Out of the Madness (4 page)

For example, if you told Lee your age on your birthday, he would give you a crisp new dollar bill for each year you had lived.
If you were fifteen, you would receive fifteen dollars. We kids wouldn’t utter one word when police tried to pick us for information
about him. We were loyal to Shortleg Lee’s money.

One Christmas morning, Shortleg had his workers deliver fat hams to all the parents and expensive toys to all the children
near his unit—about three hundred people. Our block lit up like a street festival that day, for Lee also had his workers and
their women prepare a tasty feast, with music, dancing, and drinks, on his decorated front yard. Everyone treated Lee like
some sort of Godfather.

After the attempt on his life, Lee kept a squadron of men near and around him. He became more secretive than before, only
staying in his project unit a few days concurrently. But he never stopped selling dope while living in the projects, and he
was never caught there.

After the shoot-out, I went back home and explained what had happened to my family. My mother told me never to run toward
danger again. She was high. Sherrie and Junior sensed the inevitable and darted from the room like roaches when you flip on
a kitchen light. But I remained, pondering the shoot-out; I just couldn’t believe people could do that in this neighborhood.
Then, my mother screamed in her early morning, rough voice: “I need someone to go to the store for me.” My sister and brother
had sensed this, but I had been distracted. It tickled me to see how alert they had become about getting out of trips to the
store. But there was no way I could get out of this one, which I knew would be for cigarettes.

“Can I eat first?” I asked.

“No! Now hurry up, boy, before I beat your ass.”

Unafraid, I walked to her and got the money. I went out the back door.

Another whooping probably would not have bothered me. My hide was getting used to them. Sometimes I would turn to look at
her, dry-eyed, as she hammered her blows across my back, legs, and buttocks, just to let her see the anger in my face.

During times like this day, when my mother was in a bad mood, I didn’t mind going to the store. It was a way to avoid her.
If avoiding her meant just hanging around all day without eating, we would do it. Beatings, accompanied by loud shouting and
cursing, were a way to release frustration. Every kid I knew received these whoopings. Sometimes, up and down the noisy streets,
the kids yelled and screamed, “Okay, Momma, I won’t do it no moa.”

And we children didn’t just receive our whoopings at home. Some of us were beat in our front yards or in the middle of a street.
I hated the beatings that woke me from my sleep. It was difficult enough going to sleep. As I had, some children had been
made to take their whoopings standing wet and naked after leaving the shower. It borderlined on torture.

A redneck white family owned a store where sons of the owner wore guns like wild cowboys and charged ludicrous prices for
everything. So everyone shopped at the nearby shopping center, which had two grocery stores, a Laundromat, and several department
stores. Cigarettes were too expensive at the redneck store. They cost a mere dollar and five cents at the Tom Thumb. So I
took the hidden trail along the lake to get there.

Along the trail, a route I would walk a thousand times, I tossed pebbles into the calm lake, which was maybe a half mile long
and wide, with cattails and shrubbery growing along its edge. The trail veered down near the water, where snakes lounged in
the cotton trees and bushes. After getting back on the concrete of the street, I entered the shopping center, which had a
parking lot the size of a football field. Walking around the crowds on the sidewalk near department store facades, I mentally
prepared to see Syrup Head at the Tom Thumb. She was there every day.

She eased toward me like a shy little girl. “Do you have a cigarette?” she would say, nothing more, nothing less. Her hair
looked like a swarm of termites with creepy, ugly kinks in it, and she never wore shoes on her crusty feet. People in Elmer
Scott who knew Syrup Head said heroin had driven her crazy when she was young.

She used to live in the George Loving section, which was so foreign to me that it could have been another country. She had
been a fierce fiend: first cigarettes, then weed, then heroin. On Rupert Street, in Edgar Wards, she had openly sold her body
simply to share someone’s dope, even as a teenager, and desperate men who wanted cheap sex had abused her that way. But one
day she had threatened to call the police on a dealer after he refused to give her credit. Wanting to get rid of her, he had
laced her heroin capsule. Now, in her thirties, she remembered only her very first chemical habit, cigarettes.

Three Finger Willie was also at the Tom Thumb that morning. He had been given this nickname because his left hand had three
fingers missing. He looked like a pencil with a black wig where the eraser should have been. People rumored that he was an
ax murderer. He would stand in front of the store, swinging at invisible objects. I dreaded going to the store when he was
there; the thought of dismembered and mutilated bodies, especially mine, horrified me more than any shoot-out. I avoided him
and bought the cigarettes.

While my mother lay on the living room couch, smoking her cigarettes, I fixed a bowl of rice, being careful to rinse all the
roach eggs from the bowl, and a glass of water. There was nothing else to eat. When she was done with her cigarette, my mother
came into the kitchen.

“I’ll be back in a while. Wash those dishes up. Tell Sherrie I said to cut up and fry that chicken.”

“But, Momma, it’s not my time to wash dishes,” I argued, as I always did, even when it was my time.

“I said wash those dishes. Now shut up talking back.”

After she left, I heard the usual rumble that signaled my brother’s approach. I looked out the back door. He was making his
daily rounds in his shopping basket. Several kids had squeezed under the blanket.

“Junior, go tell Sherrie Momma said to come cut this chicken up.”

“You go tell her,” he screamed back. He hurried around the corner and was gone. I began to wash the dishes.

Another sink full of pots and pans, roach eggs and roach wings. I dreaded this. Every day that’s all my brother, sister, and
I did was wash, scrub, and slave for Momma. These were not ordinary chores a woman would give her child. One thing about my
mother, heroin made her want the entire house cleaned, meticulously, from top to bottom. Whenever she was high, the cleaning
came before everything, eating, doing homework, even sleeping. If one of us went to bed without washing dishes, he or she
could expect to be awakened: with a belt, shoe, extension cord, stick, broom, lamp, or fist. “Wash out Momma’s panties, massage
Momma’s neck.” And if I said no, the cool words “Do it for Momma” and “That’s Momma’s baby boy” did me in every time. Kindness
was so rare.

When she wasn’t high, the dishes usually would sit in the sink for weeks. The kitchen was creepy. The rusty shelves, where
sewage plumbing stuck out, were filthy. Our pots went there. Too many roaches and rats, alive and dead, were under there,
too. No matter how hard I tried, I just never could get all the grime, chicken skin, and food from the pots. So I let them
sit filled with water on the cabinet. I was taking a chance because if she came back disappointed, I would get a whooping.

To find Sherrie, I walked over to the next unit, where her friend Teresa* lived. Her family was a replica of my own, with
a brother, a sister, and a heroin momma who slaved her like my mother did my sister. Knocking on the back door, I called to
Sherrie, “Momma said come and cut the chicken up.”

“Dog, she make me sick, always running off and expect me to cook. They ain’t my kids,” she said when she came out, referring
to my brother and me.

She always acted rebellious around Teresa; but I knew she didn’t mean any harm toward us. She came anyway.

“Teresa, I’ll be back later,” she said. I walked ahead of her, giving her privacy if she wanted to whisper some stuff.

Onward our lives went during 1977 and 1978, still our first or second year in the projects, washing roach dishes, running
from bullies, cutting up chickens. Around then, my mother started having men come over and stay in her room. She usually came
from in there high, and after several months of her lying, claiming they were only friends, I put things together. I really
knew the truth when I heard women say my mother shouldn’t do that in front of her kids and heard kids call my mother a bitch
to my face. I let her think I was ignorant, though, so that she could preserve her dignity. But I despised every man that
came over to take advantage of my poor mother. I let them know it, too, through looks, snarls, frowns, and much later with
fists and knives. The ones who stayed awhile, some weeks, some months, earned my respect.

Most of the time, though, the men would not stay. This meant that there constantly was a different man as a father in our
lives. You can imagine how confused we became as children. The minute we adapted to the new one, he was replaced by another
one. For women like my mother, there was an unspoken rule that said you had to take the kids along with the woman. Some of
the men would feign interest in us to adhere to this. Others she saw were really sincere, I think.

Of all the men she would meet, I was most impressed with Pie. He was short, thick, and wore a beard. Since he was from Oak
Cliff, a black neighborhood south of the projects, he knew little about project life. Even though he was in his late twenties,
he still lived at home, where we visited only once. His mother hated the idea of him being with a woman who had three kids.

But my mother, regardless, still could attract a good man. So, eventually, he moved in and became our father. Pie quickly
took responsibility for teaching Junior and me during the few months he lived with us. He taught us how to make up our beds,
fold sheets, and sort laundry. He made sure we got up on time to go to school. He would sit me under his arm, where I could
watch my heroes, the Dallas Cowboys, play football—every TV in the projects would be tuned to the Cowboys’ games. At the first
meeting of father and sons, he introduced us to personal hygiene. Afterward I was so excited I took a bath with Comet and
washed the tub out with soap. He had meant vice versa.

The one and only Christmas that Pie spent with us, he woke Junior and me up early Christmas morning. “Get up, boys,” he said
in his plain, reserved way. “I have something to show you.” I figured he had gotten us some of those Salvation Army green,
wooden toys, the kind every child knew and hated, so I wasn’t all that excited. But Pie had done more, had gone to the limits
to make us happy. He held his hands over my eyes, while burying Junior’s face in his hip, and guided us down the stairs. Once
we made it into the living room, he uncovered our eyes and let us take a look. When my vision adjusted, I saw the hottest
toy that year, a cops-and-robbers racetrack, which Pie had already assembled on the hard tile.

“So you think y’all a be happy with that?” Pie asked, smiling. Then, as Junior and I dove for the track, he let out a hearty
laugh, the first and last one I ever heard from him. Since it was still six in the morning, we played until we fell asleep,
sometimes Pie joining in, right there on the floor. He would leave us at times to help my mother put the finishing touches
on the big Christmas meal we would gorge on later. In time our sister woke and began feverishly to unwrap her new clothes
and games. Later that evening, my brother and I walked around the house looking like we had swallowed bowling balls, from
the three or four plates we’d eaten.

But there was only so much Pie could do for us in a couple of months before things turned bad. Money eventually came up missing,
valuables misplaced. Pie and my mother often got into shouting matches. One day she threw a glass at him as he stood at the
bottom of the stairs; that event marked the end of their relationship. He moved out a week later. If Pie had stayed, he could
have helped us become one of the minimum-wage families.

But other men, I learned in 1978, were out just to take advantage of a weak, unschooled woman. It didn’t matter, though; every
new man she had we called Daddy. That’s how bad we longed for a father figure, then, at our young ages. None of them was worth
a damn. Some of them I despised. One of them, Charles*, hit her, a woman, in the face.

It happened after the project authorities transferred us to another unit, so that they could remodel the former one. By then
her temper had become so bad that she would scratch and claw the men when she became upset. Charles, who lived with his mother
several blocks away, was in his early twenties. He had been visiting our bare apartment often and locking himself away with
my mother. One day, while I stood in the door and watched, she and Charles wrestled in her bedroom. She tried to pick his
eyes out. He angrily pinned her to the bed and tightly gripped her neck. Suddenly he reached back with his right fist and
slammed it into her face, twice. She let out a high-pitched wail. Before I could react, he darted past me down the stairs
and fled through some empty apartments.

She lay there holding her eye and moaning. Then she turned toward me and pointed. “What kind of a son are you, stand there
and let your momma get beat up? Get out! Get out!” she screamed.

I ran to the kitchen, got the biggest butcher knife I could find, and ran after Charles. But he had disappeared.

I wouldn’t see him until years later, when I was a young teenager carrying guns. I saw him walking, though he didn’t recognize
me. I was finally gonna give him what he deserved, a bullet in the head for busting up my mother. He wouldn’t know where it
came from. My anger was building as I followed him for two or three blocks. I was about to shoot him, in broad daylight. But
grace was with him that day, because I simply changed my mind and went the other way.