Authors: M.K. Asante
Buck (7 page)
Relapse
My mom’s back from the hospital in the same nightgown she left in. She’s in her chair, on the horn with my uncle, all the way reclined like she’s at the dentist getting teeth pulled.
Outside is gusty, wind whirling through trees, leaves clapping. The wind slaps the house like it stole something. Slams the screen door into the jamb over and over again. Howls through the halls, haunting.
“He relapsed,” she whispers to me, palming the mouthpiece. I sit on her bed and study her face: the winces, grimaces, and slow blinks. It’s all a blur of bad news. The latest is that Uzi’s in solitary confinement, so she can’t speak to him. She hasn’t talked to him yet. Uncle Jabbar has updates.
“Twenty-five years!” she cries out.
What the fuck? Twenty-five years of what?
I hear Uzi’s voice over the prison static:
Get me outta here!
“Oh God,” Mom says. “What?” She can’t stop shaking her
head. Weary lids. She tries to say something to me but can’t get it out. She’s melting right in front of me.
My mom’s crying ’cause her insides are dyin
her son tryin her patience, keep her heart racin
*
Later, I hear snatches of the story:
Uzi and his boy Antwan, they call him Shotgun, a Crip from St. Louis …
They fuck these girls from a group home, runaways …
She tells Uzi she’s sixteen … she’s thirteen …
And she’s white.
*
“Regrets,” Jay-Z, 1996.
Neveruary
“I don’t want you hanging on the corner,” my mom says. “Those guys are too old for you anyway.” I don’t think they’re too old, they’re Uzi’s age, but I don’t argue with her about it. She’s already mad stressed about Uzi, plus she just got back from the psych ward a few days ago. She’s as delicate as eyelashes.
“ ’K, Ma … but I gotta walk past there to get home.”
“You can go the other way.”
“What other way?”
“The back way?”
“Up
Star Trek
?”
“Yes,” she laughs, “and why do you call it that?”
“ ’Cause the baseheads, before they light up, say, ‘Beam me up, Scotty.’ They smoke crack out of car antennas.”
“I just don’t want you hanging on the corner. Just say hi and keep going. You don’t have to stop for them.”
“I got you.”
“No, really,” she says, sucking her teeth. “They are out there looking for young black boys to put in the system. I don’t want you to become a statistic … like your brother.”
“I got you.”
“And what do you mean, you got me? I’m not your homie.” She laughs.
“I won’t hang down there.”
But of course I do. What, I’m supposed to stay in the crib? The corner is popping, electric, buzzing. Anything can happen and does. Different people are always coming through and they all know Uzi and that I’m his little brother. And if they don’t, once they find out—
oh, you Uzi’s little bro?
—they show me mad love.
And momma told me, don’t hang with the homies
But they got me if they need me, den it’s on G
*
Everybody calls me “young buck” when they see me. The cops ride by all slow. Grit on everybody. We grit right back. Sometimes they jump out and search everybody.
“What’s wrong?” they ask as soon as they see my long face. I tell 10 Gs the deal.
“A white bitch?” Ted blurts out like he’s asking the whole city. “She’s white?” I just nod—
yeah, man
. “Come on, man, don’t tell me that. Tell me something else, anything. Tell me
he shot somebody, tell me he robbed a bank, tell me whatever. Just don’t tell me this—white!”
“In Arizona too? Damn Oohwop,” D-Rock says. D-Rock looks like he lives on a bench in Fisher Park. He’s wearing what he always wears: greasy army fatigues and a military hat on some Black Moon shit. He calls it BDU—basic dress uniform. Cargos. Camos. Velcro. Gore-Tex. Kevlar. That’s his bag. “ ’cause I’m a mothafuckin soldier,” he told me one day when I asked why he wears the same shit every day.
D-Rock calls himself the hood scientist. He hates the white man but loves white pussy. He’s always got a white jawn with him.
“Fuckin Arizona!” Ted shakes his head. “Of all places!”
Population none in the desert and sun
With a gun cracker running things under his thumb
†
“It’s racist as shit out there, man,” Scoop says.
“I know,” Ted says, “they don’t even take off for Dr. King’s birthday.”
“Vicious. What?”
“Yeah man, you ain’t know that?”
“Crazy.”
“It ain’t like you gotta recite ‘I Have a Dream’ or some shit.”
“It’s just a day off work,” Ted says. “But they’d rather go to work than take a day off for a black man.”
“They straight-up hate us out there. Fuckin hot-ass desert,” D-Rock says.
“And a straight-up Philly ngh like Uzi?” Scoop says. “They don’t want him comin home till Neveruary!”
“The judge might try to roof him. The white man don’t like you messing with his little Suzie.”
“They can’t give him no wheel of death for that.”
“What’s the wheel of death?”
“Life.”
This all feels like broken glass in my mind.
“Did you talk to him?” Ted asks. “What did he say?”
I hear Uzi:
Get me outta here!
Dear Carole,
Malo ran away. Not like the time he ran away when he was five years old, when he just went to the end of the block and looked to see if I was looking. No, this time he really ran away. He’s fourteen.
The thing is—he took my car. What kind of running away is that? Not only is my child gone, but my ride too. Initially I think he’ll return in the evening. I’m upset but not worried. But when nighttime comes and he doesn’t return, I get worried. I think about calling the police. Chaka says that we should wait. I call everyone I know but no one has seen or heard from Malo and I don’t know his friends’ phone numbers.
Morning comes and Malo still hasn’t come home. I decide to call the police. The police seem uninterested in finding a runaway black boy but they take down the information. I don’t want to report the car stolen because that will criminalize Malo.
Malo ran away but there wasn’t an argument and he
wasn’t on punishment, so I’m baffled. Where is he and why did he leave? Of course this means he isn’t going to school, but I’m not even thinking about school, I just want to make sure that he is safe. Chaka doesn’t seem worried but I’m sure he is. We are both amazed that he took my car but I had information that Chaka didn’t. I know that Malo had taken my car many times while I was asleep and his father was away. So while it was definitely outrageous that Malo took my car, since he’s only fourteen and doesn’t have a license or even a permit, I wasn’t that shocked.
Then after a week, he strolls in. I ask Malo, what was he thinking? He simply says that he was ready to live on his own. If I wasn’t so angry, I would have laughed. Actually, I did laugh. What chutzpah! Where did he get the nerve? Well, I really don’t have to look too far.
I ran away when I was thirteen too. I not only ran away but I left a note for my mother saying that I was running away to get married and that she shouldn’t look for me. I left in the middle of the night and took the subway to the 34th Street bus terminal and took a bus to Reading, PA! I arrived in Reading with nothing but the clothes on my back and called my aunt Patrice from the bus station and asked her to come get me.
There was an incident that made me run away. My mother wouldn’t let me go to a beach party that a lot of my friends were going to and I was very angry about it. My mother and I didn’t have a good relationship and I wanted to get away. My aunt Jaime had taken me to Reading when I was six years old and I had fond memories of Reading. For one thing, my aunt Patrice had a
house and that seemed like the ultimate luxury to me. Little did I know at the time that Heller’s Court was called “Hell’s Court” for a reason.
I took money out of my aunt Jaime’s purse. I am sure that my mother caught grief about that but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. My mother finally called my aunt Patrice and my aunt admitted that I was there. My mother didn’t come get me. I don’t even think that she talked to me. She was angry with my aunt Patrice for not calling her but at least she knew where I was.
Reading was wild, and even though I wanted more freedom, this was a life that was full of chaos and violence. My cousin Junie was the only child and he was wild. I saw him pick up a butcher knife and chase his mother with it. He was my age and he already had a baby. My uncle Franky and aunt Patrice ran a speakeasy on the weekend so there were lots of people coming in and out from Friday night to Sunday. They sold liquor, drank, argued, and fought a lot. This was all new to me, as my mother didn’t drink. The only fights that I saw in my home were my aunt Jaime and my mother arguing. The worst that they said to each other was to call each other a bitch. My aunt called my mother a “yellow bitch” and my mom retaliated by called my aunt a “black bitch.”
But this was on a different level. Knives and alcohol and cussing were an everyday thing, and on the weekend, it was all day. I enrolled in school and that was a culture shock. It was mainly white. My high school in Brooklyn was mixed but this school was basically white. But I think that I could have handled the school if the home situation wasn’t so volatile.
Two things happened that brought my stay in Reading to an end. My aunt took me with her one afternoon to a “friend’s” house. She told me to stay in an outer room while she went into a bedroom with a young man. I was her alibi. She would tell my uncle Franky that she was with me, and that would be the end of that. I had seen a lot but this was something that she chose to do. Then my aunt accused me of trying to be with Uncle Franky. Reading, PA, made cream sodas that were red, and this absolutely delighted me as I loved cream soda and the idea of red cream soda was wonderful. Uncle Franky would bring me cream soda when he came home from work and I loved it. My aunt took this as a flirtation with my uncle Franky. There was no such thing going on in my mind. And mind you, this was the woman who took me to a house where she had a rendezvous with a lover.
So after three months in Reading, I called my mother and asked to come home. I don’t think that my mother said a word to me all the way home.
Malo and I don’t speak either.
God, give me strength.
Amina
Bail Money
“It’s just like my daddy told me,” my dad says. “I ain’t got no bail money. Not a dime!” He swipes his keys. “None.” I haven’t seen my dad since my mom got back from the psych ward. He’s home now, just for a hot minute, before he goes out of town again.
“If we don’t help him, the system will hang him,” Mom says. “You know that’s what they do to black boys. You know that, Chaka!”
“That boy hung himself a long time ago! Why are you so surprised? He’s never done the right thing. Never!”
“He made a mistake. Wrong place, wrong time. He’s our son—we will profit by or pay for whatever he becomes.”
“He raped a girl.”
“Don’t say that,” my mom erupts, wincing at the very thought.
“A white girl! My enemies will love this.”
“Statutory rape!”
“A white girl!”
“It was consensual. He’s only seventeen, she told him she was sixteen.”
“Well, she was thirteen!”
“He didn’t know. My son is not a rapist!”
“He’s a thug. You reap what you sow,” he says like a southern preacher.
“Please,” she pleads. “They’ll do him like Emmett Till if we don’t.”
Something in the kitchen falls. I feel like everything is falling, crashing around me.
“He’s not working. He’s not in school. Can’t you see? He’s destroying you.”
“You don’t understand.”
“What don’t I understand?”
“What it’s like … for a mother.”
Later on I get on the computer, a Mac Performa 5200. I dial up the Internet and type in “Emmett Till” on this new thing my dad’s friend Zizwe told me about called Google. It’s dope, you can find anything on this jawn … including all the hardcore Afro-Centrix flicks. I read about how in 1955, Emmett, fourteen years old like me, got killed for whistling at a white woman in Philadelphia, Mississippi. But they didn’t just kill him. They shot his ears off at point-blank range. Gouged his eyes out. Tied him with barbed wire by his neck. Cut his dick off. Dumped him in the Tallahatchie River. There’s two pictures of him. One where he’s alive, glowing, wearing a fedora
and a boyish grin, looking like Uzi, actually. And another, in his casket, his face deformed like melted plastic. My soul cries for Till like he was Uzi.
I say to my dad, “So you really not going to help my brother?”
“I can’t help him. He made his bed, now he has to lie in it. One day you’ll make yours too, and you’ll have to lie in it.”
Dear Carole,
If I could run, hide from bad news, I would be on the other side of the world. Bad news has ridden the hem of my skirts and I haven’t been able to dance the news away. Now bad news has arrived big-time and in this midnight hour, when everyone is asleep and only the TV talks, I am speechless but full of fear. Fear for my child. The one that I put on the plane to Arizona. The child that I wanted to save and didn’t know what to do. My firstborn child, who was full of life and too much mischief. He is in jail facing what?
God, give me strength.
Amina
Xmas in AZ
Xmas in AZ. Nobody’s in this Holiday Inn except me and my mom. We’re here to see Uzi. My mom still hasn’t spoken to him and no one knows what’s going on.
We’re supposed to see this lawyer she got for Uzi, Mr. Dodds or something.
