by Tracy Brown
Marquis was different now, but his mother flat-out refused to call him Born. Ingrid thought it was stupid to walk around calling yourself something other than your legal name, regardless of his reasons for doing so. She was the only one who continued to call him Marquis, and he didn’t protest. It would have been pointless to argue with her about it. But she recognized that the transition from impressionable youngster to ruthless hustler was under way in her son.
Ingrid Graham was Born’s favorite girl in the world, and all of her friends thought it was precious that her son loved her as unabashedly as he did. In his eyes, his mother was smarter and more perceptive than the average woman. So it should never have surprised him when his mother uncovered what he thought was a well-kept secret. His father was smoking now more than ever. Leo was home whenever he was broke, and out getting high whenever he got money. Ingrid still hadn’t tried to talk to her son about what was happening in their family, because she didn’t even know where to begin. Born spent less time at home and more time on the grind.
He and his boys had a tight crew going, and eventually they got their hands on some guns. Trouble was, they were all about sixteen or seventeen, and everybody was still living at home with their moms. Born was the only one whose mother didn’t snoop around his room. Ingrid was never that type. She left his shit alone as long as he left her shit alone. So it was agreed that Born would hold everybody’s guns at his house, and each day everyone would come to him and pick up their piece.
This setup worked for a while. Every day the crew would come to the crib and get their artillery, and then they would hit the block and get money. By now their crew was notorious. It was common knowledge that the 55 Holland boys would rob, steal, shoot… whatever! It was all about money to them. They had a legacy already. Known for resorting to collecting hood ransoms from rival crews (they would kidnap a rival hustler who had a little paper and hold him till they got five or six grand for his safe return), it became clear that they were not above any means of getting money.
Then Martin began to play the role of a stick-up kid. He was successful most often, because when a victim took one look in his evil eyes, no one dared to challenge him. They simply handed over their valuables and prayed that he let them leave with their lives. He robbed old ladies, young girls, hustlers from other neighborhoods—anybody who had what he wanted. Soon the rest of the crew had caught on, and together they pulled off robbery after robbery. But, this successful track record came to a halt when Martin and the rest of the crew tried to rob two younger hustlers from the Harbor projects named Junior and DonDon.
Martin, Born, Smitty, and Chance were all in on this robbery. Junior and DonDon talked a lot of shit and did a lot of bragging about what they had, and about the money they made. There had been bad blood between Born’s crew and Junior and DonDon for a long time. Their crews often sold to the same customers, and stepped on each other’s toes, on each other’s turf. This was one crime that was more personal than anything else. So the four of them cornered Junior and DonDon in the lobby of a building in the Harbor projects, and demanded it all—their jewelry, money, sneakers, and all that.
“Gimme all yo shit, nigga. Punk ass! Go ‘head and give me a reason to shoot you!” Martin barked.
Born, Smitty, and Chance all had their guns pointed at both Junior and DonDon. Junior stared at Martin over the barrel of his .45. “Fuck you,” Junior said, disrespecting the robbery. He didn’t think the cowards had the heart to shoot them. “Y’all ain’t ready to use them guns. Stop playing.”
Martin shook his head. “You sure about that?” he asked.
Junior looked as if he might change his mind. But Martin decided it was too late for that. He fired, hitting Junior dead in the head. Then he turned his gun on DonDon.
“Oh, shit!” DonDon reached for his own gun, figuring he might as well go out shooting. He was considerably outnumbered, but he shot it out anyway. Born opened four holes in him before DonDon could fire twice. The 55 Holland niggas walked away with every item of value that Junior and DonDon had put their lives on the line for. When all was said and done, DonDon was in a wheelchair and Junior was dead.
Word on the street spread that the 55 Holland niggas were behind the robbery of Junior and DonDon. The hood was all abuzz with speculation, and still, Born underestimated his moms, and thought she was clueless about what he was doing.
Then one morning, Born was asleep in his room. Leo wasn’t there that day, and it was just Born and his mother at home. It was early—about eight o’clock in the morning. Ingrid came in and frantically woke her son up. She shook Born awake, and said, “Marquis, get up! The cops are outside in front of the building, and they’re coming upstairs. You need to get them guns up out of here!”
“What?” Born was shocked, because he had no idea that she knew about those guns. He didn’t have time to question it, though. He jumped out of bed and took the bag from underneath his bed. “How you know they’re coming up here? They could be going to somebody else’s apartment.”
Ingrid grabbed the bag and frowned at her son. “Boy, you know damn well your ass is hot right now,” she said. She ran to her next-door neighbor’s apartment, and tapped eagerly on the door. The woman let Ingrid in, and after a brief explanation she hid the bag way in the back of her closet. Ingrid knew that the cops had her son and his crew on their radar.
Born had thought his mother was too lame to notice, but he had underestimated how well his father had taught his wife to pay attention. She had known all along what Born was up to. She had heard what the streets were saying about him, and she had long ago noticed that her son was deep in the game. Ingrid had been expecting the cops to come looking for him sooner or later. She would address it in her own way, but the issue at hand was more pressing than all that. She had to save him from going to jail.
Once back inside their apartment, Ingrid and Marquis nervously awaited the inevitable. They didn’t need to wait too long. The cops came banging at their door no more than five minutes later. They came in, eight of them in full riot gear. “Get on the floor and place your hands behind your head!” they barked at Born. Ingrid was also subjected to scrutiny, as the cops made her stand with her hands behind her head. They ransacked the apartment, searching every room and looking in every crevice. But thanks to his mother, when they searched Born’s room they didn’t find those guns.
But they did find some of Junior’s jewelry, and a few bags of weed. “Looks like we got you,” one of the cops sneered at him. Born didn’t panic. They brought him in for questioning, along with Smitty, Martin, and Chance. But none of them talked, and the cops had no way of proving that the rope chain and pinkie ring had belonged to Junior. Nothing was found that could connect the 55 crew to the crime committed.
Still, Born was shocked. His mother had never been the type to snoop. Or so he thought. But she had known what he’d been doing all along. After that, Born started wondering how much else she knew. And he stopped underestimating Ingrid Graham. But he kept getting in trouble. He and his crew were brought in for questioning in connection with attempted murders, assaults, home invasions, and drug dealing. It got to the point that whenever someone got shot or assaulted, the police questioned one or all of the 55 Holland niggas. Born was constantly in trouble. It wasn’t long before the state got involved, and they put him in a group home all the way out in Queens.
He was in the group home for a year or so before he got kicked out for fighting. Fighting was part of survival of the fittest in a group home environment. The fight hadn’t even been Born’s fault, but they sent him to juvenile detention. He was always in some kind of group home or detention center in his early teens, and his mother always held him down. She made sure he had sheets, towels, clothes, tapes, whatever. Ingrid was sick without her son at home, and she knew that part of his “I don’t give a fuck” attitude stemmed from the pain he was feeling over the departure of his father.
Being away from home was not the deterrent that the stat
e of New York hoped it would be. In fact, in a lot of ways it prepared Born for jail. It was while he spent time at a juvenile detention center in the Bronx that Born witnessed the crack epidemic in a way that he never had before. Fiends lined up by the dozens to buy crack from one man. Born had never witnessed such extreme poverty and addiction until then. But it also showed him the potential for profit the drug game held. He watched bum-ass niggas make miraculous come-ups just by serving the fiends, who would give anything to get high. By the time he returned home after his stint in the group home, it was no secret to Ingrid that the respectable young man she knew as Marquis was also a ruthless thug known in the streets as Born. He was a fearless young man with nothing to lose and the world to gain. Born had arrogance that people either hated or loved, and he didn’t care about anything. Born was a wild one, and the streets grew to revere him.
While doing his stint in the Bronx group home, he was allowed to come back to home to Staten Island from time to time. He would put in work on the block every time he was home. A counselor at that group home named Shakim noticed that whenever Born went home for a while, he would come back with all kinds of clothes, sneakers, coats, all kinds of shit. Born had a six-hundred-dollar blue Polo sweater that everyone knew was pricey. He was always styling, and everyone took notice. Shakim had read up Born’s rap sheet, and he knew his whole story. So he would look at all the pricey new clothes and expensive jewelry that Born had each time he came back, and he’d shake his head.
“Damn! You out there slingin’ them golden grams, huh?” Shakim asked Born. “It ain’t hard to tell what you’re out there doing.” He knew what Born was doing. Shakim noticed that Born’s eyes were always bloodshot and lazy. He knew that Born was smoking weed and that he was hustling. He decided to try to get through to the boy’s mother as a last-ditch effort to save the young man.
Shakim had a conversation with Ingrid that didn’t go as well as he had planned. “Your son has too many expensive things. I know that you send him some of it. But he gets plenty on his own. He’s drawing attention to himself. And he’s sending the wrong message to the other group home residents. These kids are supposed to be turning their lives around. But your son is making it look so much more enticing on the other side of life.”
“Uh-huh,” Ingrid said. She acted like she had no idea what Born was up to. “Everything that Marquis has, I’ve given to him. I’m his only source of income.” But she wasn’t. Born was doing it all by himself. She told Shakim, “I work. I can buy things for my son if I want, can’t I?”
But Shakim knew the deal. After his conversation with Ingrid, Shakim told Born that he still had a lot to learn as a “hustler.” “What you’re doing is so obvious,” he said. “Because for the past six weeks you haven’t even been going to pick up the allowance the group home gives you. You don’t need that money, so you keep forgetting to go get it.”
Born stood there feeling like a fool for being so obvious. Shakim was right about all of his suspicions. It was no real secret what Born was doing out there. The system did nothing to deter him.
His father was fucked-up by that time. Leo was a full-blown crack addict, and to add to the problem, his health was deteriorating. His heart was failing; he was in a wheelchair. He was messed up. During one of Born’s visits home, Leo had a talk with his son.
“I want to talk to you about something. Sit down,” Leo instructed. Born did as he was told. “I see you getting real caught up in them streets. I see you. But you’re too smart to be out there in the streets like me.”
Born laughed, snidely. “Why? You don’t think you’re a good example?”
Leo ignored his son’s sarcasm. “What are you hustling for? Your mother gets you whatever you want. I get you whatever you want. What are your hustling for!”
Born shrugged. True, Ingrid took him to shop at Macy’s. He had Guess jeans. But she couldn’t afford to buy him five pairs of Guess jeans like she once did. She could only get him two or three pairs. Born wanted a pair for each day of the week. And his mother was already working too hard in order to provide for his expensive tastes. He did what he did so that he wouldn’t ever have to do without. He did it for status.
Leo knew that. And he pressed the issue further. “You ain’t making no real money out there, Marquis. Get your act together and fly straight.” Born agreed with him. He wasn’t making no real money out there at the time. But he swore to himself that when he came home he would do the shit right and stop hustling backward. He didn’t heed his father’s warnings, figuring that Leo was just tired of seeing Born hustle the right way, unlike Leo had done.
Leo could tell that Born wasn’t going to change. “Well, if you insist on being hardheaded, the least you can do is keep some bail money handy. Always have bail money, so you ain’t gotta depend on nobody else.”
Born nodded. But on the inside he winced. That was the advice a father gave his youngest son about being a hustler. Always have bail money ready. When Born came home he got right back on his grind.
Born had a steady girlfriend during this time. Her name was Simone, and they had met at a party thrown by one of his friends. Simone was a pretty girl with a Coke bottle figure. She was the first girl to get Born to let his guard down completely. She had his nose wide open. They were teenage sweethearts, and Born had shared all of himself with her. During the days when Born was in and out of group homes and in and out of trouble, Simone had been a breath of fresh air. She lived in Park Hill, and she was fly as hell. Whenever she stepped on the scene, niggas took notice, and Born was proud to have her as his girl. He had opened up to her about the pain of his childhood, and he shared his money with her. Born took her shopping, bought her jewelry, kept her laced in all the hottest clothes. Simone had been given every luxury imaginable, and Born had given her his heart.
It wasn’t until he came back home to Staten Island for good that he found out that, in his absence, Simone had been fucking everybody in the projects. She and her friend Tanya were bosom buddies, and from what he heard, the two of them were both being scandalous. Not long after he came home for good, Born vowed revenge. And he got that revenge when he fucked Simone’s friend Tanya, and then told her all about it. Simone was devastated and hurt, and her friendship with Tanya immediately ended. The two girls never spoke to each other again, and Simone was so distraught that she came to his mother’s house in tears. Ingrid talked to the girl, and told her that she had gotten what her hand called for. When Born was hurt, he tended to hurt people back. But when Simone was gone, Born’s mother had scolded him, and she told him that he was dead wrong for playing two friends against each other. Born didn’t listen, though. He vowed to never give a bitch his heart again.
The money started piling up. Born began helping his moms with the bills, paying the rent, buying clothes and jewelry for himself, and feeling important for the first time. He began to have the acclaim that he had always thirsted for, and it felt pretty good.
The part that bothered him was that he couldn’t help wondering if his father was proud of him. Part of him was angry with himself for even caring about Leo Graham and whether or not he had managed to make him proud. The man was a failure himself, as far as Born was concerned. But strangely, Born still longed for his father’s approval, his attention. He wanted his father to be proud. But he would never admit that.
Born started trying to make bigger moves. He wanted more than just a little bit of money. He wanted tons of it, and he wasn’t afraid to make moves without his crew behind him. When he found out that niggas had dough, he found a way to get dough with them, or he would take it from them instead. Jamari was with him all the way; Born’s novice, watching and learning. For Born, it was nice being a role model to somebody. He knew he had more going for him than the average hustler in the hood. He was his father’s child, and that had given him a front-row seat to the mechanics of the drug game. Being the son of a man like Leo—an Original Gangsta whose name rang bells—had clearly prepared Born for his turn on
the throne. And now that Leo had fallen, it was almost as if Born had picked up the torch and was determined to run with it. He would not lose. And Jamari seemed to recognize that as well. He seemed to look up to Born. And Born took that seriously, knowing that having power meant having followers who would do anything you needed. He figured that someone like Jamari might come in handy someday.
Born was the man. He had big rings, jewelry, chains, the whole nine. He was on top of the world. Shopping sprees every weekend, sneakers for every outfit, and jewelry galore. He was caked up. When he went shopping he often took Jamari with him, just to have company going to the mall. He would buy Jamari sneakers, too, and Born put him on. He gave Jamari an identity and taught him all the bylaws of the hustler’s manual. Soon Jamari had all kinds of cute girls on his arm, and he was beginning to forge an identity of his own in the streets. Through Born, Jamari gained access to all the components necessary for success in the game: the drugs, the guns, the jewelry, the women. Jamari was learning from the best.
Born’s mother wasn’t happy about the direction her son’s life was headed in. She felt helpless and angry that her husband’s lifestyle had influenced Born and his career choice. Many times she argued with Leo. She told him that it was his fault that Marquis was hustling, that Leo was to blame for the path her son had taken in life. Some nights Ingrid looked at her husband, and somewhere deep within her, she felt contempt toward him. She was disgusted, because he had influenced her only child to follow the same path as the father he adored.
But there had also been many nights when she’d questioned herself ‘for not taking a bigger stand against Marquis selling drugs. She had watched him slowly find his way into the game, and couldn’t pretend that she hadn’t known from the beginning that Marquis was in the game. Born had always had a unique relationship with his mother. Their lines of communication were wide open. Sure, she had told him not to do it. She reminded him that she was working hard to give him all of the things he had—all of the Bally’s footwear, Coogi sweaters, and the goose-down leathers. She even tried harder to give him everything he wanted, as a deterrent to the streets. Whatever Marquis asked for, he got. Whatever he wanted, she made sure she found a way to get it for him. But the harder she had to work to provide all of these things for Born, the more determined he became to get so much money that his moms never had to work that hard again.