the Other Wes Moore (2010) (12 page)

With our mother working so much, and our grandparents obviously slowing in energy, my sisters and I were supposed to look after one another. Nikki was older, so she was always the one looking after me, and it was my responsibility to look after Shani. But Nikki's hands were full with her own turbulent high school experience, which was about to come to a close. The move to the Bronx had been hard on her. Nikki never fully adjusted to the new social and academic environment; she attended three different high schools in four years. Shani, by contrast, was a prodigy. She did not go outside much, except to play basketball with me and my friends, and she seemed to have a book with her wherever she went. In fact, by the time I hit fifth grade and she was in third grade, she had overtaken me in reading scores, a distinction she carried through our entire academic lives and probably holds to this day. As much of a screwup as I was becoming, I still tried hard to look after her.

A few months earlier, Shani went out to play with one of the neighborhood girls, Lateshia, and came back home with her face covered in blood. When I returned home later that day, she was sitting on the couch in the living room, a red-stained napkin stuck in one of her nostrils and my grandmother's arms wrapped around her shoulders. They told me what had happened: Shani, Lateshia, and a Puerto Rican girl named Ingrid were jumping rope outside the house. A dispute broke out, words were exchanged, and Shani found herself on the receiving end of a punch to the nose. Shani was much bigger than the other girl and was used to wrestling with me, but she didn't fight back. She just started crying and headed into the house, pinching her nose to stop the bleeding.

By the end of the story, I was furious. First, at Shani for not punching Lateshia back, but then at Lateshia, who had the audacity to go after my sister. Just recently off my first encounter with the movie
The Godfather
, I pulled a Sonny Corleone and flew out the door to find Lateshia. My actual godmother, who was standing by the door, also wanted in on the action. Aunt BB, a tall, light-skinned Alabamian who had known my grandparents since she moved up to New York thirty years ago, was one of our family's fiercest defenders, and she was not going to let me go out there to avenge my sister without her being there. She had also just moved into the house with us, making it eight of us in our small row home. Just as fired up as I was, Aunt BB followed me up the street. In retrospect, we made a comical pair of enforcers, a forty-something-year-old woman trailing an eleven-year-bold boy. But we were deadly serious.

When we rolled up to her house, Lateshia was sitting on the front steps with her older brother. She straightened up with a surprised look. Aunt BB demanded to know why she'd hit Shani. Lateshia stumbled through an answer, claiming that she was defending herself. Aunt BB cut her off.

"Little girl, don't you ever touch her again. I don't know who you think you are, but you are really messing with the wrong one."

Lateshia stared back. She was too cool to show submission and too scared to show defiance. As we started to walk away, I decided I could not let my aunt handle the fight solo, so I turned around to face Lateshia while keeping an eye on her older brother. "And let me tell you," I said, "if I ever hear about you touching her again, the last thing you will have to worry about is a bloody nose."

Not only was her brother older and bigger but he had a rep as one not to be played with. But I just stood there in my B-boy stance, empowered by strains of "The Bridge Is Over" running through my head, until I felt like the message had gotten across. Satisfied, Aunt BB and I took off for our house. I was a little shaken as we walked back home in the twilight. Little things like this had a way of escalating into blood feuds. Big brothers called bigger brothers, who called crews. But Shani never played with Lateshia again and, fortunately, I never saw her brother again.

The Bronx streets had become a fixture in my life. Whether it was playing ball at Gun Hill Projects basketball court, heading over to Three Boys on Burke Avenue to get a slice of pizza, running to Saul's to get an edge-up on Bronxwood, or just sprawling out on stoops with my crew, some of the most important lessons I learned, I learned from these streets. I learned about girls getting periods not from biology class but from my friend Paris. I learned the realities of gang violence not from after-school specials but when my boy Mark got jumped and beaten down for wearing the wrong color jacket. And I learned that cops were smarter than I thought on the corner of Laconia Avenue.

I was rocking my Olaf's basketball shorts and Syracuse T-shirt on an unseasonably warm Saturday in October. I'd always wanted to go to Syracuse like my uncle Howard and play basketball for the Orangemen. I was to find out later that I wanted them a whole lot more than they wanted me. We'd just finished playing a game of basketball and were leaving the courts when out of the corner of my eye I saw Shea, one of my friends from the neighborhood. Shea was my age but shorter, with reddish hair and light skin, light enough for a spray of freckles to shine through. I broke off from my friends and walked over to him--we met halfway and greeted each other. I asked him what he was up to, and he said confidently, "Nothing, just finished working." I checked out his gear: black jeans, a white tank top, and a black backpack. Work. I knew exactly what that meant.

Shea was a "runner," an entry-level position in any drug enterprise. A runner was the one who moved packages for local suppliers who needed to make drop-offs for the street-level dealers but didn't want to carry the weight themselves. Kids like Shea were used because they were less conspicuous, and less likely to be stopped by police officers. Shea was making decent money, but ever since he'd started "working," we'd seen less of him.

Shea and I sat in front of the Cue Lounge, a bar and billiards club whose facade was painted black. The Cue Lounge sat next to a Kentucky Fried Chicken and an hourly-rate motel. Cars whizzed by as we spoke. We were checking out the black wall of the lounge, which was plastered with spray-painted tags. Some we recognized as friends we knew, and others from other walls around the neighborhood. It seemed as if everybody in the hood had their own nickname and tag, some more elaborate than others. Even me. Mine was simple: a "KK" with a circle around it, standing for Kid Kupid, an alter ego I assumed to advertise my largely imaginary prowess with the young ladies. I had redecorated a few corners of the Bronx with it.

As we stared at the markups on the wall, admiring the work of some of our contemporaries, Shea reached over his shoulder, pulled the backpack in front of him, and slowly unzipped it. I quickly looked inside. Beside a small bottle of water and a white headband were two spray-paint bottles, one with a white top and one with a blue. He looked at me with a sly smirk.

"You wanna tag?"

I couldn't say no. First off, Shea was one of the most respected young hustlers in the neighborhood. He was a worker, we all knew that--and while some of the kids were smart enough to be disgusted by what he did, other kids, even the ones who weren't in the game, respected his position. Plus, I loved throwing my name up on a wall; it felt like splashing in the shallow end of the criminal pool.

I scanned the streets for cops and nosy neighbors as I reached into his bag and pulled out the can with the white top. My eyes continued to scan as I shook the can, making sure the contents were mixed so that the paint would come out even and clean, creating a crisper result. Once I felt the coast was clear, I began, first drawing the connected Ks and finishing with a wide circle around them, my custom style. I placed the can back in Shea's bag, satisfied with my work--and our speed. Seven seconds and done. I had added my indelible mark to Laconia Avenue, a testament to the world that Wes Moore lived--or at least Kid Kupid did. Nobody could ever deny I was there. Not even me as a police cruiser rolled up around the corner.

Wuap, wuap!
The distinctive sound of the police siren rang out. Shea and I looked at each other and then sprinted off in different directions. Foolishly, I headed right past the police car; it took one of the officers seconds to wrap me up and throw me against his vehicle. Shea at least had a shot. I saw him sprinting off in the opposite direction. He turned around, saw me being patted down, and realized my escape had lasted a mere four steps. He tried to speed up, but seconds later, he too was wrapped up by a policeman. As I lay on the hood of the car, with the officer's hands pressing against every part of me, searching me, I watched Shea twenty feet away on the ground getting the same treatment.

My uncertainty about what to expect ended when the officer reached above my head and began to pull my left arm behind my back. Now I understood where this was going. I was being arrested.

"Chill, man, I didn't do anything!" I began screaming as I tried to wrangle my hands free.

"Stop resisting," the officer warned as he cuffed my left wrist and roughly pinned down my flailing right arm.

The relationship between the police and the people they served and protected changed significantly during the 1980s. For almost as long as black folks have been in this country, they've had a complicated relationship with law enforcement--and vice versa. But the situation in the eighties felt like a new low. Drugs had brought fear to both sides of the equation. You could see it in the people in the neighborhood, intimidated by the drug dealers and gangs, harassed by the petty crime of the crackheads, and frightened by the sometimes arbitrary and aggressive behavior of the cops themselves. On the other end of the relationship, the job of policemen, almost overnight, had gotten significantly tougher. The tide of drugs was matched by a tide of guns. The high-stakes crack trade brought a new level of competition and organization to the streets. From my supine perch on the back of the police car, I noticed an older woman staring at me, shaking her head.

After he finished cuffing me, the cop opened the rear door of his cruiser and pushed my head down while shoving me into the backseat. I was terrified. I had no idea what was next. A thought raced around my head--my mother was going to have to pick me up from jail. She had just finished talking to me about my grades, and now this. My relationship with my mother was in a strange place. My desperation for her support was in constant tension with my desperation for independence and freedom. I projected apathy about her feelings, but I wanted nothing more than to make her proud. In other words, I was a teenager, deathly fearful of disappointing her but too prideful to act like it mattered. Now I was afraid this incident might turn my only stalwart supporter against me.

Loneliness enveloped me. I felt my fate suddenly twinned with that of Shea, an aspiring drug dealer who I knew didn't really give a damn about me. My friends seemed far away, and in that distance I became aware of the contingent nature of my relationship with my crew. We loved one another, but how long would we mourn the absence of any one of us? I'd seen it happen a million times already, kids caught out there in one way or another--killed, imprisoned, shipped off to distant relatives. The older kids would pour out a little liquor or leave a shrine on a corner under a graffiti mural, or they'd reminisce about the ones who were locked down, but then life went on, the struggle went on. Who really cared? Besides my mother, who would even miss me?

My eyes watered as I sat in the backseat of the cruiser, watching out the window as the two cops picked Shea up off the ground and led him toward the backseat with me. Shea winked at me as he walked up to the car with his hands behind his back.
Is this dude serious?
I thought.

The car door opened, and Shea was thrown into my lap. "Fuckin jakes, man," he coolly stated as he straightened himself up.

"Yo, shut up, man! We are in serious trouble! I can't go to jail, man." I was almost hyperventilating.

"Just say you didn't do anything. Just say you don't know what they are talking about," Shea said.

I looked out the window, saw the two cops searching Shea's bag with the spray-paint cans, and realized that Shea's strategy was one of the dumbest ideas I had heard in a long time. Even I, who could come up with an excuse for everything, was at a loss for a good one in this situation.

My grandparents right after they moved to the United States. They were married for fifty-seven years.