Out of the Madness (6 page)

In our room with the door shut, the man began, talking with that soft, soothing voice, the kind psychiatrists use to relax
people. “Now, I don’t want you to be afraid of what will happen to you boys, because no one’s gonna hurt you. I just want
you to tell me the truth, and I’ll see if I can make things better for you, okay?”

“Okay,” my brother said, already falling under the spell. But I was not to be taken. The white man began his questions.

“Now, does your mother feed you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly. “We eat very well.”

“How often do you attend school?”

“Ooh, we rarely miss days. I love school, my momma always helps me.”

“Does she take care of your sister?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Does she do drugs?”

“Ooh, no, sir,” I told him.

The white man started looking confused, as if he couldn’t understand why neighbors would report something wrong with such
happy kids and such a good mother. Before leaving, he apologized to my mother. And we never heard from the state people again.

Thereafter, I was forbidden from talking with Bad Baby. Before the summer ended, he and his family moved across Hampton to
the shack houses. I later learned that Prescott, Bad Baby’s brother, was murdered there. His throat was cut.

My quiet brother, who also was experimenting with self-reliance, had learned to steal during his own adventures in the Hitler
camp. And together, on days when our humger would not let us rest, we stole food from the shopping center. We stole things
that were easy to conceal, like cans of sardines and small packages of rice. A bowl of rice and a tall glass of water was
enough for our indiscriminate stomachs.

Another hustle we used to get food was going into the shopping center late at night to steal TV guides. The newspaper companies
dumped hundreds of papers on the sidewalk. So Mark (the one who had jumped from his window to avoid the Afro hitmen), another
kid named Big Mark, my brother, and I would get there about one in the morning. We would quickly sift through the piles and
pick out all the TV guides. Then, when we had gathered all we could carry, we would scurry back to the lake to take the hidden
trail. Back in the projects, we would go from door to door, selling our magazines for a quarter apiece.

We weren’t thieves, just hungry children. Work, when we could find it, took the place of stealing. Each morning Junior and
I would rise early and go looking for jobs, walking up Industrial, up Singleton, up Hampton Road. Consumed with our attempts
to find work, we would stay gone all day without eating. Most places would not hire us because we were too young, just eight
and ten-year-olds. Occasionally we did stumble upon a place that needed temporary help. And my brother once landed a job for
a service station that paid him about thirty dollars for a full week of work.

We worked at the shopping center, too. All day my brother and I would stand at the Tom Thumb with Syrup Head and Three Finger
Willie, roaming around. We would ask customers if we could carry their groceries but would not ask for a fee. Instead we would
just stand there, looking dirty and hungry. When we were done, some would tip us, others wouldn’t. We could make a good seven
bucks after a long ten-hour day. We gave our mother sometimes all, sometimes half the money; the rest we spent on food or
candy. We also dug through the trash cans behind the DAV store in the shopping center, looking for clothes, toys, change,
and good pairs of shoes.

I still played Deadman, but not as often because a body had been found in the Deadman vacant units. Between the stealing and
scavenging, though, I was managing to stay away from the house, where things weren’t getting any better. A bootleg family
had moved in next door to us. They bought cases of beer from south Dallas, a wet part of the city, and stored it in their
house. From their back door they sold each can for a dollar. Nighttime traffic was steady in and out of their house. On the
corners, the heroin dealers were in full force.

I was on my Huffy bike all the time now. I often rode it down Fishtrap and Shaw streets, near the two candy trucks, and on
Apple Grove and Morris, up and down the sidewalks and trails on the block, not stopping for the common fistfights that crowds
gathered to watch or the young boys burning mattress cotton at nightfall to keep the mosquitoes away.

I would even ride my bike where the rapists had attacked me. Each time I did, a black man sitting on a porch watched me curiously.
Sometimes a woman was with him. I made a mental note to keep an eye on him. If he were another rapist, I would not be his
next victim.

Riding my bike on the other end of the block, I grew closer to Eric, a boy I played Deadman with. He and I were the same age
and both had heroin mothers so we had a lot in common. Eric was afraid to live in his house, a problem he discussed with me.
He knew something bad was going to happen there. So, he told me, he kept his bedroom window open, in case he needed to make
the two-story jump to safety. He dreamed, he often said, of the day when his parents would stop selling dope and they all
could leave the projects forever. To pass the time, we would sit out at night on the swings the authorities had built. We
would swing our souls away late into the dark, starry nights. Both our young mothers had stopped coming home.

Eric also knew of the muscular, dark man who had been watching me. I pointed him out one day while he sat on Eric’s porch.
Eric was surprised. He said that the man had been with some of the prettiest women in the projects. He was no rapist. He was
one of those settled cool brothers, the smooth ones who know a lot about women.

One evening, instead of going up Morris, I rode past the man’s house, where he was sitting on the porch with his girlfriend.
He stopped me and asked what my name was, said he knew about my mother and my home situation. He said he used to be just like
me when he was a boy. Looking into my eyes with his own black rubies, he told me I was good-looking.

“Women will take care of you when you’re older, if you know how to move a woman’s heart,” he said. His girlfriend just sat
there and smiled. The man wasn’t threatening, and he aroused my curiosity, too much for me not to go back. So I did go, all
summer long.

I don’t think he had children because I never saw any. I know he didn’t work. The apartment, which belonged to his woman,
was sparsely furnished and had only two dining chairs and a couch. It was still a project unit, so it had the small rooms,
which stayed hot. Everything was kept tidy and clean, even the tile floors, which required a lot of mopping. His backyard
had the same wire clotheslines and red ants.

He kept food, a lot of vegetables, greens, and fish, but none of the disgusting pig feet, pig ears, and things my mother cooked
from time to time. He never fried his food and said he didn’t eat pork because it was worse than putting heroin in your blood.
He, not his girlfriend, cooked their meals; I found that odd. Until he moved away, he gave me food, which I ate like a starved
animal.

But what I recall most is his bedroom. The windows were covered by heavy blankets, forever blackening the sun. It stayed totally
dark in there. A dull, red light, like one blinking on a dark stormy night atop a tall tower, revealed the shadow of a small
table next to his bed. That light and the reefer smoke gave the room an enchanted setting.

While the deep rhythms of the band Parliament and Bootsy’s Rubber Band softly played out of four speakers in each corner of
the room, I would sit, light-headed from his reefer smoke, absorbing the almost spiritual music, and listen to this black
man, who wore a net cap over his small Afro. I clearly remember two of his imperatives: “Always love your woman’s mind,” and,
“You have to take care of her, so she’ll hold you up when the white man wants to crush you.” Not until years later would I
come to understand his advice or the rare kind of black man he was. Over time I grew to respect him, because unlike many of
us, he seemed content and at peace, seemed to know some secrets about the projects, perhaps their purpose, perhaps why we
were in them, that made him seem not subdued, at least in many ways.

After the sweet brother piqued my interest in women, it wasn’t long before I met my first female friend, Gloria*, on the day
she and her family moved to west Dallas, near my unit, on the row behind Biggun’s. My friendship with Eric had been dwindling
away naturally, like friendships between little kids do, so Gloria came along on time.

From the first day I saw her at the candy truck on Fishtrap, Gloria was beautiful to me. Too beautiful. She was thin, her
skin gleamed with natural health, and her eyes were pearls, shadowed by shoulder-length hair. Not even her old clothes and
weathered shoes could overshadow her beauty. After I gathered enough courage I introduced myself.

“My name is Jerrold, you must don’t live around here.”

“How’d you know?” she asked.

“Because you’re shopping at the high candy truck. If you want to, I’ll show you where the cheap one is.”

“That’ll be nice,” she said, looking as if she knew she had met her first friend. And from that day forward, that’s the way
Gloria and I would get along, simply, openly, and cheerfully.

I walked her back home from the candy truck and offered to help her and her family move in.

With the work of moving, Gloria was helping as much as her girlish strength would allow, carrying bags of clothes and boxes
of pots over the barren ground between much needed rest periods. Her sisters, on the other hand, were bulky, strong women
who could help the men carry the heavy pieces. They all worked under the admiration of the older boys, who stood around watching.
Enough of them already had volunteered. And her mom, who was thin like Gloria, helped also.

Over time I learned that Gloria’s two sisters had babies and her mother was on heroin. I didn’t know much about her father—who
mostly stayed to himself—except that he had a job somewhere and was the only support the family had. Gloria’s mother shouted
at him all the time. He seemed to be on heroin, too.

I admired the young girls as much as I could at that age, but Gloria was beyond them all because she was kind, gentle, and
sweet, all at the same time. I can’t recall ever hearing one bitter word come from her mouth or one angry expression on her
face. The older boys longed for her ripeness through lusty stares. But of all, she liked scrawny me.

She was my first intimate contact with a woman. To share feelings and play games became the order of the day. And though we
would not see each other for weeks or months, we would still say that we were going together. We would sit around together
and talk on her back porch, of course after I climbed the tall tree back there, which was equally as important. Sometimes
we held hands, being sure to stay away from the minimum-wage group, who would have teased us. We occasionally sat alone under
the dark nights. We kissed only once, and I thought I experienced a little bit of that healing my cool friend had talked about,
for even at that age blacks were real mature about relationships between men and women.

Sometimes Gloria would express her disappointment at her mother, who she thought could do a lot better. I would overhear Gloria
questioning her mother about women things. But her mother, who didn’t want to be bothered, always responded unkindly, angrily,
sometimes frantically. Something else I picked up on was Gloria’s serious weakness. She lacked self-reliance, something all
the kids had learned was vitally necessary. I hoped Gloria also would gain the skill, in time.

But for now she looked to her mother for guidance, to shape her into the fine woman she was destined to be. Gloria was enduring
the projects the way my brother had when he first arrived: remaining quiet, sweet, and sensitive, even to her mother. No need
to worry about Gloria, her loveliness would see her through.

Toward the end of the year 1978, however, I let Biggun and his sister Scootie peer-pressure me into picking a fight with Gloria.
I wanted to be accepted by the bully, even at the cost of my love. I figured this was the better long-term investment, an
example of those self-reliance skills. After he dared me, I walked up to Gloria, her knowing all along what was going on,
and blackened her eye.

Biggun and Scootie oohed and aawed and giggled. But Gloria, devastated, was crying softly. When she walked away from me that
day, I saw the pain and hurt in her eyes. She wouldn’t speak to me for weeks; and Biggun still chased me home. I felt terrible
for months afterward. But Gloria eventually forgave me. She stopped me one day as I walked in front of her house and told
me I was wrong for doing that. But when I apologized, she smiled. Regardless, we would never become close friends again. Gloria
and her family would soon leave the projects. Her mother was about to have a nervous breakdown.

After apologizing to Gloria that day, I went home and found a small crowd gathered across from my window. They were watching
as a black man was being wheeled from the Deadman units by paramedics. A sheet hid his face. He was Gloria’s father.

W
ake up, Jerrold and Junior,” Sherrie screamed early one Monday morning. There was no need to wake up. Too nervous to get some
sleep, I had lain awake half the night. I forced myself out of bed and moved the broken closet door aside. A pile of dirty
clothes lay just inside the closet. Sifting through the pile, I managed to find an outfit that wasn’t so abhorrent. The shirt
was from the early sixties, the pants dirt-packed. And my mother, she didn’t even get out of bed to bid us a horrible good-bye.

That morning, Junior and Sherrie were being bussed to middle school in a white neighborhood. I had attended George Washington
Carver but was being transferred to John J. Pershing. At Carver, the teachers would come and get me out of class to give me
reading and spelling tests, though it didn’t dawn on me until years later why they never made the other kids take so many
tests. They were detecting things.