Out of the Madness (3 page)

Past the cracked wood of the front door, the torn screen, and the porch, another ant trail, made from the muscle red kind,
etched its way toward the nearby ant bed on the side of our project unit. I followed the trail of the single-minded worker
ants, who were uncompromising in their drive to beat winter, to beat the insanity of failure. I sat barefoot on a lime-green
pickle bucket some kid had left near the ant bed.

Like the ants, the project units were in the thousands, on the west side of the Trinity River. The Trinity River, as distinct
as the former Berlin Wall, was a clear boundary between the projects and north Dallas, the white side of town. Several simple
bridges allowed travel over it. Within the Trinity, marsh and grass hid stolen cars, snakes, and dumped bodies. The river
smelled rotten; and the smell often drifted into the projects, settling on the buildings.

The vast projects were divided into three groups: Elmer Scott, George Loving, and Edgar Wards, with a network of trails connecting
them. Eight apartments were carved from each unit and numbered like jail cells. Made of bricks, they looked as if someone
took a few old dirty chimneys, molded them together, and cut out windows. Clotheslines crossed in the backyards. Inside, roaches
and rats roamed throughout the night, in our iceboxes, closets, and beds. Spiders and their webs were in every corner. The
toilets always flooded; we sometimes relieved ourselves outside on the ground. Hot water was rare. Didn’t matter to me: I
never took baths anyway.

There was heat, but no air-conditioning. Some families had fans that they placed in wide-open windows to bring in the cooler
air, when it was cooler. Others had old-fashioned blow fans that stored insulated water in small water tanks. But most families,
like mine, had nothing. On long hot Texas nights, Junior and I usually tossed, turned, and sweated, unless a cool late night
breeze brought us temporary relief. We would lie awake sometimes, waiting on that breeze. But when it passed us by, we would
toss and sweat all night. Then the heat would wake us early in the morning.

Noise echoed throughout the units day and night, with everyone sitting on his or her porch when the apartments became unbearably
hot. Radios would blare music, mostly blues and mellow jazz. Crowds of young, lusty boys and teenage girls with their babies
would gather on the corners, on porches and in parked cars. But not too close to the dope dealers.

Since there were few streetlights that worked, the dark darkness gave the place an eerie, wasted look. Teenage boys roamed
though the three sections late at night, to visit girls or the marijuana house in George Loving. Fights, rapes, and arguments
were as common as the fear and grief that gripped this place.

Set up near the projects, across the wide fields, were rowdy gambling shacks and E-Z joints. Within these places the pimps,
freeloaders, people trying to make rent money, and gamblers congregated. They gambled away hundreds of dollars, while old-timers
kept card and domino games rolling through the night. Soul-food restaurants established by people who used to be in the drug
business served plates of food until early morning.

Small colonies of houses shared borders with the projects. Families from the projects who had been able to scrape up extra
money lived in these Mississippi wooden shacks with holes in the walls and roofs.

I lived in noisy Elmer Scott, near the lake and the grade school Jose Navarro, with babies, kids, and thousands of people.
There were two distinct groups of families. The first was those who had minimum-wage jobs, who sacrificed and let their children
eat daily hot meals and wear decent clothing. The second was those who had totally given up. They were thieves, hustlers,
dope dealers, and lost dreamers, like my mother. Being content with day-to-day survival was a forced way of life.

But some people, like Ms. Ruthy Mae, didn’t seem to belong to either group. She was an older woman with two daughters in their
early twenties and Chris, her five-year-old son. She had been in the projects a long time. She kept to herself, hardly ever
going outdoors. From her house, which had junk stacked everywhere and an old-fashioned blow fan in the kitchen window, Ms.
Ruthy Mae gave like Jesus. She gave us butter, bread, chicken, and anything else my mother sent us to borrow. She gave us
clothes, even though they had the decadent odor of a trash mine. She never turned us down unless she just didn’t have it.
She never spoke unkind words, never raised her voice. She wouldn’t be around for long, though.

Then there were people like me, who observed every word, every facial expression, and every event. I had to know how things
worked, white policemen, drug addicts, project concentration camps. I bugged everyone I thought had an answer or a clue. The
torture everyone endured was as much a part of me as my own fingers, as livid as the scorch vulture.

Outdoors, the ants were still nonstop near my green pickle bucket. The ant bed, dead in the middle of the several trails that
branched out from it, held the ants’ harvest. No matter how far they ventured, or how difficult it was dragging a grasshopper
or spider, they always faithfully returned to the nest. The ones leaving the nest seemed to be more vibrant, more energized,
than the ones entering, who seemed burdened down. Antennas gesticulating, they scavenged until they found something edible
to return to the queen. It was obvious that the force that drove them through death, storms, and stomps of giants was natural.

But there was a group even more loyal than the ants; and their trails to the lair were just as visible. Unlike the ants, they
worked not only in the daytime, but also at night. In droves, from all directions, they would converge on the several corners
where the dope dealers worked all day, pumping their product into these people. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week,
men mostly in their early thirties accepted TVs, food stamps, clothes, and anything of value for the dope. Unlike the ants,
the dope fiends were not bothered. There was no one to stomp their heads or scatter their trails, as long as they continued
to come.

From my pickle bucket, while my weak body warned me that it was time to go lie down, I looked to the corner. I saw some dope
dealers working. Nearby, a boy named Mooky was practicing on his tiny drum set, which his mother had saved her money to get.
His mother had four children and was from the minimum-wage group. When upset, she would viciously beat poor Kevin, Mooky’s
older brother, even though she wasn’t on drugs. Her husband had left, and she had to move to the projects. She stayed frustrated.

Mooky was about four years old. In his Salvation Army clothes, he had cocked his head to the side and was listening to the
changing rhythms of the drums, as if they held the answers to every deep mystery. The steady thrums of the beats were echoing
off the brick walls.

On the horizon, the sun was setting. On the ground, the ants were quitting. But the dope fiends were scampering in now from
all directions, letting nothing keep them away.

“Mooky,” his mom said, “it’s time to stop.”

On that day, I made a personal promise that if I did nothing else, I would never become like my mother or these people. I
would just say no. However, I didn’t realize that most of them had thought it was that simple, too. But no matter how intelligent,
full of courage, motivated, and strong they had been, the ghettos, slums, and places like the projects had broken them all.
Now, because my mother, my life guide, had birthed me right in the middle of the mud, the odds against my survival were stacked
higher than the Empire State Building.

As a testimony to society’s power, the black mothers and fathers, who could have explored space, built cities, and pioneered
new medicine in America, kept coming for their dope. I wondered if just for one night the steady drum of their footsteps would
end.

Black parents rose in the mornings and turned into the living dead. They traveled back and forth to the corners, where they
brought the harvest and purchased heroin. They locked themselves in dank bedrooms and bathrooms. They tied straps tightly
around their arms, making their veins stick out. They sucked cooked pills out of bottle tops and into needles. With the injections,
release eased into their veins, their precious souls. Perhaps they glimpsed happy times, strong communities. Maybe they saw
themselves holding up torches of guidance, lighting the way for their children. Maybe they felt pure courage deep within,
courage they had given up. Somewhere inside were men and women of intellect and capability trying to get out. Or did they
see their tasks as so overbearing until they just refused to fight? So they abandoned their pride and families, their manhood
and motherhood, their responsiblity to their children. And every day they hid the shame of this refusal behind the guile of
dope.

A
week or two later, still in July 1977, I stood outside, just to breathe the fresh morning air. I wanted this to be a routine
early morning, one when most of the evil and the people who had not gotten enough sleep during the night, like my family,
were still asleep. Leonard Brown, Ugly Biggun, stood on the porch a unit down. What had brought that rascal out this early?
I hated that bully, that fourteen-year-old who beat up little kids like me. He acted like he was so bad among our ranks but
would act so friendly around older, bigger guys.

Biggun was slim but strong for a fourteen-year-old. He had a wide, flat chest and ripples in his stomach. His pea-size, wrinkled
head, with flaming red eyes in slit sockets, was a constant joke. Several months before, when we first moved in, Biggun had
been okay. The dummy had even tried to teach me something.

“It’s a simple trick,” Biggun had said one day as we walked together to the redneck store to buy a pack of Kool Lights for
my mother. “All you do is take off at full speed and hold that speed until the person gets tired. Then let him get close to
you. Suddenly slide into the ground, and he’ll go past you.”

I listened curiously as he continued. “Get up and go another direction. He’ll give up; they all give up. … You better learn
it because you’ll need it around here,” he had warned. If Biggun had reason to run from anything, if he couldn’t scare it
away with his face, I certainly had better learn the escape, I thought. I used the trick the next day, when ugly Biggun went
back to being a bully and chased me down the street. But with a little improvisation of my own, I was sliding into the hard
ground and kicking up a cloud of dust as he ran after me. I used his own worthless trick on him.

As I watched from my front porch, men got out of two cars and walked toward Shortleg Lee’s* apartment. They were all skinny,
and they all had Afros. The Afro bandits.

No matter how many times they would do it, I could never believe that men would get out of those cars and roam through here
to kill somebody. Kids were around here. But here they were again. I ran into the house and peered past the shades of the
living room. I was in shock, but still excited. Ugly Biggun ran into his house, too. The Afro bandits were seven strong, with
pistols and pump shotguns, and one held a jar of dark liquid. It seemed they planned to catch the dope dealer Lee while he
slept. His time had finally come. His workers were not in sight. But to my surprise, the Afro bandits walked past his apartment
and surrounded my young friend Mark’s house. They were going to kill Mark’s family.

They fanned out around the front door. One of them knocked. Mark’s fat, double-chinned mom answered. I ran out the door, going
to get a close-up of the massacre.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“Where is Lee?” said the Afro bandit.

“Lee doesn’t live here.”

“Tell Lee some friends are here to see him.”

“My kids are in here,” she moaned in a tremulous voice. “Lee doesn’t live here, I told you.”

“Well, which one of these apartments does he live in?”

She lied. “I don’t know.”

They continued to badger Mark’s mom. Meanwhile, I followed two Afros who went around to guard the back door. Soon, a third
one came back there to round them up. “We’ve found Lee,” he coldly said. I trailed them loosely.

As they were reassembling in front of Lee’s apartment, two more were going around to prevent escape through the back. The
head Afro knocked on Lee’s door once, then twice. He waited, then knocked again. No one answered. He signaled for his men
to retreat. They slowly walked backwards, maybe ten paces. Then the man holding the jar stepped forward and threw it against
the upstairs window. The smell of gasoline erupted in the air as the gangly Afro men unloaded their weapons while backing
slowly toward the two cars. They left in a hurry.

The minute the gunfire began, I hit the ground facedown. All children would hit the ground when they heard gunfire, as though
they had been trained in the military. The gunfire sounded like a sound track from some war movie. Mark jumped from his second-story
window in fear and ran for his aunt’s house in Edgar Wards. Before rising up, I waited several minutes through the silence
that comes after several loud explosions. The gunfire made people scramble from their apartments. Lee’s splintered window
frame was smoking. He emerged unharmed and walked toward the parking lot with a pistol; he knew he had to show the people
he wasn’t afraid, or they would lose their respect.

Shortleg Lee, a man in his early thirties, was well known, not notoriously recognized, as some dope dealers, but known, like
a natural landmark, building, or park. His right leg was lame, so he dragged it when he walked. He had short napped hair and
a beer belly under a flat chest. He always wore blue jeans and a T-shirt. His manner was quiet and soft-spoken, always smiling.
He also was extremely secretive. Some young black woman had rented a project unit for Shortleg Lee, and that was where he
spent his days.

Only his dope comrades, who worked several street corners, knew anything about him, his past, or his family. We common people
were kept ignorant. But it was obvious Lee had money, a lot of money. He bought his twenty-one-year-old girlfriend a new Mercedes-Benz.
But he didn’t openly flaunt his money or carry it in big wads like the few younger dealers. He captured the people’s yearning
for money in another, insidious way.