A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball (9 page)

That night I slept soundly. I woke up early the next day, excited that we were all going to church. Halfway down the block, at 5921½ Prairie, the Revelation Missionary Baptist Church, presided over by Pastor Mary L. Box, occupied half a storefront and may have sat thirty-five people at the most. Mom didn’t go regularly but had said she was thinking about it. That was her—not one to build up anyone’s hopes in case she didn’t show. We knew she was going to try. There had been times when Tragil and I would be up front, singing with the choir, getting ready to do our solos, and we’d see Mom come in quietly in the back just to hear us. Other times, she’d bring some friends with her that we didn’t know, some of the group kind of smelling like stale wine and cigarette smoke.

If anyone had the nerve to stare or, worse, make a comment, Tragil and I would glare right at that person. That was our mom and she was there, same as the rest of them, to find a space of peace, of love, and of forgiveness.

No, I didn’t have those thoughts at seven going on eight years old. Actually, I went to church most of the time because that was the law according to Grandma. Pastor Box, a darker, older lady pastor, seemed to understand that as the only boy in the congregation, it wasn’t easy for me to be asked to sit quietly and patiently for all the hours of the long—and I mean
loooonnngg
—services. Grandma didn’t just try to keep us in church on Sunday: there was also Wednesdays and Fridays and special holidays when we were expected to go.

Pastor Box, before and after the service, would always check up to see how I was doing. I rarely said much other than that my report card was good and maybe my daddy had taken us out for ice cream as a reward. During the service, the pastor would praise my hard work in school, calling me the church family’s little superstar. She’d say, “I have a feeling this boy is going to be something special.” I didn’t know what that meant really, except that it felt good.

Most of what was said and talked about in church went right over my head. Later, I would find lessons kind of sneaking up on me, almost like the punch line of a joke that takes you years before you can laugh and think—
oh, now I get it.

Take the solos that Tragil and I used to sing in what I considered to be
our
song—for good reason. It was a spiritual called “Wade in the Water.” The chorus was a sort of a riddle that told the children to wade in the water and that God was going to trouble the water. Why? The verses talked about Moses leading the Israelites through the water, helping to get them through. I knew there was a message in there somewhere. Was it that anything that you wanted to do bad enough would make you face your fear? Maybe. As an adult, I learned that Harriet Tubman sang this song as a sort of map for runaway slaves to escape their masters and the dogs chasing them.

One Sunday morning Mom came in to hear us sing and sat in the back alone. I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of the words. I was feeling happy to see her smile and feel proud of her children. I was also happy thinking about the epic meal that would happen after the service was over.

That morning, I’d gone upstairs to check in and smell what Grandma was cooking for the later meal. Everything was almost ready: fried chicken, greens, corn bread with butter, and a couple of pies that she would bake and serve hot later, straight from the oven.

It always seemed to me that Pastor Box took the service long past the time that church was supposed to be over. But this day it was almost forever. But at long last, the final prayer was said. When I opened my eyes and looked toward the back, ready to go get Mom and walk her back home to Grandma’s, I saw that her seat was empty.

Tragil had spotted her leaving earlier. There was nothing to do but put our focus on what we had in front of us—food. Out of church we flew, sprinting down the street and into our building, up the three flights of stairs, following the unmistakable aroma of fried chicken and the sounds of laughter.

Grandma’s house was full of different relatives—her sister, my aunts and uncles, cousins, everybody. Mom wasn’t there, but since people would flit in and out all day, maybe she had stopped in earlier or would come later? As usual, I managed to be first in line for the buffet. That way, by the time everyone else was served, I could come back for seconds.

After the seriousness of church, everyone joked, making small talk, catching up with each other and the latest gossip or news. Unless you were me or Tragil, the keepers of family secrets, you would have never guessed that the day before, I was scared almost to death when police held a gun to my head during a drug raid.

DURING THAT SPRING OF 1990, OUR HAPPIER DAYS WERE few and further apart.

My fondest memories were the little things. More and more, basketball was just me going up to the park by myself with Roger’s ball and trying to get me a game. Or running my own drills, shooting the ball from every conceivable spot on the court. The dream of being great one day at basketball felt too big for me—like shoes that I couldn’t fill. But I liked the feel of the ball in my hands and the way I could forget everything else other than getting it through the hoop.

My favorite pastime that spring was watching
Knight Rider
with Grandma. In syndicated reruns, the show came on in Chicago once a week and that was my time. Everyone in the neighborhood and most of the Southside just about knew how much Willie Mae Morris loved David Hasselhoff and his talking car, KITT. Everyone knew not to mess with me and my grandma when we were up there watching that show. Years later, I actually told David Hasselhoff how he helped me get through tough times in childhood.

The violence with Mom’s boyfriend became more dangerous. She was around less and less. One night when they were home and the electricity had been turned off in our apartment there was another police raid. This time, as usual, the boyfriend had slipped out just before the police came pounding—
boom, boom, boom
—at the front door, announcing themselves. I scrambled out the back door and up the steps, hoping that Tragil was right behind me, at the same instant that the police threw on their floodlights, catching me in blinding white light as I got to Grandma’s back door. My sister knew they’d snatch both of us if she tried to get out, too, so instead of running she decided to go back inside and hide under her bed. The police came into the dark apartment with flashlights and guns drawn. They found her but couldn’t see that she was a young person and put the gun to her head, telling her to come out real slow. Then they interrogated her at length about the person they saw going up the steps—about what drugs I had and who I was.

Tragil was traumatized, sobbing and telling them, “That’s my baby brother. He didn’t do nuthin’!”

Eventually they accepted she was telling the truth. As always, they didn’t find any drugs but took Mom down to the station to question her about her boyfriend. That was a night she didn’t come home. Nor did she return the next night.

Tragil tried to reassure me but I was distraught. Those were sleepless nights. Mom wasn’t at the jail, so where was she? Nobody could convince me to leave the porch and come inside. No one was going to let harm come to me. I knew that. But my mother was somewhere, not safe, fragile, but trying. I couldn’t banish the thought of someone, some man hurting her, and especially my never seeing her again. And those thoughts scared me more than the police, more than anything, enough that when staying awake became impossible, I cried myself to sleep.

Days passed and Mom finally came back, looking tired but more clear-eyed than I’d seen her in a while. Tragil and I didn’t say anything, not wanting to jinx any possible improvement, although we were both hopeful. We had to be.

But who were we? Two kids without power to do anything. Just how powerless we were was made very clear one morning when I stumbled upon a sight in an alley not too far from Fifty-Ninth and Prairie. I was on my way back from going to the store for Grandma, getting closer to our place, when I spotted what looked like a pair of sneakers left in a garbage can. Shoes? Free shoes? As I approached, however, I realized there were legs attached to the sneakers. When I looked more closely, I saw the body and the face of a dead boy a few years older than me.

I knew him. Whoever took his life and put him there, nobody would tell.

The most tragic part of the wasted humanity, wasted life, was that the world wasn’t crying for the children getting killed in my neighborhood. When I joined Grandma on the porch after that, I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I’d seen. She had enough on her mind.

Mom had fallen so far behind on the rent that the landlord took drastic measures. One afternoon Tragil and I arrived home to find the furniture outside our building in the front yard and our mom sitting on the curb, crying her eyes out. We had been evicted. One of Tragil’s friends walked by and asked if she knew whose stuff that was and my sister only shrugged, pretending the people getting evicted were neighbors. Grandma talked the landlord into letting us move back in and Mom swore up and down to start paying off the back rent she owed.

For a short while, there was a noticeable improvement. But selling drugs to make money and get out of a financial hole only led her further into an even darker hole, addiction. My hope was disappearing fast.

One Sunday morning after days of not seeing Mom, Grandma sent me on an errand and I went running down to the store a block away. Just before I went into the store, I paused to see who was hanging out on the corner. There in the group of homeless people, dealers, and addicts—some scavenging for drugs, others in different stages of being high, some leaning against the wall next to the alley—was Mom.

She didn’t know me.

On the way out of the store, I looked again to make sure it was her, my mother, Jolinda Wade. That woman was my mother but at the same time not. She didn’t see me. Or if she did, she couldn’t recognize her youngest child.

The glazed, lost look in her eyes was not something I could ever forget. For all that I’d seen, I was more haunted by that moment than by almost any other from these years. How could I fight whatever it was that had her in its clutches so tight that she didn’t know me, her only son?

Back at the house, I remember telling Grandma that I was going to pray for my mother at church that day. My grandmother had been praying all those years and now Tragil had been telling me that we didn’t have to be too proud to ask God for what we needed. I didn’t know if my prayers were getting through, but I had to try.

A year earlier, Tragil had been losing hope that our lives would ever improve, when a lady at church told her, “You only twelve years old, but you can make a difference at home if you ask for the help you need.” Those were the days when Tragil protected me from her tears, turning up the TV loud so I couldn’t hear her crying, because, she would later say, “I could take the pain but you were young and I didn’t want you to have it. You were no trouble. You were so good. Never complaining. You didn’t deserve the pain.”

But now the time had come for her to tell me that enough was enough. “You know,” Tragil would say, “you can complain, you can ask for whatever you want and say it out loud and God hears you.”

Every night, we would close the door and sit on our beds and ask for what we needed. My first prayer was this—
“If you take me and my sister out of this place and you save our mother, I will be someone worthy of your help and I’ll be the best dad and take care of my family when I grow up and I’ll be good to other people, too, and if I jump out of line or make a mistake, I’ll admit it and get back on the right road.”

When my words were hard to form, Tragil would remind me that God knew my heart and my deeds, so there was really no wrong way to pray. That freed me. I talked to Him, I bared my soul, I prayed my heart out. I wanted something different, another life for me and all my family, just for us to have a chance. I wanted the dreams to shine real for me, too, whether it was playing basketball or owning a sports car that could talk to me like KITT, and I connected the prayers to my promises of living up to my word to achieving my dreams.

Tragil and I prayed to get out of there and we were heard.

ON THE RIDE HOME AFTER THE GAME AGAINST THE MEMPHIS Grizzlies, Zaire is the first one to comment on the level of play.

“Daddy,” he says, “that was crazy!”

Usually the boys don’t watch the whole time. We’ve made a deal that if they stay for the first two quarters, then they can go to the practice facility upstairs to play for the rest of the game. And sometimes they have trouble waiting until halftime. But not this time. Maybe they picked up on the strong emotions that Tragil and so many others in our circle were having as the game unfolded. Whatever they sensed, Lisa Joseph tells me afterward that the boys didn’t want to leave their seats at all except for a couple of bathroom breaks and for snacks. Yeah, they have good appetites!

What can I say? There is no question that out on the floor I felt supercharged with Daddy power and the energy of countless answered prayers. My game was a dance of gratitude.