Out of the Madness (8 page)

Henry took an interest in me and would advise me about putting my God-given intelligence to use. “Jerrold, you have a lot
of sense. I hope you grow up and make something out of yourself.” A lot of people would make this comment, but none of them
ever said how to do it. And Henry was a bit of a coward to me. He wouldn’t help Sherrie or me when we had to fight, wouldn’t
even come out of the house. Because he helped my mother supply her heroin, he became more important to her than we were: He
ate before us, and we would receive a savage beating if she detected the slightest disrespect of him.

After school one evening, Henry introduced me to fishing. He took me down to the pond with two rod and reels and a bucket
of worms he had dug up from his mother’s backyard. We sat very close to the cattails, where he schooled me about fishing.
First, he pointed at a long water moccasin that was relaxing in the cattails. “Don’t disturb it,” he said. Just beyond the
cattails he cast the lines into the water. He propped them up in the air using a Y stick and twisted the reels until the lines
were tight. We sat for a few minutes. I was told to watch the movement of the tip of the rod, which would signal a fish nibbling
or nudging the bait. I sat with little interest, paying no attention to the rod I should have been watching. I heard Henry
say, “There he goes.” I turned around in time to see the rod bend almost to the water. As suddenly as it had tightened, the
line slackened. “There are carps in this lake as long as a man’s leg,” Henry lectured. I went on to love the activity and
to catch fish as big as Henry described, some so enormous we had to go into the water and drag them out by their gills.

Although I believe the fishing time was special for Henry and my mother, I stayed detached during our time together. As long
as Henry or I cast the line, she would sit there and haul in the fish. Her skin had darkened from sitting in the sun all day.
I believed my mom unconsciously used the activity to combat her drug habit, though it never worked.

But Henry eventually did something that made me dislike him. He convinced my mother to sell drugs with him. They started selling
for Nick*, Shortleg Lee’s brother. Now my mother was a drug dealer again, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the
gun-toting gangsters kicked down our door like they had done before, only now they would probably kill us. Because their drug
habit came first, I knew things always went wrong when dope fiends dealt the dope, too.

Eventually my mother’s new career brought more of her free-loading fiend friends around. They kept death near us. One evening
I ran to the back door. As I jerked open the screen, this dope dealer who was visiting my mother kicked me hard between the
legs, so hard that it made me urinate on myself. I flew backward through the air and hit the ground. I saw him reach for his
revolver, then stop when he recognized me. When I walked back up to the door, he hit me in the face and told me never to run
up and startle him.

I said, “Excuse me. I didn’t know we were entertaining some panicky dope dealer. I thought I was allowed to run up to my back
door.” My mother just stood there and said nothing to the man for busting up her son. She probably was afraid to.

Along with oddballs like the panicky dealer were people like Big Mary. She came around more than the others. She weighed around
three hundred pounds, with rolls of flesh on her huge arms and legs. She was clever, her every intention ill. With her big
earrings, she reminded me of a fat voodoo woman. Big Mary always brought her skinny flunky husband with her when she came
to our house, and the black-toothed jerk would go through our icebox and eat every bit of food we had left.

Always with a pleasant yet insidious undertone, Big Mary would shoot us her nettled smile. I hated how she slithered my name
from her mouth like a lizard. “Jerrold, come talk to you Aunt Mary. Tell me what you momma’s been doing.” My mother was easy
to manipulate, and the vulture Mary pecked away every bread crumb she could. She would encourage my mother to waste her welfare
checks, always making sure she received her cut first. She knew she was depriving us by doing this, but Big Mary didn’t care.
That vulture did it to her own kids, so what the hell, free bread crumbs.

However, one of my mother’s friends, despite being as hooked on dope as the rest of them, did me a favor. She took me into
the bathroom to make me bathe. I wasn’t going to let her, but she won my confidence with her brisk but polite comments.

“Boy, I’ve seen many men before, so there’s no reason for you to be ashamed.” As I sat in our bathtub, she used a kitchen
knife to scrape the dirt from my ankles. I avoided her eyes as I watched the water blacken with dirt. The woman told me not
to be ashamed because it wasn’t my fault.

“But don’t let me see you let yourself go like this again, Jerrold,” she said. She said I should learn to take care of myself
and not depend on my mother. I never forgot her lesson, even after she stopped coming around.

When a kid had parents selling drugs, he did one of two things: moved with relatives or stayed away from the house as much
as possible. Junior, Sherrie, and I had to take the second alternative. When the house was crowded with these noisy dope heads,
when smoke, needles, and trash were everywhere, we would get the hell away. Sherrie would go to her boyfriend’s grandmother.
Junior would hop down to Big Mark’s house. And I would linger with the older boys, would go to some pool or conversational
gathering, or would play football in the wide field. Sometimes I would do just as Eric and I had done: sit on the money swings
and watch the noisy people. At night I still watched the stars.

If stars were most visible in the late hours, my mother must have seen a lot of them. Her new career kept her out all night
with Henry, among the black blackness. Sometimes she didn’t come home. During these times, Sherrie began to take care of Junior
and me. She made us come in the house, bathe, and lay out school clothes. When there was food, she made sure we ate, too.
In a way, we all were growing closer, leaning more on each other for support. Even in the darkest hours, at our ages of nine,
eleven, and thirteen, we were finding our inner strength, to help us deal with our daily tribulations.

But I never would have figured Junior could be brought from his privacy, his isolation, to defend Sherrie. It was a very late
night, when my mother again was gone, that Sherrie crawled into our room. The trip from her room to ours certainly didn’t
require her to crawl. But the heavy black rapist on her back did. She managed to fall on Junior and me, waking us up. In my
sleep I mumbled something about making the man wait in the living room until Momma returned. I had become so used to men being
in our house that I thought his visit was just routine.

But when he made the three of us stand by the closet, I understood. We weren’t nervous or frantic. We kept asking him what
he wanted and telling him that our mother would be back soon. In response he kept telling Sherrie to come with him. Finally
Junior bravely stepped forward. Junior, who had run from every bully in the projects, who hated violence like Gandhi, told
the man that no matter what he did to us boys, he wasn’t going to harm my sister.

Junior had a lot of undiscovered physical strength. He was very stocky and muscular, so he probably could have given the man
a good battle. And Sherrie and I would have helped, probably would have hit the man in the head with a hammer or stabbed him
with one of the kitchen knives. We were hard enough to do that.

Luckily, that wasn’t necessary. When the rapist went to check things out at the front door, we put Sherrie through our bedroom
window while shouting, “Run, run!” She sprinted to Mrs. Burnese’s house, where she knocked on Mrs. Burnese’s back door so
hard that the glass at the top of the door broke. Mrs. Burnese’s son, Charles, ran after the rapist with a pistol. But he
already had vanished.

In the dark, I ran through the Deadman units I knew so well to go call the police. They came a little late, about two hours
later. We spent the rest of that day on Mrs. Burnese’s living room floor and didn’t see our mother until the next day.

Man, my family was buried under all this pressure. Things definitely were coming all the way apart. Even throughout that night
at Mrs. Burnese’s, as I sat up sleepless, I doubted we would ever make it, unless we found an Almighty force, maybe one who
held the power of life and death in His hands.

I
t had been almost two years in the gruesome projects since the man tried to rape my sister. I had gotten to know Mrs. Burnese,
who was ancient in the projects, and her grandson, Sherrie’s boyfriend, enough to visit them more often.

As I visited, I had heard Mrs. Burnese talk about her episodes with ghosts. Most adults in the projects claimed to have had
an experience with one. She could tell the most terrifying stories. Always after nightfall, she would gather us children in
her living room on the hard tile near the two couches. While we sat in a semicircle at her feet, she would bring the spirits
alive.

Because her storytelling was so strong, it seemed as though the ghost would gather with us, would come from the dark pantry
or from upstairs to listen to her tales. She seemed to be such a truthful woman, so she left everyone in fear. After each
story, Mrs. Burnese, with her prunly wrinkled skin, so dark it looked burnt, and with her red, knowledgeable eyes and towering
height, would warn us to respect the dead.

Her favorite story was about a man with fiery red eyes. “He was big, black, and cold,” she said. She had seen him on a late
trip to the bathroom one night. On her way back to bed, she looked downstairs, and there he stood. “Hey, whatcha doin’ down
there?” she had screamed. But he just stood there, blank and cold and without expression. She said she knew he wasn’t anything
living. Yelling, she ran and jumped into bed with her husband. He grabbed his pistol and ran downstairs, ignoring her objections.

“What could he do with a ghost?” she said. But his disbelief had forced him to investigate. Downstairs, he found the doors
and windows secure, no sign of forced entry anywhere. “He must have come through the walls,” said Mrs. Burnese. After hearing
several of her stories, I stopped walking past the graveyard on my way to the shopping center.

Henry stayed around our house a few months after the rapist had come. On a night when dope money was hard to come by, he shot
up a lot of the dope and fled with the proceeds from the rest. This upset my mother severely. She stayed restless and upset
after his departure—but it was routine to us kids. She paced around the house, listened to old love songs on the radio, and
stared yearningly out the window. She and Henry had become two dope fiends in love.

We all were terrified of the house after the rapists. Sherrie began spending most of her time with Teresa or Mrs. Burnese;
Junior hung around more at Big Mark’s house. I still visited the library, reading volumes of books. We all were just stagnating.
We knew killers were going to come.

So when the candy man came instead, his arrival was a boon in disguise. This white man lived in a suburb to the west of Dallas.
He would arrive each evening to recruit black boys for his illegal candy business. Drunk Tom, who was a wino with a year or
two of college, told me to go with him. “You can feed your family,” he had said. That was all I needed to hear.

Sitting in a van with seven other kids, I was taught a speech that claimed the job was a design to keep young boys off the
streets and out of trouble by giving them a part-time job. Scott*, a cunning white man, also made sure I could count his money.

Scott was small: some of the older boys were twice his size. He tried to make up for this by talking sternly and barking orders,
something we tolerated for the money. But toward the black adults in the projects he acted benevolent and concerned. Everybody
saw through his act.

He would take about eight of us to a suburb, fill our carry boxes with candy, then make us work up and down a street, selling
his candy. As soon as we sold out, he would pick us up, reload the boxes, and take us to another street.

I recited his speech at every door: “Hello, sir. My name is Jerrold Ladd. I’m with the Junior Careers of Texas. This job is
designed to keep us black boys off the streets and out of trouble.”
It also makes us do illegal work because my boss is not licensed, doesn’t pay taxes on the money, and works us for under one
dollar an hour. We’ll soon have criminal records. He’s making a bundle, too
.

Some of the white people were sympathetic, but a lot of them were cruel. They slammed doors in our faces, and others called
the police on us. The police busted us in one city, took mug shots and fingerprints. They dragged Scott downtown, too; but,
after these incidents, he would just move to another city, until he was busted again. The white people sicced their dogs on
us. One of them had bitten a young boy real bad. Scott did nothing.

Scott sometimes took us to his pleasant apartment, where his wife and son lived with him. He would do his books and other
paperwork. He also would worship his scroll, a piece of paper in a box that he kneeled and prayed to for money and riches.
He invited us to see the ritual one day. While down there on his knees, he chanted strange words in his off-key voice for
about five minutes.

On another day, his wife asked me to stay home with her while Scott and the others went to the candy warehouse. I guess he
thought she had plans to, say, make me take out the trash or a similar service. But she wanted something else.

She was a sweet, blonde-haired woman. As soon as Scott and the crew left, she put on a gown and we sat on the couch. She wasn’t
wearing a bra, and her blue panties were showing.

“Jerrold, you seem like a real special boy, different from the rest. I like the way you ask questions and keep quiet.”