When Bill was burned by Murphy Homes, he promised to never again be helpless. A rep was preventive medicine. If you were from one of the lucky slums that struck fear, you could walk where you pleased. It was what we all wanted, even tender me, to be seen out there, and, on the strength of my pedigree, turn any street into home field.
This was the motive for even Wabash, with its modest lawns, brick homes, and absent public housing, to expect or incite beef. Conflicts bloomed from a minor remark or misstep, and once in motion everyone stayed cocked and on alert. This is what beef is: Baltimore was too primitive for gangs, everything relied on natural or man-made borders. The duchy of Wabash and Sequoia was marked off by train tracks. North of there was Tawanda, a parallel world, that saw Wabash like Wabash saw them. You only crossed those tracks if you were out of your mind. Whatever you needed — cheesesteak, dish detergent, girls — you had on your requisite side.
It was night, and like all the others, Big Bill, Joey, and Marlon were out on their home corner. There was the normal high that comes from the hormones of youth, that fresh sense of being unchained. But also there was the omnipresent feeling that It could go down. In those moments — which back then were all of our moments — your neurology was always code red. Bill’s crew was hyper-tensed — the laughter was controlled, smiles had edges, and no one stared too long at one spot.
And then It happened. Someone — no one ever remembers who — yelled, Yo, it’s them, coming across the tracks.
There was no math. Bill just reached in his dip, and, like his friends, shot out in the appropriate direction.
He could have been a headline, some fool whose stray ripped through a bassinet. The rush blinded them, not one of them got eyes on a clear target. But in the yellow glare of streetlights, phantoms fell before them. Someone screamed “five-oh!” and there was a hectic dash down the now-quiet streets, up to Marlon’s porch, and then down into his basement. They took a few breaths, settled some, and then got to yelling, high-fiving, and beating their chests. Yo, I hit one. Hell, yeah, I got at least two of ’em. When I heard about it, it sounded like something out of Looney Toons or the farcical West — a lot of gunfire, no blood or injuries. But that was not the point.
Bill heard the admonishments of my father, but Dad couldn’t walk the path for him. We were divided — one foot in America, the other in a land of swords. They told us to act civilized, but everywhere bordered on carnage. Bill became uncomposed. To be strapped was to grab the steering wheel of our careening lives. A gun was a time machine and an anchor — it dictated events. To be strapped was to master yourself, to become more than a man whose life and death could be simply seized and hurled about.
Bill’s logic was taken from the Great Knowledge, the sum experience of our ways from the time Plymouth Rock landed on us. To this compendium each generation added its volume. Our addition was the testament of the broken cities — West Side, Harlem, the fifth ward. The Knowledge Man knew that death was jammed in us all, hell-bent on finding a way out. So he never measured his life in years but style — how he walked, who he walked with, how he stepped to jenny, where he was seen, where he was not. This man turned his life into art and pledged himself to the essential truth: No matter what Civilization says, academic intelligence is overpraised and ultimately we are animals. When I saw one of these true disciples, almost-men like my brother Bill, I knew there were vital things that I had missed.
The Knowledge was taught from our lives’ beginnings, whether we realized it or not. Street professors presided over invisible corner podiums, and the Knowledge was dispensed. Their faces were smoke and obscured by the tilt of their Kangols. They lectured from sacred texts like Basic Game, Applied Cool, Barbershop 101. Their leather-gloved hands thumbed through chapters, like “The Subtle and Misunderstood Art of Dap.” There was the geometry of cocking a baseball cap, working theories on what jokes to laugh at and exactly how loud; and entire volumes devoted to the crossover dribble. Bill inhaled the Knowledge and departed in a sheepskin cap and gown. I cut class, slept through lectures, and emerged awkward and wrong.
My first day at Lemmel, I was a monument to unknowledge. I walked to school alone, a severe violation of the natural order of things. I got my first clue of this standing on my front porch, my canvas backpack slid across one shoulder, watching as small groups of kids make their way down the green hill that sat at the end of the Mondawmin parking lot. All the way to school, everyone rolled like this — three deep or deeper. There was a warped affection among them, the kind born from a common threat. They constantly looked around. They tossed ice grills like there was no other choice. They exchanged pounds with each other frequently, as if to say I am here, I am with you. All their Starter caps were cocked at the appropriate angle. Everyone moved as though the same song were playing in their heads. It was a song I’d never heard. I shrugged my backpack a little tighter on my shoulder and made my way.
Later I’d understand that the subaudible beat was the Knowledge, that it kept you ready, prepared for anyone to start swinging, to start shooting. Back then, I had no context, no great wall against the fear. I felt it but couldn’t say it.
I paid little heed to great injustice, despite my mother showing me blueprints of slave ships and children’s books tracking the revolution of Dessalines and Toussaint. Still, I could spot even small injustices when they shadowed me personally. I knew that to be afraid while on the way to school was deeply wrong.
I walked the hill alone, the error of my way now dawning on me, but reached the doors of Lemmel with everything intact. I climbed the long flight of concrete steps and stood in a corner of the school, waiting on the bell, staring at the ground, trying to vanish.
I emerged into a morass of numbers and bureaucracy. Lemmel was partitioned into three grades, four tracks, and sixteen classes, ranging from special ed to gifted. Each track was then given the name of a champion — Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson. My class was 7-16. We were one of six gifted classes on the Thurgood Marshall Team. I don’t know how gifted any of us were — more likely we had parents in the race, mothers who worked for the city, got their degrees from Coppin State. They’d gone far enough to know what was out there and what they’d missed in the manner of their coming up. These are the parents the intellectuals erase in their treatises on black pathology. But I saw them in effect at Lemmel, that and teachers always with an eye for children who were two seconds faster and seemed to be bound for something more than the corner or Jessup. From the hallway’s rafters these teachers hung propaganda: It is by choice not chance…that we choose to advance, The Marshall Team; We can achieve…We will achieve.
The many problems of the city came to rest at the Lemmel’s doorsteps. Kids hailed from the projects, foster care, from homes without lighting, from parents who still shut down Odells while their children ran the streets. Lemmel stood out, because all the chaos of West Baltimore swirled around it but never inside. The school’s guardians believed in the vocabulary of motivation and self-help. Their favorite phrases featured words like “confidence,” “push,” and “achieve.” They saw Lemmel as a barracks, themselves as missionaries called to convert us to the civilized way.