Miseducated

by Brandon P. Fleming

  There were two conflicting versions of me. As a child visiting my paternal side of the family, I was one version—the one where I enunciated my vowels and said “Grandfather” and “Grandmother” with a hard er and was forced to dress like a Huxtable child. That little boy had died. The other me was born. The me who was full of mischief and rage after kicking and screaming and clawing at the dirt, begging my dad not to send me back into the hands of Lucas. The me who was brutally beaten for five years until the only father who intervened was not even my own. The me who wished that my father and his high-sadity family had a little bit of gangsta in them, so if they had the slightest sense that something was wrong, they would have gone to hell and back to fuck shit up until I was safe. The other me prevailed: the one who no longer felt like a misfit because I dressed, walked, and talked too hood. The one who finally had a place and a purpose and people who would have my back.

  Dad didn’t know what had heated and hammered me into a new form, only that I had changed. And he looked at me the way his father had probably looked at him when he blew off college and enlisted in the military, and again when he decided to be with my mother instead of the type of woman they imagined for him. He saw the opposite of what he had worked hard to build, the opposite of what he had planned, the opposite of what he had hoped I would become. Dad stopped calling me his beloved baby boy. Instead, he started calling me a thug and a hoodlum. There was no more singing as he drove me home. There were no more love seals drying on my face when he dropped me off.

  The life that I wanted and the life that Dad wanted for me were opposites. He wanted to show me a different life, a better life. One with stability and family gatherings with his wife and other children and a nice house and a fenced yard. But it wasn’t my style. It wasn’t my taste. Not for a real nigga. Stability felt parched and stuffy, like a G-rated movie, devoid of drama and explicit thrills. Strange, I know. But dysfunction was my normal. Delinquency, second to basketball, was my favorite sport, and I thrived on creating chaos. Orderly environments made me feel like the black sheep. I became the little devil my father wanted to fix. The heathen he wanted to convert. The rebel he hoped would conform. Eventually, my actions showed him that I was a reprobate beyond redemption.

  The home he shared with his wife and other children was like another planet to me. The hallways and living room walls were decorated with Bible quotes and Christian keepsakes. The backyard had a trampoline and the kids would invite friends to play and hold picnics in the grass. His two daughters talked properly, the way he and my grandparents forced me to talk when I was their age.

  He wished that I was more like his stepson, judging by the frequent comparisons. We were the same age but polar opposites. Kelton was smart, soft-spoken, and respectful. He made straight As in school and his record was blameless. I, on the other hand, spent more time in the principal’s office than in class.

  Kelton loved shit like Kidz Bop and boy bands and singing along to Dad’s gospel music. But I was inspired by gangsta rappers like Jadakiss, Sheek Louch, and Styles P. I walked around with my bandana on, repping my new set, aiming my index finger at imaginary people and pretending I was pulling a trigger while chanting explicit lyrics about shootin’ mothafuckas. I didn’t know how to adapt to my dad’s suburban life, so I proved myself to be a rebel.

  “You can’t be a thug and a son of mine,” he said as he snatched the bandana from my head. I hated being there. The comparisons drove me insane. The way he would extol my stepbrother’s accomplishments and scold me for not doing as well. The way he would honor his wife with words of affirmation and demean my mother as unfit. I came to see their whole whitewashed family as my adversaries. And I knew that by targeting his stepson, I could hurt them all.

  My father was big and strong, so there wasn’t much that I tried in his presence. But he eventually had to go to work. And during those eight hours of the day, I became a household terrorist. I destroyed Kelton’s bitch ass toys, punched him in his bitch ass face, spit in his bitch ass food, everything imaginable. And I dared his mom to do something, like, Touch me, and my big sister will whoop your ass. But when Dad returned home after my eight hours of tyranny expired, I paid the price in whoopings. But I was immune. He couldn’t hurt me. His blows were love taps compared to the vicious beatings I’d endured from the man he did not save me from. All of the adults in my life either wanted to expel me from school, cast me out of the family, or beat me.

  Then came a day when all seemed to be well. I hadn’t caused any trouble and I was playing nicely in the backyard, jumping on the trampoline with Kelton and two of his white friends from the neighborhood. It was the last day of my weekend visit with Dad before he took me back home, and I wanted to go out with a bang.

  I came up with the brilliant idea of breaking into homes in their subdivision. There was one home in particular that hadn’t had any cars in the driveway for the past several days. I figured the family was out of town or on vacation. To pull it off, I recruited Kelton and his friends as my accomplices, because they knew the neighborhood better than me. Kelton immediately said no. I called him a bitch nigga and then looked at his friends like I was Deebo and they were Smokey and Craig.

  The three of us set off on our mission. We had no camouflage, no tools, and we walked stealth-like down the middle of the street in broad daylight. When we arrived at the house, I gathered my gang and devised a plan. We identified four possible entry points: the garage, the front window, the side door, and the back window. I commanded the troops, “Y’all go that way, and I’ll go this way.”

  I sent them around the back, and I tackled the garage door, which I was able to pry open at the bottom. I called the others and we squeezed through into the darkened garage. Only one more door stood between us and the inside of the house. I tried to jimmy the lock with an ID card, but it didn’t work. The only option left was the drop-paneled ceiling. But there was no ladder.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” I said. “Lock your arms together and lift me up.”

  The plan worked. They bolstered me like a cheerleader as I struggled to gain balance. I reached up, pushed aside one of the panels, and was about to hoist myself through when there was terrifying pounding on the garage door and a voice bellowed, “Police! Open up!”

  I would have tried to improvise an escape, but one of my accomplices panicked and pressed the button to open the garage. There we stood, two white boys abetting a Black boy and cops ready to take us away. One of the cops was a Black man. Lucky for us, he threw us in the car and decided to return us to our respective homes. Nothing was damaged and nothing was stolen. Plus, the home we had broken into was vacant. Nobody even lived there.

  At that age, I was still learning how to be gangsta. I eventually stopped visiting my dad for holiday breaks, which suited us both. New York is where I wanted to be. I was eager to go back and show my cousins how much of a real nigga I had become. They seemed to be proud. But then I started getting ahead of myself. I was testing boundaries, leaving the safety of our street, going to the corner store alone. I even met an older girl one night while hanging out on the corner. She said there was fun happening at her house, so I followed. This was a dangerous indiscretion. On the next block, Barry and my cousin were once lured to a girl’s home. When they arrived, they were ambushed, beaten, and robbed by a gang of men.

  I did not have enough street knowledge to anticipate that something like that could happen. My twelve-year-old ego was inflated by the fact that I had a new crew and a few misdemeanors under my belt.

  The girl’s home, if it was really her home, looked like a trap house. The place was dark, the lights were dim, and the house was filled with smoke. We walked past a group of guys playing cards; they were smoking weed and drinking forties. On the table were other types of drugs that I had only seen in hood films. A few bodies were sprawled on the couch like they were lifeless. They gave me a wary, faraway look as if I were suspicious. The girl grabbed my hand and said, “Come on, this way”
as she led me toward the steps. The stairs creaked as we climbed them. I could hear indistinct moaning in the distance. There were three rooms upstairs and the doors were all open. When we walked past one room, I saw pornography on the television screen. We walked past another doorway and I was stunned. There were multiple men taking turns on one girl. “Come on,” my girl said as she nudged me to keep moving. I could not un-see it. I glanced back to confirm that what I saw was real. But by that time, we had made it to the third room. This one was ours.

  I was no longer a kid. Kids aren’t supposed to see what I saw. Kids aren’t supposed to do what I did. I was something else now. But I was not a man either. I only knew that I was born into circumstances that I did not choose. I conformed to the identities and lifestyles of people that were accessible to me. I needed their acceptance. I learned their values and mindsets and traumas. I became their likeness. This is how the cycle goes.

  Back home, I was almost thirteen and finally graduating from elementary school to join my big brother in junior high. Then Mom came home with news right before the school year began. She sat us down in the living room to make the announcement.

  “We have to start packing,” she said. “We’re moving to Washington, DC.”

  Mom was excited for the fresh start. She was done trying to find love. She was ready to be the mother that she wished she had always been. But I had gone rogue. And she had no idea that I was on the brink of becoming everything she wanted to save me from.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  DRUGS & HOOP DREAMS

  It sucked being the new kids in the DMV, a place we had never heard of until Mom moved us there. Washington, DC, lower Maryland, and Northern Virginia are lumped together for their shared culture and proximity. The area has its share of rough neighborhoods, and we lived near a few of them.

  When school started, Sierra was in eleventh grade, Barry was in eighth grade, and I was in seventh grade. On that first day, we hit cultural barriers that we didn’t expect. Kids took one look at us and knew we were New Yorkers, even if we had just relocated from Richmond. Being the new kids can be challenging: we wanted to make new friends, but we didn’t want to seem desperate. And we were contemptuous of the DMV lingo, culture, and style.

  Even our attempts to say hello were awkward. We opened New York style: “Yo, what’s good, son?” But their greeting was “What up, moe?”

  Moe? Barry and I looked at each other like, What the fuck is a moe? Granted, they could have also sneered at our use of the word son, which might sound demeaning to someone unfamiliar with the term.

  That wasn’t our only difference in dialect. When someone said or did something outlandish, we said, “Yo, you wylin’!” or “You buggin’!” But they said, “Young, you lunchin’!” Barry and I looked at each other like, What the fuck is lunchin’?

  We used the term mad for emphasis, as in This food is mad good; but they used jah-like, as in This food is jah-like good, moe. It was all confounding.

  And their fashion sense—it was seriously contorted. We wore long white tees and Timberland boots and durags. They wore skullcaps and Nike boots with rubber bands clinching the hem of their jeans above the shoe. But our odds did not end there.

  We even danced differently. Up north, we Diddy-bopped like Bad Boys and we could break out in a Harlem Shake battle at any given moment. But in the DMV, the hallway dance battles between classes involved a strange set of moves called Beat Ya Feet. Barry and I looked at each other like, Beat your what? and broke out in childish laughter.

  I was willing to adapt to get along. Barry, on the other hand, was not. He came across as standoffish and supercilious, which put us at odds with our new community from the start.

  One day during our first week in our new place, I was hitting it off with a girl who rode our bus. We were in the back row vibing. I leaned into every word she said and occasionally licked my lips like LL Cool J. Every time a speed bump or a pothole jolted us off the seat, I landed closer to her. I finally closed in enough to finagle my left arm around her shoulder and whispered in her ear all the real nigga shit I’d done back in New York and Richmond. “You lying,” she said. But in a soft, smooth voice I cooed, “Nah, girl. You can ask my brother.” Barry was sitting in front of us. I had reached first base, and I was aiming for an RBI when, suddenly, our romance was interrupted by a guy across the aisle.

  “That’s Dre’s girl,” he said. “You better watch it.”

  Before I could turn to address him, Barry rose from his seat and yelled, “Nigga, fuck Dre!”

  It seemed that the entire back of the bus fell silent. Everyone swiveled and looked at Barry as if he had just screamed the Lord’s name in vain during a revival. Dre was like the neighborhood Kimbo Slice. He was tall with big hands and knuckles that looked like boulders. There were tales about him beating up kids for looking at him the wrong way; when one kid had tried to escape, Dre had chased him into his home and thrashed him in front of his parents. Junior high was his kingdom and no one challenged him.

  None of that mattered to Barry. So he drove the point home: “And tell him that I said it!”

  Word got back to Dre. The next day on the bus there were oohs and aahs and hoopla around the news that Dre wanted to fight Barry.

  “Tell that nigga to meet me on my street,” Barry said. “He know where I’m at.”

  I was against this idea. Dre had the one thing that we did not have at the moment: friends. Our gang was back in Richmond. Here, we had no crew to support us, and I feared that we would be mauled like the kid who was stomped by Rell’s gang back in Richmond. Barry did not care.

  The next day, people rode our bus who did not even live in our neighborhood. Everyone anticipated the brawl between Dre and the new guy. The bus was rowdy and they ignored the bus driver’s demands to sit down. Amid the chaos, Barry did not say a word.

  When the bus doors opened at our stop, everyone waited and let Barry out first, like he was a heavyweight boxer making his grand entrance from the foyer. I was either his trainer or his tag-team partner, depending on how the event would unfold. If Barry was winning, I’d stay on the sideline screaming, “Fuck that nigga up!” But if he appeared to be losing or if Dre’s friends piled on, I would have to jump in and we would go down together.

  I felt like Barry was Adonis and I was Rocky in Creed, entering the ring with Tupac’s “Hail Mary” blaring. I walked by my brother’s side, rubbing his shoulders and giving pep talks. Barry stood five foot ten and I was five foot seven. We were both laced in Timbs like they were combat boots, prepared for whatever was about to go down, surrounded by naysayers who wagered on Barry’s demise.

  We waited for almost an hour at the rendezvous. Dre never showed up. His fans were shocked. They had never seen Dre back down from a fight. Some said that he was shook because no one had ever been crazy enough to challenge him. Some said otherwise. But whenever they saw each other at school, Barry fearlessly scoffed in his direction. And Dre never dared to look Barry in the eye.

  We got respect from that moment on. Barry was the new neighborhood Kimbo Slice, and I was Pepé Le Pew, reaping the benefits in girls. I dated Dre’s girlfriend and her best friend as well.

  Eventually, Dre moved away and the neighborhood acknowledged and respected our gangsta. Only one other person tried to cross my brother. Barry nearly beat him into a coma. The most savage part is that my brother did not even flee the scene. Instead, he called the ambulance for his victim. When the police arrived, Barry said unapologetically, “Yeah, I did it” and handed himself over to be cuffed and taken away.

  But there was one other crown to claim: we wanted to leave our mark as real niggas as well as superior athletes. That would mean beating Marquel, one of the best basketball players for miles around. This would be up to me.

  Years had passed since Barry outscored me in our old front yard. He and our New York cousins had taught me well and made me tough. I’d go for a layup and Barry would knock me to the pavement and yell, “Get up, nigga!�
�� During our backyard battles in New York, I’d call foul and my grown cousins would tell me to stop my bitch ass crying. So I learned to keep playing with blood dripping down my face. I’d go for a layup and they’d push me in midair. I’d crash hard to the ground, but if the shot was good, I’d pop up and yell in their faces, “And one, bitch!” I became obsessed with the physicality of the game.

  The AND1 streetballers were my idols, and Mom used to take us to parks in the Bronx and in Harlem where they played. I’d watch playground legends like Skip to My Lou, Half Man Half Amazing, and Hot Sauce and mimick their every move on the court.

  Barry was proud when my skills surpassed his. He pushed me to be better than him. The basketball cage near our new house was a major gathering place. This was the era when guys wore basketball shorts under their jeans because a game of 21 could happen any time someone started talking shit. I had beaten nearly everyone in the neighborhood while Barry yelled, “Fuck that nigga up!” from the sideline. After an especially intense game where I emerged victorious, one of the guys said, “Brandon might be nice, but he can’t beat Marquel.”

  In true Barry fashion, his chest flared and he balled his fists as he stepped to the guy’s face and barked, “Nigga, fuck Marquel!” I knew where this was heading. But this time, the fight would be mine.

  Word reached Marquel on the other side of town. He accepted the challenge. Although we had never met, I had seen him at school a couple of times and heard people talk about him in worshipful tones. He was the Jesus Shuttlesworth of local basketball. He was expected to be one of the best players to come out of the DMV, and time proved this true. At age thirteen, his ability so far exceeded his years that he was even better than most of the high school’s varsity players. But I was unfazed. We played the same position and we were headed to the rec center for an epic Battle of the Point Guards.