High Price (25 page)

Overwhelmingly, those incarcerated under the federal anticrack laws were black: for example, in 1992, the figure was 91 percent and in 2006 it was 82 percent.
⁸
While the intent may not have been racist, the outcome—lack of outrage and failure to change course in response to the disproportionate number of black men who were convicted, imprisoned, and disenfranchised—certainly was. The result, in many black communities, was an unchecked disaster that reverberates even today.

And as the late 1980s turned into the early 1990s, I began to see what I then thought were the effects of crack cocaine on my own family and friends. My cousins Amp and Michael became my own family’s example. On one visit home around this time, I discovered that they had been exiled from my aunt Weezy’s house because of their cocaine use. The cousins I’d once looked up to, who’d instructed me on sex and manhood, had now been kicked out of their own mother’s house.

Instead of getting their own place, however, they had begun living in a toolshed in her backyard. It was the same one, in fact, that we’d tried to hide behind unsuccessfully when we were caught trying to smoke our first cigarettes as boys. Amid the rakes and lawn mowers in this ten-by-ten shack, my cousins had their new sleeping quarters.

When I came to see them, the shed was squalid, filthy. It had no electricity or plumbing, of course. Where were the cool older cats I’d admired and hung out with? Could these be the same brothers I’d looked up to, the ones I’d trusted to get advice from when I’d had my first embarrassing sexual experience?

These days, Amp and Michael weren’t working or taking care of families; they were stealing from their own mother in order to buy crack. They were once even caught trying to steal their mother’s washer and dryer to sell them to buy drugs. The only way their behavior made sense to me was if it had been compelled by a drug. At the time, I didn’t recognize the roles played by factors like their failure to graduate from high school and Anthony’s chronic unemployment. I didn’t think about how we’d all engaged in crime back home, even without using drugs. I didn’t know how Michael had gone from having a wife and steady job as a truck driver to living in that shack at his mom’s. I didn’t think about the difference the military had made for me. All I could see that differentiated me from them was their drug use.

I tried to find them to talk sense into them on a later trip home. But they dodged my sanctimonious black ass. They weren’t going to let themselves feel humiliated. They also knew that I had nothing to offer them but empty words. The “just say no” rhetoric of the time wasn’t effective for adults who had limited employment options and had previously said yes. And that’s all I really had to give them then.

For one of my friends, though, the consequences of our failure to recognize the real problems that were behind the “crack epidemic” were even worse. I knew that when I’d joined the air force, Melrose and a few other friends had started slinging rock (meaning, selling crack cocaine) on the corner. They’d boasted to me about how girls would do “anything” to get crack and bragged about all the money they were going to be making. I hadn’t paid much mind at the time because I knew that for all their talk, they were still living at home with their mothers or in other equally nonaffluent situations. Obviously, they hadn’t made any real money.

I thought that their dealing was virtually all talk, like so many of the capers we’d planned in high school but never really gone through with. We had always been just about to get some real loot, always been about to grab the riches and fame that we knew were just around the corner. My experience in England had made the futility and unlikeliness of success in these endeavors transparent to me, and it now seemed a bit sad, embarrassing even. I hadn’t expected their small-time hustling to amount to anything, good or bad.

But apparently, Melrose had been selling cocaine, on the 3900 block of Southwest 28 Street in Carver Ranches, pretty regularly. He wasn’t moving large quantities and was no one’s idea of a kingpin. Of all my friends, he was never one I expected to be involved with violence: although he was incredibly physically fit and an imposing-looking specimen, he was a genuinely good-hearted person. As a child, he’d been sent to that “special” school where he’d gotten no education at all, but he was gentle and no real threat to anyone. On August 14, 1990, he’d spent hours celebrating his daughter Shantoya’s first birthday with her. Then he went out to the corner.

The guys who decided to jack him—some small-time dealers from another neighborhood who had targeted the spot where he worked—didn’t know he’d just come from a toddler’s birthday party. They didn’t know Melrose was as kind and loyal a person as you’d ever meet. They didn’t know him at all. They drove up and pulled out their guns before Melrose and his boys on the street had any chance to react. They made everyone on the corner lie down on their bellies, stealing their drugs and cash. Then for reasons known only to the killers, they shot Melrose in the back of the head.

Within three minutes, the shooters were caught and arrested by the police. But medical aid didn’t come nearly as quickly. No ambulance at all arrived to help Melrose. His friend Michael’s mother, Annie, called 911 four times, trying to get someone to take him to the hospital. Michael’s sister Jackie ran to a nearby firehouse, where firefighters stood with their arms crossed, not responding to her pleas for help.

Annie had covered Melrose with a blanket and was sitting with him as he lay dying on the street for nearly twenty minutes before the paramedics finally showed up. An angry crowd of more than a hundred people later marched to the firehouse, furious about the slow response. Authorities claimed the rescue workers weren’t authorized to help until police arrived to ensure that the shooting was over. But the arrests had occurred within minutes—and there was no reason to believe that there were additional gunmen at large.

Derrick “Melrose” Brown left behind four fatherless children. We’ll never know if he could have been saved by a faster emergency response.

Melrose never had a chance. There were many critical experiences and policies that had led him to that corner, starting with his dismal educational history and the lack of economic opportunities it presented. But at the time, I blamed it all on crack cocaine. If he hadn’t been slinging, if drug trade rivals hadn’t come for him, he would still be with us, I thought. Forgetting my own early experience seeing my sister shot for no good reason and the equally senseless deaths of my friend’s brother and the white motorcyclist I saw shot in retaliation for his death, I became convinced that crack had made everyone go crazy. And I soon decided to get involved in research that I thought could help do something about it.

CHAPTER 10

The Maze

It is one thing to show a man that he is in an error and another to put him in possession of the truth.

—JOHN LOCKE

E
veryone in the psychology department knew about the class: some students even created T-shirts reading, “I survived experimental psychology,” which they wore proudly afterward. It was among the most demanding courses in the entire curriculum, one of those make-or-break requirements that tend to weed out the distracted, lazy, uncommitted, or otherwise challenged.

Still, we hadn’t expected to face a human version of the radial arm maze. We had seen this eight-armed, circular contraption in the rat lab and read about it in our texts. None of the thirty-odd students was quite sure what to do as we found ourselves, on a beautiful sunny North Carolina day, in the center of a large unpainted wooden structure, the size of a half-court in basketball.

It was about the third week of what was essentially my senior year of college, 1990. I was at the Wilmington campus of the University of North Carolina. I had no idea that this class and my professor, Rob Hakan, were about to change the course of my life. All I knew was that I was keeping my eyes on the prize, which for me at the time was simply graduating with a degree in psychology. I still had a vague idea that I wanted to work with underprivileged black children. I didn’t have a specific path to that job in mind, beyond finishing college. Although that goal was tantalizingly close, if I hadn’t taken Rob’s class, I don’t think I would have gone on to become a scientist.

Experimental psychology was focused on research methods, and the maze exercise initially seemed irritating to me. It was not exactly a challenge to determine which of the arms did, in fact, have a jar of Skittles or M&M’s at the end of it. I felt slightly insulted to be treated, quite literally, like a lab rat. However, because I knew and trusted Rob, I went with it, figuring that he must have an important point to make by putting the class through this exercise.

And indeed when I tried to write up the results afterward, I immediately understood the experiment’s purpose. I had to go back to check the number of the arms in the maze, the markers like red and blue dots of paint that helped distinguish between the arms that contained rewards and those that were empty and other specifics that I hadn’t realized were important at the time. I could see why these details mattered and the importance of observation and measurement in experiments.

And as the semester progressed, I similarly began to discover the order and purpose that underlay much of what at first had seemed pointless to me in psychology. There was a beauty to the structure of this science and there were formulas for understanding behavior. What had seemed like arcane requirements for research and petty concerns were revealed as important ways to avoid bias. They were necessary to control the conditions so that you could ensure that the variables you were studying were indeed linked to the outcome of interest and not just incidental, but causal. This was a way to look under the hood of human nature by stripping away some of the confusing complexities. And it was quantitative, mathematical, solid.

Most important, I was learning how to think and communicate like a scientist; discovering for myself the profound truth of Einstein’s quip that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” For Rob’s class, we wrote up a new experiment every week. That meant loads of practice, just as I’d needed to succeed in basketball. And as in basketball, practice helped me understand and learn how to work within the rules. As I learned them, I got better and more confident. All the while, my behavior was constantly being reinforced with “attaboys” from Rob and on tests and papers, good grades.

While I was having this awakening, Rob saw that I was increasingly serious and encouraged my questions. He wasn’t one of those dazzling or charismatic professors who wow students with their outsize personalities and intellect; instead, he was quiet and soft-spoken. But he was young and attractive and his creative and challenging exercises and enthusiasm about his subject made him appealing. He stood about six foot four, with sandy brown hair.

I started hanging out after class to talk with him, then playing basketball with him on the psych department’s intramural team. He turned me on to musicians I’d never heard such as Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan. It seems strange now to think that I hadn’t heard the music of these icons before meeting Rob at age twenty-three. But in my narrow world there didn’t seem to be space or need for white folk singers. Rob also introduced me to books like Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf
, which helped me feel a real connection to academia. I well understood the feeling of wolfishness and the sense that one doesn’t belong in polite society described in the book. Like the main character, who sees himself as a “wolf of the steppes,” as well as a man, I felt I had a dual nature, too.

At the time, I was living with a woman named Terri Howard, a slender, light-skinned sister with huge brown eyes that made her look as though she might be the female twin of the musician Prince. She was a business major and we would be together for four years. While I tried to look respectable and behave respectfully toward her pretentious Republican mom and her mom’s new husband, they seemed to think that a man like me with three gold teeth and whose speech was still filled with heavy street vernacular was too rough around the edges for their Terri. I took considerable comfort in learning that a leading German intellectual who lived more than a century earlier than I did had struggled with many of these same issues.

Further, Rob made it clear that there was room in research for people like me, those who had not followed the traditional middle- and upper-class route to academia. Indeed, his lab team at the time was a collection of seeming misfits—all of whom went on to later success in medicine and research. One guy was a bona fide Deadhead, complete with long hair, beard, and hippie paraphernalia. Another started as a skinny, highly distracted dude who had so much energy that he smoked pot to calm down. His intensity made people nervous. There was also a highly driven married couple whom we called “the spouses” (their last name was Strauss), whose visible competitiveness stood out at laid-back UNC-Wilmington.

After I got one of the highest grades in his class, Rob encouraged me to enroll in an advanced independent study course that he would supervise. It was then called advanced physiological psychology, but it would now be labeled as behavioral neuroscience. In order to complete the coursework, however, I had to learn some new skills. The first thing Rob wanted me to do was to learn to operate on the brains of rats. Although I was much more interested in helping him with survey research he was then conducting on human sexuality, he was out of funding for that project. He convinced me that if I learned how to do rat research, I just might help unlock the secrets of the human brain, cure addiction, or at the very least, make a career for myself in science. I was flattered by the attention and wanted more such praise. I wasn’t sure at first, but over time I began to think I might be able to do it.

Much of my confidence came from the fact that Rob was very clear with me that hard work was what mattered most. Because he kept reinforcing that idea, I wasn’t as intimidated by the subject matter and the actual brain surgery I had to do as I otherwise might have been.