A Stone of Hope

by Jim St. Germain

  I met with Iza and Damon and then spoke to Marty and Christine. I talked to Joanna. Everyone agreed that the best thing to do was leave Boys Town at the end of my first college semester. No one wanted me to lose ground: we’d all done too much work to get me where I was.

  Though I avoided it by delaying my release, the monster was still facing me. I had to leave the place that allowed me to be a kid, a place that let me be a wrecking ball without having to pay enormously for it. That level of forgiveness wouldn’t exist past the front door on Sixth Avenue. The real world didn’t care where I’d been, what I’d been through. There would be no safety net to catch me as I dropped through the air.

  “What are you afraid of?” Joanna asked me.

  “I don’t know. Like what if nothing has changed,” I said. “I know things haven’t changed back there.”

  “Well, you can’t worry about that, Jim,” she said. “You can only worry about what you can control. You’ve changed just in the short time I’ve known you. I can’t imagine how far you’ve come from the day of your arrest. It can’t even be measured in time.”

  Joanna tried, but she didn’t really know the world I grew up in. The orbit of poverty, the one I’d be returning to, isn’t just one thing. It’s an infection that seeps into every area of your life: shelter, clothes, meals, health, family dynamics, fear, crime, and constant violence. And the exhaustion and distress of every day being a constant fight.

  I knew my grandma’s apartment hadn’t changed. Nor had my block. Nor had just about everyone I knew. Those three years were like decades to me, but to everyone else, it was just three years. Some of them were doing exactly the same things in the exact same spots. People I knew might be a bit taller, have a little bit more money or a new hairstyle, but they were all essentially the same.

  Two days before my release I was in the car with Iza coming back from the bank. I had accumulated $987 in allowance through the years and Iza helped me set up my first account. That plastic card was power to me, an intoxicating thing that represented privilege. I kept pulling it out during the ride and pretending like I had real money on it. Iza and I were joking how no one needed to know.

  She parked the car in front of the residence. As I undid my seat belt and was about to open the door, my muscles braced. Then a flood washed over me. I started crying and crying, had never cried like that before, especially in front of another person. Iza was the only mother figure that I ever had. And now I was losing her. The safety she embodied would vanish. As would my home, my family, my support network.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “You will always be part of our family. Of our life.”

  I didn’t see how that was true. And I couldn’t stop crying.

  “You’re welcome to come back to the house whenever you want. We’ll be here.” Then her voice caught and she started crying too. It was strange: Iza was always nurturing, but rarely so emotional. Working with all of us had given her a tough exterior that she kept wrapped tight. It was painful for us both to let go like that, but it was cleansing. We needed to do it.

  The unknown was terrifying. The Jim I had become had never been out in the world. I went straight to my room and lay on top of my clothes, my eyes focused on the bare ceiling. I had no idea what life after Boys Town would be like. Would it look like this? Like my childhood? Something I couldn’t even conceive of?

  A real fear was coursing through my mind and body. I had no frame of reference to know if I’d actually changed. Was it this place or was it me? What if I didn’t like the answer?

  PART III

  OUT

  13

  Re-Entry

  February 2007

  All the truly living, at least once, are born again.

  —TA-NEHISI COATES, THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE

  When a young person is dropped back into the world where he first learned how to behave and assert himself, he can’t just shut it all off or out. It’s embedded in his responses, and in his identity. It’s connected to his very being. It’s not just that he was in the streets; the streets are in him.

  When I walked out of Boys Town at eighteen years old with a semester of college under my belt, I returned to the push and pulls of the old neighborhood. Part of me looked forward to heading back there, to the place that taught me about resilience and community, to the streets that formed so much of my identity and sense of self. I had a complicated relationship with my home and my family—but despite that, they still made me who I was.

  But the shift was more difficult than I had imagined it would be. I was back in my grandmother’s cramped apartment on Crown Street where everyone struggled for their own bit of space. Sleeping in the same room with my father and my younger brother, Roothchild, felt like a giant step backward. My foldout bed was out in the middle of the living room, and everyone had to walk past it all hours of the day. I didn’t have a closet or any space for my clothes and few possessions. I had this twisted feeling that my freedom was back in the system, that I had given things up by being released.

  Although back there I had been state property and constrained by the rules, I come from an impoverished community. I was home and I was free, but I was just back in the hood with nothing. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and forget what year it was, what I was doing. Then I realized I was back. All those years had passed and I hadn’t moved an inch. I hated it in my bones.

  My father had been in and out of the hospital for years. By the time I was back home he was living with my grandmother again, having lost both of his kidneys. He’d hole up in a chair next to his bed watching basketball or Catholic services on TV, shut off from the world. He’d rarely leave except to go to church on Sunday or to get dialysis. With no education and no English he was only qualified to be on his feet in an assembly line for eight dollars an hour, and even that he couldn’t do. My dad has always been strangely militant with me while playing fast and loose with himself, his prospects, and his health. I suspect he was hard on me when I was growing up so that I didn’t turn into him.

  Even though he couldn’t work he was not eligible for government benefits or social security because he didn’t speak enough English to pass the citizen test. Dad never embraced America the way I did—or the way his own father did. My father was a grown man when we arrived, set in his ways. A big part of finding your place in a new land is being able to speak and understand the language. So my dad was here but not here. He was like a ghost, his existence not even recognized by his own country.

  The walls had closed in even tighter over those three years. There were eleven of us total: My aunt and her boyfriend lived in a bedroom on the other side of the apartment with their own bathroom. The rest of us shared a tiny one off the entryway. My younger cousins were in a smaller bedroom, as was my aging grandmother and my sister Geraldine, who had been looking after my father. Wilfred and his wife still rented the narrow room by the kitchen.

  My older brother, Colin, would sometimes drop in under the influence and stay in different rooms; other times he’d be off finding trouble, crashing wherever, dealing with the demons a hard life brings. There was always tension in that house—the kind that comes from not knowing people at all and the kind that comes from knowing people way too long.

  My mind-set was so different than before. My focus now was on my education, working, exercising—smoothing out all those rough edges. But things escalated quickly between Colin and me. It was peaceful when we weren’t there, so a common solution was to lock people out, especially late at night.

  Colin was taller than me but skinny and wiry, with a squeaky voice and thicker accent. He actually did go back to Haiti that time my father tried to send us and I hid out to avoid getting on the plane. Sometimes I’d look at Colin and see the version of me I never wanted to be. He wasn’t street smart, just a loudmouth whom I always had to protect.

  We’d go at each other like monsters, like gladiators, the way only brothers can. Once I was in the house late at night
, doing push-ups during a break from studying. The house was asleep and Colin started to bang on the front door.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  I didn’t move.

  “Open this door! Fuck!” he said.

  I kept my eyes on the floor and held the tension in my muscles.

  Boom, boom, boom.

  This went on for over ten minutes. It reached the point that I knew if I let him in, things were going to fly. So I kept ignoring it, finished my reps, and broke the book back open. I thought maybe he’d give up and sleep it off somewhere else. But he kept knocking and ringing the bell. My dad and Roothchild woke up.

  “You gonna let him in?” Roothchild asked, groggy.

  “Nah,” I said. I kept my eyes on my reading, willing Colin to go away.

  Then he started to kick at the door—thwack, thwack. “I know you’re up, Jim! Let me in!”

  Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

  “Open this fucking door! Open the door, Jim!” Colin boomed in the hallway. “I’m gonna fuck you up!”

  Roothchild pounced up from the floor and opened the door. Like a windup toy, Colin turned the corner at the hallway and flew for me.

  I was bigger and stronger than him, sober and in shape. I picked up Colin’s whole body like a sack and slammed him onto the floor in the hallway. Then I pulled him down to where he couldn’t even get his arms up.

  “Get off me! Get off, yo!” Colin said.

  I put my mass on top of him, just to subdue him. The whites of his eyes were crackly and red.

  “Let me go, yo! Get off!” He made like he was going to spit at me. “Shit!”

  When I started to walk away, he sprung from the ground and came at me again. I turned quick and punched him in the jaw, knocking him back down.

  “Fuck!” Colin yelled. He sat on the ground for a few seconds. Then he gathered up again and darted to the kitchen. He grabbed a bread knife—a long one, sharp and serrated—and came back at me full speed.

  “Colin! Fuck, man!” Roothchild yelled.

  “Enough!” I heard my dad yell. He was up now, standing in the doorway.

  As I saw the knife coming at me I instinctively grabbed a hammer from the hall closet. He started to swing the knife sloppy, just hitting air. Then he charged at me. I took his momentum and carried him into the wall, his head and the hammer making holes in the plaster. The noise shook the whole floor and the knife dropped.

  My dad picked it up and then stood in between us, hands out on both our chests. He wasn’t big but when he wanted to be, my dad was a giant. He’d get that growl in his eyes that could shut anything down.

  “Both of you! Enough!” he yelled. “Out of your fucking minds.”

  The cops came knocking about ten minutes later. It was like a routine call for them; they had been coming semiregularly by that point. I knew how to speak to the police. Working and being in college gave me the upper hand once they arrived.

  The cops mostly focused on Colin. He was the problem: they could see it in his red-shot eyes, in his slurred curses and rah-rah nonsense. Colin never did himself any favors.

  “Fuck y’all!” he was screaming from a chair in the kitchen. My dad and one of the cops were standing over him. “You can’t fucking come in here trying to arrest me.” Colin was banging on the kitchen table on each word. “I. Don’t. Give. A. Fuck.” The table rattled under his slapped palm. “I don’t give a fuck. I’ll go to jail. You think I’m afraid of jail, I’m not afraid of jail. I’m not afraid of dying! I don’t give a fuck.”

  In the spaces between his rants, I stayed measured and calm. “Officer,” I said, maintaining eye contact, “my brother came in to the house drunk; he started screaming and waking everyone up. I—”

  “You can arrest me, I don’t give a fuck.” Colin was still raging. A scared kid hiding behind a giant mouth.

  “I have class in the morning,” I continued. “I’m a college student studying human services. He started to bang on the door. We got into a verbal altercation, which led to a physical altercation, then he came at me with a kitchen knife. I grabbed a hammer to protect myself.”

  “You know I’d fuck you up!” Colin was yelling. “You should arrest me! Better arrest me or I’m gonna fucking kill him!” Colin was asking for it that night. The cops ended up giving him a warning, but they made sure he left for the night. The hectic energy lingered in the apartment for a while until we all just went to bed.

  My grandmother was a strong, beautiful woman with fine gray hair and soft caramel skin. All over her face was written the beautiful struggle. She was quiet and respectful, a churchgoing woman of God. She brought us here and took us into her place, even though there wasn’t much room. Over the years, the toxic environment in that house caused her too much stress. My grandfather had died while I was in Boys Town, so by this point, she was also a widow.

  Eight months after I returned home she got ill, was hospitalized overnight, and died soon after. It was like a huge part of me was cut out, and I felt responsible. At her age she needed to relax and be taken care of. She didn’t need to live with all the adrenaline and noise of youth. She and my grandfather had been sending us whatever they could since we were babies, had brought us to America, had given me my life, and our presence made things that much harder for them. It was a huge sacrifice, more than I can ever fathom or repay.

  Damon and I had ended on bad terms, an accumulated heaviness that comes with that kind of tight experience. But as was his way, he set me up for success, arranging an interview with the Park Slope Key Food supermarket. The interview was succinct and straight to the point. The manager, Eddy, was a tall, heavyset, dark-skinned gentleman with a bald head.

  “Wassup baby, so you want this job or you want to waste my time?”

  “I need this job,” I said.

  He fired back. “Well, I got a business to run. If you’re here to play games I’ll fire your ass in a heartbeat.”

  “I don’t have much of an option. This isn’t about the six bucks an hour or whatever. It’s lifesaving. A real opportunity.”

  Eddy eyed me for a few seconds, wondering if I was for real. Then he tossed an apron at my feet, summoning me to work on the spot.

  Eddy was a refined and experienced chameleon, able to switch back and forth depending on his audience. No one was as eloquent when attending to a customer and no one was as blunt with the kids who staffed the back rooms. He was a grandiose dude, but I learned a lot from him. And during a vulnerable point in my life he stuck out his neck for me, even though he didn’t have to.

  So in between classes and studying I stocked shelves, unloaded trucks, cleaned floors, and helped customers. It was mindless work but structurally vital. Having my own money, having to be at work at certain hours, it all saved me from going down the wrong path. Damon knew all this, as did Eddy. Being unemployed is a slippery slope, leaving you one bad choice away from falling back into hustling. The job was like a levee, a type of protection against relapsing.

  That first year back home, I saw how relentlessly my past would chase me down. A few friends invited me to go with them to Wet Fete, an outdoor Caribbean party held once a year in Brooklyn. I went with Trini, a skinny dude with braids I worked with at Key Food; and Fernando, my friend from hustling days whose foot had been hit by Ky-Mani’s bullet ricocheting off the Jewish Steps. He had been in and out of trouble with the law while I was away, most of it gang-related.

  That afternoon Trini picked Fernando and me up in his Mitsubishi, which he had hooked up like the Batmobile. His car had one of those deafening mufflers like a jet engine buzzing you, the sound carrying for blocks. Trini thought he was some kind of street racer and drove like a maniac. I avoided getting in the car with him when I could. But he had the tickets to the party and had fronted the money, so we rode with him the fifteen minutes down Nostrand Avenue. I sat in the backseat all juiced up: I had been clean and straight since returning home. That afternoon was really my first break, my first chance to unload a bit like a normal
nineteen-year-old.

  Wet Fete was held in an outdoor yard between buildings in East Flatbush, one of the toughest parts of Brooklyn. Tables, booths, tents, and stages are set up in a fenced-in space. I was wearing shorts, a tank top, and the slip-on Crocs I had been rocking since Park Slope, gear that I didn’t mind being soaked in all day. We came through the gates and headed inside into the madness: Live artists performing reggae on stages, and DJs on platforms spinning soca music. Water hoses sprayed the crowd; shirtless guys, and women in barely hanging bikinis, all letting loose and dancing, their eyes turned back like they were under a trance. The strong scent of marijuana blanketed the air, blunts flowing freely. The sensory memory was fierce.

  “I can’t believe I never heard about this!” I yelled to Trini over the music. “Shit, I’m coming every year!”

  Trini gave a creeping smile. “That’s what I been telling you, man,” he said. Trini’s eyes were scanning the crowd of women lost in the rhythm.

  “Shit, I need a drink!” Fernando yelled out over the music.

  “Damn right,” Trini said.

  The three of us were weaving through the crowd when we bumped into a clique from the neighborhood. Among them was Dexter, a cold-looking dude I had had a scuffle with before I went away. While Fernando chatted with them, Dexter stared just past me, almost off my shoulder. He didn’t want to show fear but he didn’t want to meet my eyes either.

  It’s strange how you can be completely changed on the inside but the outside world has no idea. I gave Dexter a nod, just to let him know it was all good. He nodded back.

  Fernando, Trini, and I reached a tent to get a drink, vodkas on ice in big red plastic cups, then braided our way toward the center of the party to scout out the girls and dance. At Caribbean parties like this, the men bump and grind on the women and then the women return the favor. It’s called dubbing—as in you get a “dub” from a woman. The woman moves her backside on your privates and grinds on you to the music, and then you switch. I found a sexy dark-skinned girl in a pink bikini and we went at it.