Breeze and his crew started traveling hundreds of miles out to a town in Pennsylvania, the same town that a rival clique a few blocks up was also hustling. Sunny was a tall and dark-skinned dude from Union Street who’d known Breeze most of his life. Sunny had braided hair, which he kept under a do-rag with a backward fitted cap. He had this stiff walk where his upper body would be a beat behind his lower body, and a “buck fifty,” a scar from his ear to his jaw. Breeze and Sunny got into a fight out in Pennsylvania, and Breeze broke Sunny’s jaw. With no hesitation Sunny shot and killed him.
When I got the news, I couldn’t process it. How can a man murder someone he knew as a child? How black is the heart that can fill his body with bullet holes? It ate my insides. No matter what I’d seen in my life, I couldn’t shake Breeze’s murder. I obsessed about it, and the what-ifs kept snowballing: What if I hadn’t gotten close with Breeze? What if I never introduced him to some of my friends? Why was I so lucky to get sentenced when I did? To the place that I did? How come he didn’t get the same opportunity?
What made it worse was that Breeze was not a typical street kid at all. He had a certain innocence, a reserved kid who wouldn’t even look people in the eyes. Just like Jigga’s, Breeze’s murder struck me on two fronts: One was my closeness to him, our relationship. The other was his closeness to me: my life and his had been running the same path and my life would’ve played out the same way. His death was a peek into the alternate future. It haunted me.
“Do you think about hurting yourself? Do you have suicidal ideation?” I was sitting in front of a psychiatrist in Brooklyn Heights, his glasses barely hanging on to his nose and a checklist on his lap.
“What do you mean?”
At the residence the night before I had been throwing pictures and kicking the walls, screaming and crying and not letting anyone near me. Damon couldn’t calm me down, and when Iza put her arms around me I pushed her away, which alarmed her. When I started talking about how I didn’t want to live anymore, they had no choice but to take me to see a psychiatrist. By law they were required to do so: I was still state property.
“Do you think about killing yourself?” he asked me in a stuffy room with framed diplomas on the wall. “Do you plan how you would do it, if you did it?”
“No. Never.”
He seemed suspicious, like I was hiding something. Like he was used to people hiding things from him. I was there, after all, against my own free will. “Well, why do you think the Canadas brought you here?”
Recognizing the severity of the situation, I tried to speak honestly. “Maybe cause I ask ‘Why me’ a lot,” I told him. “I probably said something like ‘Why am I living if this is what life is like for me? If this is it I don’t want to live anymore.’ Something like that.”
“Hmm . . . okay,” he said, finishing up writing. Then he looked up. “Do you feel that way now?”
I shrugged like I wasn’t sure. Intellectually, I didn’t believe that. But emotionally it was stone solid true.
“Do you want to tell me why that is?” he asked.
“To be honest? Not really.” I didn’t have the energy to explain something that seemed so obvious. Any day I might get the call that my father was dead, and I panicked every time the phone rang. Friends of mine were dying, my family didn’t want to see me, my only conscious memories were of poverty and hopelessness, and here I was trapped in a system that most kids never recovered from. How was I supposed to react?
My father spent a month in the hospital and then got released to a local clinic. He had ups and downs but somehow slowly recovered. When he was eventually released back to my sister’s home, new problems arose because he needed dialysis five times a week and couldn’t work. But at least he was alive. And being alive was enough.
Iza’s compassion and support carried me through the darkness of that storm. She also taught me something valuable: to use my pain and anger as motivation. Iza enabled me to view myself, and my future, in a positive light. My very first exposure to college—even to the word “college”—was through her.
“What are you always doing schoolwork for?” I asked her once. She was sitting on a stool reading from a textbook and taking notes. Damon was preparing dinner with some of the other residents.
“Well, I’m in college,” she said. “You know I’m in college. I have homework every night.”
“Yeah I know. I know.” I hesitated. “But what’s college?”
Damon looked up from the stove. “You never heard of college?” he asked. Iza flashed him a look.
Even if I had heard the word—and it wasn’t tossed around on my street—I’d never made sense of it. “Maybe. I’m not sure.”
Five-year-olds in Park Slope already knew about college, its significance, that their life’s trajectory would pass through there. For them, it was the standard, and the expectations were clear. Here I was, sixteen years old, hearing about it for the first time. The world is only as small or as big as the things we are introduced to.
I began to get curious about the homework Iza was doing alongside us in the house. “I’m writing a paper,” she’d say, or “I’m studying for an exam.” Damon would explain things too, tell me about classes he took or books he read. Sometimes Iza had to watch a documentary for school.
“You get to watch movies?” I said, dumbfounded.
“Sometimes,” she said, smiling.
“Can I watch with you?”
“Of course. But you have to talk to me about it afterward. Help me answer my homework questions.”
The dots started to connect for me. My father, if he were to survive, would not be able to take care of the family. There was a huge void there and I needed to step into it.
What really got me excited was Iza telling me that in college you pick your own schedule, go to school when you want, and pick what subjects to study. Freedom. I incessantly peppered her with more questions.
“How do I get there?” I asked her. “What do I have to do?”
“Well, first you have to graduate high school,” she said. “Get a diploma.”
“Okay. So college is just like school.”
“Yes, but it’s a school where you can obtain a degree in a specialized field like social work, business, medicine, politics. Your major.”
“What’s a major?” I was relentless.
“Like your focus of study. I’m studying human services.”
“What’s that?”
“Similar to the work I do here with you guys. Like a social worker that helps people.”
Out of habit, I tried to find the trap in all this. “Costs money, though, right?”
“Yes, but if you maintain decent grades the government will help with tuition and expenses. You just have to fill out a bunch of forms.”
Then she came with the icing on the cake: college was filled with women. “You’re going to be outnumbered by the girls,” she said. “Like three to one.”
I badgered and begged Iza to take me on a visit to her school, the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC). If I had my privs, she eventually agreed, I could accompany her to class.
The next week, I was sitting in the living room area counting up my points when she yelled up from the basement.
“Jim, I’m leaving for class in five minutes if you want to come!”
I rushed up the stairs, threw on my outfit from Charles: clean T-shirt, blue jeans, and Reeboks. We drove over the bridge into Manhattan, to the upscale streets of Tribeca on the west side of downtown. It was the New York that I had no part of, that I felt wasn’t designed for someone like me, that I assumed wanted nothing to do with me. That day I saw it through brand-new eyes. Because of Iza, it was almost like I belonged. Or that I could belong.
After parking we walked up a small hill past an elaborate playground: clean rubber padding and attentive parents. As we entered the main floor of the school building I spotted a large cafeteria, rows of computers, offices, and a huge glass window overlooking traffic
zooming up the West Side Highway and a majestic stretch of the Hudson River.
“Don’t wander too far. Stay around here,” Iza said as she got on the escalator. “I’ll be back in an hour.”
I barely heard her; I was entranced. Students dapped each other on the run, bulleting to class. Others sat in the computer lab typing, listening to music on headphones. A pack of them had folding tables set up to recruit for their clubs. Eager dudes were all bottled up in one area scamming on girls, showing off their new Jordans and flirting like high-school kids. The student body was all shades and origins, a melting pot that intrigued my virgin eyes. I absorbed as much of the scene as possible, trying to hold it tight inside of me so I could access it later.
I likely looked deranged, wide-eyed and staring at everyone and everything. The freedom and independence was a palpable thing on the campus. On the footbridge that connected the wings of the building I froze in a haze, absorbing the view of the Hudson. There were boats, high-rises towering over the water, golf driving ranges, and a basketball court so clean that its black looked like rubber. People were jogging, playing pick-up games, walking their dogs, or relaxing with books or headphones. This was it. This place. I wanted to be here.
In what felt like a blink Iza was back.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“I never seen you smile like that,” she said. “Ever. You got like a clown face on.”
She playfully shoved me and said, “Let’s go.”
On the ride home I assaulted her with more questions, making sure it was possible for me to actually go to college. She reassured me that it was in my hands, if I took a different approach to life and learning. “That could be you,” she said. “I’ll help you, you know. But I can’t drag you there. You gotta meet me halfway.”
Damon used to say something similar, how you could lead a horse to water but you couldn’t make it drink. After that trip, I realized how thirsty I’d been. How ready I was to drink.
Not long after, I was sitting with Damon and Yi in the rec room watching the six o’clock news. I was daydreaming a bit when I caught an image on the screen: faces from the old block. They were handcuffed, and being perp-walked in front of cameras. The NYPD gang squad had rounded up a bunch of dealers and boosters I knew well from my neighborhood. I could’ve—or would’ve—been with them, facing football numbers, my future walled off in an instant.
Breeze’s murder had been something of an epiphany, a wake-up call. My still-developing maturity compelled me to process it more profoundly: the scarcity of opportunity that led people to the drug game, the tornado of violent culture that swept in and took everything out. I saw his death through a wider lens, one that clarified details and gave context, like a picture coming into clear focus.
Boys Town became what I needed it to be because I let it. Like the planets aligning, enough things shifted into place at the same time that I got the necessary momentum going. I quit smoking weed, exercised more, paid attention in class, and made an effort to be agreeable in the house. I was still at the age where my brain was a clay that could be molded new.
One of my rituals at dinner was removing the black olives from my salad and tossing them in the garbage. “You been throwing those out for years,” Iza said to me once. “You ever try one?”
“Nope. Don’t need to. They’re nasty.”
“C’mon. What’s gonna happen? Just try it.”
Iza hadn’t steered me wrong yet so I popped one in my mouth.
After that they had to hide the olives from me. I’d eat them straight out of the metal can for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
A few weeks after my visit to BMCC, I was rumbling around in the kitchen, opening drawers, looking for a pen for one of Iza’s assignments. Inside a drawer I found a beat-up paperback titled The Pact, with three young black professionals on the cover. I took it up to my bedroom and started reading—the first time in my life I’d ever done that on my own initiative.
The Pact was the true story of three friends from a poor section of Newark who grew up in troubled homes without fathers. As juveniles they each had run-ins with the law, and one of them came close to doing serious time. As teenagers, realizing where their lives were headed, they made a promise to one another: they would all go to college and become doctors.
In alternating chapters, each talked about the “positive peer pressure” he gave to the others, how it motivated them and forced them to keep up. One of them wrote about a formative experience when he was young. During a dentist appointment he started asking questions about the tools and teeth, and the dentist took the time to teach him the names of things, how the tools worked, even making a game out of it during his appointments. That simple interaction lit a flame inside of him that turned into a fire.
Their story was inspiring. It had an impact because these men were just like me. And they had risen out of the rubble to all become doctors, the most prestigious profession there is. Like the hip-hop lyrics I once absorbed, here again was my story reflected back to me, only this time with hope at its center. So many passages stuck out to me, including this:
Among boys, particularly, there seems to be some macho code that says to gain respect, you have to prove that you’re bad. . . . The wrong friends can lead you to trouble. But even more, they can tear down hopes, dreams, and possibilities. We know, too, that the right friends inspire you, pull you through, rise with you.6
I had never encountered myself on the page like that. Some of it was timing; Ms. Oglio had actually given me the book a while back but I wasn’t ready for it and left it lying around the house. Or perhaps it was divine grace that had it find me when I was ready to open it. I knew I didn’t have other kids to build this pact with, so I decided to make one with myself.
It began with me not wanting to disappoint those who invested in me: Christine and Marty, then the Canadas. Eventually, it turned into me not wanting to disappoint myself. Damon and Iza modeled the type of adult I was interested in being. I was almost seventeen years old and finally open to the idea of becoming one.
12
Astonishing
They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.
—MEXICAN PROVERB7
The will to change doesn’t magically wipe the slate clean. I’d been spending nearly half my day in school, and more in tutoring sessions at home, but what actually seeped through was still a slow drip. One morning, Paula, the program director, was observing class through the glass window. She noticed how inattentive I was. “It’s like your body is there but your mind isn’t,” she told me in a meeting afterward. “I could see it in your eyes.”
After less than five minutes of watching me she detected a chasm: the gap between what I needed and what I was getting. Besides language barriers and minimal schooling, I was a slow learner and easily distracted. But she didn’t get on me about it. Most teachers and administrators placed the burden of pulling myself up solely onto me. Like it was a question of will. Paula had vision: she looked outward and saw an opportunity.
She proposed something unprecedented for Boys Town: the chance to attend a GED program, on my own, outside the school. It would be a smaller classroom, individualized attention, a setting that would give me the opportunity to succeed. “It won’t be easy. But it gives you a fighting chance,” Paula said. “How does that sound?”
It was another Hobson’s choice; it’s not like I had other options. I literally had nothing to lose.
In order to be accepted in the GED program, I had to go through a battery of evaluations. They discovered I had significant learning disabilities, including ADHD, that made it hard for me to concentrate on work and to focus in class. My body could not stay still for tests and my attention was all over the place.
Teachers had always attributed my failing in schools to lack of motivation, and I have to admit that was part of it. Still, there was a physiological explanation for my academic troubles, one that went beyond my external
conditions. Looking back, I can’t help but notice the irony: recognizing and naming my deficiencies were precisely what gave me strength. Nowadays I don’t put too much stock in such diagnoses, but back then I was in no position to reject the accommodations that came with it.
On school mornings, when everyone walked down to Willoughby Street, I’d take the subway alone out to Kings County Hospital, where there was a wing that housed the GED program. That subway stop also happened to be walking distance to Crown Street. At first I exploited the freedom, stopping by to see my homeboys, catching up on hood politics, sometimes falling back into smoking weed. I soon realized that this was basically spitting in Paula and the Canadas’ faces, and I wised up. So each morning after that I made the decision to turn left toward the GED school instead of right toward Crown.
Right next door to the hospital was Wingate High School, and an ambulance station, and across the street was the office of the chief medical examiner of New York City. Those buildings told a story that you could follow with your eyes, one that I’d heard too many times. That one-block radius contained the institutions that shadowed just about everyone I knew. The GED program there was like a final exit, our last chance before society threw up its hands and left us to the elements.
A counselor in the GED program contacted the Brooklyn Learning Center and convinced them to see me for free. On my first day there after school, I met my tutor, Joanna, a beautiful young white woman with long brown hair and a blinding smile. Her cheeks would rise and her front teeth would take up half her face. There was something innocent about her appearance, but when she spoke I was disabused of that assumption. She got angry about the right things: injustice, bias, inequality, exploitation.
A Stone of Hope Page 16