The Working Poor (46 page)

Leary Brock had been playing hooky, and her mother knew it. On that particular day, however, she left Anacostia High School on time, after the last class, and began to walk home through the struggling black district beyond the southeastern shore of Washington, D.C.’s grimy Anacostia River. It was less than a mile to the small house owned by her parents. A man named Earl was following.

Leary’s name was pronounced le-REE, like a small bird singing, and her spoken words sometimes had the rhythm of poetry. She had a fervent gaze, and her light skin, like her mother’s, distinguished her from most other African-Americans in her neighborhood. She was restless against the confines of school, family, community. She wanted to defy, seek, and wander, and so she crossed boundaries. “I used to try to interest her in taking law,” said her mother laughingly. “The reason I told her she’d be a good lawyer is ’cause she’s such a big liar.”

Earl, in his late twenties or early thirties, had been hanging around outside the school. He had been watching Leary. On this day, he pulled his car up beside her, jumped out, grabbed her arms, twisted them behind her back, and shoved her inside. He hit her, drove her to Washington’s red light district on 14th Street, and forced her into a grubby rooming house. “I remember this big, fat greasy Italian-looking dude signing him in and giving him a key,” she said years later. “He tied my hands to a bed top, told me I could scream as loud as I wanted and nobody would help me.” She did, and he was right. As he raped her, she heard laughter. If she told anyone, he promised, he would kill her and her parents, and she believed him. “I was pretty damaged goods.”Then he actually drove her home.

Leary did not tell, not then. She was afraid both for her parents and of her parents. She was sure that she would be blamed by her mother, Velma, who knew that she was cutting school and suspected that she was doing drugs. A wall had gone up between them, and more than thirty years later its remnants still divided their recollections. “She probably was in drugs to make her act the way she was acting,” Velma speculated. “She started going around with a white boy, and sometimes they get in drugs real early, and I think that was happening.”

“No,” Leary declared.

“She must have not been just coming from school, because she would have told me,” Velma insisted. “She knew that I would be upset, because she was where she wasn’t supposed to be.” No, Leary countered: Although she cut a lot of classes, she hadn’t that day. And if she had told her mother about the rape? “Oh, it’s hard to say now what my reaction would have been,” Velma admitted. “I might have been so mad at her for not being where she was supposed to be—I don’t know, really.”

“I thought it was my fault, of course, you know the scenario,” said Leary. “When I had my miscarriage because of the rape, she wouldn’t even
come.” Her father did, though. He spoiled her, Velma complained with a smile.

Leary then made a choice, and like many choices that teenagers make, this one seemed less momentous than it turned out to be. Instead of finishing school, she moved to New York City. “I had every opportunity to do it another way, and I chose to run,” she observed years later. “I was running away from my mother’s scorn.”

In Manhattan, selling magazines door-to-door, “I ran into some people that invited me to stay with them, because they knew where I was going, what this thing was leading to…. That family was what introduced me to a world I did not know before.… These people was doing hard stuff, you know. They were sniffing. See, at that age, you take a young girl to an after-hours joint where everybody’s sitting around with these black lights—you remember the sixties with these black lights?—and people bringing you the drugs on a $20 bill. Oh, man, you know. I’m like, what is this? And I’m seeing how classy people are dressed and whatnot, not knowing of course, at that age, that that was not class. But that was my beginning. That’s when I took my first snort, in that club. I’ll never forget it. From snorting, I went to skin popping, from skin popping to mainlining. Heroin. At least two or three years.” The drugs helped her “escape the ghosts.”

Her parents traveled to New York to try to rescue her, but not until she got pregnant did she want rescuing. She would not do drugs while carrying a baby. “I came off of it cold turkey,” she said. “I was twenty by then, and I came home. I tried to clean up my life and did the right thing.” She was relieved to hear that Earl could do her no more harm; he had been killed by his wife. “She didn’t do no jail time.”

Leary’s old neighborhood in Washington was a bad place for kicking the habit. “Somehow or other, I started getting back into the same group, because you know once you’ve been in that lifestyle, that lifestyle is a habit,” she said. “Those are the people that you have to eliminate from your life. If you don’t want a hot dog, you don’t go around a hot dog stand, ’cause the aroma’s gonna get you—or you’re gonna run into somebody who’s gonna buy you one. So that was how it was in my life: on and off, on and off. I would stop for years and then get around people who were in that lifestyle and go right back into it.” When she went back into it in Washington, she discovered a new pleasure: crack cocaine.

The introduction came from a co-worker at a school for the mentally and physically handicapped where Leary taught food service skills. It was not a bad job, and she was good with young people, she thought. Her prospects were limited without a high school diploma, and her work record was fragmented by her repeated binges on drugs. But here she was doing well—until her associate, whose husband sold cocaine powder, invited her over one weekend. “We were sitting around having drinks just chit-chatting,” Leary recalled. “A thing came over the news about crack cocaine, and I said, ‘Why do people do that?’ Curiosity killed the cat. She said, ‘Yeah, it’s really something up there in New York. I’ve had it once or twice.’ And she said, ‘You want some?’ I said, ‘No, I’d be afraid to take it.’ She said, ‘There ain’t nothing to it.’ She went back in the back. Before the night was over she had gone through $1,200 of her husband’s cocaine powder, trying to make this crack. We wound up having to go out on the street and buy it. That was the beginning. I can pinpoint. That was the beginning. Then it was like every weekend. I had it to the point where I kept the demon at bay for a whole week, but on the weekend I had to be at her house, you know, ’cause I was beginning to get this desire, my brain was wanting it.” She was in her thirties, unmarried, with four children by four different men.

“I called it the terminator, that crack cocaine, because it didn’t have any physical hold on you. It’s a mental hold, a psychological hold, a habitual hold; you don’t physically need it. It hits a portion of the brain that has never experienced this sensation before. And when it’s awakened, you can’t put it to sleep. I’m serious. It’s ability that you didn’t know you possessed. Now you can become a fast thinker, you’re motivated to do this, that, and the other. This is only an allure, because this portion of the brain is not functioning on that level, but it’s being stimulated at that level for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then it’s really a crash. Oh, no, no, no, no. The brain wants to go back there. All right? It wants to feel that sensation again, and it will make you forget sleep, food, clothes, anything that you normally would do. It just slams that shut. You have to go THERE! It’s worse than a physical addiction. … It stripped me totally of who I was. It held my spirit in bondage, begging to come out, and it couldn’t. It arrested every part of my life and then began to terminate it.
I
no longer existed.
It
did.”

She started being late to work, then absent. “They saw a change in my
behavior and they figured where there is a problem, ‘Let’s let her go,’ ” she said. “I’m glad that they got me out of there before I committed a crime.”

She did commit a crime, many times. “I sold it for a little while, me and this Italian guy,” she said, “and then we went to Pennsylvania. Believe it or not, I stopped for a whole five years, because the Amish that I lived around, they were able to give me herbs and things that were soothing enough to my lifestyle.” She worked two jobs, and felt safely removed from the world of crack. “Little did I know. That stuff is everywhere,” she said. “It’s everywhere. I’m serious, man, I’m telling you. It may be around the corner—I’m sure it is right around the corner from the Vatican. It raised its ugly head, and with this Italian guy, when we put our two heads together, we were dangerous. We drove to New York, to 143rd and Broadway, bought us a package and started our own business.”

Leary bounced relentlessly back and forth between drugs and jobs, often mixing both together. “The weekends started to overlap into Monday, and then Monday into Tuesday,” she recalled. “Next thing you know I turned around and it was Thursday and I hadn’t been to work. … I came on home to my mother’s and father’s.” She used what she had learned about horses from the Amish to get work as a groomer at a Maryland racetrack, where she thought the careful state regulation would keep narcotics out. “Little did I know, the drug is everywhere,” she said. “I’m thinking I’m running away from it.”

Her methods of financing her drug use became an index of decline. “At first, I had money in the bank,” she explained. “I had friends. Oh, I lived the high style. I didn’t know nothing about the street life until much later on. I was always catered to and given stuff. I’d be sitting around with bundles of the stuff, you know, traveling up and down from here to Florida. I was gone, I was doing things, I was a mover and a groover, and it was, again, the glamorous life—the life that I had seen when I was younger I was seeing now. That was a trap. The devil is so, so clever, OK? He disguised it with all this glamour and all this other stuff going on. There’s so much coming at you, you don’t see the snakes slither in.… When the money ran out, when the friends ran out, I had to do it on my own. And because I had a networking ability, I was able to get with people who was trying to be incognito about this drug. … I was their go-between. That was one way I was able to make my supply. They would give me the money ’cause they could not go out and get it, and I would go get it for them, and

I would get a portion from the drug dealer, a portion from them. I believe because I wasn’t larceny-hearted, is why I’m still alive.” She once had a near miss when dealers burst into a rival’s apartment where she was staying, started shooting, and hit her in the back. Ultimately, she turned to prostitution for her drug money.

Mostly, Velma took care of Leary’s children, as so many grandmothers do in such families, and when Velma’s grandchildren had children, she took care of those great-grandchildren as well. Velma was bone tired, and sometimes angry about the generations that passed their burdens to her, but she also had an iron spine. She admired obstinacy, drawn from her earliest childhood memories in the hard South. Her grandmother and her grandmother’s sister, who were born in slavery, used to reminisce about the steely resistance of their aunt, Leary’s great-great-great aunt. “The slaveowner would tell her to do something, and she said she wasn’t gonna do it, and he would beat her and beat her, and she said she still wasn’t gonna do it, and so he’d put her down in a cistern, a well,” Velma recounted. “She never would do it. She was just that stubborn. Just let him beat her.”

In its own way, Velma’s journey had been as daring as Leary’s, propelling her out of the familiar into the adventurous, though with far different consequences. One of eight children on a sharecropper’s farm in Alabama, she left in 1940, in her twenties, and made her way alone through Tennessee to Washington, where she found a good husband, a good job in the printing section of the Agriculture Department, and a place in an undergraduate class at Howard University, although she never finished. Her husband, Horace, was an electrician for the Veterans Administration. Leary, even at age fifty, imagined that he had worked in the White House.

Off drugs and on, Leary appeared and disappeared, and each arrival seemed worse than the last. “It got to the point that I wouldn’t even allow her in the house,” Velma declared, “and she would somehow break in the house. I called the police and explained it to them.… She’d come in the house to sleep. So the police told her she had to leave ’cause I didn’t want her here…. I said, ‘No, if you’re foolin’ with that you can’t stay here.’ It was hard to do, hard to say it. It hurt me to see the police leadin’ her away and all.”

Her father never quite gave up on her, Leary remembered. The last time she saw him, she promised that someday he would be proud of her, and he told her that he was proud of her now, “as though he saw in the
future,” she recalled. “All he wished for me was that I would be happy and safe,” Leary said, “and that was a profound statement: happy and safe. If you look at it, if you’re not safe, you’re unhappy. If you’re not happy, you’re in unsafe territory.”

Then, at a time when she was out on the street doing drugs, her father died. One of her daughters found her and took her the news.

“She got the word that he had passed, and when the funeral was gonna be and everything,” Velma recalled, “and she put a note in the door that she would be coming by to go with us. And so you know the funeral cars can’t wait for you. So we went on, and to my surprise, people at church told me she was there.… She just stayed back in the back and left before we went out.”

“That was my spirit,” Leary countered. “I couldn’t go.… Shame. Guilt. He was my best friend. I had to deal with my own grief the way I knew how. That was the beginning of the turning point for me.” You have to hit bottom before you come up.

Several months later, in the haze of a high, she spotted an undercover cop in an unmarked car, walked up to the driver’s window and said, “Look in your computer for Leary Brock.”

“You Leary Brock?” he asked.

“Just look in your computer.”

He did and found two outstanding warrants: failure to appear on solicitation charges, and on felony drug possession.

“ A r e y ou Leary Brock?”

When she answered yes, he called for a female officer as backup. “I was in jail during Easter,” Leary said.