wasn’t for me you’d probably find him dead somewhere or locked up or on drugs. But I ain’t his mama. That’s your job! People gonna say the boy’s some kind of hoodlum, in the streets all the time, and you know what they gonna say about you. The way you run around it’s no wonder his daddy left.”
“His daddy ain’t leave! You know damn well that I left Darryl and you know why! Malik is well fed and well supervised he just fools you into giving him more money so he can buy junk food that he knows I don’t want him havin’. And the only one who questions my ability to raise a child is you. If it was up to you I’d still be getting my ass kicked by Darryl and then you’d have something to say about that!”
It would go on like that for hours until Mom would finally call one of her boyfriends and disappear for the night. Then one night there was a knock on the door.
“Baby? It’s me. Let me in. We have to talk.”
It was Darryl, my father. He was back and he wanted us back with him. He moved around the corner from us and came by everyday bringing Mom money and flowers and jewelry. He even brought toys for me. Pretty soon, under pressure from Grandma, Mom forgave him and we moved back in with him under promises that there would be no more beatings or drinking. His promises held for about three weeks.
When the beatings started this time they were far more vicious and didn’t just accompany the flashbacks. Anything could bring his rages on. He said that if we tried to leave him this time he would kill us all. Everytime he hit her I would run to get the knife, but I would remember how hard he had struck me last time and fear would sieze me. I would just stand there waving the sharp blade threatening and screaming at the top of my lungs.
“Stop hurtin’ my Momma!”
But I was afraid to attack him. I felt like a coward and could hardly look at either of them in the morning. I couldn’t look at my mom because I had failed her and not at Darryl because I hated him and wished him dead. Huey and Tank knew all about it. They had even been spending the night a couple of times when Darryl had flipped.
Once he kicked both of them out of the house in their pajamas in the dead of winter and their mother had to come pick them up at one o’clock in the morning. She was pissed but knew better than to say anything to Darryl. I never spent the night over at their house because I was afraid to leave Mom alone with Darryl. I was afraid I’d come home to find her tied upside down with her brains leaking out of her ears.
Huey understood. Huey and I used to sit around for hours planning ways to kill the mutherfucker. Huey seemed to take the beatings as hard as I did and was probably the only kid on the block besides myself who didn’t idolize the princely black lion that was my father. Huey and Tank had both begun to look at my mother as if she was their mom too. I guess I looked at Charlotte the same way. We were like siblings and they reacted to me and my mother’s pain as if it were their own.
“I’m glad I don’t have a father.” Huey said to me one day, “No one should have to be forced to grow up with that. It’s a shame that women have to marry men. Men only hurt them. That’s all men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Us too. That’s all we’re good for and when we get older it will only get worse.”
Huey was always saying deep shit like that. Shit that makes you think, makes you wonder, and, more often than not, makes you sad.
“It doesn’t always have to be like that. You see good dads on TV. I think white kids have good fathers don’t they? Rich kids maybe?”
“Nope. That’s why it’s on TV. Right next to Spiderman and Barney the talking dinosaur. Because that shit is just a fantasy.”
Huey was at my house the day Darryl snapped and tried to murder my mom. It wasn’t another flashback, just a fit of pure meanness. He found some cyanide capsules and tried to force my Mom to take them.
“You gonna try and leave me bitch! I’ve given you everything, you
He punctuated every sentence with another blow to my mother’s skull.
“Everything you wanted! Everything I had! I gave you everything and you wanna try and leave me? You ain’t goin’ nowhere. You hear me? You ain’t leavin’ here alive!”
“Please, baby, I ain’t goin’ nowhere! Nigga, I ain’t playin’! Don’t you hit me no more!”
She fought him hard this time, biting and clawing at his back, punching and kicking when she could get an arm or a leg free, but just like always, he threw her to the floor and sat on top of her. His knees were in her chest. He had her jaw gripped in his huge tarantula-like hands and was trying to force the pills down her throat.
“Bitch, I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you, that little pussy-ass son of yours, and myself. I’ll kill us all before I let you get out of here.”
I ran and got the carving knife. Huey was right behind me. I pulled it out of the kitchen drawer and then ran into my parent’s bedroom. Then I froze. I stood there like a fool waving the blade and yelling at Darryl to stop, watching as he attempted to murder the only thing in this world, besides my grandma, that I had ever loved. Watching as he forced poison into her mouth. The only thing in this world that had ever loved me back, that had ever made me feel safe and happy.
I saw one of the pills slowly making its way into my mother’s mouth as he brutally pried her jaws apart and my vision narrowed until it was like I was watching the whole thing through a keyhole. Slowly the light began to fade and I felt my body go limp. I was losing consciousness. I felt small hands slip the blade from my hands just before my head hit the carpet. I wanted to see who the hands belonged to, but even as I fell my eyes would not leave my mother and my periphery vision was gone.
Those tiny hands entered my miniscule field of vision in slow motion. Tiny light brown hands raising a knife high into the air above a tiny light brown head with curly brown hair. The hands rose and fell and rose and fell. Each time they rose a wave of liquid red followed the blade in an arc that flew from the metal and spattered the walls. The hands rose and fell again and again until they were no longer golden brown. Until they were the blackest red I had ever seen, slick and shiny like crimson oil.
Just before my mind shut down completely I thought to myself, “Huey was right. All men are good for is destroying things and hurting people. Even us.”
Then I dreamt, of concentration camps and jungles set ablaze with napalm. Darryl was burning in my dream. He was burning alive in the jungle. I saw him die twice that night.
The cops thought I had killed Darryl, but there was no evidence linking me to the crime and we never told them about Huey being there that night. They knew about the beatings so, when they ran into a dead end in their investigation, they just figured Darryl had gotten what he deserved and closed the book.
I tried to confess to the murder, but so much evidence pointed away from me, including my mom’s own testimony that someone else had broken in and stabbed him to death, that no one believed me and those who did couldn’t prove it. The cops looked down at me like I was stupid and pitiful and when they spoke to me it was in patronizing voices that they probably thought were soothing.
“I’m sorry kid, but if you had killed your dad you’d have blood all over you. I know you probably wanted to kill him though. I know if I was you I would have wanted to.”
I cried. I wept so long and so loud that I started having an asthma attack. I didn’t even know I had asthma until then. As much as I wanted to accept the blame for ending Darryl’s life it was denied me. Deep down I resented Huey for taking that away from me. I was grateful to him for saving my mother’s life and ending her misery, but I hated him for denying me the chance to kill the bastard myself. Yet, somehow, Darryl’s murder still drew us all closer. Secrets have a way of doing that sometimes. After that, more than ever, we were like brothers. And each year brought us even closer together. I wish now that they had never met me. They would have been better off and maybe Tank would still be alive.
— | — | —
Chapter 6
—W.E.B.Du Boi, “The Souls of Black Folk”
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1999. It was almost the end of summer and every kid I knew in that neighborhood was piled up on Huey’s porch, joking, bullshiting about bitches we’d never met, jumpshots we never really made, and fights that we never
