disrepair becoming no better than the slums they left behind. They paid exorbitant prices to escape the ghetto and buy into this more integrated neighborhood only to see their property values plummet as white folks packed up as fast as black folks moved in and with them left all the public utilities and maintenance. Street lamps stayed broken for months casting entire blocks into a deadly sinister darkness that incubated crime. The streets fell into disrepair as the road crews neglected them allowing them to crack and split becoming an obstacle course of potholes and fissures. The sidewalks crumbled providing ammo for rock fights. Sometimes the trash wouldn’t be picked up for weeks and garbage would blow up and down the street smothering the neighborhood in stench and debris.
Mom and I took to driving our garbage up to Chestnut Hill and dropping it off in front of the homes of rich white folks. Buildings would sometimes burn to the ground before fire trucks arrived and then their charred skeletons would remain for years, swaying in the breeze and providing refuge for crackheads, junkies, and winos. When they finally got around to demolishing the rat infested deathtraps, they rarely rebuilt. The neighborhood was filled with these empty lots scarring the landscape; irregularly spaced between the endless rows of identical homes like gaps in a smile. Police brutality and harassment increased exponentially with the Caucasian exodus and getting an officer’s help was like trying to squeeze your ass through a donut hole. By the time my generation came along, this nice integrated neighborhood had become like an extension of North Philly; just another fuckin’ ghetto filled with the angry and the hopeless.
My family and I lived on Ambrose Street, between Washington Lane and Duval Street, a few blocks from G- town High and only a mile or two from Wissahickon Park. It was also adjacent to Mount Airy, an upper middle class neighborhood where people like Patti Labelle and Teddy Pendergrass lived.
Mt. Airy had old colonial mansions and lush tree-lined streets so everyday we got a first hand look at what we would never have. Because of our proximity to them, we went to the same schools as the Mt. Airy kids and they were always eager to rub our noses in their comparative wealth. This made us acutely aware of our own poverty and desperate for and resentful of their affluence. Desperate enough to rob our neighbors, kill, sell drugs, pimp, ho, or whatever nefarious enterprise would get us paid the most and the fastest. It was better to live down in North Philly where at least you would never see what you were missing.
Everyone I knew from G-town would lie in school and claim to be from Mt. Airy; ashamed of their destitution. That is until gangsta rap blew up and poverty suddenly became fashionable. Over night there were suddenly punk ass Mt. Airy boys and even white boys from Chestnut Hill wearing their pants saggin’ off their hips, toting nine millimeters and claiming thug life, frontin’ like they grew up in the G or in North Philly just to seem hard, eager to capitalize off the inherent hipness of the underclass. It was disgusting and it infuriated me.
We lived in a three bedroom row home that was nearly two centuries old and not carrying its age well at all. It was made of red brick that had faded to a chalky orange color and looked like every other house on the block. In the summer it was an oven and in the winter it was a meat locker. They didn’t know a lot about insulation back in the seventeen hundreds.
I can remember few truly happy moments in that drafty old haunt. Watching creature double feature at the foot of Mom’s bed and listening to her calm breathing as she slept away on Saturday afternoons, playing with the dog in the yard, eating my Grandma’s sweet potato pie and my Mom’s fried chicken, catching crawfish in the creek that ran through Wissahickon Park and coming home and trying to breed them in the bathtub, having sex with the babysitter, shooting squirrels and pigeons off the powerlines with slingshots and pellet guns. But mostly all I can remember is the violence and the rage.
Annabella Black, a gorgeous, nearly six foot, chocolate black, amazon goddess was my mom. Everyone called her Bella, which means beautiful in Italian, except my grandma who still called her Annabella Blacksmith even though she knew we had dropped the “smith” off our names before I was even born. Mom didn’t want me to be born with the name of my Great great great great grandfather’s slave master.
To this day I’ve never met a woman more lovely than my mother. She looked like she had ridden a sun beam down from heaven and I loved her more than anything in creation, which wasn’t hard because I hated just about everything else. My Dad’s name was Darryl and he looked like something that had stepped off the wall of a pyramid, but he had problems…violent problems.
Mom used to say that Vietnam destroyed the best Black Men of her generation…even those who made it home. She kept telling me how Pops was a good man before the war but that all the horrors he had witnessed and was forced to participate in had twisted him.
Pops was 6’2” tall, lanky, ripped with hard wiry muscle, midnight black, with a huge wooly afro, a goatee, a boyish smile, dark smoldering eyes, and big hands roped with veins ending in long spidery fingers. He looked like that famous painting “The Moorish King” that hung in the Philadelphia Art museum, like a Black Moses. His voice was smooth like marijuana smoke curling out of the end of one of those hand-carved pipes and he had game. He could put the mack down on a female so smooth that her panties would slide off from their own lubrication. If he hadn’t married mom he probably would have wound up being a pimp. As it was, he was totally legit.
He worked hard doing construction work for the city and brought home every cent to care for my mom and me, but like many hard working men he drank hard too. When he wasn’t working, Pops and I would sit on the living room floor playing with GI Joe, army men, video games, and electric race sets while he slowly drank himself into an introspective fugue. When the toys inevitably broke, he always seemed to be more depressed about it than I was and replaced them immediately. He would play football with the older kids on the block after work and they all looked up to him like he was a big brother or something. Still, they were all afraid of him. He was one mean-ass- nigga. He was known to chase people off of his car at shotgun point and more than one of the neighborhood kids had watched as their dads were beaten bloody by him. He was nothing to fuck with and no one did.
There were rumors that he had killed people and I couldn’t really deny it. He had killed in Nam so why not in the hood?
Pops was one of those psycho Nam vets. Not the kind that climb towers and shoot demons dressed as pedestrians but the kind that have flashbacks and scare the hell out of their families. With eyes glazed staring deep into a long ago tropical jungle he would scream and cry believing that he was back in Saigon dodging mortar fire. During these episodes he often beat my Mom up pretty badly. It still wounds me to remember the flow of her tears and how helpless I was to staunch their tide. If Pops was around today and he tried that shit I’d put his ass right where he is now, on the wrong side of the grave. Deep down, I guess I’m still waiting to settle the score. I owe him some pain for hurting my mother. For making that elegant goddess weep.
Sometimes I wonder if all the shit I’ve been through has just been preparation for the day when I finally see that sonuvabitch again. And I will someday. I’ll see him in hell. And then we’ll settle up.
To this day I can remember the gruesome war stories he used to tell and how they would keep me up all night terrified that the “Cong” were creeping through the bushes, preparing to ambush me and drag me off to a prison camp. He once told me how the guys in his platoon would take captured Vietnamese soldiers and tie them upside down to a tree then beat them in the head with bamboo poles until their brains would leak out of their ears. I couldn’t picture it then. Now it’s easy to imagine. I’ve accomplished similar feats with my shotgun. Back then, however, as I cringed in the dark listening to my mother’s screams and his angry curses, his stories would warp my dreams into a gore-streaked delirium. I guess they scared him too because he always slept with his eyes open.
Once when I was just five years old he was in the midst of a really bad hallucination and had my mom down on the living room floor with her arms pinned behind her back, the stained glass coffee table was shattered and he was cursing and crying, but his eyes were glassy and far off, focused on nothing, full of rage and fear. I knew he wasn’t in our apartment anymore, but in a Vietnamese jungle thousands of miles away. He punched my Mom in her head and I saw her eyes roll back revealing the whites. She looked as if she had died. Then he began to strangle her. That’s when I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the knife.
It was one of those carving knives they sold on TV. The one where the guy saws through a tin can without dulling the blade. I stared at the lethal looking serrations that ran like a row of shark’s teeth down the edge of the blade and my heart fluttered. My legs filled with lead. I raised the knife, but I couldn’t move my feet to cross the distance that separated me from my desperately struggling mother. There was a strangled exhalation that sounded like the last gasp of a dying man and that got me moving. Mom was dying.
I ran into the living room and let out a yell that sounded like something from a Tarzan movie. I plunged the blade between his shoulder blades stabbing it in as deep as my five-year-old muscles would permit, which wasn’t much at all. He spun around and punched me hard, like you would strike a grown man, like you would strike an enemy. He knocked me out cold.
