We did not run, and as they closed, it became clear that we could never escape, the mentality of war must always be at the ready. Someone would have had a boom box. I like to think “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” was on the deck. But that would be a year too soon. This was spring 1989. I was still a reluctant warrior, artless and gauche. But I had done the Knowledge, and pledged my unwieldy ax to upholding the code.
They slowed down as they came to us, out of breath, some of them putting hands on their knees. They began laughing and a few of us started to soften our stance. But I stood off to the side, confused and convinced that whatever respect was accorded to the other brothers could never extend to me. One of them approached me — What’s up, nigger? — and extended his arm. I tightened in a mix of fear and frustration. I thought of how this would end, just as it began. But then he smiled. I looked down and saw his open hand, universal and at peace. I reached out and gave him a pound.
CHAPTER 5. This is the Daisy Age
I wore a powder-blue short-sleeved shirt, matching navy Travel Fox, and stonewashed jeans. I had a green tie-dye book bag, with twin yellow ropes in place of straps. The back festooned with buttons, the totems of my champions — Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X. Nigger, I was fly — my cut, two days old, tops. The angles of my lineup could have cut the chains, freed the slaves. Likely, I hung a wooden ankh from my neck. Likely, I was armed with Knowledge of Self—The COINTELPRO Papers or A Panther Is a Black Cat.
I was thirteen, but I carried that thing, stepped off the porch with the bop of God’s son, floated across the black parking lot of Mondawmin, paid my fare, descended the cavernous escalators, then trained up to Rogers station. I was still a transfer and bus ride away, and yet I was overcome by status. Through all my terror and trembling, through all my torpor and dim wits, I had conjured this passport into the royal city. I wish I had paused on that long subway platform, closed my eyes, and inhaled. I wish I had acknowledged the feeling, held it close, and understood that it was not forever. But I was young and immortal, so I bounded down two escalators, walked a few yards, then emerged into the sunny basin beneath the station.
Word to Mark Garvey, the West Side was in effect. Everyone had run through Charley Rudo’s, High Energy, Shoe City, and Robert C’s, until we emerged with piles and piles of school clothes that would have us styling for months. Rogers Avenue was humming, dozens of buses bound for everywhere pulled in and out of their hubs. Kids gathered in smiling packs, more free than any school children I’d seen in two years. I was alone, but now Original Man and unafraid. I had survived jumpings and kids in hoodies, hands in deep pockets threatening to pull out. I had survived my father, his many books and hands that were boulders. I had survived the shadow of Big Bill and emerged not a man of streets but of Knowledge.
I stood off to the side, all Nobody Smiling, affecting a measure of cool, representing William H. Lemmel. I caught the publicly chartered 33. Poly/Western scrolled across the front like destiny. When I boarded at Rogers it was half full, but as we rolled down Wabash and across Cold Spring Lane it swelled with other kids like me but not. They were gifted, but had been sheltered in more forgiving schools and hailed from neighborhoods with detached houses and lawns built for tackle football in the fall. This was still the West Side, and so they wore the reserve of that shackled land. But they had reclaimed their laughter, and deployed it without regard for weakness or what it might say.
I had spent that summer in early college prep out at the nearby campus for the University of Maryland, yet another of the programs my parents were always putting us in, hoping that whatever messages we missed from them might connect from another angle. For a month, I lived in a dorm with kids cropped from all over the city. We bunked together in suites, and during the day took lectures in the sciences and field trips to various points of interest in the city. We ate in the school cafeteria. Our downtime was spent swimming, hanging out in the dorm lobby, watching cable videos, or sitting outside our rooms bumping “Back to Life” on our boom boxes. Fridays our parents came for us, or we boarded the 20 bus and looked out the windows as it wended its way through the roads and stations of the open county. There were talent shows. A few of us lip-synched Slick Rick’s “A Children’s Story.” I was the narrator. My boy Isaac acted it out, snatched the lady, pulled the automatic.
At night, suite doors were left unlocked and jimmys and jennys would float through each other’s rooms. We did not know what to make of the girls or of ourselves, but felt the deepest need to express the burgeoning adult inside. Kiesha breached the portal of my room at a heathen hour. The dawning light from outside woke me up, and against the darkness, she was angelic. During the day our conversations had been friendly and vague. She was slender, brown, and from Cherry Hill, where they beat niggers with scrap metal and threw ’em off the Key Bridge. We had exchanged numbers and had talks on three-way. She lay down next to me with her hands around her chest.
Are you good? I asked.
She said something affirmative. I went back to sleep. The next morning, all the girls giggled and asked if I was gay. They were so advanced. I was only thirteen. This was 1989. There were still things I did not understand.
We dismounted the 33 bus in front of the campus, and joined a gathering throng buzzing about the first day. I was amped, but played low-key. I scouted immediately for girls, and what I saw disrupted cognition. There were honeys from across the city — Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled up like Lily Powers — finger waves, a head of dyed blond, and eyes like enchanted daggers. I saw we were outnumbered, as brothers who try the civilized way always are. But in this instance, it was thrilling.
I caught flashbacks, and saw faces that took me back to Callaway Elementary and Ms. Rhone. I saw a few from that summer at UMBC, and two or three from Lemmel. There was no bell that I remember. We just all filed in at the proper time, and made our way to homerooms inscribed on letters we’d received some days before. Here I found my first white teacher, bespectacled, old, and balding, a holdover from the days when Poly was a different fraternity. We were a different breed, cut from something different than the boys he first taught or the old teachers in short-sleeved white shirts with ties and inconspicuous haircuts.
Poly changed with the culture and demography of Baltimore. It was now our time. The pall was slowly coming off, and we were recovering from crack, though still caught in the aftershocks. I worried less about getting jumped. Weathermen talked more sun. Reports of school shootings were replaced with black is back. Chuck D still preached: Elvis was exposed. Our heroes did not appear on stamps. At night, I pumped “Strictly Snapping Necks” and brought forth lyrics. My daydreams were all on stage. It was black and silent, until I raised my ax and touched the mic with literature and fables.
Big Bill was transitioning into life at the Mecca. In his dorm, among the piles of clothes and kicks, the CDs and tapes, the yellow notebooks of lyrics, he packed his gun. He was charged with the possibilities of this second life — no regulations, no chores, the chance to burn consecutive Els. And he was slowly evolving. He carried a couple of Dad’s books and began to feel the call of the People. But he feared the loss of his essence, a slow erosion of the extrasensory gifts imparted by the streets. College was a cartoon to him, flush with bumblers, gophers, and kids who could calculate the temperature on Mars but could not tell you the time. Bill was moved by laws of survival. He was a soldier, insistent that he would not be caught out there. But the “out there” was bigger than he ever dreamed.