looked at me like I kicked her dog,” he told me.
“Yeah, she’s going through a thing right now,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Sounded like more than a thing to me, Kenyatta. She looked really upset. I knew it was serious when Mom threw me the car keys and told me to get lost for an hour or two. What did your ass do now?” he asked me, as if he already knew the story.
“What makes you think I did something?” I folded my arms over my breasts so he wouldn’t see that my nipples had started to stir beneath my T-shirt. It wasn’t that I was cold, but I could feel Baby’s eyes on my breasts and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it just yet.
“Because I heard your name more than once and school. I thought you was doing ya thing in the white man’s world?” Baby asked me. He always poked fun at me for going to college, saying college trained us properly in the etiquette of white folks. He didn’t actually believe it, but it made his dumb-ass friends laugh when he said it. His mother had wanted him to go to college, but Baby’s head wasn’t really in it. He was always thinking about his next dollar, so it didn’t really surprise me when he had caked off from a dot-com company he started. His mother let him take a year off to see how the business would pan out for him, but she made it clear that he would either be in somebody’s classroom or on the streets for the new school year.
“Hell, I am. I’m in the top twenty percent at the university,” I said, snaking my neck. I had a lot of bullshit with me, but I took school very serious. “I didn’t mess up in school, I actually got an A plus on my thesis.” I reached into my shoulder bag and took out the ring-bounded copy I had. Mom still had the original. I ran my thumb across the title line, as if blessing it, before tossing it over to Baby.
“It’s the piece I wrote for my journalism class. Right before we broke for the spring, Professor Faulk gave us an assignment that we could take on for extra credit, so when I was on vacation in Cali, I started writing that.” I pointed at the folder.
I watched him as he mouthed the title. “Gutter?” He looked up at me with questioning eyes. He knew what the word meant, as did I. Our mothers had never hid the fact that our fathers were gang bangers, but I don’t think either of us understood the power they held, or the lives they’d altered.
“My thesis is about our fathers… my father really. They’ve even talked about publishing it,” I confessed.
“Damn, congratulations, Dollar.” He slid off the bed and leaned down to hug me. I could smell the chronic in his clothes, and for a minute I felt like getting high, until I remembered that I gave it up when school started. “So if the joint was this good, what they tripping off?”
“The truth,” I said. “All my life I’ve thought of my father as just another thug from my mother’s past, but I know better now, Baby,” I leaned in to whisper. My heart was fluttering uncontrollably as I searched for the words. “For a long time I’ve wondered who my father really was and what he was about, so when me and Gunn flew out to L.A., I started asking questions. Most of the stuff I knew from the war stories in New York, but on the West Coast they filled in the blanks.” I had to pause as the stories came rushing back to me. “Some of the stuff I learned I wouldn’t dare tell my mother, but since she’s read the story all cards are on the table now.”
“Talk to me, Kenyatta.” He touched my forearm. I could see the anticipation in his inviting brown eyes.
“Baby, if I tell you what I found out you’ve got to promise not to tell your mother, because it really ain’t my place to be sharing this with you. They didn’t want us to know the truth, so they kept it from us all these years. My mom found out about my little investigation and the paper, which is why she’s pissed.”
“Kenyatta, I know my father was killed, but I don’t know the circumstances. I’ve asked Mom about it, but she gets all tight-lipped and shit. I want… no, I
How could I say no to those eyes? “A’ight,” I took a breath. “It all kicked off in Harlem…”
part I.BLOOD OATH
chapter 1
LENOX AVENUE was especially crowded that night. Summertime was in full swing, so the streets were alive with activity. A dozen or so young men crowded the park, either playing ball or waiting for next on the double courts. It was dark out, but children still ran in and out of the park playing tag or climbing the monkey bars. Even in light of the past few months, Harlem had gained back its luster.
Lloyd sat on the stoop, kicking it with several of the homeys and drinking a forty ounce. The Cincinnati Reds fitted that crowned his dome was tilted slightly to the right. The lesser soldiers sat around listening to him tell war stories. Some were factual, but most were fabrications of the truth.
“Word to mine, son, these niggaz is mad fake,” Lloyd declared, swigging from the forty bottle. “Muthafuckas be acting like our click ain’t the tightest out here, fuck Harlem!”
Lloyd fashioned himself as somewhat of a big man on the streets. Early on in his youth he made a name for himself by being a general knucklehead. He had been arrested several times, but had never done more than a few months in jail. He made his climb from a low-level nobody to a blip on the radar. Lloyd was eighteen and down with one of the largest gangs in the country, the Bloods.
“Yeah, fuck them niggaz,” a young man wearing a Cleveland Cavaliers jersey added, trying to sound surer of himself than he really was. “But yo…” He hesitated for a minute. “Man, I heard they had this shit sewed up not so long ago.”
“That’s bullshit. They tried to get it popping, but we stomped them muthafuckas!” Lloyd declared. The young men stood around debating history of the B &C rivalry in New York and watching the world go by. Hearing their own voices, coupled with the sights and sounds of Harlem made them totally oblivious to what was about to go down.
Two mountain bikes were coasting along the shadows of the street in front of the building. The riders were dressed in oversized white T-shirts that laid flat across their laps, but if you looked closely you could see the slight awkward lumps. Hook and Noodles were the latest lost souls who had found something of worth in the “movement” as they liked to call it. They had murder on their minds and big things on their persons.
A kid by the name of Benny, who happened to have the misfortune of being with Lloyd, was the first to notice the duo. “Who them niggaz?”
When Lloyd turned around the beer in his mouth quickly dried into a paste as the cyclists drew matching.40 calibers. Noodles’s face twisted into a mask of pure hatred as he skidded to a stop and jerked the trigger.
The whole avenue seemed to stop moving as the sound of the.40 cut through the night air. Benny clutched at his neck as a large chunk of it and his collarbone came loose. Blood sprayed over his comrades and a girl who was coming out of the building. The girl opened her mouth to scream, but another blast from the.40 sent her flying back through the door she had just exited.
The kid in the basketball jersey flipped backward as Hook gave him two to the chest. Lloyd thought about fleeing until he found himself staring down the barrel of two high-powered handguns.
“Chill!” Lloyd pleaded, crouching in the corner.
“Fuck that chill shit, nigga, you know what it is!” Hook hissed.
There was a coldness in his eyes that told Lloyd that he was going to die no matter what he did or said. He tried to bolt, but Noodles tripped him into a pile of garbage. Hook yanked Lloyd roughly to his feet and shoved the barrel of the.40 under Lloyd’s chin.
“The big homey wanted you to have this,” Hook said before pulling the trigger. Lloyd’s body jerked once and his brains shot up through the top of his head. Hook cursed and wiped the blood and chunks from his face with the bandanna he had wrapped around his wrist.
“Damn, nigga, you almost got that shit on my whites!” Noodles scolded his partner for the mess he had made with Lloyd.
“Nigga, stop crying. The O.G. says the bodies keep dropping until he says otherwise,” Hook shot back.
Noodles looked at the several dead bodies and shook his head. “All this over one dead nigga?”
“He wasn’t just some nigga, he was a legend and you better not let the big homey hear you talking that crazy
