Midnight (6 page)

The hustlers who think they a cut above the rest insist on fourteen- or eighteen-karat gold. Where I am from, even this kind of jewelry is known as junk.

Around my way, at the time, the dealer’s car of choice was the BMW. They also chilled in Maximas, Saabs, Jaguars, and baby Benzes, the 190. Somehow each of them would find some way to fuck up a decent new ride. Either they would put bright-yellow fog lights on, or skirts, or an additional bumper made of plastic or some big fucking letters pasted on the windows, which I thought could only draw even more attention to themselves when it seemed to me like common sense that their line of work required them to hang back and camouflage.

Around the hood they be flossing their money knots, shaking their dice, shooting their C-low, smoking their weed, hugging their forties, making an unnecessary scene in the sunlight when everybody’s watching. Any one of them would pull a stack of bills out, line a bunch of boys up, and pay for all of them to get cuts at the barbershop or ice cream at the ice cream truck. I turned down their offers. It wasn’t no real money in it for me. Besides, I have a father. I wasn’t out looking for none of these cats to play daddy.

All of their deals were loaded anyway. They got almost
everything. You got next to nothing. The police stay on your ass, not the boss’. They stayed styling while you became nothing but a scrambler, a runner, you running all the risk all the time.

One of them, known on the streets by the name Superior, offered me a package to sell for him, with promises of me blowing up over time. I told him, “Nah,” I had no time for that bullshit.

Of course there were working people where I lived who had regular jobs. Their work was legit, but their mentality was just as foreign to me. We had janitors, waiters, garbagemen, and postal workers. They were grown men. They did what they thought they had to do on the weekdays and got high or drunk on the weekends to forget it all. They tricked part of their earnings watching and paying young girls to peel their clothes off at Squeeze and paid them a little more to bounce in their laps. Compared to all the other men in the hood, they swore they were doing it. They had legit jobs with benefits and crowned themselves kings because of it. For entertainment they juggled the hearts of the husbandless mothers who outnumbered them ten to one. Their constant lying and creeping made for tight, uncomfortable, volatile rides down on the elevator in the morning where these various women faced off.

We also had a couple of shiny shoe U.S. Army cats living in our hood. They were shipped, deployed, and flown in and out. They were respected for their assumed military skills. On top of that, cats admired that they had permission and orders to kill without penalty.

Envious young niggas got their get back on the military men by making trampolines out of their girlfriends and wives while they were away on active duty.

One cat named Arthur fucked around and caught feelings for one of the army wives, and blasted her husband on the
first hour of his first day on leave back home. The army guy had survived the blood, roar, bullets, and bombs of America’s unjust wars. He managed to stay alive in the alleys and corridors of Beirut, Lebanon, but got clapped up and gunned down easily on the ghetto-hot streets of BK.

Luther Mathews was a big-time corrections officer, who still lived in our building along with the same motherfuckers who kept getting locked up. He walked around like he was a supercop
and
a deteck. The older females sweated him because he had a job, benefits, and a uniform. I looked at him like he couldn’t be too smart, a grown-ass man still stuck in the projects with the wild wolves.

I once saw him behind the building beefing with some young strays like they was his own children. Quick-tempered, he started screaming, “Wait till I get y’all asses up at Rikers,” like he was so sure every teen would end up in lockup eventually.

The real cops were like germs no antibiotic could kill. They watched us. We watched them. They were all over the place. So were we. The only difference was, we lived there and they didn’t. Still, they acted like they lived there and we didn’t. They had beef with everybody who wasn’t one of their bitches or snitches.

No matter what a guy’s angle is, legit or illegit, around my way you gonna encounter the police. There are random stops, random searches, random beatdowns, random arrests, random police shootings and murders of unarmed teens, and none of it random. So I moved calm yet swift through the streets and I got more than a few hidden places to stash my heat.

The notorious cop around our way was Officer Brandon Huff. Black and built like a bodybuilder, he was known for pulling over pretty young thangs on a routine survey and head count of single mothers. He would entice them with his
promises to straighten out their teenage sons who wouldn’t “act right” or respect them. He was big on beatdowns and more prejudiced against black youth than a white man. Everybody around my way called Officer Huff by his street name, Stress.

I like math and I am good and quick with numbers. I figured out the smaller percentage of time I spent in the hot spot known as my block, the less of a chance of me getting harassed and bagged by the cops for standing still.

I avoided my block, treated it like one big walk-through. I was looking for something or someplace entirely different. I set up my adventures elsewhere. But since everybody else, including the heroin fiends, stood on the block every day in the same spot doing the same things, it was impossible for them not to notice me moving around.

Over time people thought they knew me. The streets stay watching. But I didn’t take none of them for friends or acquaintances or bless ’em with any kind of real conversation. From time to time it would just be one of them doing the telling and me doing the listening and nodding. I had to keep track of the happenings one way or another as a form of defense of my fam.

It was only DeQuan who kept coming for me, trying to pull me into the fold of his fucked-up “community.” He kept track of all of the boys on the block, made them fight shit out, even hung a punching bag on a chain from the lamppost. He set up races and games, gave kids new names based on how they battled and competed and where they fit in because everything for him was about muscle, strength, competition, and dominance. He believed in “each one, teach one.”

He was a supplier. That’s how I saw him. I knew for now I needed him to reup on bullets, plus you never know. So I cooperated with him from time to time. I saw he took a liking to me, maybe because he bet on me a few times and won.

As far as I was concerned, I was at war with every boy, every teen, every man living or working on my block. I was either at war with them with my mind, my ideas and my beliefs, or my fists, my feet and my weapons.

I was sure about one thing. Our hoods were fucked up. Nobody could think or live straight. Everybody everywhere got guns cocked and loaded and one thousand reasons to shoot. I got my guns too. I don’t love them. But I need them.

Umma is my heartbeat. I love her more than I love myself.

I care about what she thinks and has to say. Easily I would give my life to save hers. Yet every day I strive to stay alive because losing my life would kill her.

As Umma’s firstborn, and a son, we are closer than skin is to flesh. Without exchanging any words I know many of her thoughts. Her feelings are extremely intense. So sometimes I have to leave her presence to avoid being swallowed by them.

From age seven until now at fourteen, I’ve held her hand in mine and led her into America. I have translated everything she saw and heard. I’ve spoken for her in the offices of immigration, at the lawyer’s office, at the bank and realtors. Every day I had to pay close attention to everyone, what they were saying and doing in regards to my mother, and had to read and interpret documents they wanted her to sign that were even difficult for me to understand. Ours is a closeness that only a foreigner in a foreign land who cannot speak the common language might really understand. Still, our closeness is more.

Clearly I know the difference between a father, a husband, and a son. I wanted to be the best son possible, not only because my father said to do it; not only because I am her only son; but also because she deserved it and I love and respect her beyond anyone else.

Umma is the opposite of every female that I saw or knew
so far in America. She doesn’t change her mind every few seconds, minutes, or months. She is steady. Her love and loyalty are forever. Her friendship is something you can count on. She is an amazing talent, while being so modest and down to earth. She is a young wife and mother, and an extremely attractive woman without conceit. She doesn’t need or want everyone to look at her or to give her compliments all day to feel all right about herself. She is an incredible cook, who fills every one of her dishes and pots at every meal, with love. After eating, you could feel the love growing in your belly and strengthening your body.

She is a hard worker but always pleasant. She is so smart, yet so unselfish. Even when she criticizes she is accurate but soft and always sweet. The best thing about her is her certainty. Her belief in and dedication to Allah is unshakable. You could see it in her every action every day, without her preaching a word of it. Her family is her life.

Umma’s love for my father is like radiation, something active and extreme that’s in each speck of the atmosphere every day. Since leaving the North Sudan, where Umma was born, raised, married, and gave birth, I do not mention her husband, my father, because mentioning missing him would set off a tidal wave of her emotions and desires and a typhoon of her tears that could only drown everyone and everything in its path. We live life like he is right here beside us in the United States.

We bow down and pray to Allah together at the same time each and every day.

When we first touched down at John F. Kennedy Airport in America, we were supposed to be received, cared for, and guided by one of my father’s American friends, his former roommate while studying at Columbia University. We were both surprised when he never showed up and never responded to our many phone calls. Especially after
my father phoned him from the Sudan and told him, “I am sending my heart overseas. She is with my young son and carrying also my daughter in her womb.”

The roommate became permanently pressed in Umma’s mind as the symbol of an “American welcome,” and the measure of “American friendship.”

On our first day in New York, once we made it outside of JFK Airport in Queens, we took a taxi to New York City. We checked into a Midtown Manhattan hotel recommended by the cab driver. At the Parker Meridien, instantly we became familiar with the weight of the American dollar, as each night’s stay in our hotel room equaled a month of Sudanese dinars and high living.

At the concierge’s desk in the hotel lobby, I collected information and got a few answers to our questions, as well as a map of the city of New York, including all of its five boroughs and a subway guide.

For a month Umma and I lived in our hotel room trying to figure things out. We walked the streets and learned to ride the train together, making and carrying out our plans. It wasn’t long before Umma revealed that the shock of this new place, and the weird people and things we saw every day, were making her sicker than she was supposed to be in her third month of pregnancy.

On the train she would comment to me that the women in this country must all be in mourning, because they wore no henna on their hands. Back home women with undecorated hands and feet were either unmarried, uncelebrated, or widowed. Henna was a sign of happiness, good fortune, good health, good life, and beauty.

The train rides were a source of shock for her: singing beggars with either no legs or no arms or both, foul-mouthed youth who wouldn’t stand up and make room for elderly ladies or women traveling with babies and young children.
Once there was this man in his thirties, drenched in the smell of cheap wine, who attempted to stand directly in front of where Umma sat before I moved him out of her way. The last straw was when a homeless man seated beside us turned out to be dead. Two young transit workers got onto the train, then stood around arguing over who was gonna clean up the pool of watery shit that filled his seat after his body was removed.

While shopping in the random fruit stores, Umma would say that the fruits here looked abnormal and strangely large. So many of the fresh tropical fruits she craved were missing from the midtown stores, like dates, guava, tamarind, and apricots.

In the supermarkets we checked out, she would say that the raw chicken looked bloated and swollen and unusually yellow, as if someone had intentionally painted them with an unnatural color. In the fish market she would recoil at the stinking smell, saying fresh fish has a distinctive scent but did not have a foul odor. Even the coffee served in the coffee shops was an insult to her. I guess this was not surprising since Sudanese coffee ranks as one of the best-tasting coffees prepared in the world.

Umma spit up even the New York drinking water, saying it was awful and tasted impure. I never doubted her words. On our estate, our water was drawn from our fresh water wells. Back home she picked fruits off our trees, plucked and pulled vegetables from our gardens and fields, crushed fresh coffee beans, fried them, and brewed everyone’s coffee. She cooked incredible stews and baked fresh breads and was so accurate in her mixture and blend of spices that an invitation for dinner at our place was never turned down, but instead was met with great excitement and anticipation.

I knew and Umma impressed upon me that we had to find affordable housing and a comfortable living space before
our monies dwindled down to nothing. So far we had spoken with many professionals who were all clear and specific about the money they wanted from us as payment. Yet they were cloudy and vague about what they would actually do to earn the money they were requesting and quick to add that they could not guarantee us any results. Umma sensed they were liars and cheaters under the banner of business. Most things we were left to figure out for ourselves.