My homeroom was ruled by the crusader, Ms. Nichols, who traded her government name of Eleanor for the freed handle of Sadiqan. Dreads flowed down her back. Her skin was dark and smooth. She was like the women Dad and the rest of us sold books to, the ones who’d pore through the selection on the tables, convinced that something between their covers could close the gap. I could not have been in her class more than twenty minutes before she started to curse. It flowed from her natural — Oh, that’s bullshit; fuck that. I giggled like the rest of the class, but not too hard because she bore the seal of black matrons. Her eyes held razors; she sliced into boys who talked out of turn. You could see she came from somewhere hard like Walbrook Junction, that she’d risen off the block, even if the block had not risen off of her. But she was a philosopher. She used the great breadth of social studies to hold forth on sex, vegetarians, Reagan, apartheid, Akhenaton, and the origins of God.
This was all my father wanted — for the long struggle to wake us up to be present in class as it was at home. The struggle infused all his dealings with me. Whenever he could, he violated my weekends with his latest pet lesson.
Dad: Ta-Nehisi, cut off the cartoons. You’re coming with me.
Me: Can I have another hour?
Dad: (The Look of Not Playing.)
Me: (Cutting off the TV) Okay. I’m getting my jacket.
And then we were off in the brown minivan, across the city, public radio our soundtrack, my father telling me again the story of black folks’ slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carryouts, the wig shops, the liquor stores and note that not a one was owned by anybody black. We would stop at Brother Kinya’s printing shop, and Dad would sit down and talk that brother/ nation/black talk.
When we got home, I’d go upstairs and flop on the bed. But Dad never knew when to quit. Instead, he’d call me down to the basement and assign another book, another history that traced our days from the Nile Valley to the Zulus’ last stand. When I turned the pages, I could feel the Something More, like a smoldering fire across the room. Days later Dad would ask for a report. But try as I might, I could only half remember what I’d read, and what I remembered I could not really recite. My dad’s response — a sudden shining in his eyes at the sound of certain words or at my stuttering approximation of some crucial idea — suggested to me that even the little I retained had gold in it. But none of it made sense. I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.
My math teacher was Ms. Chance, who seemed to love only her kids more than math. She had style: an almost Southern accent, red highlights, and acrid perfume. Her zeal was so complete that it pulled us in, made us brag to friends that here we were at twelve, and we knew what it meant to add with letters. She whizzed through lectures, held coach classes after school. She was not Conscious in the way of my father, but in a different way that I couldn’t name but could spot from one hundred feet away: the general manner of black people who simply wanted to compete and see the good works of their own brought forth. I was my own greatest foe, she told me. She’d be off on quadratic equations, then catch me in her periphery with my head in the sky.
Ta-Nehisi, wake up.
I was not a studious boy. I came to conclusions easier than most, but was increasingly disappointed in the world as it was, so invested almost nothing in studying it. But what I was inspired to know, I learned. I read my social studies text like a great novel. I was a novice at algebra, but I was so drawn in by the promise of Ms. Chance that I showed for coach class until I brought home an 80 average, which counted for a triumph on my report card.
These were the exceptions. In second grade my teacher told my mother she suspected that I was mildly retarded. But at Lemmel I truly indulged. I slept through French class, dreaming of pencil fights and paper football. We were blessed with Latin, but I spent most my time talking out of turn and finding excuses to leave my seat. I probed teachers for weakness, then proceeded to make them believe that my parents were on drugs.
Walking home from Lemmel, I couldn’t shake free of my native dreamy state. I thought of everything and noticed almost nothing around me. I could have stumbled just out of the reach of an onrushing fender and felt only a light breeze. Still, I was smart enough to start walking home with friends — Leroy and some others from around my way, about my age. We took the grass hill, but by the time we got to the bottom, I was usually lagging behind the pack. And that’s where I discovered all that I’d been warned about, cracking knuckles and looking my way.
I saw only one of them at first, but these things were three-card monte, and you never knew if there were ten others in camouflage waiting for you to swing or stumble on a rock. He came to me like he had no ill will, but his talk of peace was a lie. While I slowly focused, he quickly explained his pretext for approaching me. He acted confused, looked at me like I had an answer. It could have been a cousin with a snatched chain, a younger brother banked down at the harbor. It didn’t matter because it was fiction. It’s true our laws had mostly forsaken us, but we were not without shame. In deference to the statutes of yore, a boy always had to state the offense before he and his friends started swinging. But in deference to the perverted times, the charges were always pulled from the air, excuses.
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what was going on. Three more appeared, flustered, abandoning this fake diplomacy, and one of them, with yellow skin, in a maroon tee and jeans, stepped to me waving his hands—
Mutherfucker, what’s up?
But by then my group saw I was missing, and made their way back. I was saved by Leroy, who happened to be in one of their classes—
Naw, yo, he cool.
They looked me up and down, and backed away.
Warm Fridays, like that one, always meant fight season. The climate pulled the boys out in their shell tops and sweat suits. Later I came to know the crew that rolled on me — the Mighty Hilton-Beys. Lemmel kids, but the type who slept through middle school and were usually done by tenth grade. What they lived for was after school, slouching sinister in front the 7-Eleven at the bottom of Dukeland hill. That was where the hoppers lifted Hostess and reached for the burgeoning asses of young girls.
There were any number of crews like them, carving up Lemmel into fiefdoms. They were assembled by shared neighborhoods, classes, and elementary schools. Their minds were made small by scrambling at the bottom. So they stood on bus stops, in subway stations, flocked to sidewalk sales, tipped drunks for fifths, and flocked to the Civic Center and bumrushed the show. They would lamp outside Mondawmin Mall, between the Crab Shack and Murray’s Steaks, attempting to invent a rep.
I was raised on the struggle of elders — iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we’d freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings.
The vagueness of the struggle made most of these kids barbarians, but there were a few like myself who were still noncombatants. My cheeks were fat. I talked a lot, laughed in such a way that I gave the hardest kids around me permission to laugh. That same easiness made me soft, and as I bounced awkwardly through the crowd of ungifted kids on my way to class in the morning, I became a confirmation of all the most dangerous rumors about the Marshall Team. Most of the Marshall Team were from further south, where the new nastiness of the city had already settled into a natural and unquestioned state. They understood their place in this new ecology. But still they would not play dumb. They were sharper than their friends, uncles, and cousins. And a couple of them even combined that with the grace of the street. Charles Davis could glide into algebra with perfect rhythm and a black leather bomber on his back, one of the rare kids who knew how to carry a textbook like it was fashion.