Charlotte.”
“Then at least let me have the three of you over for supper?”
“Only if you can tell me where to find some weed in this neighborhood? I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and I don’t know nobody yet.”
“I got some shit you should try then. If you like it then I’ll tell you where you can get hooked up. Come on in.”
As unlikely as it would have seemed, a day after hospitalizing each other, Charlotte Turner and her two warrior sons became my new best friends. Our mothers soon became interchangeable. So much so that when we brought home a bad report card we were just as likely to get punished by one as the other and sometimes by both. Even though I was tall and skinny, my appetite was every bit as ravenous as Tank’s and sometimes we would eat dinner at his house and then run over to my house and have dinner again.
The three of us became the terrors of our school and neighborhood. We were like our own little gang and used to extort the kids at school for their money, sneakers, jewelry, jackets, anything we wanted and they had.
I found out why Huey looked so different from his brother too. Huey and Tank had different fathers. Tank’s dad was another victim of the war in Vietnam. He had come back from ’Nam a hopeless heroin addict who discovered, like so many others, that where the drug had been cheap and plentiful during the war, stateside it was worth more than lives. He fathered Tank just months before getting himself killed in a convenience store hold- up.
Huey never knew his Dad and his mother only knew him for a few painful hours.
Back in 1985, Charlotte Turner was snatched off the corner and whisked away in a patrol car for no apparent reason other than being a Black woman selling Black Panther newspapers at a time when militant black organizations were no longer in vogue. There were two cops in the car that day. “I Spy” cops. One white and one black.
The black cop was in the driver’s seat when they pulled the police cruiser alongside her. Charlotte stood on the corner wearing a black beret over her afro, a black leather coat and bellbottomed jeans.
“What are you supposed to be? Public Enemy or something? You trying to fight the power?”
“Fuck you pig!”
“Fuck me? No, bitch. Fuck you!”
The black cop leapt out of the car and smacked the newspapers out of her hand. The white cop slipped up behind her and jerked her arms behind her back. Charlotte fought them when they tried to handcuff her.
“What am I being arrested for? If I’m under arrest then read me my rights. I demand to know why I’m being arrested!”
“Bitch, you ain’t got no rights! Now are you going to resist?”
They began punching her and then cracking her across the thighs and buttocks with their nightsticks until her protests subsided. They nearly broke her arm getting the handcuffs on, twisting it behind her back and wedging a nightstick between her shoulder and elbow then wrenching up on it until she cried out. When she screamed and kicked the white officer pulled the club out from behind her and cracked her across the face with it. Her left eye still droops from that blow.
Once cuffed, he slid her limp bleeding body further into the vehicle and slid in beside her. He slammed the door and ordered the Black cop to drive off. Instead of driving to the police station they drove down to the train station at the end of Tulpehocken Street and took turns raping her while the other held her down.
Charlotte remembers looking up while the white cop was grunting and groaning inside her, poisoning her womb with his vile seed, and seeing the other cop, who looked like he could have been a relative, holding her arms over her head and urging the white cop on to a faster climax so that he could have his turn. When both of them had spent themselves inside of her, they raped her again, with their nightsticks. They then threw her exhausted body onto the railroad tracks assuming she wouldn’t have the strength to drag herself to safety before the train came to finish the job they had begun. But Charlotte had the strength and she passed that strength on to the son they’d planted in her belly, Huey, the son of her rapist, who she named after Huey Newton the Supreme Servant of the Black Panther Party who he remarkably resembled. She also passed on her newfound passion for the martial arts and her hatred of anything white. When I talked to her about what Elijah Muhammed said in his book about the White man being the devil she was quick to agree. I was smart enough to know that her opinion was biased though.
Huey was a shy skinny kid who was so pretty you would have thought he was queer if he wasn’t so damned spooky. The kid never smiled. He was like a man trapped inside a boy’s body. Whereas Tank looked like a pro- wrestler in miniature, Huey looked like he should have had a guitar in his hands rather than a knife or a gun. Everyone our age was scared to death of Huey and with good reason.
By the time we all became friends, Huey had already killed another kid in a fight and had just barely avoided juvenile detention, squeaking by on a self-defense plea. His Jui-Jitsu instructor had helped by testifying that Jui-Jitsu was strictly a defensive art and only works to counter attacks. No one else in the courtroom knew enough about Martial Arts to notice that the moves he’d used on the kid had not come from Jui-Jitsu but rather from Muay Thai kickboxing, a brutal offensive art. Luckily, his Muay Thai instructor had not been present to testify.
The more I got to know Huey the more I realized how lucky I had been to have escaped our fight with just a broken jaw. He’d been known to break people’s arms and legs in fights. Who knows what might have happened if I hadn’t run away. The only time I ever saw Huey smile was when I asked him what he might have done to me that day.
I pitied Huey as much as I admired him. He seemed to be perfectly bred for the streets. He was cold and hard, so tormented by the demons in his soul that the horrors on the streets couldn’t phaze him. He walked around like he was just barely aware of the ground under his feet. Even when he was fighting it was like he was barely interested in what he was doing. His eyes always had that far-away look.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen him afraid, but then I can’t ever really remember seeing him happy either. Anger or indifference seemed to be the only emotions he was capable of. Most of my viciousness back then was done mostly just to stay ahead of him. I mean, I couldn’t have fools more afraid of him than me. So, where Huey was fast, clean, and efficient, I was cruel and creative and would brutalize and torture anyone who fucked with me in the most gruesome ways I could think of. Tank once threw up watching me cut the ears off a fifteen year-old boy who had beaten and robbed this little retarded kid named Nate who wasn’t even quite nine yet. I was twelve. That was the same year we met Scratch face to face and also the year my father came back.
— | — | —
Chapter 5
—Amiri Baraka,
“Short Speech to My Friends”
««—»»
Mom and Grandma were fighting a lot around that time. My mom had started dating again and my Grandma was none too pleased about that. She would call her a slut and say she neglected me. I guess I was partially to blame for it; getting in trouble so much and always bugging my grandmother for snack money, insisting that I was starving. My mom was miserable and I think she went out just to get away from Grandma and maybe even from me too. Whenever she tried to stay home and do what Grandma wanted it was even worse.
“What kind of job you got that you gotta leave heah at six o’clock in the morning and don’t get back ’til six o’clock at night, then still have enough energy to run the streets all night?”
“I don’t run around in the streets all night.”
“Well you damned sure ain’t here taking care of your responsibilities! That boy of yours is half starved all the time. In the streets all hours of the day and night with no supervision. You know what goes on in them streets? If it
