No Matter How Loud I Shout (37 page)

Carla's moment comes fairly early in her stay at Kirby, on a day when Shabazz shows a movie to the girls of Amber Cottage, an after-school special about a kid being terrorized at school by a bully. The protagonist decides to get a gun for protection, but ends up shooting himself while trying to fish it out of his school bag when the bully next approaches him. The boy is permanently paralyzed.

Reaction in the group is predictable. Several girls think the boy's decision to get a gun was reasonable, but that only fools shoot themselves.
Others, particularly Carla, think he didn't make enough of an effort to fight back with his fists in his earliest encounters with the bully. “I'd have bombed,” she says, street slang for a pummeling attack with fists and any other weapons on hand.

“What about saying you're sorry?” Shabazz asks. “What about talking about it, reasoning, finding out what the source of the conflict is? There's usually some reason these things get started. Why not just apologize for it?”

Carla looks at him in astonishment. “Sorry doesn't work where I live,” she says with contempt. “You got to earn respect. Sorry is backing down when you need to stand tall.”

Shabazz nods his little nod, the one that signals not agreement, but amusement, as if he knows exactly what someone is thinking. Carla has seen that nod a lot lately. “So bombing is always a better way, then? That's the only way you can ever be strong? You don't think turning away from it takes another kind of strength?”

Carla sneers, but remains silent. Shabazz then tells the group about two former residents of Amber Cottage, Virginia and Claudia. Claudia had been a hard-core gangbanger from one of LA's oldest Latino gangs, White Fence, which can trace its origins back to the thirties, and whose members are third, even fourth generation. Claudia came to Kirby on car theft and weapons charges, her whole identity wrapped up in her barrio and her gang—a carbon copy of Carla, tough, smart, resistant to change. She just wanted to do her time, she announced on her arrival, then return to her gang. She didn't even bother to put up a pretense of cooperation, as Carla has.

But, Shabazz tells the group, over time, Claudia decided there were ways to be strong she had never thought of before—like refusing to be sucked into warfare over insults and turf and what neighborhood someone happens to be from. She realized that for her, gangbanging had been the easy way out, a way of avoiding real challenges, real tests of strengths, of compensating for a messed-up and violent family at home with an even more messed-up and violent pseudo-family on the streets.

Carla laughs at this, mocking Claudia and White Fence as a bunch of lightweight has-beens. But when she meets Claudia later, Carla falls silent, listening to the seventeen-year-old speak of how she at first hated Kirby and Shabazz, but how this place made her see herself, and her future, in new ways. She saw clearly, for the first time, that she was on a path going nowhere she really wanted to be. What was she gonna do, gangbang at age thirty? The life was already getting boring at sixteen, the routine of lazing
around with the homies peppered with sudden bouts of violence wearing at her, beginning to seem pointless and pathetic instead of exhilarating.

So now she is in college instead. Claudia says she has plans for law school. She wants to be an example for other kids in her barrio, “a strong brown woman making it—and making a difference.”

“I want to make an example of myself,” she tells the group, with all the fervor and idealism a teenager can muster. “I'd like to be Elijah Muhammad for brown people. Martin Luther King. I'd like to make that big of a difference.” She laughs a little, suddenly self-conscious at the sentiment, which makes it seem less grandiose than it otherwise might have sounded. “I'm going to make a difference. I'm determined. That's why I'm aiming my sights so high. And if I can help some brown boy or brown girl start thinking the same way, that's what I want.”

For once, Carla has nothing to say as she warily eyes this mature-seeming young woman, impeccably dressed, juggling school and a part-time job and dreaming of the future. After Claudia leaves, Shabazz tries to goad Carla by saying, “Claudia has come a long way to get where she is. I think some of you would like to get to that place”—he is looking at Carla as he is saying this—“but you don't know how to get there. Yet.” Still, she has nothing to say.

Later, Shabazz tells the group about Virginia, the other graduate from Amber Cottage he had mentioned. Like Claudia, Virginia had, after a defiant start, run a good program at Kirby three years ago—she was smart, worked hard, participated in group, helped the other kids see things. But when she got out, she returned to her old gang.

“She just couldn't give it up,” Shabazz says. “She was an honest-to-God, hope-to-die gangbanger for life. So she went back to the life, and just after she turned eighteen, she got shot in the head point-blank. Didn't kill her, but the bullet went through one eye, and messed up the other one pretty good. She's totally blind now. Can you imagine that? How awful it must be to be blind?”

He looks at each girl in the room. The thing about gangbangers, he explains later, is that while they may laugh off fears of dying, the idea of being disabled for life never really occurs to them. They may be criminals, but they're also children, and they are possessed of all the usual childish feelings of invulnerability. So Virginia's fate, the idea that they, too, could be left less than whole by their choices in life, leaves them queasy.

“Of course, Virginia's
still
gangbanging, blind and everything,” Shabazz continues. “When her homeboys get ready to go, she just says, throw me
in the car, give me the gun, and tell me where to shoot. You got to respect that, right?”

“Shee-it,” a member of the group whispers, shaking her head. Even the girls of Amber Cottage are shocked at this story. Shabazz doesn't have to say anything more. His point is clear to Carla and the rest of the group. They can become Claudia. Or they can be Virginia.

A few weeks later, Carla pulls Shabazz aside and asks him if she could talk to Claudia again. “I just wanted to ask her a few things about college, you know,” she says with a shrug. “No big deal.” But she can't help grinning when she sees Shabazz doing that little nod of his.

The makeshift library on Unit K/L is cold tonight, and oddly silent. None of the usual sounds of too many kids jammed too long in too little space are coming from outside. The TV room stands empty and desolate, the orange plastic and chrome chairs in neat stacks, the folding tables leaning against the cinder block walls, the scuffed linoleum mopped almost clean. Barely audible, an adolescent voice can be heard weeping down some distant corridor, loud gulping sobs that suddenly cut off with the thump of a steel door shutting.

The unit is in lockdown, with every boy confined to his room, stripped to his underwear. Contraband was discovered earlier that day—a homemade knife and a set of master keys, both hidden behind a loose brick in the kitchen, sure signs of an escape attempt in the making. The kids are master smugglers—they have marijuana and other contraband tossed over the walls to them, passed over during visits, tucked inside mattresses and holes in the walls. After the find in the kitchen, every room has been searched, all personal possessions confiscated, the hall “runners”—juvenile equivalents of trustees—stripped of their privileges. Sister Janet and I had to beg the burly and taciturn “senior”—the new night man in charge of the unit—into releasing the writing students from their rooms for an hour so we could hold tonight's class. Unlike his predecessor, who avidly supported the class and
bent the rules each week to let us work past bedtime, this newly arrived senior seems to think it all a waste of time, perhaps even a threat to order on the unit. He sometimes appears suddenly in the library doorway, heavily muscled arms crossed, observing the proceedings with a dour expression on his face. The boys invariably fall silent in their jailer's shadow. Still, he agrees to let the class go on this night, and the boys slowly file into the room.

Most of the class is subdued. But just returned from his three-month visit to CYA, Geri is eager to read aloud from his autobiography in progress. As usual when Geri is reading, the class is enthralled—not only because his writing is among the best in the class, but because it sometimes seems he is telling all their stories. “I've gotten a lot farther along since my last time here,” he says. “You have a lot more time to yourself at YA.”

He has reached a point in his narrative where his mother, Mary, has been released from prison and is desperately trying to stay clean. Geri is a world-weary nine years old by this time, and he is constantly worried that his mom will lapse back into drug addiction and prostitution. She seems to be holding on, though. Then temptation suddenly appears during a visit to the home of one of Geri's friends. With that setup, his face assuming the look of uncertainty he always wears when reading aloud to the class, Geri resumes his story.

Just as we were ready to exit the room, my friend's mom Andrea jumped in front of us with a glass pipe in one hand and a plate containing crack cocaine in the other.

“What's the big rush, Mary?” My mom didn't say anything. She just stared at the glass pipe. Andrea began to wave the pipe in her face, then asked her if she wanted a hit.

My mom struck the lighter, then began to put the flame to the pipe until she remembered how much trouble it caused her. I could tell that she was very sorrowful because her hands began to shake, her eyes began to water, and the glass pipe fell to the ground and broke. I stood there watching my mom as she sobbed, until finally she snatched me by the arm and led me out of the house.

From that point on things seemed to be all right. My mom enrolled into a junior college . . . where she met a young fellow by the name of Sam. Sam was a nice man with a good paying job. He also used to box and every now and then he would show me a combination or two. I remember a time when Sam beat this huge white guy up for being rude to my mom. This was the shortest fight that I have ever seen! Sam hit the guy and the guy hit the floor and that was it. Sam was cool! Sometimes he would place me on his lap and
let me steer the car. One time I wrecked into a parked car, but Sam didn't care. In fact, he said that the car shouldn't have been there in the first place.

About six months later, Sam and my mom got married . . . Everything seemed to be going great. . . .

November 4. My birthday. I had the biggest birthday party there could ever be. All of my friends from the neighborhood were there and all of my cousins. Sam dressed himself as a clown with a big red nose and big red Afro. He also performed magic tricks and comedy shows. The funniest part that I remember about the party is when Sam spiked the punch. All of the kids were staggering around the house like old drunk bums off of the streets. I couldn't remember too much of what I had done, but the next day all I knew was I had a migraine headache and my whole room smelled like puke. On top of that, Sam and my mom got into a big argument over him spiking the punch. The argument went on for a couple of hours until finally Sam just walked out of the door. It seemed as if my mom didn't appreciate anything that Sam thought was cool. . . .

After that, what seemed to be the perfect marriage turned into a case of misery. Everything that the two of them had to say to each other turned into a big argument. Finally Sam got fed up with everything and decided to break off the marriage. I began to cry very painfully because I had lost the best stepdad in the world . . . I didn't know if it was my fault or if they just didn't care about my feelings or what. Every time my mom meets a neat guy, he turns out to be the wrong one. . . .

I found myself talking back and smart-mouthing. I began to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I didn't come home after school until ten o'clock
P.M.
one day. Once I got home, I was expecting to get a whipping, a yelling, a slap, or something. But I didn't get anything at all. Not even a “Where have you been?” or an “Are you okay?” I remember a time when I pulled a cigarette out of the pack and began to smoke it just to see what my mom would say. She thought it was cute, then began to laugh about it right in front of my face. That really made me mad. I wanted to curse her out, to hit her or something. But instead, I walked away. As I was walking, I began to ask myself questions like, Why doesn't she do anything when I mess up? and Does she really care about me? I turned around and headed back in the living room to ask her these questions, but she was gone.

I began to search through the house and call out her name, but she was nowhere in sight. I went into her room and called her name but she wasn't there. Just as I began to turn towards the exit, out of the corner of my eye, I could see small trails of smoke coming from the cracks of the closet door. I
slowly walked over to the door and touched it to see if it was hot. After that, I grasped the door knob and began to turn it until I heard a lot of movement coming from the closet. I took a deep breath and snatched the door open very quickly and stood there in disbelief. I couldn't believe my eyes. It was my mom sitting in the closet smoking crack. She was holding a glass pipe in her hand. Her eyes were big as two golf balls, her lips were chapped white, and she couldn't talk or do anything. I began to shed painful tears, asking God, Please let this be a dream. But this was no dream at all! It was like a worst nightmare come true. All along I had a feeling that something was wrong, but I never thought that this was the reason.

I ran out of her room, through the living room and out of the house crying for the fact that I thought that my mom had changed. But she hadn't changed at all.

I ran to the playground . . . and climbed to the top of a huge slide. I crawled over the safety bars, then balanced myself on the deck. I looked up and I could see my house with the screen door wide open just the way I left it. But I was crying and sweaty and I started to lose my grip. I gave a loud shout calling for my mom, but it was too late. I fell face first to the ground, landing on a broken bottle in the sand. The whole side of my face was busted up and blood gushed out. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital and the whole side of my face had painful staples in it.