DEDICATION
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY SON, CALEB JIM ST. GERMAIN.
YOU’RE MY SANCTUARY; YOUR LOVE STRENGTHENS ME AND
ENCOURAGES ME TO KEEP FIGHTING.
EPIGRAPH
Any society, any family, which cannot share or take seriously the pain of its children, and views that pain as something normal or to be expected, is a society condemned to remain a hostage to itself.1
—POPE FRANCIS, CURRAN-FROMHOLD CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, PHILADELPHIA
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART I: BROOKLYN, USA 1: Front-Row Seat
2: Five Square Blocks
3: Hustle
4: Buffett
5: Survival Mode
6: T and T’s
PART II: THE SYSTEM 7: State Property
8: Points
9: Scars
10: Inside Out
11: Light
12: Astonishing
PART III: OUT 13: Re-Entry
14: Through
15: Exposure
16: Outward
17: The Circle
18: The Bridge
19: Thousands of Kalief Browders
20: Fences and Billboards
21: Unfinished Products
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Authors
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART I
BROOKLYN, USA
We teach what we know, but we reproduce what we are.
—John C. Maxwell
1
Front-Row Seat
September 2000
As the aircraft descended, I pushed my ten-year-old face up against the tiny window, in thrall to the light: flickering orange, yellow, and red. A planetary system down there. Bright and beautiful jewels sprinkled in the dark sky, millions of candles stretching out past the horizon. It was such a stark contrast from where I’d come, a town called Bon-Repos in La Plaine, Haiti, where most of the population lives in darkness.
As kids, our world was small. We didn’t even know about other places. Being dirt poor, we had to create fun and distraction out of what was lying around—mostly discarded wood and metal. We’d make our own toys, stacking rubber tires, aluminum, wood, and a milk can to make cars. We’d make our own kites using loose plastic and string. We’d put blades at the ends of the kites to cut the other kids’ kite wires so they couldn’t fly anymore. That’s how you’d win.
When the wheels touched down and we felt that thump and then the loud whirring, I exhaled. It was like I had been holding my breath for ten years and the relief made me light-headed. We had made it—no more hunger, no more beatings, no more of the uncertainty that had become a fact of my life. Landing on a tarmac at LaGuardia Airport made me feel free. America, New York City, was where dreams were made and I would make mine here. I’d heard that from everyone, so it must be true.
A friend of my grandfather picked us up at the airport in his black Lincoln Town Car and we packed tight in the leather seats and carpeted floor. I piled with my siblings in the back and watched the flashing reds and blues streak across the windshield, mesmerized by the speed and electricity of the highway, the buildings stretching up into the darkness, the skyline in the distance as large as any mountain. We crossed a bridge that stretched for what felt like miles and I thought we were going over the ocean.
My mother wasn’t with us—and she hadn’t been for a long time. Soon after my younger brother Roothchild was born, my father beat her pretty badly. He was in a rage, suspecting her of being with another man, even though he had lots of his own women on the side. While my mother was lying on the floor, he picked up a piece of metal and held it over her like he was going to hit her. Luckily he hesitated long enough for his friend Kesner to hear the commotion and run into the house; he grabbed my father’s arm and wrested the metal from his hand. My mother told me later she was afraid he was going to kill her.
A few days later, she woke early, packed what she could, and left for provinces in the rural north. She had family with some means up there in a town called Lascahobas—her dad was mayor and chief judge—and she started up again. Over the years, she’d send things back to us: a bag of rice, maybe some beans, a gift or two. Occasionally we’d go up and visit though she often sent me back to my father for causing too much trouble. When my siblings and I finally got visas to come to America, we sent word to her and she came down to say good-bye to all of us.
I was too overwhelmed to think of her, though, as we pulled off the highway and plunged down into local streets, slower and packed with parked cars in every conceivable spot. We pulled up to a traffic light, dangling red in the quiet.
“Why we stopping?” I asked in Creole, looking around. “No one’s coming.”
The driver, a slim older gentleman with gray hair, looked back and smiled at me. “Well, it’s the law,” he said. His voice was calm, matter-of-fact.
I was not sure what that meant.
“I have to pay money if they catch me,” he explained, eyes latched on me in his rearview. “It’s like a hundred dollars.”
“Oh,” I said, turning around to look through the rear windshield. “But how would they know?”
“They’re always watching, Jim,” he said, eyes ahead. “Even if you can’t see them.” I understood who they were, but I couldn’t figure out where they were hiding.
I turned and pressed my forehead against the window, which was cool and wet. On the glass I blew my breath and streaked out a circle in the fog, a head with eyes and a smiling mouth. Then I wrote my name: “JIM.”
Even off the highway there was still so much light. Bright whites under awnings and in the windows, yellows and reds coming off the street. It would take weeks for me to adjust to the unnatural nighttime light, fluorescent and buzzing and constant.
“What’s this?” I said, jumping forward again. “Where are we now?”
“Home,” my grandfather said.
“Here?” I didn’t hide my disappointment. I’d imagined it would look like the street in Home Alone, which I had watched obsessively on a staticky videotape in Haiti, dreaming of the big house, the nice neighborhood, the Christmas season. It all spelled America.
“Almost,” he said.
“What’s it called?”
“Crown Heights,” he said.
Older kids, electric with energy and confidence, ran the sidewalks. They were pushing one another and laughing, blasting music and yelling at people passing by. They sat on the hoods of parked cars, thick brown cigarettes dangling from their lips engulfing them in smoke. Under the streetlights I spotted dark hoodie sweatshirts and Timberland boots, red do-rags, pristine NBA caps, and fitted skullies, clothes I’d only seen before when my cousin Rodlin had visited us from the States.
The car came to a stop and we poured out onto Crown Street. I eyed a perimeter of jagged fencing above a large stone wall, block and bright graffiti blanketing every inch—names and signs I couldn’t decipher. I spotted my grandma coming outside, tall and healthy, big for a woman. My father, who’d moved up here the year before, followed behind her. Teenagers and older guys were everywhere: on the corner, in front of the park, outside the building, sitting on the stoop. Just about everyone threw us a look as we passed; some stared us down—earrings reflecting and gold teeth sparking. A few yelled things I didn’t understand. I couldn’t tell if they were welcoming us, making jokes at our expense, or just greeting my grandmother, whom they all seemed to know.
One kid sitting on the stoop, hair braided tight against his head, said hello to my grandmother in Creole. This was Serge—Jigga—who would become one of my best frie
nds. Sitting next to him was a kid named Kino. Short and fiery, he grilled us pretty hard. I tried not to break eye contact with him. Though I was a “just come” in America, I knew fear was a universal language and instinctively understood that I couldn’t break first. He spit out a laugh and looked away.
My eyes widened as I looked up at the mass of faded red brick, almost half a block wide. It was bigger than any building I’d ever seen and I thought my grandparents owned the whole thing. Bright red metal bars zigzagged from the top and made their way down across the windows. Single trees popped up like soldiers on square dirt patches. It was jarring because I couldn’t shake the image of the kid’s block from Home Alone. I had expected grass and trees, a white wood fence, hello-neighbor types watering their lawns, garbage pails stacked at the ends of long black driveways.
As we entered the building the thick smell of marijuana wafted toward us. A group of teenagers were in the lobby puffing and rolling dice. I slowed down to get a closer look at the game. Five guys were circled up and bent down, some on their knees, spread around dirty green cash on the floor. Dice skittered across the linoleum, yells ricocheted off the cinder block. My grandma yanked my arm. “An nale,” she whispered. “Let’s go.”
“Just ignore them, Jim,” she said as we passed. That first interaction—me straining to look, Grandma protesting—was a preview of things to come.
My father smacked me lightly on the back of the head.
“Look at you here five minutes and already looking for trouble,” he said, half-joking. My brothers laughed. “Sou moun,” my dad said. Always in someone else’s business. The rest of my family seemed fearful, but I was curious. Something was going on there and I wanted in.
My father’s sister Michelle, who had lived with us in Haiti and helped us out a great deal, also moved into that apartment with her two children a year earlier. Aunt Michelle’s son Wikley met us in the lobby and grabbed some of our bags. They had been here for two years already; he’d gone through puberty since I last saw him so he looked filled out and seemed to move different, more New York. Light-skinned with permed coolie hair, Wikley no longer looked like he belonged in the family. He swaggered like he thought he was a stud as he led us into the elevator. The ride was jittery, and the elevator smelled like stale urine, but I thought it was cool: this small metal box that took us to our floor at the push of a button. It was the most American thing I’d seen.
We walked off the elevator into the dim lights of the hallway. I ran my finger along the thick cinder blocks, faded white with carved symbols, gang signs I didn’t yet recognize. We entered through the door of my grandmother’s apartment: a narrow hall leading out into a cramped space. My family was about to increase the population of that apartment exponentially and the moment we walked in, it felt like it.
There were unpainted wood doors off a tight hallway and the thick smell of artificial Haitian cuisine: canned meat and garlic powder. Grandma was preparing a dinner for our arrival but I went straight for the kitchen; I’d been dreaming about the clean white light of that refrigerator. The reality was a smack in the face. It was near empty: an opened bag of hot dogs, a giant bottle of dark soda, and some wrapped meat up in the freezer. I snatched one of the hot dogs and devoured it cold.
An hour later an older gentleman with a mustache came out of a door off the kitchen. Wilfred was one of the renters who lived in my grandmother’s place and stayed in that side room with his wife. He opened the fridge and started ranting that someone ate one of his hot dogs, how hard he worked to be able to buy food. Every eye automatically lit toward me; they knew I was the only one bold and careless enough to touch things without asking, within minutes of entering my new home.
At the time, the master bedroom housed another two renters, who had their own bathroom. My sister, Geraldine, would sleep in my grandmother’s bedroom off the kitchen. The other large room was split into two by a giant curtain. My aunt; her boyfriend; and Wikley’s little sister, Jenny, slept in a bed there on one side. The other half had a bunk bed for Wikley, with my dad on the bottom bunk. My brothers Colin and Roothchild and I would share space with some comforters on the floor, lined up like mummies.
The life my grandparents had in Haiti in the 1970s was almost middle-class. But, like most immigrants, when they migrated to America it was downgraded. The apartment was rugged, old paint peeling off thin walls, holed-out furniture ratty from use. When we opened the kitchen cabinets roaches would fall out with the dishes. At night when I flicked the lights on in the kitchen, I’d hear chhhh, chhhh, chhhh as they scattered under the oven. I’d have to chase them around with a slipper on my hand. Sometimes we’d have to take a metal dustpan to the rats, turtle-size things with spiky hair and dead eyes.
I was grateful to have a home, but over time, I resented my grandmother’s apartment. It was a stinging reminder of the gap between what I thought America was and the reality I had stepped into. Our ceiling was always leaking, and water would seep into the kitchen, the bathrooms, sometimes the bedrooms. The problems piled up and took months to fix, if ever. The doorbell never worked and that filthy elevator was a death trap. It would get stuck every other week, forcing someone to call the fire department to get them out. People would get jumped in there too. One time I got in the elevator and a guy waiting there put a .45 Glock to my forehead and took the little bit of money I had. After that, I started to take the stairs.
Still, we were used to worse. In Haiti, during the rainy season, flooding is the norm. And not water-filling-a-basement-type flood. It is like a Katrina every year. Houses, animals, whole families are swept away. What was a national tragedy in the United States is just a season of the year there.
Our house there was a small rickety nothing, scrap aluminum roof over wooden beams, two overcrowded and dusty rooms with no plumbing and sporadic electricity. We had a narrow bed made for one person, which we stretched to the limit. I’d pile on there with Colin and Roothchild, or Geraldine, or sleep alone with just a sheet on the dirt floor. It was so dry and dusty we’d pour water on it to keep it moist. As I got older I would sleep out when I could, on other people’s beds and floors, sometimes in abandoned cars, sometimes just outside.
But there is another smaller Haiti along the coastline with exquisite beaches and expensive resorts, where elite Haitians and rich foreigners don’t even have to know what’s going on in the rest of the country. I didn’t even know about this Haiti until I was six and went to a resort in Wahoo Bay with my uncle Reynold’s family, who were visiting from America. The resort itself was immaculate, not a spot of anything anywhere. Even the garbage cans and ashtrays were clean. Sky blue and yellow pastel hotels, private beach bungalows, waiters carrying colored cocktails by an enormous pool, waterfalls cascading around bright wooden bars. And underneath the push-up umbrellas, shading themselves from the sun, white tourists. White tourists were everywhere. Of course, I felt like the tourist, there in my own country. It seemed everything rich and powerful was associated with white skin.
Now, I quickly learned there were two Americas too. And in New York they’re side by side, virtually on top of each other. I could see both out of my grandmother’s second-story window: Nostrand Avenue cut right through my neighborhood, a clear dividing line. On one side were gangs, poverty, violence, crowded apartments, drugs, broken families, and incarcerated fathers. But on the other side—approximately fifty feet away—lived Brooklyn’s middle class, the Hasidic Jews. They owned brownstones or had nice little lawns; their children went to private schools, had tutors, and lived in a stable environment. I had come to the land of opportunity and bam, I had a front-row seat to the America that wasn’t mine.
My exposure to white people had been so limited that the sight of Orthodox Jews was a shock. When I first heard that Jews owned all of the buildings in Crown Heights I asked, “What the hell is a Jew?” I’d soon meet a kid in school whose father was a black Orthodox Jew, which blew my mind. Around the neighborhood I’d see the Orthodox traveling a
round in thick groups in their wide-brim black hats, curly sideburns, and long beards. They wore thick black wool suits throughout the year, insulated from the weather and everything else. They lived in their own world within our world.
In the months after we arrived, my grandmother ferried me around to doctors for blood work and health checkups and to government offices: social security, identification, forms and more forms. All the loops immigrants go through. The way they welcome the huddled masses in the modern age. The language barrier was thick, the processes were repetitive, and my grandmother was in uncharted territory. My grandfather traveled back and forth to Haiti a lot and just wasn’t around enough to be in charge. It was half the year before I could even start school, putting me even further behind than I already was.
Even so, our lives in New York were an improvement. In Haiti, we’d almost always wake up in the morning without food. Late spring and summer is mango season and they just about grow everywhere, full green-and-orange bunches. During those months I could climb those big blooming trees or throw rocks to knock them down—often getting chased by whoever owned that tree. The rest of the time I’d forage around and look for things to eat. Forage describes animal behavior, I know, but that’s what I did. I’d go around the neighborhood and scout things out, searching for anything on the ground or in the ravines that I could wipe off and eat. I’d hang out in different homes to see who would have something to give me. Or I’d figure out a way to hustle myself a meal. Once I took the food from a voodoo ceremony, the gift to the spirits, which was just not done. Another time I passed a chicken as it was laying eggs—I scooped up the eggs in my shirt and ran, boiling them over a fire in the dirt. Somebody must’ve told my father because he whipped me with a belt when I got home.
I quickly fell in love with the urban landscape of New York: Stepping over the underground trains rumbling up through the vents, dodging the cars like an athlete, making sense of the tangled colored lines on the subway map. On a typical block in Brooklyn, there’s an entire economy: restaurants, barbers and beauty salons, Laundromats and grocery stores, check cashing next to the liquor stores, electronics alongside two-for-one suits. Chinese restaurants, fried chicken establishments, and a few Caribbean takeout spots. The corner store would make any sandwich you wanted behind a wall of chips and candy, things I’d only seen smuggled in diaspora suitcases. And I caught a glimpse at the hidden illegal world unfolding in the backs of stores owned by Arabs and Hispanics.
A Stone of Hope Page 1