A Moment of Silence: Midnight III (The Midnight Series Book 3) (13 page)

“Stepping down the last step lightly, I saw him and fired my knife through the darkness over Naja’s head and into his left eye. He screamed in a way that I never heard a man scream in my life. He dropped the cat as soon as he grabbed his face. I could tell the cat was dead and Naja was stuck there from fright or grief. He looked like he didn’t know what to do; my knife was just lodged there firmly and there was blood. I dashed in and grabbed her hand. But Naja tried to reach for her cat. Then he tried to grab Naja’s hand, but I was swift. I yanked her and dashed out. I stopped on the bottom step and thought to go back and kick him, then yank my knife from his eye. I felt Naja’s little fingers pulling me.

“ ‘Come on, he’s so stupid,’ Naja said.

“That guy was spinning in circles like crazy. He seemed in shock. He was big and I didn’t want to get close enough for him to grab me or to touch Naja. Soon as we dashed he started chasing us, but more like he was stumbling. I snatched open the heavy stairwell door that led back into the lobby. There were people in the lobby so we stopped running, and calmly walked through the lobby and outside. But Naja’s hands were trembling. I couldn’t believe that people were in the lobby but didn’t come to help out when they heard the screaming noises. When we got halfway back to your building, I looked back through the concert crowd, but he wasn’t coming out after us. From upstairs I saw him moving through the crowd with his hand cupped over his hurt eye. I didn’t see the knife though. Strange; it was like no one stopped him or helped him. They had to see him bleeding.” Chiasa exhaled.

“So what are you crying for?” I asked Chiasa, picking up my nine.

“Naja’s safe, and I did get him back good. His eye was spilling blood. But I know . . .”

“You know what?” I asked her, putting on my belt.

“I know you . . .” she said, her eyes cast down. “Naja is right. You are going to kill him.”

“Don’t cry for him,” I told Chiasa. I removed my wedding ring and began emptying my pockets.

“I’m not. Not for him,” she said. “I’m crying because you and Naja both don’t know that Ms. Marcy is dead. She had a heatstroke while she was outside, worried and searching for Naja.”

7. HONOR

The closeness of men, a network of brothers, some related by blood, some related by word is bond, some related by faith, each of us related by action—I believe in that. Thought it should be automatic. Yet, I had operated as an army of one. Ninja style, it had worked for the eight years that I had lived in Brooklyn. Now I saw that what I had failed to consider strongly and to do was to build an army.

Now that I am sitting here with my hands cuffed, my feet cuffed, my hands chained to my feet and my feet chained to the next man who’s also seated here with his hands and feet cuffed, I’m thinking. This is not the “closeness of men” I believe in. This is not “brotherhood.” The one who is chained to me on one side is also chained to the man seated close to him on the other side. We are twelve men, hands and feet cuffed and legs chained one to the other.

Reviewing the path that led me to be in this unexpected position, I realized that what I had done wrong was that I had failed to build an army. I had created a business successfully, but not an army to protect the business or continue with the business when and if for any reason I ran into any serious trouble. I had not built an army, and therefore did not have the power to confront my enemies with any real force or threat or with lethal action or positive outcome. I could take down one enemy at a time, as I had already
successfully done. Yet I could not defeat a system, an organized army of enemies or a rotten culture or attitude. Furthermore, I am here, mixed in and chained down with other men who had failed to do the same.

My mistake. I had been moving through life as an individual, believing that as long as I work hard and live right and respected limits, as long as I created businesses and stockpiled my paper and jewels, that was good enough. Now, I see that it’s not only the hustlers and gangsters and politicians that need armies. Every man needs an army of brothers; every man, every family, every neighborhood needs an army of real men.

It’s not just a numbers game, I’m thinking. It runs far deeper than that. A man could be a part of an army of one hundred, or one thousand or ten thousand or one hundred thousand or one million. But the value of that army or that team is in the value of each of the men it is made up of.

I looked to my left. Each man cuffed and chained together alongside me today—we look alike. We each speak English. Still, we don’t share a common language. We know it too. So even though we are shoulder to shoulder, we don’t speak. We don’t say. We don’t ask. In fact there is no “we,” unless the chain gets yanked, or an order gets called out or the leash gets lashed. Then, reacting on impulse, we would either start or stop moving, we either sit or stand.

Locked down on my birthday, I’m thinking,
Now I have lived more years in Brooklyn than I lived at home in the African Sudan.
My body is here. My mindset is from the other side of the world.

My mistake. Muslim men are supposed to give
daa’wa. Daa’wa
is spreading light, teaching and/or introducing and/or inviting one or more people to an understanding of Islam, about Muslims and the Holy Quran. To give a man an understanding is to give him the keys to the universe. To hand a man a Quran is to give him the answer towards straightening himself, strengthening himself, and becoming useful to himself, his father, mother, family, and ’hood. I
failed to do that. In fact I just watched quietly as men without understanding lived recklessly—some I knew, some I did not know. I just swerved around them, building and working and praying and being rewarded in so many ways.

Now I’m asking myself, what is the value of being one man who has a true faith, strength, family, and business trapped and surrounded by men who have none of that, who don’t even want it or know that it is missing and who don’t have any idea how it would feel or what it would be like if they did?

Inspiring other men to become believers, who are not perfect, but who are humbled and striving, is the starting point of building an army of men. Not just a band of niggers or a gang of fools or a heap of heedless heathens. I looked to my left at these men who are cuffed here, who I am cuffed to, and felt I knew for sure that the last thing they wanted to hear about was faith. They probably would figure I’m in the same cuffs, same as them, and in the same place, same as them. So, shut the fuck up.

Without an army of believing men I’m in a tight spot. There’s no human to plead my case, who has an understanding.

In the East, where I hail from, men have honor. That doesn’t mean that they are perfect. Yet they are better off than men over here, who have no honor at all.

Honor is honesty in action, fairness in action, and integrity in action. Integrity meaning a man has a set of guiding principles or beliefs that he bases his movements, decisions, and actions on. He doesn’t trade those beliefs for anything. If he sees one man or a thousand men doing something that he does not believe in, he doesn’t join them, isn’t swayed by popularity but guided by principle or faith. I’m not certain if honor is something that can be taught to any random man, or if it is something that a man must be born into. I am certain, however, that in order for a man to have honor, he has to have seen other men living and acting with honor. Otherwise, he would not have a blackprint of or a feeling for what honor
is or what the value of having honor means to him and to the men who surround him every day. Having friends and brothers and sons and fathers and grandfathers who are men of honor is peace. Having men without honor and without knowledge of the meaning of honor is chaos. Without honor, each man is an open enemy to the next man.

I could bond with men who are not Muslim if they were men of honor. I could bond with men who are Christians or Jews if they were men of honor. I could bond with men who had not yet chosen a faith if they were men of honor. However, I could not bond with any man who is dishonorable.

Back home across the globe, I could tell a million men about the day and the night of the execution. Not one of them would misunderstand the reason the deed had to be done. Each of them would know, without discussing or debating, that a man’s women, his mother, wives, sisters, and daughters, are his honor. Back home, you couldn’t and you wouldn’t be a man chasing another man’s little girl, filling her with fear and trapping her in a basement, unless you were ready to die, willing to be executed. Back home, even if you were a man filled with perverse feelings, you’d rather cut off your own hands or kill yourself than disgrace your parents by dishonoring yourself, them, or a neighbor. Back home, if by some stroke of chance or destiny you did dishonorable deeds, instead of you being left alone and accepted, you would become a target. The man whose honor you violated would be expected by all other honorable men to deal with you severely. Once he served you with death, he would be welcomed back into the brotherhood of men. Each man in the brotherhood would have done the same thing given the same or a similar situation. As a show of respect, they would never again mention the foul offender or his foul offense to the honorable man who murdered him. They would all know, without being reminded, that such unlikely violations can only be overcome through silence.

Over here in America, the dishonorable ones are accepted and sometimes even welcomed, and often are given authority over other
people’s lives, while the honorable ones are dealt with dishonorably. Despite my plan to make a confession and be judged based on my deed and punished based on justice, and to serve my punishment honorably, I am caught up in a snafu. Even if I explained, men over here would not understand. And even though I feel down today, jerked around on a chain, taking baby steps, part of a shameful parade, I still feel more sorry for them than I do for myself.

These men who are chained and seated beside me come from a culture without honor. I know. There’s a thousand of them living in the Brooklyn projects where my family used to live. They don’t even know what’s wrong. They don’t even know what’s missing. They have no god and no father, no beliefs and no motivation to find out. Their worried and broken mothers and frightened girlfriends, baby mommas and sisters and daughters, were scurrying around the corridors of the Brooklyn court building talking to their enemies and captors, bartering for their sons’, brothers’, and boyfriends’ lives. Their women, who are also without honor or husbands or protection, and who are also without standards or understanding, were willing to give up anything, say anything, do anything . . . oh Allah . . . to get their men out of bondage.

My mother, wives, sister, and unborns . . . I would never allow them to come in here, to see me this way, or to even be seen by my captors. I would never give my enemies the opportunity to lay eyes on them, to trade words with them, to take money from them, or to lay hands on them,
la kadar Allah
(God forbid). They would not have the chance to make their evil offers to my women, or take sacrifices from my mother or wives, or to question or interrogate my young sister, or to run my women ragged because of the desperation they feel because of me in cuffs and chains or behind bars.

I will keep my family separate from the heat. I feel good about that, could take anything and face any circumstance as long as they were protected, I told myself.

Yet, my failure to give
daa’wa
, to teach and to strive to create a brotherhood of men, to share what I know for sure, might be
the cause of my temporary downfall. I know, if I am here, cuffed and chained and forced to be still and deep in thought and self-criticism, it meant that I am suppose to be. Allah is showing me something, teaching me something.

When a bad thing happens to a Muslim, we don’t say, why did God do this to me? No, we say, what did I do wrong to earn this punishment? We believe that all that Allah does is perfect. We are the flawed ones.

We also believe that each of us will be tested, challenged, perhaps given a taste of evil. In these times, we don’t move further away from Allah. We move closer.

Still, my failure to build an army even with the closest of my friends weighed heavily on my heart.

8. THE WALL 
•
 
A Reflection

“Yo Chris,” I said when he picked up the phone.

“You back? I thought you gave up on the BK and decided to chill in Japan.”

“Nah, nothing like that,” I said.

“Hope you shot some footage with that movie camera so we can check it out when we finally see you,” he said. Then he asked me, “Why you calling from a pay phone?”

“It’s summertime, man, you still on punishment?” I flipped it on him.

“Oh you got jokes. Nah, I’m good now,” he said.

“Wanna work?” I asked.

“What’s the job?”

“I got a home owner in Queens who wants to hire a crew to build a wall.”

“A wall?” he repeated.

“Around his house,” I explained.

“That’s manual labor, my brother. How much is the pay? Not minimum wage that’s like three dollars an hour,” Chris said.

“The pay is good,” I told him.

“What’s that mean?” he asked me.

“It’s good enough for me, and you know I’m about that paper,” I said, and he laughed.

“Is Ameer working on it too?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s down.”

“Then the money must be right,” Chris said.

“Let’s us three get up before dojo tonight. I’ll kick y’all the numbers and the schedule then,” I told him.

“A’ight,” he agreed. “Let’s meet at the Curry Shack at four then. That’ll give us enough time.”

*  *  *

“We all got blacker,” Chris said. He was holding the door open as Ameer and I both rolled up at the same time, coming from opposite directions.

“Sun must’ve been sizzling in Japan. I didn’t think this brother could get any blacker,” Ameer said as he embraced me and gave me a pound.