High Price (7 page)

Our grandmother also tried making us take piano lessons. That never stuck because we didn’t really practice. The only use the piano in the living room got was when Big Mama played hymns herself or played and sang with Brother Curtis. He and Big Mama were treasurers in the church where she played the organ. I’m not sure if they were seeing each other romantically or not, but he would often come around to play music and to discuss church business. The Bahamian side of my family were Seventh-Day Adventists who went to church every Saturday.

Even though Big Mama disapproved, I tried to avoid church and related activities as much as possible. It was always either boring or frightening: when I believed in God as a child, I saw Him as an angry, unforgiving God who knew I was up to no good and had no tolerance or understanding of my circumstances. He didn’t seem to do much for those who prayed. And when the contrast between people’s behavior in church on weekends and during the rest of the week became obvious to me—and as my childhood kept showing me just how unfair life really was—I pretty much stopped believing or at least stopped thinking much about it. Later, in my teens, I sometimes even used the idea of God to convince friends to shoplift with me, saying that He would understand us taking from those who have more. But Big Mama’s deep and genuine faith sustained her.

She also looked out for me and stood up for me with my father in a way that no one else did. After I’d moved to Big Mama’s, Carl was supposed to do the weekend-dad thing with regular visits. Every Friday night, I’d sit expectantly by the front window, watching for his green 1972 Gran Torino. I’d eagerly count down the hours until he was due to arrive. But, sometimes, he didn’t come. Or, if he did show up, it would often be late on Saturday rather than Friday evening and he’d be drunk. On at least one occasion, he was so intoxicated when he took me to his place that we had to pull over on the side of the road because he was hallucinating and knew it wasn’t safe to drive. We just sat there until it passed.

I didn’t mind when he was drunk. I just wanted to see him, even if all I’d get to do was hang out at his house while he slept it off. When he showed up, his drinking didn’t make him abusive or unkind toward me. I never attributed any particular effects to it at all. However, I distinctly remember Big Mama getting on his case more than once, describing how I sat and waited so hopefully when he was late or didn’t show, and telling him it was disgraceful to treat a child like that by setting me up for such disappointment. It was unusual to see an adult take my side. It stuck with me.

But while Big Mama was smart and strong-willed, she also had some strange ways about her. Like Grandmama, she played favorites. She was intensely loving toward Brenda and me. However, she barely spoke to our other siblings. Indeed, she simply ignored them. In the same way that I reminded Grandmama of our dad, I think my sisters other than Brenda reminded Big Mama of our mom. And that wasn’t good: just as Grandmama saw Carl as abusive and not good enough for her daughter, Big Mama saw MH as irresponsible and unfaithful to her son.

Consequently, she was cold, even indifferent to my other sisters. When they came around, like all the other kids I knew they would say hello to the adults as they walked in. This was a nonnegotiable sign of respect. But sometimes Big Mama wouldn’t even look up, let alone respond kindly and welcome them. The only reason they wound up going to see her at all was that, later in their teens, they wanted to stay out late and not catch hell from MH. They knew all too well that Big Mama wouldn’t keep track of their comings and goings.

Big Mama also kept an unusual home. She owned one of the largest houses in Carver Ranches, a black neighborhood in Hollywood, Florida, just north of Miami. The sprawling, three-thousand-square-foot residence had at least six bedrooms. Her husband, my grandfather Gus, had built it for her. It was, in fact, one of the first houses to be built in that community. However, rather than provoking envy, as such a fine, spacious home might otherwise have done, instead her house inspired fear.

Big Mama’s place was known as the hood’s “haunted house.” It got much of its creepy reputation because essentially, no one had done any maintenance on it—internal or external—since Grandpa Gus died of a brain tumor in 1958. Family stories had it that he’d died slowly and painfully and something in his wife was lost along with him when he finally passed.

When I moved in, although she had three of her adult children living with her—Ben, Norman, and Millicent—only rarely did anyone lift a hand to clean the house or maintain the yard. Ben had an excuse: he was slow and may not have known what to do.

Outside, the lawn was brown and dead. In Florida, the sun burns through and destroys anything you don’t diligently tend. On one side, the yard was much bigger than the front lawn, which added to the house’s eerie, off-kilter look. Right in the center of that side yard was a massive sapodilla tree, untrimmed and wild. (It grew large brown fruits that were fuzzy like peaches but tasted like sweet cinnamon pears.)

Inside the house wasn’t much better. It was infested with scorpions, spiders, and rodents—so much so that no matter how badly you had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, you’d hold it because you never knew what kind of scary creature you might encounter. To make matters worse, between the bedroom where I slept and the bathroom was a long, dark corridor. That hallway was definitely a place that you didn’t want to explore at night. After dusk, creepy critters seemed to be everywhere.

My cousin Louie, who was about a year older than me, lived with Big Mama, too. He was there because he didn’t get along with his stepfather. We both shared a room with twin beds with my grandmother. She’d sleep on one narrow bed; the two of us cousins slept together on the other. Big Mama’s adult children occupied the other bedrooms, while Brenda slept in the front bedroom where my grandfather had died. Since his death, Big Mama had never been able to sleep there again.

At night, Big Mama fell asleep to some kind of talk radio, which she kept at high volume. Louis and I would just lie there in that overheated room with her, eventually crashing from sheer exhaustion. But the radio’s messages crept in: what we heard over and over was a parade of white guys forecasting doom, predicting complete catastrophe. There was always some world-threatening political, economic, or environmental crisis going on.

At the time, much of the news centered around the horrors of Vietnam, the Watergate crisis at the White House, and the Arab oil embargo. It scared me at first. I became anxious about the stuff they were predicting, fearing overwhelming disaster of one sort or another. I wondered how we would survive. Soon, however, I got desensitized. I realized that nothing was really changing, that the supposedly imminent apocalypse never really materialized. Our neighborhood was in a process of slow decline, but we weren’t exactly getting nuked or overrun by communists. I began to tune those kinds of thoughts out. Oddly enough, this forced immersion in bad news and doom-mongering ultimately made me somewhat optimistic, as well as boosting my skeptical thinking.

Louie was also a good influence in many ways. He was a genius at math: the only kid in the neighborhood that I knew who was in advanced classes. I didn’t like it when other kids knew more than I did or were better at something than I was, so I kept an eye on what he was studying and even asked him questions about math from time to time. I’d check out the covers of his textbooks, get the names of the teachers he liked. I wanted to be prepared.

Everything around me seemed to reward competition and competitiveness—from organized sports to the games we played on the streets, even board games. From top to bottom, I saw a culture of competition, not only at school and in terms of work but also even in romantic relationships and between family members. Winning matters; nothing is worse than being a loser. I got this message virtually everywhere. It dominated both the mores of the mainstream and of the hood.

Consequently, I wanted to ensure I was a winner in every way that seemed accessible. For example, though I almost always played on losing sports teams, I was also clearly the star of my team—so those losses didn’t bother me as much. In math, I wanted to be ready to learn what Louie had learned when I got to his classes the following year, because I wanted to be at least as good as he was. If there was a way that I could win—or even just show that I was capable of winning—I wanted to find it.

A skinny kid who was short like I was, Louie didn’t excel at football or basketball, which were the sports I preferred, but he could play baseball. He was a pitcher and was pretty good, too, so long as he wore his glasses. His coach would make him put them on; otherwise he didn’t like to wear them. He didn’t want to be seen as a geek. But his aversion to geekiness didn’t have the roots you might expect. Kids like us didn’t automatically opt out of competing for academic excellence, even though it may have seemed that way from the outside.

Where I grew up, nerds, dorks, and other kids who had a reputation for being “smart” in school did not automatically become targets for bullies for “acting white,” as the stereotype of poor black neighborhoods portrays it. We didn’t scorn nerds any more—or less—than white kids do. We definitely didn’t scapegoat them for the reasons that some “experts” have invoked to try to explain some of the persisting racial achievement gap in school. We were no more anti-intellectual than the rest of America.

It wasn’t school achievement itself that we saw as “acting white.” It’s something much more subtle than that. And understanding this complexity is important to understanding my story and to recognizing what’s really going on in poor neighborhoods. What was being reinforced and what was being punished was not about education.

Sure, there were some black children who were bullied for “acting white” in the neighborhoods where I grew up. And, indeed, some of those kids were high achievers in school. Some, however, were not. It wasn’t scholarly success itself that made people targets. We didn’t disdain academic achievement per se and we didn’t look down on those who got good grades because of their marks. “Acting white” was a whole different ball game, something that frequently correlated with school performance but wasn’t defined by it.

What really got kids labeled as dorks or sellouts and picked on about their schoolwork were their attitudes toward other black people. It was the way they used language to demonstrate what they believed was their moral and social superiority. The kids who were targeted wouldn’t speak in the street vernacular that the rest of us used, even on the street or in other informal settings. They wouldn’t really deign to talk to us at all if they could avoid it. Their noses in the air, they looked down on us. It was snobbery, not schoolwork, that was “white” to us.

The dorks and L7s (picture it in a kid’s handwriting: it means squares) couldn’t see any value in things that were important to us, viewing us as ghetto, just like white people did. That’s what “acting white” really meant. Kids like this failed to recognize that sports were, for us, often the only way to show mastery. They couldn’t see that leadership—even if you were leading the “bad kids”—mattered. They didn’t respect loyalty, which we learned to place above all else.

All they valued was what mainstream America did. They thought that made them better than us. They sided with whites in the competition we all felt; they thought that this made them winners and us losers. While some of them might have also idolized sports heroes just as white people did, they certainly didn’t want those jocks dating their sisters. A star athlete, as I later became, might have been acceptable when scoring a touchdown on the field or for a quick high-five afterward to show that they knew cool people. But he wasn’t someone they’d consider a friend, let alone as a potential romantic partner for the females in their families. That’s one of the primary reasons kids who had been labeled a dork or sellout might have been picked on.

By contrast, a kid who did well in school, who showed everyone respect, wouldn’t get bullied for “acting white.” Instead he’d get support, along with the good-natured ribbing any children—black or white—give someone who stands out in some way. Indeed, the thugs and roughnecks would often try to protect anyone who was doing well, whether in school or in sports, from danger or from problems with the police or other things that might destroy their future.

In fact, it was just this sort of intervention and protection by people—some of whom ultimately wound up in prison, addicted to drugs, or murdered on the street—that saved me more than once and prevented me from doing some really stupid things. It wasn’t only athletes who got cheered on for having a path out. We wanted to see everyone that we liked do well, though, of course, as with all humans, there were the usual jealousies and rivalries, too.

But woe betide the kid who thought getting As made him better than you, who didn’t give neighborhood kids their proper respect, whether through lack of social skills or true snobbery. That could bring misery. Though some of what we saw as snobbery might have been lack of social skills, we had little tolerance for it. We knew and followed the social code. We needed all the respect we could get. Further disdain from other black people was just too much to stomach.

Our world required exquisite attention to facial expressions and body language, to unwritten rules about status and signs of disrespect. Reading these cues and responding appropriately could sometimes literally mean the difference between life and death. More often, however, it was “only” your whole social life that was on the line. For kids everywhere, matters involving social life feel like life and death, of course. But in the hood, that’s even more exaggerated because there are so few other available sources of status, dignity, and respect.

My frequent moves between one relative’s house and another’s and my constant contact with cousins, siblings, aunts, and uncles helped me to understand quickly the ins and outs of our social code. My desire for status made me pay particularly close attention, sensitizing me to even the slightest signals about who was up and who was down and how that was determined. I observed all of this closely. And these social skills were crucial to my success.