Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (38 page)

“Just as attempts to provide blacks with a greater slice of the labor market pie began in earnest, the pie shrank,” writes Thomas Sugrue in
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit.
“Blacks made gains in occupations that became increasingly scarce in postwar decades. The combination of discrimination and profound changes in Detroit’s industrial base left a sizeable segment of the black population bereft of hope in the land of Canaan.”
²⁴

So as the new millennium approached, the secure, decent-paying jobs to which a significant portion of African American men once aspired in a city like Newark had simply gone. This was particularly devastating for the young. Between 1973 and 1987 the percentage of black men aged twenty to twenty-nine working in manufacturing plummeted from 37 percent to 20 percent.
²⁵
As exemplified by the abandoned factory next to Gary’s home, nothing but a shell of that former industrial capacity was left. And thanks to segregation—Newark was one of a handful of places that became even more segregated after the civil rights era
²⁶
—these losses devastated entire communities and even whole cities.

One in three of Newark’s black residents lives in poverty; black unemployment in the city is more than twice the rate of white unemployment and five times the national average.
²⁷
And with each economic downturn, the impact of these trends—deindustrialization, segregation, poverty—intensified and became amplified.
²⁸

What does this have to do with Gary and guns? Well, first, when jobs are scarce, drug dealing becomes one of the few economic sectors available to those with a high school education or less.

In
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner describe the business model for a drug gang in the nineties, culled from research by then University of Chicago sociology student Sudhir Venkatesh. He spent several years
researching one gang on the South Side, the Black Disciples, and was given access to its inner workings. “[The gang worked] an awful lot like most American businesses, actually, though perhaps none more so than McDonald’s,” writes Levitt. “In fact if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.”
²⁹

Within the monthly costs the gang had to cover—this was in the nineties, during the height of the crack epidemic—2 percent was spent on weapons and more than 10 percent on “mercenary fighters.” If you stayed in the gang for four years, then you could reasonably expect to be arrested 5.9 times, incur nonfatal wounds or injuries 2.4 times, and sustain a one-in-four chance of being killed.

These were the kinds of odds that caught up with Tyshon, who died in Chicago just moments before Gary died in Newark. And in the absence of any concrete intelligence from the police, my guess is they are the same odds that sent Gary’s murderers (who were probably not that different from Tyshon’s) in pursuit of the boy in a red hoodie, later imprisoned on a drug charge.

Moreover, research by Professor Delbert S. Elliott, founding director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence, in Boulder, Colorado, found a clear correlation between the inability to find work and the propensity toward violent behavior. Race and class differences related to violent offending are small during adolescence, he discovered, but disparities widen considerably going into adulthood, depending on the ability to find work. This occurs for two reasons. First, the absence of employment severely reduces the likelihood that people will get married, which is one of the key routes to more stable, less violent behavior. Second, growing up in poor, disorganized neighborhoods inhibits the normal evolution of adolescent development. Young people in such areas, Elliott found, tend to have lower levels of personal competence, self-efficacy, social skills, and self-discipline. “Many are not adequately prepared to enter the labor market even if jobs were available. They are, in some ways, trapped in an extended adolescence and continue to engage in adolescent behavior.”
³⁰

Gary’s adolescent transgressions were unremarkable. His father recalls how the reverend who performed his funeral service once saw him hanging out on the block and asked him what he was up to. Gary smart-mouthed him to the effect that it was none of his business. When the reverend told him he knew Gary’s grandmother, Gary said, “Well, you ain’t gonna tell her nothin’,” and walked away. The very next day Gary was on the porch with his grandmother when the reverend pulled up and told the grandmother what had happened. Gary got a slap right there and then, his father told me with a big laugh. “Since then, he was like, ‘How you doin’, preacher? How you doin’, sir?’”

He was thinking of leaving Newark and maybe heading south to start a new life in North Carolina with his older sister. She had been in town just a week before he died and told him he should go with her when she returned. But Gary thought it better to wait until graduation.

He was, his father said, a “typical teenager.” “He liked school to a certain extent. You know kids. They like school. But then when the teacher’s trying to teach them something they don’t want to be bothered. ‘I don’t want to be in school.’ He passed his classes. He did what he had to do.”

“Typical teenager” in Newark comes with some caveats, which by now are all too familiar. In Gary’s room, where his cat, Mocha, still lurks and his clothes still hang six months after his death, an RIP notice hangs in memory of one of his friends who was shot down.

It was his final year in school, and Gary Jr. had initially decided that he had no interest in marking the occasion. “He didn’t want to go to prom. He didn’t want to go to graduation. But as soon as he turned eighteen, he said, ‘Daddy, I want to go to the prom. I want to go to my graduation. So we need to get my stuff together.’ He had a little girlfriend. So I said alright. So at the time he was shot, he just talking about going to school and going to graduation.” His father felt that North Carolina might have provided opportunities Gary Jr. wouldn’t have had in Newark. “If that’s where he’s going to go and be successful, I had no problem. I told him that. Because Newark is crazy. Being a young black guy here. . . . It’s hard,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s hard here, trying to be young.”

CHAPTER 10

GUSTIN HINNANT (18)

Goldsboro, North Carolina

3:30
A
.
M
.
EST

T
HE TWENTY
-
FOUR
-
HOUR PERIOD IN WHICH THIS BOOK IS SET
ends with a green 1996 Cadillac Sedan Deville rolling to a stop in somebody’s yard in the early hours of November 24 on the corner of Walnut and South Audubon in Goldsboro, North Carolina. It’s a quiet, verdant street where, in the fall, leaves are heaped in tiny piles, in a small town that many in North Carolina have not even heard of. When the police spotted the car, while answering another call, its doors were open and lights were on. The passengers had fled. The driver, eighteen-year-old Gustin Hinnant, was not so lucky. His body lay slumped back between the two front seats, his head hanging where the backseat passengers’ feet might be, dripping blood that collected in a pool on the floor. He’d been felled by a single bullet that had pierced the rear window and hit the back of his head.

Gustin’s slender, long face was as dark and smooth as melted chocolate, a gloss finish in a picture that might have been Photoshopped but for the hint of peach fuzz (his autopsy mentions a “faint beard and mustache present”). Not quite angelic-looking, perhaps, but both youthful and playful. “In his physique he was a small-statured guy,” says Daina Taylor, a family friend who’d known Gustin (pronounced
Justin
) since he was a small child. “He was what we’d call light in the butt . . . not meaty. So the only thing he had going for him was that”—she opens and closes her hand as though she were operating a puppet. “Yapping with the hands.”

“He was slim,” says his father, Greg, who raised Gustin by himself for most of his life. “His body was cut a little from doing weights and pushups. Muscular, but still no big guy . . . petite.”

Young enough that his favorite movies, according to Facebook, were
Happy Feet
and
Toy Story
and that his favorite hobby at home was to sit in his room quietly and draw pictures. Old enough that just a few days before he died he changed his Facebook cover photo from a graffiti-emblazoned wall to a sprawling array of high-caliber bullets.

Old enough to spend the night with girls. Young enough that they would usually get caught climbing through his window. “A couple of young women did it,” says Greg, shaking his head. “And every time they come through I’ve caught ’em. I tell ’em, ‘You welcome in my house through my front door anytime you want to. But you come in through that window, you ain’t welcome in my house. Don’t let Gustin talk you into coming through that window.’” Too young to respect the considerable leeway he was given by Greg’s working hours (his dad was on the night shift at Walmart). “‘Listen, ‘bro. I work at night. You know my days off. Don’t be hardheaded,’” Greg had told him.

“On more than one occasion, his father came home and there were girls in the house,” adds Daina, barely stifling a smile. “Now if you know that your father gets home at seven a.m., kick them girls out at five or six. Don’t defy him fully. Everybody’s falling asleep on each other naked and stuff. Check yourself. You want to be a man. This is part of being a man.”

Old enough to be making plans for a proper career, even if there was some discrepancy among those who knew him about what that career would be. According to Greg, he wanted to be a physiotherapist for elite sports players. “They throw their knee out or something, he wanted to be that guy who would bring them back to the level where they could go back to work,” he explained. But he told Daina he wanted to go to Wake Technical Community College and train to work for a cable company. Hardy, a friend from school, says he wanted to be “an entrepreneur.”

But Gustin was still too young to let go of his dream of becoming a rapper one day. He spent a lot of time on the computer working on Virtual DJ applications and had started a record label, called Green Team, with his friends. The one song I heard online, performed with someone called T. Quail, was not bad. Mellow, rhythmic, and cut under with some soul. The lyrics are basic. “Keeps telling niggas to fall in line / You can say that you’re better / but we know that that ain’t true / all we hear nowadays is disses / that’s what rappers do.” Also, “You see money and you gotta get it / You see money and you gotta spend it.” It’s not brilliant. But compared to the other amateur rap that’s out there, it’s certainly respectable.

Old enough to seek his kicks in forbidden places. For a few months, Gustin had been sneaking out of his bedroom window as soon as Greg left for work and heading to Slocumb Street, which Greg considered a hangout for ne’er do wells. Gustin’s room was at the back of the house (a roadside cottage opposite an industrial park) that backed up to a wooded area which, on many an evening, served as Gustin’s escape route. “He’d go out that window, walk round that fence, and go down that dirt road to where the action’s at,” explains Greg.

Gustin was too young to realize he was swimming in shark-infested waters and way out of his depth. One of the boys he used to spend time with on Slocumb Street is now in jail for shooting two boys, says Greg, who grew up in the Bronx. “I said, ‘Gustin, man, you ain’t ready for those boys over there on Slocumb Street, man. You gonna end up getting yourself killed. You ain’t grown up like I did. You don’t have that killer instinct in you because you don’t have to survive like we had to survive. You got a mother and father to buy you stuff.’”

Daina, who lives on Slocumb Street, was worried the message wasn’t getting through. Raised in Queens, New York, she is, in her own way, a community organizer. As well as running her own company doing residential and commercial janitorial work, she is also director of a charitable organization that helps ex-convicts avoid reoffending. In the old days people called her “the book lady.” “I would ask children what they were interested in and then get books shipped from different publishing companies based on what the child’s interest was,” she explains. “Anything that would make them read. My focus was on the children who didn’t know how to read. But Gustin did not need remedial help.” She would also check report cards, and those who got good grades would get a couple of dollars or a trip to McDonald’s. Gustin always got a treat.

“I was afraid for him,” she says. “I know the streets. I grew up in the streets. And Gustin didn’t strike me as being street material.” If anything, says Daina, he was “a little nerdy”—a very bright honor-roll student who liked to play Words with Friends in chemistry class. “Even when he was hanging out with them boys, he kept his grades up,” says Greg. He would have been the first person in his family to graduate from high school. The green Cadillac was originally intended as a graduation present. “Greg always bragged about his children’s accomplishments, especially when it came to the report cards,” says Daina.