Out of the Madness (2 page)

Jerrold escaped by embracing Malcolm X’s credo of self-reliance, and by realizing early that knowledge was power and the key
to liberation. He became a voracious reader. He discovered his African heritage, with which he forged a new identity. “Knowing
the great accomplishments of my people, when they existed in their own civilizations, started a chain reaction that would
change the foundation of my mind.”

He also benefited from rare friendships with whites who helped him along and gave him important breaks. He learned from his
mistakes, fought for the right to be a father to his out-of-wedlock daughter, and strove to help his mother kick the drug
habit. By accepting responsibility for his own life and destiny, even when racism was a daily and deadly reality, Jerrold
understood the most important lesson of survival.

Out of the Madness
provides disturbing similarities between apartheid South Africa and America. In both societies the majority of blacks fight
for survival in violent worlds which breed the same frustrations, desperation, rage, bitterness, violence and self-destruction.
The men are often emasculated by the system, and many in turn abuse their women, neglect their children, and even kill each
other. In the mean streets of South Africa and America innocence dies young; children cannot afford to be children and live;
and few survive long enough to understand what it truly means to be a human being.

Jerrold Ladd survived the madness. The scars his soul bears have enabled him to pen a deeply felt and beautifully realized
memoir of what it means to be a young black male in America’s equivalent of the Alexandras and Sowetos of apartheid South
Africa. It is a story of survival with dignity and pride against insuperable odds. So universal is its message, and so sincere
its anguished voice, that it emphatically makes its appeal to the human heart by which we all feel, and the conscience by
which we seek to do right.

M
y body felt hotter than the sun scorch coming through my bedroom window. My mother had just told me my fever was 103, though
she didn’t need to. Slowly I turned onto my side and laid my scrawny arm on the sill. When I touched the metal trimming, heat
shot through my arm. I jerked away and saw the skin already blistering on my forearm. In the delirium of fever, I had forgotten
just how hot that window could become.

This was west Dallas housing project heat. Just like the life here, it was thick, foul, and hard to breathe. Today, a morning
in July 1977, the heat hovered over my bed like a vulture surveying its prey. Today, it was unbearable.

Normally, I could have withstood the heat, even the fever. They were not uncommon. But an unusual anger was sapping my strength,
an anger I couldn’t release. Two white police officers had almost let my mother die the previous evening.

Yesterday, I heard voices coming from the living room that did not belong in our house. I peeked around the corner of the
stairs and saw two men holding revolvers against the heads of my mother and stepfather, hollering about how tough they were.
My parents had swindled drug money from them. One of the men looked at me. I dashed past him, running through the back door
of our apartment as fast as I could to where my brother and sister were playing.

Sherrie, my older sister, made me run across the wide field to get the cops assigned to the fire station. I ran like a deer,
death, blood, and murder running through my head, my lungs screaming for air. I hoped that since the men had noticed me, maybe
they would spare my parents. Many parents had been shot in the head lately.

When I arrived at the firehouse, I told the Dallas police officers that men were in my house with guns and were about to kill
my parents. They took one look at me, this little black scrawny kid, then casually continued discussing a hunting trip. They
took their unconcerned time, no hurry, no rush.

If I had not been seven, bony to the bone from starvation, and in such confusion, I would have hit those white cops, pounded
them with my seven-year-old’s fury. The nerve! After I had sought help from the only other adults a kid is supposed to trust
besides his parents. The nerve! After I had told them that men were in my house with guns and were about to kill my mother.
The nerve! To make me race against time for my mother’s life, the most important person in the world to me, then be shown
that it doesn’t count, that it isn’t more valuable than a lousy conversation.

When the cops and I finally returned fifteen minutes later, I looked inside before entering. There was no blood on the floor,
no dead bodies lying around. The men had left. My mother wasn’t concerned at all. She told the cops everything was okay.

The following morning I was still upset over what had happened as I lay on my used flea-populated mattress. It stank from
the piss of other children, and was becoming soaked from my sickly sweat—mostly because there were no sheets. It was too hot,
anyway, for sheets.

The project heat. It was worse than the dirty clothes scattered around my room, worse than the mildew, the crusty white walls,
and the spiders, roaches, and other bugs that lived in the apartment.

I decided to get out of bed. I knew the best way to fight the fever, the heat vulture, and the anger was to get up, walk on
the hard quarry tile, which looked like a warehouse bathroom floor, and find some food. Before I could, though, my mother
entered the room with two pieces of chicken. My appetite left.

“Here, Jerrold, you want some chicken?” she asked while looking at her frail son, her youngest of three. But I just sat there,
shadowed by my woolly hair, looking with my big rabbit eyes, which missed nothing, examining my mother’s face. For the second
time in an hour she had spoiled my appetite.

“Are you still feeling bad?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Momma is going to go and get you something for that fever. Okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She, twenty-seven, thick long hair, baby smooth skin, attractive, sat the chicken down and left the room again. My appetite
came back. In a few minutes I had devoured the bird pieces, using my fury for strength. But I was still angry at her for almost
getting herself murdered. It was her fault. She should not have run away with that man’s money, the person who had sent the
hitmen to frighten her. Thank God that visit had been only a warning.

But I knew she would continue to do wrong, for she was compelled by a force more powerful than love, hate, hunger, or death.
More important than her children, her dignity, herself. She would do it again, and again, until she was forever damaged or
killed. As a teenager, I would hear the story from her, how her mother started her on dope.

Before moving to the west Dallas housing projects, she had lived with her mother and seven brothers and sisters in a weathered
shack in west Dallas, around 1957. As the oldest of eight, she had little time for anything but cleaning, cooking, and washing
and no time for games and other things young girls love to do. Although she wanted to go to school, her mother made her drop
out at age fourteen. After all, that’s what kids were for, she would show. Not to love, nourish, teach, or help plan for life,
but to clean, cook, and wash. But my mother had a plan to get away from her mother, who ran a slave camp, who stayed high
off prescription medication, and who was concerned mainly with men and not her children: Marry young.

When her young mind was closing on that answer, my future mother became pregnant with my sister, Sherrie. She was fifteen.
The baby’s father didn’t marry her. With a young child of her own, she couldn’t stick around a house with seven yelling, screaming,
starving, desperate brothers and sisters in a swamp of poverty. And she had no need for a sinister mother who would find a
way to use her for her welfare checks. So she met and married Paul Ladd. Then, sometime during the early years of their marriage,
my brother, Junior, and I were born.

I still longed for my father. I missed how he used to wrestle and put us on his tall shoulders, and missed how he would throw
big sticks into pecan trees and make us scramble at his feet, seeing who could pick up the most pecans. I missed the cool
house my father provided, where my brother and I would take the phone receivers and use them for walkie-talkies. And I missed
our clubhouse, which my sister and we boys spent days fixing up.

But these good times were a thing of the past, had ended when my grandmother started my mother. It happened in a bathroom
in one of the many shabby apartments we moved to, when one of her many migraines was at full blast.

“I know what you can take for that headache,” her mother had said. She handed my mother a syringe and a heroin pill. Then,
with the coaxing and reassurance that only a mother can give, she showed my mother how to work the drug into a batter and
inject it into her arm. She handed down the force that had made her neglect her own children and many others neglect their
children. It was the same force that would make my mother neglect us. She also handed down the force that destroyed herself.
In 1979 she died from a drug overdose.

After my mother became addicted, failure came fast within her marriage. She misused her minimum-wage-earning husband. She
broke him. She sold their appliances. She ran off with men who supplied her dope. She left us, her children, naked and freezing
on cold winter streets. Neighbors would keep us until our thoughtful dad, who cleaned, cooked, and washed, came home. One
night they had argued.

He left her that day, after they had a big fight in the living room because she had left earlier without letting my dad know
where she was going. Usually a quiet man, he shouted and called her names, believing she was returning from a boyfriend’s
house. In response, my mother hit him in the face several times, while doing her share of name calling. Fed up, my dad told
her to get out and to take her kids with her. That’s when my eyes lit up! I grabbed his leg and hung on; my brother joined
me.

“Go on, son, go on with your momma,” he kept saying.

“No, Daddy, we want to stay here with you.”

I remember screaming and kicking as she dragged me away from my father. I knew things were going to be dreadful without him.
Soon, he would have nothing to do with us. The next morning we had moved in with a lady in the projects. Weeks later we had
our own project unit.

*   *   *

The small ants, unlike the monster red ants usually rampant around the projects, had started a new trail from under my bed,
where I still lay. It led to the meatless chicken bone on the side of my bed. The ants scampered about, scavenging for meat
particles. Another trail led to my closet, where bundles of old clothes, which had not been washed for months, were oozing
foul vapors. That was my wardrobe. Up my windowsill, past the scorch, and down the outside bricks, the two ant trails merged
and disappeared in the brown grass of the front yard.

Moments later, my mother returned to my room with two Anacin, something she could get even when she couldn’t get food. I took
the pills while she watched. My throat was raw. She wasn’t high, as I clearly saw by her alert eyes, but give things a few
hours, a couple of minutes. She never stayed down too long. As always, she wasn’t able to hide her unhappiness, even while
standing there. Sometimes she tried, offered a smile, a kind word, some pocket change for candy. But most of the time she
stayed angry.

It was not a mean anger, but a desperate one—especially when she had a hard time getting another dose. Shout, whoop, beat,
the rage of the devil would come from her. What could I do? I was a scrawny kid who was so loyal to his mother that I would
have walked the earth barefoot for the Anacin she was addicted to or the cigarettes she demanded I borrow from strangers when
she was high. What could I do but be loyal to her?

Uneducated, unschooled to the streets, and vulnerable, she was easy prey for people who would take advantage of her. With
three children, my mother had been placed inside the projects by the federal housing people. With her new heroin habit, no
family support, and no husband, she slipped and began to crumble. She worried, cried, beat us, and dreamed in her heroin high.
Her face became a picture of worry.

What could she do with no knowledge, no skills, no ambition, and little support? And living in a place not unlike Hitler’s
concentration camps? So she worried, worried about getting the next heroin pill, which never failed to make the unyielding
hardness of her life go away.

My rage at the cops had really left with the eating of the chicken, so I went into the sparsely furnished living room, which
had one couch and a picture on the wall of some dogs playing cards. Junior had spread cards in strategic positions around
the living room, playing a game we called Army Man. Though muscular and strong, he was very gentle. That was his manner, caring
and affectionate. He was nine, with a narrow head and scalp-short hair. He had become quiet and despondent once we entered
the projects.

But Junior loved kids and kids loved him. He would push them around all day in a shopping basket from the Tom Thumb grocery.
To protect them from the scorch, he would cover the basket with an old blanket held up by a stick. The kids would laugh and
pretend they were on long journeys as my brother maneuvered the basket down twisted sidewalk paths, under bare trees, and
along glass-littered street curbs. He and the children would play all day, until the fear of deeds done in the dark sent them
hurrying home. He was remaining gentle, regardless of what my mother was doing.

My sister, Sherrie, who was the oldest, had probably left to get away from my mother and the house. She was being made into
a young mother—cleaning, mending, and scrubbing, though hardly any cooking took place—when she should have been studying,
maturing, preparing for life. Sherrie was very fair-complexioned, yellow, some would say, short and shapely. Her intelligence
was average, her loyalty to our mother vigorous. She was even more naive than our mother about the streets but was strong-hearted
and had a solid will. Trying to hustle up money, school supplies, clothes, and food kept her busy.