of being there. The place was really, really nice—fancy. You could tell that school district had a lot of money. The halls were clean, the rooms were bright, the teachers were good, and the food in the cafeteria was so good. We saw those lunches in the cafeteria and we were just, like, “Wow.” Sometimes it was the only meal we ate all day, so it tasted extra-good to us.

  If only they would’ve done something about all the racist bullshit, it would have been great to be there—weird, but still great. But they didn’t do shit; we were expected to just take it. Kids could come up to us, spit at us, call us “nigger,” and we were supposed to just ignore it. But I wouldn’t take it. I’d get up in their faces, then wind up in the principal’s office, and everyone would look at me like I was bad, like I didn’t belong there.

  “I’m telling you,” I’d say to the principal. “Jack keeps calling me ‘nigger’ when I pass him in the hall!”

  “Well,” the principal would say, “I’ll tell him not to do that anymore. But you gotta just ignore him, Michael.”

  “We don’t ignore that kind of thing where I live,” I’d say. “It’s disrespectful. I can’t ignore that.”

  Those boys never got in trouble for doing what they did to us. But if we stood up for ourselves? You’d think we’d killed someone. That’s why I got kicked out and suspended a lot. It got to where I would bust their fucking nose when they said that shit. Then they’d say it more. Then I’d fight more.

  I got suspended a lot, man. I got suspended, hell, maybe once a month.

  This was back in the days of corporal punishment, so I got paddled by teachers, too. Kids today can’t believe it, but back then we got beat all the time. In the 1970s and ’80s any adult could spank you, basically, for any reason at all.

  So, why didn’t I just let it go when I got called a name or shoved by a white boy at Decatur?

  Oh naw.

  For one thing, I had to go back to my neighborhood at the end of the day. If I didn’t do something about being taunted by a white boy, my black friends wouldn’t let me hear the end of it.

  For another thing, fuck those guys.

  Even though I was in trouble all the time, a lot of the teachers at Decatur liked me just like they had at 48, I could tell. A lot of them thought I was funny and charming, even though I was impulsive. And a lot of the girls liked me, too. I was a lover at a young age.

  That was my main motivation for going to school at that age: to see the girls. I can see them even now. This girl named Tracie. Another girl named Shereen . . . There were so many girls that I liked when I was a kid. Now, did the girls like me back? I don’t know. I was a little ratchet. I could make them laugh, though.

  Then came the greatest news any of us had ever gotten. A blessing. Like a gift from God, my mom got a letter in the mail that said she’d won some money in a sweepstakes.

  Holy shit! We had never, none of us, won anything, ever. Not a raffle; not a bet. Our family had the worst fucking luck on earth. But now? Now everything was different. We were winners! Big winners. We were looking at thousands of dollars, out of the blue. We’d have nicer clothes for school. We’d have more food. We’d be able to fix
up the house on Carrollton. My mom could even have her white picket fence.

  While they were waiting on the prize money, my mom and Reggie took out a loan for home repairs and renovations started. We were so excited watching it all go up. The new walls. Fixed-up attic and basement. We were going to have a nice house. We were going to be one of those middle-class families with the TVs and the cars and the clean front yards. I was so proud of us.

  The house was getting pretty, just like my mom dreamed, like they had in the old TV shows she watched. She couldn’t believe she was finally getting that picket fence, and it was her pride and joy. Nothing could disturb our happiness now. All the bad shit would stay outside that fence forever.

  Do I have to tell you what happened next?

  We got evicted.

  Mom had put the picket fence around the dream house and had it all decked out and looking nice. And then the bank came and they took it all away.

  It broke my mother’s heart.

  Reggie and my mom didn’t have money to pay back the renovation loan. That letter about the money we’d won? That gave my mom the idea to make all those home improvements? Turned out it was a scam.

  Reggie and my mother had got some kind of Reader’s Digest sweepstakes thing in the mail and thought it was real. By the time they understood what had happened, they’d gotten all this work done on the house, and there was no money to pay the loan back. Reggie was already supporting nine people on one salary. There was no way he could afford the payments on the loan, too. So we got kicked out. The door in the picket fence hit us on the way out.

  “I’m going to go buy that house for you one day,” I swore to my mother as we left. “I’m going to get that house back. Mark my words.”

  “Okay, baby,” my mom said.

  She sounded so tired. And I knew she didn’t believe me. But in my heart, I knew one day I would get that house for her again. And I’d make it so no one could take it away from her again.

  The only place we could afford now was the worst place we ever lived, a real hard part of the city: Thirty-First and Ruckle. It wasn’t so far from our old place, but it sure felt far. Back in those days in my neighborhood, you just had to go three blocks over from a nice working-class neighborhood, and bam, you were in the hood. We went from la-la-la-la-la-la, birds chirping, to dong-dong-dong-dong-dong, dark. On one side of College Avenue there were squirrels and sunshine. You cross over and it’s all rats, roaches, and thunder.

  There were so many roaches and rats living in the basement, it was like a horror movie down there. One night, the hugest rat of them all actually climbed up on the bed where my mother was sleeping with my baby brothers, bit Aaron, and scratched Nathan in the face.

  The house just kept falling apart. The paint, which I’m sure must have been lead based, was peeling. Outside was no better: The street was overrun with hard guys. The side door wouldn’t even shut, so anyone who wanted to come in the house could. The only good news was we had nothing worth stealing.

  The stress of living there was getting to everyone. My hair started to fall out in spots. At school they called me Dalmatian.

  One night, Robbie got into a fight with Reggie. They were yelling at each other, saying horrible things. Robbie stormed out of the house.

  “John,” Reggie said when Robbie had left, “you can have your brother’s room. Robbie’s not coming back here.”

  Well, that set our mom off. Robbie was, after all, her eldest son.

  “What are you doing?” our mom said. “You’re trying to get rid of him? Who’s next, me? You’re going to marry Julie instead, and she’s gonna have your next kids?”

  “Whoa!” Julie said, totally freaked out that our mom seemed to think she was competition for her stepfather. “I don’t want your man. No, ma’am. I gotta go.”

  She was a teenager by this point, and she moved out the next day.

  Meanwhile, my brothers and I were getting bigger and tougher, and running with some rough older kids, a lot of those same guys my mom had been warning us about since we were all little. Reggie started to seem scared of us.

  It all came to a head one day when we heard screaming and yelling coming from mom’s bedroom. We ran in there only to find our mom on top of Reggie, pinning him down. We knew they were having trouble and arguing about money a lot, but we didn’t know it was that serious.

  Turns out, it was really fucking serious.

  What happened next is a blur, so I’ll just tell you what I remember.

  It was the late afternoon and I was getting home from fifth grade. I don’t know where all the other kids were. I only remember me alone. As I approached the house on Ruckle, I found my mom out front wearing a nightgown.

  She was at the top of the front steps, on her knees, crying.

  “Mama!” I shouted, running up to her. “You okay?”

  She was crying so hard, she could barely talk. I hugged her and held her.

  “Reggie’s gone,” she said between sobs.

  I didn’t know Reggie and my mom were having problems to that degree. And I couldn’t believe they’d really broken up. Maybe, I thought, it was just a fight. I was sure they’d get back together again.

  “He left,” my mom said. “For good. And he took everything. Everything!”

  I walked into the house—it had been stripped bare. Everything they’d gotten together over the years was gone. All our nice furniture was gone, and Reggie had even taken the fridge and the stove. All that was left were our beds.

  Reggie had even taken Aaron, the older of their sons, to go live with him at his new house across town, but he left Nathan, then still a baby, with us. My mom said it was because he thought Nathan didn’t look like him.

  Mom was destroyed.

  Reggie had promised when they got married that he was going to take care of her, take care of all of us, but I guess it got too real for him. Looking back, my brothers and sister and I all can see that Reggie had taken on more responsibility than he could handle. He was a working man dating this pretty lady and then all of a sudden he’s tied to this huge, broke-ass family, the older boys turning into hard-core muhfuckas. We’d probably be freaking the fuck out, too, if we were in his place.

  Yeah, but why did he take the fucking furniture? That is something I will never understand. That was some cold-ass shit right there. You’re getting your freedom, man; can’t you get a new couch?

  When he left, our mother had a mental breakdown. Our house had gone from nice to just trashed, like a fucking squat. Reggie decided that he wasn’t going to give her money for groceries or utilities anymore, either, so we were in a cold house in the winter with no heat and no hot water. My mom somehow scraped up enough to keep the electricity on so we could use a hot plate to warm up water. That way we could each take a little bird bath once a week. It felt only a little better than being homeless would have. It felt like Reggie basically left us there to die.

  Maybe that sounds like I’m exaggerating. But death didn’t feel so remote at the time. There was death all around us in that neighborhood back then.

  One cold winter day, not far from the house on Ruckle, Chaney and I saw a cab parked but running in an alley called Horseshoe Alley. It was a freezing morning and we didn’t know why someone would be down that alley with the doors open unless there was something interesting going on. Maybe we’d see people making out. Or maybe the car was up for grabs and we could take it for a ride.

  We walked back there to see what was up.

  What we saw was frozen blood on the ground and a dead man lying there with wide eyes. The cabbie. It looked like he had been mugged and shot, then left to die in the cold.

  He seemed not to have been dead long, but already his blood had frozen him onto the ice. Chaney and I stared hard at that man’s dead eyes, the frozen blood, the way his body was lying there. It was the first dead body we’d ever seen.

  It wouldn’t be the last.

  4

  Our Forty Acres and a Mule

&n
bsp; With Reggie gone, my mom went on welfare. Social workers came over to the house with their briefcases. While they said they were helping us, they also seemed to be torturing her. I hated when they showed up, because it seemed like they were making her beg. She was a proud woman, and she’d worked hard in her life. She’d paid her taxes. It didn’t seem right that they would nickel-and-dime her.

  “Go play,” my mom would say to me when the social workers appeared. But I would stand there in the doorway listening to her argue with them about her checks. “I was getting $240!” she’d yell at them. “Now I’m only getting $140! I have seven children! How am I supposed to feed seven children on that?”

  When you have eight people to feed, that hundred dollars really matters. At the beginning of the month, the fridge is full and everyone’s happy. But then comes, like, the twenty-third of the month, and all the food stamps have been spent, or maybe your mom sold some so she could get something else she needed. Whatever the reason, your fridge is bare, and you have to listen to your stomach grumble while you watch McDonald’s ads on TV.

  At first, I felt embarrassed about being on welfare. For a long time, my brother Chaney and I didn’t want the other kids to see when we took out food stamps at the checkout counter. I hated that my mother would send us around looking for the mailman so we could get our check as soon as possible.

  But it didn’t take long until times got so hard that it wasn’t embarrassing anymore. After a while I couldn’t afford to feel ashamed; I was too hungry. And I saw that a lot of the older black people around me had no such qualms about taking government money.

  Now, if you didn’t grow up where I did, you might only know about welfare from the “welfare queen” stories of the 1980s. Was that stigma totally overblown and racist? Yes. Was it 100 percent made-up? No, it was not. I saw a bunch of grown-ass men out there on the front porch, standing there all day, with no shirt, rubbing their bellies, looking for the mailman. A lot of the people we knew took advantage of the government’s help and they never looked back.