fading light I could barely see a thing.
I tried to explain, again. “I’m a student at the university, doing a survey, and I’m looking for some families.”
The young men rushed up to me, within inches of my face. Again someone asked what I was doing there. I told them the numbers of the apartments I was looking for. They told me that no one lived in the building.
Suddenly some more people showed up, a few of them older than the teenagers. One of them, a man about my age with an oversize baseball cap, grabbed my clipboard and asked what I was doing. I tried to explain, but he didn’t seem interested. He kept adjusting his too-big hat as it fell over his face.
“Julio over here says he’s a student,” he told everyone. His tone indicated he didn’t believe me. Then he turned back to me. “Who do you represent?”
“Represent?” I asked.
“C’mon, nigger!” one of the younger men shouted. “We know you’re with somebody, just tell us who.”
Another one, laughing, pulled something out of his waistband. At first I couldn’t tell what it was, but then it caught a glint of light and I could see that it was a gun. He moved it around, pointing it at my head once in a while, and muttered something over and over- “I’ll take him,” he seemed to be saying.
Then he smiled. “You do not want to be fucking with the Kings,” he said. “I’d just tell us what you know.”
“Hold on, nigger,” another one said. He was holding a knife with a six-inch blade. He began twirling it around in his fingers, the handle spinning in his palm, and the strangest thought came over me: That’s the exact same knife my friend Brian used to dig a hole for our tent in the Sierra Nevadas. “Let’s have some fun with this boy,” he said. “C’mon, Julio, where you live? On the East Side, right? You don’t look like the West Side Mexicans. You flip right or left? Five or six? You run with the Kings, right? You know we’re going to find out, so you might as well tell us.”
Kings or Sharks, flip right or left, five or six. It appeared that I was Julio, the Mexican gang member from the East Side. It wasn’t clear yet if this was a good or a bad thing.
Two of the other young men started to search my bag. They pulled out the questionnaire sheets, pen and paper, a few sociology books, my keys. Someone else patted me down. The guy with the too-big hat who had taken my clipboard looked over the papers and then handed everything back to me. He told me to go ahead and ask a question.
By now I was sweating despite the cold. I leaned backward to try to get some light to fall on the questionnaire. The first question was one I had adapted from several other similar surveys; it was one of a set of questions that targeted young people’s self-perceptions.
“How does it feel to be black and poor?”I read. Then I gave the multiple-choice answers: “Very bad, somewhat bad, neither bad nor good, somewhat good, very good.”
The guy with the too-big hat began to laugh, which prompted the others to start giggling.
“Fuck you!” he told me. “You got to be fucking kidding me.”
He turned away and muttered something that made everyone laugh uncontrollably. They went back to quarreling about who I was. They talked so fast that I couldn’t easily follow. It seemed they were as confused as I was. I wasn’t armed, I didn’t have tattoos, I wasn’t wearing anything that showed allegiance to another gang-I didn’t wear a hat turned toward the left or right, for instance, I wasn’t wearing blue or red, I didn’t have a star insignia anywhere, either the five- or six-point variety.
Two of them started to debate my fate. “If he’s here and he don’t get back,” said one, “you know they’re going to come looking for him.”
“Yeah, and I’m getting the first shot,” said the other. “Last time I had to watch the crib. Fuck that. This time I’m getting in the car. I’m shooting some niggers.”
“These Mexicans ain’t afraid of shit. They kill each other in prison, over nothing. You better let me handle it, boy. You don’t even speak Mexican.”
“Man, I met a whole bunch of them in jail. I killed three just the other day.”
As their claims escalated, so did their insults.
“Yeah, but your mama spoke Mexican when I was with her.”
“Nigger, your daddy was a Mexican.”
I sat down on a cold concrete step. I struggled to follow what they were talking about. A few of them seemed to think that I was an advance scout from a Mexican gang, conducting reconnaissance for a drive-by attack. From what I could glean, it seemed as if some black gangs were aligned with certain Mexican gangs but in other cases the black gangs and Mexican gangs were rivals.
They stopped talking when a small entourage entered the stairwell. At the front was a large man, powerfully built but with a boyish face. He also looked to be about my age, maybe a few years older, and he radiated calm. He had a toothpick or maybe a lollipop in his mouth, and it was obvious from his carriage that he was the boss. He checked out everyone who was on the scene, as if making a mental list of what each person was doing. His name was J.T., and while I couldn’t have known it at this moment, he was about to become the most formidable person in my life, for a long time to come.
J.T. asked the crowd what was happening, but no one could give him a straight answer. Then he turned to me. “What are you doing here?”
He had a few glittery gold teeth, a sizable diamond earring, and deep, hollow eyes that fixed on mine without giving away anything. Once again, I started to go through my spiel: I was a student at the university, et cetera, et cetera.
“You speak Spanish?” he asked.
“No!” someone shouted out. “But he probably speaks Mexican!”
“Nigger, just shut the fuck up,” J.T. said. Then someone mentioned my questionnaire, which seemed to catch his interest. He asked me to tell him about it.
I explained the project as best as I could. It was being overseen by a national poverty expert, I said, with the goal of understanding the lives of young black men in order to design better public policy.
My role, I said, was very basic: conducting surveys to generate data for the study. There was an eerie silence when I finished. Everyone stood waiting, watching J.T.
He took the questionnaire from my hand, barely glanced at it, then handed it back. Everything he did, every move he made, was deliberate and forceful.
I read him the same question that I had read the others. He didn’t laugh, but he smiled. How does it feel to be black and poor?
“I’m not black,” he answered, looking around at the others knowingly.
“Well, then, how does it feel to be African American and poor?” I tried to sound apologetic, worried that I had offended him.
“I’m not African American either. I’m a nigger.”
Now I didn’t know what to say. I certainly didn’t feel comfortable asking him how it felt to be a nigger. He took back my questionnaire and looked it over more carefully. He turned the pages, reading the questions to himself. He appeared disappointed, though I sensed that his disappointment wasn’t aimed at me.
“Niggers are the ones who live in this building,” he said at last. “African Americans live in the suburbs. African Americans wear ties to work. Niggers can’t find no work.”
He looked at a few more pages of the questionnaire. “You ain’t going to learn shit with this thing.” He kept shaking his head and then glanced toward some of the older men standing about, checking to see if they shared his disbelief. Then he leaned in toward me and spoke quietly. “How’d you get to do this if you don’t even know who we are, what we’re about?” His tone wasn’t accusatory as much as disappointed, and perhaps a bit bewildered.
I didn’t know what to do. Perhaps I should get up and leave? But then he turned quickly and left, telling the young men who stayed behind to “watch him.” Meaning me.
They seemed excited by how things had turned out. They had mostly stood still while J.T. was there, but now they grew animated. “Man, you shouldn’t mess with him like that,” one of them told me. “See, you should’ve just told him who you were. You might have been gone by now. He might have let you go.”
“Yeah, you fucked up, nigger,” another one said. “You really fucked this one up.”
I leaned back on the cold step and wondered exactly what I had done to “fuck up.” For the first time that day, I had a moment to ponder what had been happening. Random thoughts entered my mind, but, oddly, none of them
