At Tioga, Ma did the legwork and caught the blowback. When it came to the day-to-day discipline, Dad was a worst-case scenario, summoned when we’d gone too far. In those moments, Ma would cock her head and walk away. It was left to us to wait in our bedrooms, until late night or early morning, when the wraith got to swinging his black belt.
We had to do something ignorant for that, a feat I managed annually. But Ma was hard core in her own right, and most dangerous when she lowered her voice slightly a few decibels above a whisper. She was raised in the projects down on Gilmore, and as a girl, never saw a fight she didn’t want. Dad generated a fear that was supernatural, but my mother was his earthly, overseeing manifestation. I was closer to my mother in those days, mostly because while Dad lectured from Olympus and could descend like a plague, she talked easily and discussed everything like it was a local weather report, even sex.
Now, boy, she once told me, in one of her many renditions of the Talk. Whenever you start, be gentle. Don’t get there and start jumping up and down on the girl. Remember to be gentle.
But she didn’t protect us from Dad, and in his stead, she could be ruthless. My mother delivered my first beatings. Once while I was mouthing off, she reached for a high heel. I took off running, and then felt the sudden impulse to dodge to the right. The shoe whizzed past me and smashed a dent into the wall. I turned around in shock. Ma laughed and walked away.
Bill resented the awkward relationship between my mother and him. Once, I came home and caught him in full rage. He was on the phone with a friend. He threatened to pull tool on Dad. He called my mother — with her short, Conscious natural hair — a bald-headed bitch. I walked past him quickly and didn’t say anything. I was never comfortable with anger. I would feel the claws of rage digging into me, but my nature never allowed them to hang on for long. I thought that the rage just went away. It took years to find out I was wrong. But back then, I did not know where to go.
I didn’t say much to him for the next week. I knew the rules about insulting mothers, the obligations of the son. I should have been thinking of arsenic-laced cookies, a hot poker in the eyes while he slept. But I was bad at holding on to the dark burn that feeds revenge. Instead, I almost understood. We were of different mothers, what we saw in the world was not the same. He was a terrible bear, but still I held Bill in that place that most young boys hold their heroic brothers. I pilfered his old Nike tees, and gray Adidas sweat suits in hopes that all his heart, his stones, his terrifying bop had seeped through in the wash and would now react with something latent and manly in me.
That was, of course, fantastic folly. Back at school, I marveled as my man Fruitie went from herb to culture hero. We were down by law, both awkward and out of sorts with the Lemmel ecology. His handle on the rock was questionable. His choice of fashion was pedestrian. He had the sort of easy temperament that most of the other boys tried to cover with armor. His slave name was Antwan Smith, but the Marshall Team addressed him as Fruitie because he laughed at anything, told bad jokes, and cared nothing for the mask and shadows seemingly necessitated by the street. Like me, he had some height on him and came from one of those nameless places that the goblins did not fear. But that was where our parallels reached a dead end.
I lost count of how many times Fruitie got banked. The accounts came back as oral history with variations on the same heroic theme: There Fruitie stood at the base of the school steps, surrounded by vandals who dared not shoot the fair one, even though Fruitie was chill and always at ease. Instead, they circled, looking for the perfect angle to sucker punch. Niggers never even saw Fruitie’s ax, only the surge of boys flinging themselves at him and then flying away, no longer under their own power. He fought fiercely, repelled waves, before going down. With each telling, the deeds became greater, the villainy swelled in number, their methods grew in atrocity. They came from Douglass High School, damn near grown men. They lumbered out of the woods by the score. They pulled up in paint-splattered work vans. They wore hard hats and steel-toe boots. They swung two-by-fours, pipes, and brickbats. Not once did Fruitie prevail, and yet for the sheer will to war, he was John Henryed and the Marshall Team conferred on him a sort of respect that no jump shot or dime piece could give. The Gods of the Avenue mocked him. The time and the era outmatched him. But he would not be contained.
Out on the bus stop, where Garrison and Liberty meet, he revealed the source of his power while I stared on, unbelieving. We were catty-corner from a fire station and across the street from Jim Parker Lounge. I was shivering in the winter, having just had my sky blue Nike skullcap snatched.
This is the sort of dumb shit that slowly takes us out. There existed a Baltimore where school is for school’s sake, where a kid’s greatest worries were spelling tests and the first awkward juvenile crush. Neighborhoods like Rolling Park had bullies, fat kids, and badasses in a rebellious phase.
But in Mondawmin the vultures among us corrupted everything. They were not growing into something better; they were not finding their deeper selves. The Knowledge was a disease. Some took to it faster than others. But eventually we all got it. We all grew tired of getting touched. We were just like boys everywhere, dreaming of model trains, Captain Marvel, and chemistry sets. But for us there were orcs outside the door, blood in their teeth and always waiting. At some point we grew tired of crumbling under their boots and embraced the Knowledge, became like all the rest groping for manhood in the dark.
Each black boy must find his own way to this understanding. Fruitie was a blue jay in the meadow, and that made him remarkable, because even he had come to Know. That winter afternoon, while the vultures swooped in and took off with my hat, all I had to do was whistle and Fruitie would have been at them. But I did nothing. After the spot rushers had gone, Fruitie stepped into the awkward air and dropped a jewel. He confessed to me that he was afraid, but when surrounded by henchmen, he’d quote a line from Rakim Allah and he was harder than he’d been in the moment before.
I nodded, but pushed his words into the back of a basement. Some weeks later, on the field across from Lemmel, we were shortcutting to the M-1 bus stop — he was headed home, I was off to see my grandmother. And then here these mutherfuckers came, with more numbers than us, running across the field between west of Dukeland and south of Liberty. I’ve forgotten how they looked on purpose, but I remember that again they grabbed for my Raiders fitted, yet another hat, and then snatched something from Fruitie that I didn’t see. They offered to let us go with no further damage. I accepted. But Fruitie had grown tired long ago. There is no other way to say this: I walked away.
From the safety of the bus stop I watched him. He was not Thor. When he swung his long arms, nothing shook on its axis. Within seconds he was on the ground. It was horror. They were on top of him, wailing away. Fruitie was gone. He thrashed wildly, kicked his legs. How could this sight, him helpless on the ground, pinned in a one on six be poetry? I was a boy like all boys, selfish in my own particular way. What I could not understand was something that seemed elemental to everyone else around me — that a kid who lost his heart was worthy of nothing.
The next day at school, the whole affair, like always, had gone around the Marshall Team. Someone approached me in science class—
Fruitie should fuck you up.
But that was never my nigger’s style. He gave a pound when he saw me, and kept joking like nothing had happened, like nothing had gone wrong. His kindness wounded me. And I knew then that I was alone.