The Corner (77 page)

“You next,” he tells R.C.

For what’s left of the night, DeAndre stays with the boys, drinking and smoking, his talk crossing back and forth between ordinary, prideful bluster and something truer to the day’s experience.

“I got to be a father to him,” he tells his crew. “I’m gonna do better for him than got done for me, and I’m gonna be up there with him so he knows who I am. My child gonna know me.”

Later he walks back down the hill with Dinky, telling his cousin that he’ll be off the corners completely for a while. What business they have together at Gilmor and McHenry now falls to Dinky; he’ll watch the shop while DeAndre looks to his son.

“He a tough little boy, too,” DeAndre assures his cousin. “Only cried but the one time so far.”

The next morning, he’s up later than he means to be, tired from the previous night. Still, he and Fran arrive at Sinai by early afternoon. They split up in the lobby: Fran, on a mission to find a child-safety seat for the ride home; DeAndre, heading straight for the maternity ward.

“Name?” asks the woman at the security desk.

“McCullough. DeAndre McCullough.”

“And you’re here to see?”

“My son.”

He says it with such obvious delight that the woman can’t help smiling.
When DeAndre walks into Tyreeka’s room, she’s awake, resting, her lunch half-eaten in front of her. The baby is stirring in his bassinet—mouth open, eyes shut, arms outstretched, tiny fingers curling into air.

Tyreeka is not the same; not by any stretch of imagination is she the same. She watches DeAndre as he negotiates around the hospital bed, leaning over to kiss her lightly on the forehead. Though drawn from the ordeal, her face is radiant. But it’s her manner, assured and regal, that conveys her new status. From the first, she had planned to hold DeAndre to her; now she believes she has means enough to do this.

Looking down at his son, DeAndre can sense as much. He can step outside himself long enough to acknowledge that this young girl, once a plaything, will now and forever be more than that. She might hold him, she might not. But never again will Tyreeka Freamon be incidental. At this moment anyway, he accepts all claims and obligations. And for the first time ever, perhaps, DeAndre concedes to his girl.

“You can pick him up,” she tells DeAndre.

“He asleep.”

“No he ain’t. He wakin’ up.”

DeAndre reaches into the bassinet and gathers up the bundle. He sits on the edge of the hospital bed, propping the newborn on his knees at arm’s length.

“Damn,” he says, amazed.

He’s still there, still captivated, when Fran arrives. She walks to the bedside, takes Tyreeka’s hand, then backs off to watch her son watching his son.

“Dre, what are you thinkin’?”

“Huh.”

“What are you thinkin’?”

DeAndre shrugs. “I’m not thinkin’ about anything.”

Fran shakes her head. “How,” she asks, “can you sit there and not think of anything?”

“I did it in school all the time,” says DeAndre dryly.

They all laugh, even Fran. But then she catches herself and dishes out her token disapproval: “That’s sad, Andre.”

“It’s the truth,” he says quietly.

Fran looks beneath the bassinet, taking stock of the hospital freebies. “We should ask them for extra. They got a baby-care package that they give if you ask for it.”

Fran leaves to talk to the nurse, comes back arms laden with supplies,
then goes back out to work the nurse for a full package of diapers, pausing in her efforts only long enough to tell DeAndre he’s not holding the baby correctly.

“I know how to hold him,” he counters.

“You got to support the head.”

“I got him, Ma.”

For the exodus from the hospital, Fran is in charge—so much so that DeAndre and Tyreeka both are bristling by the time they get to Riggs Avenue. In their eyes, Fran has standing as a grandmother only; beyond that, the child-parents intend to take full possession of their baby.

That they set up their nursery on Riggs Avenue, rather than on Boyd Street, is telling; that they spend the first two weeks there, visiting no one and limiting Fran to occasional phone calls and afternoon visits, makes the point clear. Fran had counted her coming grandchild among the few remaining reasons to keep trying, to stay at arm’s length from the corner. She fully expected Tyreeka and DeAndre to struggle, to lean heavily on her for advice and support. But for them, the child provides an opportunity for a clear declaration of independence.

In these early days, DeAndre settles in at Tyreeka’s aunt’s house, willingly submerging himself in a daily routine that spins around the needs of the baby. In the confines of Tyreeka’s tiny second-floor room, he is moved at the wonder of his son, and he acts toward Tyreeka in a way that exceeds even her own expectations. He defers to her in all things natal; her every pronouncement regarding the baby is gospel.

Motherhood changes Tyreeka in ways previously unthinkable. Once a needy and lonely girl, she is now dispensing to this newborn a degree of energy and love that suggests a wisdom beyond her fourteen years. Once a corner girl, she has begun to grow into something more, finding within herself a reservoir of maturity that is as inexplicable as it is surprising. Once, she wanted DeAndre and whatever good times he might show her. Now, for the child, she has started to think about more than that.

When DeAndre holds the baby, changes him, or gets him to laugh or coo, she is there to encourage him. When DeAndre talks about going back to school, she tells him how smart he is, how easy it would be for him to get a general equivalency degree. When he insists that he’ll have a new job by year’s end, she is careful to show him no doubts.

These first days on Riggs Avenue are an idyll, a time when, for once,
two children of Fayette Street are able to make dreams meet expectations. Here, for an instant or two, they open up to the newborn and to each other, confident that this fresh life will not betray them or prove them inadequate. Elsewhere, a commitment turns out time and again to be the prelude to abuse and disappointment, but here, in Tyreeka’s bedroom, the baby takes what they have to offer and gives back only need and joy and meaning. Amid this, all the petty fights, the cheating, the insults of their last year together are forgiven, if not entirely forgotten.

Their allegiance holds fast through the second weekend in December, when they finally bring the baby down to visit Fran on Boyd Street. There, they occupy the third floor of the rowhouse, with DeAndre lugging the bassinet, stroller, diaper bags, and clothing satchels up the steps and recreating the room on Riggs Avenue as best he can. But Fran remains the outsider in what has, up until now, been DeAndre and Tyreeka’s best adventure so far. They know they can do this; they are doing it. As far as DeAndre is concerned, his mother has no place other than to keep Marvin at bay and otherwise admire her son’s efforts at fatherhood.

Fran’s advice goes unheeded, her experience counts for little. And when she asks to feed her grandson, DeAndre tells her she can’t.

“You not supposed to let anyone but the mother feed the baby,” he tells her. “Otherwise, the baby won’t learn to know its mother.”

Fran goes off into a rave. “Who in hell have you been talking to? You don’t know what the hell you talking about.”

DeAndre stands his ground; Tyreeka told him this and Tyreeka’s word is enough for him. Only the mother feeds the baby.

“So you can’t give him a bottle neither, right?”

“The father can do it sometimes.”

Fran rolls her eyes and stalks around the kitchen, savaging her son’s assertions, talking about how she raised DeAndre up and raised DeRodd up and knows more about mothering than the two of them will ever know. DeAndre retreats upstairs.

“For all I get to do with that baby, why you even come down here?” she shouts after him.

“You think you so damn smart.” DeAndre yells back. “You got something to say about everything. You can’t run your own life but you tryin’ to tell us how to raise our child.”

Fran follows him up the stairs. “Andre, that child gonna know his mother no matter what. You all is bein’ ridiculous.”

Ridiculous or not, they shut Fran out, returning after the weekend to stay with Tyreeka’s aunt and enjoy another week of fairy-tale existence.

For many of Tyreeka’s friends, the arrival of a baby is treated with similar delight and absorption for a period of weeks or months at most. Then, the distractions of adolescence take hold and they go back to the corners, to the dance clubs, to the house parties and movies and new trysts with new boys. The babies go to grandmothers, or great-aunts, or great-grandmothers—to be raised with their birth mothers serving, at best, as older sisters and, at worst, as casual acquaintances.

Tyreeka, by contrast, chooses to stay at home, day after day, and do the work of raising DeAnte. As she sees it, the school semester can still be salvaged: She’ll miss three weeks, ask for makeup work and extra credit, then take finals with the rest of her class. Come January, she will get the baby up in the morning, feeding and dressing and playing with him, then dressing herself and catching the bus to Carver. With her aunt working, it will fall to her grandmother to watch DeAnte for as long as it takes Tyreeka to attend school and then catch the same bus back. It will be doubly hard for her to study and graduate, but now, for herself and DeAnte as well, she feels compelled to try. A year ago she was out on the corners with DeAndre and his boys, cutting class, forgoing class for a trip to the harbor or an afternoon movie. Now, because of DeAndre’s son—her son—she’s thinking and talking in the future tense.

“I’m not quitting school,” she tells DeAndre. “I’m not goin’ to end up on welfare like all these other girls, sittin’ out on the steps every day with their babies.”

And DeAndre, still in the thrall of this domestic interlude, can only agree. Stores have been hiring for Christmas shopping season; he’ll go out and get a job, maybe even talk to Rose Davis about finishing school.

“We get enough money, we get a place of our own,” he tells his girl.

Once, such a fantasy would have meant everything to Tyreeka, and when DeAndre speaks the words, she gives him casual agreement. But Tyreeka is still worried about DeAndre, worried that he’ll drift back to the corner, and worried, too, that she’ll be drawn into that world with him. Here, at her aunt’s house, she’s on the bus route to her high school. Here, she gives a share of her AFDC check to her aunt and has room and board and her grandmother to watch the baby when she’s in class. At long last, she has something approaching adult guidance and support. But with DeAndre, she knows, every day would be a question.

“I don’t want our son growin’ up like we did,” she tells him. “I don’t want him to be doin’ the things we did.”

For a while longer, DeAndre spends days and nights in the makeshift nursery, assuming the role of father to the extent he understands it. This means providing, and for a time, DeAndre is able—by loan and by barter, by begging from his mother and by calling in some small profit from Dinky—to spring for Pampers and some baby outfits. Everything else is soon beyond his means. Shoes, car seats, jolly jumpers, toys: DeAndre feels the pressure with every need or want Tyreeka can express or he himself can imagine. Worse, he’s governed by his standing obsession with material status, his best-brand, damn-the-expense insistence on Weebok or Nike shoes or Disney store clothes, and yes, a gold name-necklace for his child.

“My son,” he tells Tyreeka one day, “won’t be wearing off-brand shit.”

“Andre, how that baby gonna know what he’s wearing?”

“I’ll know.”

“And what about when you locked up?”

“He’ll know I was out there makin’ money for him.”

Tyreeka balks. The same girl who used to measure DeAndre’s devotion in the money she could make him spend, now tells the father of her son that all those things would be nice and fine, but what the child needs more is a father’s presence.

“You go back on the corner, you might get shot or locked up,” she argues. “How you gonna help your son if you dead? How you gonna help him if you in prison?”

DeAndre, who can sense what’s coming, begins to battle with her on this point. He cannot lose himself forever on Riggs Avenue. He cannot stay in this nest, changing diapers and warming formula and burying himself in domestic quietude. He has tried the straight way before, wearing Wendy’s blue pinstripe and taking home minimum wage for a handful of work shifts. And for a few days shortly before Christmas, he drifts around West Baltimore and the near suburbs, filling applications—the stores at Westside, the Toys ’R’ Us on Route 40—but he’s pretending to a plan for which he has neither faith nor patience. His mother, he knows, is slipping; she can’t sustain the promise that she brought out of detox. And his father is more lost than ever; Gary has been so hungry for capers lately that he hasn’t even found the time to come see his grandson. Come right down to it and nothing is waiting on DeAndre McCullough save the corner itself.

He tells himself that it’s just temporary, just a quick run to turn a few packages and get enough money together. After that, all the better plans will be back on the table. But no one ever goes down to the corner telling himself anything different. No one tells himself the truth, though many do think it. Outside of the game, people always make it sound like it’s a decision to sell drugs, or get high, or take to violence. But that’s the way the outside world can afford to view it: As if the same free will that makes life worth living elsewhere can strut down to Mount and Fayette without getting its ass beat bloody. The fact is, it’s never so much a decision as the absence of a decision. It would require Herculean strength for DeAndre to find a new moment, to pivot and walk away from the only world he’s ever negotiated—a world that guarantees him some kind of standing. And now, with Tyreeka and his son and his own future at stake, that moment simply doesn’t come.

By Christmas week, he’s back down at Gilmor and McHenry, making real money the way he knows how. He’s seen his son born; he’s made sure that DeAnte McCullough knows him, that should he catch a bullet or go away for some years in Jessup or Hagerstown, there is a thin but basic bond on which he can rely. Since his Fairmount Avenue arrest, he’s held the corner at arm’s length, either staying away entirely or leaving it to friends to do most of the street-slinging on a package. But now he’s come back big time. He tells himself that when Tyreeka sees the money, when she’s up to her ass in paid-for Pampers and toys and designer baby apparel, she won’t say shit. This he believes. Deep down, DeAndre tells himself, Tyreeka is still the greedy little girl he used to know.