Dutch (2 page)

Jacobs stopped for a moment and wiped the sweat from his brow with his silken handkerchief as he gauged the temperament of
his captive audience. He felt satisfied, so he continued in the same vein to drive it on home.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I will prove to you that no man, no woman, and no child will be safe in this city until
this man, Bernard James, is behind bars for the rest of his life. So, I’m giving you the chance of a lifetime today to do
what no man under the sun has ever had a chance to do… find guilt in Bernard James and destroy him. I’m giving you the chance
to look evil and wrong in the face and once and for all in the name of the state of New Jersey say that one word: guilty.
Ladies and gentlemen, it may be your duty to oversee justice, but it’s your right to guarantee your own safety. Thank you.”

District Attorney Anthony Jacobs looked over at Dutch as he slowly returned to his seat and sat down. The only thing missing
for the starry-eyed jurors was the closing of a curtain.

D
elores Murphy picked up the morning edition of the
Star Ledger
once again to read the headlines splashed across it like the still-fresh blood of a dying victim.
Trial of the Century Begins Today,
she read to herself. Underneath was a picture of her son, Bernard James, being led into the courtroom with his lawyers in
tow. She let the paper fall from her limp hand and hugged herself as if the room had suddenly turned cold. She shivered as
she approached the double-glass doors that led to her balcony overlooking the city. As she looked down from her thirtieth-floor
penthouse apartment, it seemed to her that the earth and its inhabitants were tiny. But, when she looked up, the heavens seemed
vast.

“Please, Lord, I know who he is and I know what he done become, but he mines, Lord. He all I got,” she said, frowning as if
God was supposed to know that. It was the umpteenth time she had prayed since awakening three hours ago.

She glanced at the antique clock to see that it was only nine-thirty in the morning. She knew the trial was set to begin at
9:00
A.M
., and she wondered what would be the fate of her only child, her only son. She delicately reached for the bone china teacup,
half filled with herbal tea, and took a sip. The warm steam from the tea soothed her confused mind, but only momentarily.
She was so torn between the blood of her son and the blood she knew her son had spilled. It was an evil, twisted plot she
knew she was a character in, and knowing what her son deserved in this lifetime and in the next was an ache only a mother
could feel when wanting to protect all she had.

She looked around the million-dollar penthouse Dutch had bought her on the East Side of Manhattan and she thought of her beach
house in Boca Raton, Florida, and her place in the Hamptons overlooking the bay.

“Son, what’s an old lady like me need so many homes for?” she had asked him one day.

“Wherever it rains, I want you to have a roof over your head.”

Then he copped the joint in Southern California for close to a mil, even though it never rains there.

Just then as she thought of her son’s insatiable smile, the phone rang. She didn’t even look at the caller ID box. She just
sat in silence thinking of the many gifts Dutch had lavished upon her over the years, changing her destiny, changing her life,
and changing her fate as he had changed his own. She heard her machine off in the distance, “I’m not home right now…” and
then the beep sang in as a familiar voice came through the speaker.

“Yo, Ma, it’s me, Chris. Dutch… I mean, Bernard told me to call and check up on you. I guess you sleep, but when you get my
message call me and let me know you all right.”

She heard Chris’s voice and a smile stretched across her face and she felt the warmth of the sun as it beamed down on her.
Chris, aka Craze, was her son’s best friend, or rather his only friend, and the only person besides Dutch who knew the numbers
to reach her.

He called my baby that stupid name,
Delores thought to herself, hating the word “Dutch,” clinging forevermore to Bernard James, Jr., her only love’s son. But
to the world, he was Dutch, the most feared black gangster to hit New Jersey in thirty years. Her mind traveled back over
the years to the beginning, to the love that had started it all.

The year was 1971 and Newark was in a state of slow recovery from the devastating effects of the riots four years earlier.
It had all been over regentrification of the Central Ward and the plan to convert too much of the area to an overly expensive
hospital. But that wasn’t all. The truth was there was overtly practiced racism within the city’s political system and total
corruption of the police force during the 1960s. All of this, coupled with the militancy of the young impoverished blacks,
added up to one thing. TOO MUCH! The answer from the city was a resounding, NO MORE! So, once a black cabdriver was pulled
over in 1967 in an infamous traffic stop and was shot, Newark brothers were up in arms. Things would never be the same, and
nevertheless, nothing changed. A black mayor was elected in an effort to stop crime, but the riot continued to fester, leaving
whole areas devastated and whole city blocks looking like an old woman with a toothless smile.

Delores was seventeen at the time of the riots. Her mother had raised her in a strict Christian environment, or as strict
as poverty would allow the hungry to be. ’Cause when there’s nothing to eat on the table, nobody blames you for eating from
under the table, not even the Lord. So, Delores’s mother did the best she could under the circumstances and Delores had respect,
if not love, for her mother. But after the lawlessness of the riots and the exhilaration the disenfranchised feel whenever
given a chance to attack the enfranchised, Delores’s mother lost her to the riots… literally.

Delores was over her girlfriend’s house in the projects the day the riots broke out. From the eleventh-floor window she could
see the tanks of the National Guard rumble down the middle of the streets surrounded by soldiers carrying automatic weapons.
She saw the distant fires and smelled the smoke of the near-raging flames.

“I don’t give a damn. They need to burn all this shit down. Who the fuck built this muhfucker and a black man can’t even live
like a man in this fuckin’ country. It’s 1967, man. When this shit gonna stop? When they gonna stop fucking with us? They
fuck over us, keep a muhfucker making a fuckin’ law to lock a nigga up and don’t nobody say shit. It’s 1967! Now that we say
we not gonna take it, and try to stand up for some shit, these crackers got the National Guard coming through this bitch!”
screamed Horace, some friend who was drinking C&C out in the living room with Delores’s girlfriend’s mother.

“Man, we need to go down there and fight!” said another dude.

“Man, if I go down there, I’m killing them muhfuckers, you hear me? And it’s gonna be some Huey Newton shit over this bitch,
god damn. Yeah, it’s gonna be war, if I go down that muhfucker!” said Horace, sippin’ some more of that C&C, knowing what
might have to be done if he had to get out that chair.

The gunfire rumbled Newark, New Jersey, and thundered through the air and Delores felt so liberated at that moment, so proud
to be black. You damn right, all this fuss, all this attention, all this power to fight, all because they killed that black
man.
Mmm hmm, y’all gonna see about fuckin’ with us,
Delores felt like shouting from the rooftops.

“Look! There go Ms. Bennett! Damn, she got a nice TV,” shouted Delores as she signaled for her girlfriend, Arnette, to take
a look.

“Where’d she get that from?” asked Arnette, a little slow.

“Girl, where you think? She stole it!” Delores exclaimed as if she was a seasoned riot veteran. “We need to get us one,” added
Delores.

“Girl, is you crazy? They killin’ black people out there! You know Sharon? Her brother got shot on Springfield Avenue last
night and he wasn’t doin’ nothing. Her mama said he was just standing on the corner waiting for the bus. I ain’t goin’ out
there,” said Arnette, shaking her head. “Why don’t you go out there?” she asked Delores right back, leaning away and folding
her arms across her breasts as screams of sirens filled the room and an ambulance sped down the block. “Ain’t no telling who’s
in there,” said Arnette warning Delores of what evils lurked outside.

Delores wanted to know firsthand what was goin’ on even though she feared what was on the other side of the door. She turned
on her heel and grabbed her coat on her way out the bedroom door.

“Where you going?” asked Arnette nervously.

The slamming door answered her question. Delores was out the house in a flash. However, the moment she set foot on the cold
street concrete, she knew she had made a mistake. For one moment, she turned around, ready to dash back into the safety of
Arnette’s apartment, but deep inside something stopped her and she felt calm and her fears diminished. She headed up the block,
stepping over trampled garments, bloodstained debris, and smashed and destroyed merchandise. She noticed an abandoned soldier’s
helmet lying next to a smashed TV.
Good for ’em!
she thought as she bent over to pick it up like some trophy, but quickly pulled her hand back, realizing it was soaked in
blood.

She gasped for breath as she looked up to see a woman haulin’ ass down the street toward her with an armful of frozen chickens.

“Baby, don’t go up there! Them soldiers is locking up everybody they can catch,” the woman informed her as she strained with
her arms full.

“Ain’t you comin’ from there?” Delores asked, wanting to say,
Why you ain’t locked up?

“They ain’t catch me, baby,” the woman said with a rebellious chuckle as she continued home with her chickens, thinkin’ about
dinnertime.

Well, they ain’t catchin’ me neither,
thought Delores.

As she turned the corner onto Springfield a crowd of people were gathered in a circle around a man lying on the ground. Delores
walked up a little closer, maneuvering through the crowd, getting close enough to see that the man lying on the ground was
clutching a bottle of Thunderbird wine. People were trying to identify him but his face was beaten badly and drenched in blood,
making him unrecognizable to the community.

“Is he dead?” a small, girlish voice ventured from the crowd.

“Who is he?” asked an old woman in a housecoat looking for her son whom she hadn’t seen or heard from since the riots broke
out.

“He don’t look like he’s movin’ to me,” said an old homeless man known as Willie.

“Call an ambulance,” shouted Delores to Willie.

“An ambulance! Shit, girl, you think an ambulance gonna come over here if we calling for ’em?” questioned some chick wearing
a fire-red wig, fire-red high heels, and a skintight dress to match.
Look at this broad, looking like Ms. Kitty from
Gunsmoke, thought Delores to herself as she smiled at the woman.

“I think this nigga just drunk,” someone added.

“Or dead,” chimed Ms. Kitty.

“Or both,” said Willie, shaking his head, as the crowd burst into laughter and began to disperse in different directions,
leaving Delores standing alone, still staring down at the man’s lifeless body. She had never seen a dead body, at least not
in the middle of the street, and she wondered how people could find such a sight funny.

She turned away as she saw the small grocery store on the corner she knew all too well. It seemed untouched, just sitting
there in the midst of all the rubble and surrounding destruction.

Sirens wailed, gunshots rang, and people could be heard shouting and cursing as they looted the streets. Yet the store sat
serenely and intact by itself as if it were in another place. She made her way across the street and closer to the dark and
deserted store. She saw signs plastered over the windows that read
Black Owned
.

No they didn’t!
Delores stared in disbelief.
Black Owned. How can it say that?
Delores knew better. She knew all too well that the store wasn’t black owned. Everybody knew that. She knew the old white
man who owned it, Mr. Reilly. She knew how he smelled when he leaned too close to her and how his yellowed teeth sickened
her when he leered at her openly, like she was a piece of meat. He knew how hard her mother worked and how she always had
to scrape and scramble to pay her weekly grocery bill, but still Mr. Reilly would take every opportunity to humiliate her
whenever she was as much as a day late in payment.

“Do you think I run a charity, girl?” he would ask, addressing her as if she weren’t a woman.

“No, sir, Mr. Reilly. I have asked you before to address me with the same respect I address you,” her mother would reply.

Mrs. Murphy was a proud black woman. She knew that for the sake of keeping food on her table she would have to swallow a little
pride now or swallow nothing later. Little did she know that Delores would have rather starved.