The transition did not come easy — he never learned to sit down for hours every night with his head in a book. But he started showing up for class, and found that he liked the methodology, the back and forth of debates. He partied less, cut off old friends, and mastered the great art of the cram. Slowly it came together, and at the end of his first semester of any effort, he saw what he could do — a C plus GPA — if he only tried.
Dad was ecstatic, and for the first time he got some idea that all his labor might not be washed away.
I took my last SAT in November of my senior year, and what I remembered most was that it meant an exit from the prep classes taught by Jovett and my mom. Kier was out of Poly, too, and began hanging with new friends near Barrington. It was no longer the island I remembered, for not even the great cloud giants could keep the rotting city at bay. Kier ran into Barrington’s collapse, and whereas I was unsure of what I wanted and how I would get there, Kier was on intimate terms with his own desires. He wanted a mass of ends, accessible by a shortcut, and so he turned to the drug trade.
We parted ways there. I was too formed by then, and firm in my own ethics and beliefs of what crack had done to us all, clawing out the eyes of our cities with its steel-white talons. At school, I cut off Ebony at every pass. We talked almost every night for hours about all the nothing that young people feel the fate of worlds hinges on. After school, we’d hang out at the library or the sub shop across the street. I gathered her life story, how she was originally from Jersey, and how drugs had taken both her parents down. She moved in with a godmother out in the county and came to high school away from all the problems of the city. Of course, by then Woodlawn was also shifting over. In ten years, the neighborhood mall would go from the Gap, arcades, and Hecht’s to check-cashing joints, fast-food, and plus-size clothing stores.
On the surface of it all, she was unbroken and serene. Once, she challenged my father to a debate over his revolutionary credentials — made him justify a Black Panther who’d moved to the suburbs. He was forty-six, and was moving toward a lighter touch with my younger brother, Menelik. He did not preach much now, as he was entering into the twilight of his parenting years. My mother might go away for a weekend, and Dad would cook, wash dishes, and take us to the movies. He walked in on us studying, wearing reading glasses, pulled low on his nose. He looked down at us sitting at the table and then pulled up a seat. She grinned immediately, and then grilled him on the ethics of talking black while leaving the least among us behind. It was good and spirited, and Dad’s logic was indomitable as usual. Still, it didn’t stop Ebony from asserting my claims to the West Side were little more than fraud.
Beneath it all, I saw her wounds, the thing that makes men run into burning houses. Here was my damsel. All her demons were hidden, but I could feel them baying out from within and activating something immutable in my DNA. My grades improved in direct proportion to the time I spent around her. I got extracurricular. I did a Garvey speech for the school in the black awareness assembly. I became a peer counselor. They’d pull me out of class for workshops on conflict resolution.
My motives were impure, like my brother’s: Ebony was involved in all of these things. She was one of those kids. She caught me in the hallway after sixth period. She’d been gone all day and was wearing a dress that seemed like it was bought for church. She’d just been honored for grades, for extraordinary effort or some such accolade of overachieving. She was always overachieving. She handed me an envelope and told me not to open it until after school.
I had to go to Mondawmin that day for shopping, and thought little of what I’d mindlessly stuffed in my backpack. I opened it after I got off the subway. It was the program from her ceremony, and on the side was a love note that I could not recognize as such. It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels but wants to protect herself all the same. I did not know what I was holding, and was caught on the price in self-esteem for figuring it out. I talked to her that night and thanked her, but I did not push like I was supposed to. I could not see that beneath the shield, beneath the smiles and laughter that were her armor, behind the glowing ax, all of us are waiting to be swept away.
My mother extended her SAT classes for the kids at Sankofa. I would come downstairs on Sunday mornings and make faces at them before I headed out. I was looking out the window into manhood and independence. No one hassled me about my grades. No one checked on me in my room. My parents went out of town and left me with now nine-year-old Menelik. I took him to his Little League football games. That was a great season, the first time in my life where I’d been turned loose from the parental vise grip. Still, you could not dent the expectations of my mother. She would bring me college catalogs. Dad took me down to the civic center for the historically black college tour. I imagined myself in Tougaloo, Tennessee State, Dillard, or Johnson C. Smith, somewhere else with a different way of living and perhaps the sort of standards that would admit a screwup like me.
At school, I caught the attention of teachers and counselors who tried to move me into Advanced Placement. I politely declined, no need to soil my last year. Still, in spite of me, some of them managed to place road signs in my life path. My English 12 teacher, Mrs. Effron, saw my papers and short stories and was the first person, outside of my mother, to tell me that in this I may have a gift. My guidance counselor, Mr. Herring, took to me immediately and put out of his mind my earlier transcript and three years of ineptitude. When the applications began to fly, he wrote me a recommendation that was beyond anything I felt I had earned. I saw in myself the disgrace to my father’s name. But Mr. Herring was a black man, Conscious like my father, and thus desperate to reclaim troops for the field.
That winter, I applied to four schools — all in the area, in hopes of never saying good-bye to my drummers. The shortest application was for Howard — a gamble, a pebble slung into the dark. Then I returned to the last leisurely half of senior year. That was the year, the only year of my childhood, that I took off from hip-hop. The older gods were falling off. EPMD were breaking. Chuck and Flav had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out Malcolm were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight. I felt some part of that need to stand on the corner of the world and grab your nuts. But I was at the gates of manhood, and they could not fade me. They were hard where it mattered least — attacking whole genders, claiming to run the street, and then fleeing in the wake of the Beast.
By then, Big Bill had brought home other gifts — Bob, Steel Pulse, and Burning Spear. He would gather his friends at our home, my parents gone for the week, and blaze out back, banging Babylon by Bus. They were all nouveau Conscious, had dropped their slave names for handles taken from Zulu and Swahili. Bob Marley had been dead for a decade, and yet he emerged to us as the great bard of our people. Later I found the frat boys had ruined him, like they do everything they touch. But back then, he was prophetic. That year I did not know where I was headed, but I knew that I was mortgaged to the grand ideal — the end of mental slavery and the fulfillment of the book.
In those last lazy months of senior year — half days and free periods — I was admitted to Morgan State, sent a dorm room assignment and glossy package extolling my new independent life. It was my third acceptance, all to local schools, and all the product of three quarters of grinding from a 1.8 to a respectable 2.4 grade point.
Who was I in those moments of acceptance but a boy finally realized? All my years my family pounded me in hopes of something more. My mother told me I was sharp, but would never make it this lazy. My father could drown a whole weekend into chores. Big Bill would punch me in the arm, warning that out there was a world out of control and the safeties were permanently disengaged. My mother used to say I was going to fly, but I could not see how. And now I’d come home and in the mailbox, each month, I found a fat packet with my name on it. I was not made complete, but I felt worthy of my mother’s praise.