be no fear in his heart at all. I stared at him as if I had discovered a new species, then he played himself by pushing me again instead of just flat out punching me. This muthafucka wasn’t taking me seriously and was gonna try and embarrass me like some bitch before kicking my ass. It fucked me up cause back then I was the baddest brotha on the block and definitely the baddest thing at that little school. Even the junior high school kids knew that if you fucked with me you’d better protect your neck ’cause I would more than likely be back to stick a blade in it. The only people who didn’t know what a terror I was, was Mom, my grandmother and Tank and his brother Huey.
Tank thought he was hard coming from North Philly and all. The brothas down there think everybody else is soft ’cause they ain’t on welfare and their moms ain’t on crack. But even though we had marginally nicer homes and better schools in G-town, we were still just as poor, just as desperate, and just as mean, and many of us were on welfare and had parents who were hitting the pipe as hard as them fools in the projects. We were every bit as angry, as bitter and hopeless, as jaded and hardened and lost. In my mind I was going to prove all of that with one punch.
Tank shoved me a second time and I dipped and threw an uppercut to his solar-plexus with all the strength I could muster, a Tyson punch, thrusting upwards with my legs so that I nearly rose off the floor myself. I knew that at 5’3” and less than 100lbs there was no way I was going to knock the much bigger kid out going toe to toe with him but I knew just where to hit to cause the most damage. I figured I could knock the wind out of him and then fuck his shit up while he struggled to catch his breath. He bent over with the punch and I kicked him right in the face trying to shove my worn-out Nike right into his mouth and succeeding in splitting his lip open and cracking a tooth. The huge kid staggered backwards holding his face and I kicked him in his gut like the SWAT team kicking down the door to a drug warehouse, putting all my weight behind it like I was trying to drive right through him. An explosion of air came out of his lungs and he went down on one knee gasping and wheezing as he fought to replenish the oxygen I’d just deprived him of. I leapt on him and began pummeling him with my tiny fists.
There were other kids in the hall now, but I was only peripherally aware of them. They were just shadows dancing and raging at the edge of my sight which was filled only with the tremendous ten-year-old.
“Get ’im! Kill that dirty mutherfucker! Fuck his shit up!”
I didn’t know who they were cheering for and didn’t care.
Tank lashed out blindly trying to fend off my attack and caught me right between the eyes with the back of his fist. Blue lights flashed in my skull and I staggered backwards. That’s when Tank got up. I’d never seen a kid come back after a beating like that and my eyes widened in surprise and fear. It was like watching Micheal Meyers or Jason Vorhees rise up after being stabbed, shot, and burned to death. It seemed supernatural and damn did he look pissed.
He charged me and swung a right at my head. I leaned back to avoid the blow and he swung a left uppercut into my gut. Just to pay me back I supposed. Air evacuated my lungs in a great rush and my eyes teared up. The whole world seemed to shift as pain overwhelmed my senses. It took everything I had to remain standing. I turned away from him and he punched me in the back so hard I thought my spine would snap. Another blow struck me in the back of the head and the light bulbs flashed in my skull once more.
I wanted to black out. My body wanted to sink to the floor and succumb to the painlessness of dreams, but instead I kicked at his unprotected head with some fake-ass Bruce Lee move as he charged me again and shocked myself by connecting, catching him on the ear and knocking him face first into the wall. There was a sickening wet “Smack!” and a great splatter of blood sprayed across the wall. This big, black, mean-ass thug screamed when he saw his own blood and ran past me, down the hall, to the principle’s office. The motherfucker was going to drop dime on me.
In no mood to face the principle, I decided to skip out. I pushed past all the spectators who had gathered to watch the gladiatorial games and slammed through the fire door setting off alarms and not giving a fuck.
I started running and was halfway home when I realized that I couldn’t go home at noon without my grandmother getting suspicious and calling the school. So I took a detour and went to the library. It was the only place you could go during school hours and not get questioned.
Northwest Regional Library was one of the newest and nicest libraries in the city. It amazed me that it was right in the middle of Germantown. In the children’s section they had a big wooden sculpture of a dragon that was almost twenty feet long and upstairs they had computers and thousands of books. I loved this place.
I checked out a book on Shaka Zulu and sat enthralled for hours reading about how he’d nearly taken over all of Africa. I felt as if I had been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. On the plains of Africa I felt like they would have appreciated my skills, my ferocity, my aggression. I would have become a great general in Shaka’s army or maybe even a king myself. Here, I was just a thug who would no doubt wind up in prison someday.
I read the entire book in a few hours and then made my way back over to the shelves and picked up a book I’d never seen before, but whose title called out to me just as it was meant to do. It was called “A Message to the Black Man in America” by some cat named Elijah Muhammed. I checked it out and started reading it as I took the bus back home.
It was almost five o’clock in the evening when I made it home. I walked past all the kids playing in the street and all anyone was talking about was how I’d kicked Tank’s ass and how his older brother Huey had been around looking for me. I had only read the first ten pages of Elijah Muhammed’s book, but already there were thoughts in my head of black unity and how the social diseases of poverty, racism, and oppression had corrupted our brains and made us self-destructive creatures who fed on one another turning all our rage and hatred inward rather than turning that aggression outward towards our oppressors. Old habits die hard though.
“Shit, I don’t give a fuck! I’ll kick his ass too! Them North Philly niggas ain’t shit!” I said boldly and loudly. Too loudly in fact ’cause my grandma overheard me.
“Is that you cussin’ like that Malik? Boy, you’d better get your fresh behind in here ’fore I take this belt to your hide!” Sometimes I wished she was half deaf like most other grandmothers. But at forty-seven years old she was the youngest grandmother I knew.
“Did you hear me boy? Get your bad behind in here! I want you to clean up that filthy room of yours before your momma gets home and haves a fit!”
“Damn!” I said under my breath as I skulked up the steps and into the house.
Grandma could talk real mean sometimes, but it was all a front. Deep down she was as soft and sweet as cotton candy. She just yelled when she was lonely, just to get attention. I don’t know why my mother couldn’t see that. It was probably ’cause she was so stressed out from working all day and, in her words, “Takin’ shit from white folks.”
I went inside and Grandma was all over me as soon as I stepped through the door.
“Where’ve you been boy?”
“I went to the library after school.”
I put the book down on the kitchen table and Grandma’s eyes zeroed in on it then seemed to stay fixed on the book. She stared back at me in shock like I’d just set a decapitated head on the table instead of a book.
“You got that at the library?” She asked.
“Yeah.”
“Who told you about this book?” she asked.
“Nobody. I just saw it sitting on the shelf and it looked interesting.”
“Mmmhmm.” She replied and then turned away from both me and the book.
“Well, get upstairs and clean that nasty room of yours.”
I went to work on her.
“But, I’m starving, Grandma. Do I have to wait for Mom to get home to get something to eat?”
“You didn’t look that hungry when you was outside runnin’ that filthy mouth of yours.”
“Them boys was sayin’ some kid from North Philly was gonna beat me up.”
“Who’s gonna beat you up, boy? What have you done now?” There was worry and concern on her face. It wasn’t just me getting into a fight that scared her. It was that around our way fights had a way of turning deadly.
“I ain’t did nothin’. This kid just wants to fight me ’cause he wants to prove he can beat me. I don’t even know the kid.” That seemed to relax her a little. This was just typical adolescent machismo and not the type of thing kids got murdered for. It was much better than her knowing that I’d trashed the kid’s brother and he was out looking for revenge. She’d have worried herself sick if she knew that. Just like I was doing.
“Well, ain’t nobody gonna beat you but me if you don’t clean up that room. Ain’t nobody gonna lay a finger on
