Out of the Madness (5 page)

In only those two years, my mother had become completely fettered by the projects. She had turned into a complete drug addict
and whore, and her addiction had reached a higher level. Her arm was swallowing up pills like quicksand. Odds were if we stayed
around the house, we would get a whooping. My brother never cared about these odds, since he was always the first one up and
out. Until school started, he would just push his buggy all day and not come home until nightfall. His plan had worked fairly
well; only once or twice did grotesque Biggun chase him home. Nothing was at home anyway. We had gotten down to having jelly-and-syrup
sandwiches for dinner.

At home, I wasn’t too concerned with my mother, either. She couldn’t fuss at who she couldn’t find. Since she hardly came
in my room, since she never came among that filth—it probably would have killed her—I just stayed in the closet. When she
called my name, I would ignore her. I would sit in there all day, fighting off the insects and remaining motionless if she
stuck her head in the bedroom door. I enjoyed the total darkness in the closet, away from most of the noise, the dope, and
the fussing. That closet, my sanctuary, my friend. I would just daydream in there, sometimes thinking about my dad, hoping
he would come and visit us. But he didn’t, not once.

From the closet, I would also keep the window open, in case I heard the other kids rounding up everyone for a game of Deadman.
I would wait until my mother went inside her room, then dart out the door. One evening, only weeks after we had started starving
in that Hitler camp, only months after men had started seeing my mother, a special game of Deadman got under way.

“Who-all wanna play Deadman?” one kid asked.

“Ooh, I do.”

“I do, too.”

“Go and get Chris, Mark, Ke-Ke, Donkey, Ping Head, Big-gun, and his sister Scootie,” and another dozen children, which was
easy because we were so many and because everyone loved Deadman. All frictions, all jealousies, left when we played Dead-man.
It seemed sacred. Moreover, we children were too anxious because of the excitement about to happen. For Deadman was a complex
game, full of ways in which the players could be entrapped, ensnared, eliminated, or become a Deadman. It was just like living
in the projects.

Huddled close together in a circle, like a crowd trying to stay warm in a winter storm, everyone held his fist at chest level.
Ping Head, Biggun’s brother, used the counting technique to determine who would be the first Deadman. “I struck a match and
the match went out.” (Whoever’s fist he stopped on would lower that hand.) One person dropped a fist. “I struck a match and
the match went out.” Another person dropped a fist. This continued until one of Biggun’s fists remained. Since he was the
only person with a fist still held up, he was the Deadman.

He had to catch and touch the other children, who, in turn, would help him catch the others, until the last person was captured.
This person, whose fists never remained after he had finished counting because of the counting formula, would huddle everyone
up and count again.

An entire project block of twenty-four buildings was the area where the manhunt took place. It was getting dark, the best
time for playing because it wasn’t so hot. Across from my unit stood two vacant, vandalized buildings—in a few spots throughout
a project block would always be several vacant units. All the windows had been broken out of these. Glass, nails, and pieces
of Sheetrock were everywhere. Holes had been kicked through the walls so that a man could walk through each apartment or could
crawl or hide in the ceiling. It looked like a construction site.

Biggun stood outside the circle of people, waiting to touch anyone who tried to run. In time, one person dashed away. When
Biggun took off after her, the whole circle scattered in all directions. The acrobatic youngsters headed toward the ghostly
project buildings, while the sprinters stayed in the open space. The others went to find hiding places somewhere on the vast
project block.

I climbed the tree that grew in front of a vacant project unit, our Deadman play area. Eric, a kid who loved this game, dove
through a window. His mom and dad worked for dope dealers, and he was terrified of staying in his house, since many parents
who worked for dope dealers were being found shot to death inside their apartments.

Biggun dove out the window behind Eric; but Eric was too quick for him. Several others whom Biggun already had touched ran
after Eric as he ran back inside the building. The whole spectacle was open to me from the tall tree I was sitting in, which
was in jumping distance of the two-story roof. Playing Deadman, I would jump onto the roof if someone climbed up the tree
behind me. If they had the courage to follow me, I would hang from the roof and drop to one of the ledges, then jump from
it and escape through the building. When Biggun climbed the tree, I jumped. After running through the project, I blasted down
to the other end of the block to get far away from Biggun.

Deadman, all the kids loved to play it, all the adults loved to watch it. They would set chairs outdoors to watch the game
for hours. Ms. Betty, Mrs. Burnese, Ms. Brown, loved to see the kids scare the hell out of them by jumping from two-story
buildings or doing flips through windows. Sometimes even the dope dealers would watch. One-arm Nathan*, whose arm had been
amputated, a man who kept his dope in a medicine bottle hidden in nearby bushes, in a crack between the sidewalk, or in his
empty sleeve. Or Messy Marvin (before he was murdered in a hotel room), who had a big house in the suburbs with a gun collection
in his living room.

I thought I had outsmarted Biggun by running to the other end of the block. It was getting dark, so everybody else was staying
near the vacant units, near people and the older boys. I ran between the two units where we had lived, now vacant on the other
end of the block. Biggun’s figure was gaining on me. Evidently I hadn’t gotten around the building fast enough. I increased
my speed, preparing for the slide move. Just as Biggun was upon me, I faked the slide; but he didn’t go for the bait. He grabbed
and threw me to the ground. He was going to get his revenge for my outsmarting him with his own trick earlier, despite the
sacredness of the Deadman game. With his knee in my back, he grabbed for my pants, and tried to pull them down. What the hell
was Biggun doing? I wrestled onto my back and looked into his face. He wasn’t Biggun. He wasn’t one of the Deadman children.
He was a rapist.

I screamed for help from that little dark spot between two tall project buildings, screamed until the rapist got scared and
ran off. He probably knew the projects were too crowded, knew the dope fiends stayed too busy. He knew if the dope dealers
heard my screams, they would have stomped him until every drop of life drained from his body.

I breathed a sigh of relief as I stood and dusted the dirt from my pants. I was so glad that this rapist hadn’t succeeded,
because I already had been through the experience. Before we moved into the projects, when my mother and father were still
together, a young man had shown a strange interest in me. I must have been under five because I was not yet in any school.

With the promise of some candy, he took me into a shed and made me pull my pants down. I don’t recall any pain, so I don’t
think he entered me physically but had his privacy between my legs. Afterward the boy said he wanted me to come back. And
though I really didn’t understand, I felt something was very wrong. So I told my dad, without telling him what had happened.
I didn’t want to go back. The next time my dad saw the boy, he shouted to him to leave me alone. Later we moved away.

That spring of 1978, I walked home and didn’t tell anyone what had happened between those two dark buildings. It wasn’t the
first time some rapists had tried that, and it wouldn’t be the last. I went back to the safety of my closet, among the lifeless
clothes. I hated living here, among all the bullies, noise, and murder. I hated starving, hated cleaning up like a maid and
washing out panties in the bathroom face bowl. I hated my father for abandoning me, with an eight-year-old’s hate, which,
of course, never lasted long. Just because he left my mother didn’t mean he had to leave his children, too.

B
y the summer of 1978, I had already begun to develop strong self-reliance traits. I was coming to grips with my reality. We
were children in abject poverty, separated from real America. We had parents who were trying every morning to deal with the
man or woman in the mirror. The first law of nature, self-preservation, prevailed for them. They became wrapped up in big
balls of grief and left us to fend for ourselves. But my mother, even in her zombielike condition, was there when I needed
her the most.

She would come out of her dope trance, utter her powerful wisdom, then disappear without a trace: “Don’t hang around the wrong
crowd. Don’t stay out too late.” Times like that made me wonder how my mother would have been if she had not been put through
so much, if her mother had let her go to school, and if the father of her children had not abandoned her.

When she confronted me about stealing food from the shopping center, mother’s intuition, she explained in two quick sentences,
nothing more, nothing less, how it could devastate my life:

“Jerrold, whatever I do, I’m not gonna raise you to be no thief. When people find out you’re a thief, they’ll never trust
you again.”

But I was driven by hunger and had no concern for what others thought. I had experienced enough hunger headaches to know that
you can’t do anything when you’re cramping and swelling and every cell in your body is screaming for a bread crumb or something.
It almost paralyzes you.

The boy who introduced me to stealing, Bad Baby, was sixteen, short, and lean. He was aggressive, and would act quickly on
his beliefs, which were good ones. The young girls loved his long Afro and the sharp clothes his mother, who had a speech
defect, piled up for him. Of course they were a minimum-wage family, and they lived next door. Their apartment had nice cheap
furniture, pictures, pots, plants, and wall-to-wall carpeting on the floor. The apartment also stayed cool and pleasant from
the air conditioner in the window.

“Jerrold, are you coming over for dinner?” Bad Baby often asked.

“Naw, man, I’m not hungry,” my shame would say.

“Come on over and eat, Jerrold. There’s no reason to be ashamed, little brother. Ain’t nothing wrong with eating at a friend’s
house.”

Bad Baby had this kind of sympathy for my brother and me because even the poorest kids now talked about how dirty and ragged
we were. They had given us nicknames. They called me Dirt Dobbler and Junior Dirt Mieser. But Bad Baby wasn’t like them. Instead,
he did nice things and never talked bad about me.

Bad Baby was also good at building bicycles from used parts. He also stole them. At times, when his mother let him, he would
ride his bike out of the neighborhood. I didn’t have a bike of my own, like kids from the minimum-wage group, so he would
carry me along on the back of his bike. We went to visit his aunt across Hampton. We ran errands to the store. But on one
trip, Bad Baby took me across the Hampton bridge. It was the first time.

With Prescott, Bad Baby’s older brother, we rode alongside the traffic on busy Hampton Road until we came upon a residential
area. As we turned down several different streets, Bad Baby and Prescott checking in all directions, I noticed small bikes,
toys, and chairs unattended on their front lawns. They stopped at one corner, where Bad Baby ushered me off and pointed to
a bike lying in someone’s front yard.

He said, “Jerrold, this is the only way you’ll ever have a bike. Go get it, man.”

“I don’t want to,” I told him.

He and Prescott stepped away for a second, talked, and returned.

“Jerrold, you’ll never have a bike unless you do it this way,” he lectured.

“Bad Baby, take me home.”

“If you don’t get the bike, we’re gonna leave you here.”

Seeing that I wasn’t budging, they sped off. I ran after them, but they were too fast. Scared, I turned back around, hopped
on the bike, and pedaled in the direction they had ridden. They stood around the corner, waiting for me. We hurried back past
the traffic and back across the bridge. Along the way, Bad Baby told me that the people had plenty of money and would never
miss the bike. To keep me from being whooped, he told my mom he’d built it for me. And I kept it.

Bad Baby had always observed what went on at our house and had always been concerned. So it was no surprise when he found
out my mother was on drugs. After he gradually became closer to my brother and me, he convinced us to run away and sneak into
his house late one night, even though it was only next door. He thought things would be better if my mom was reported.

Since our mother had traded the upstairs room with Junior and me, Bad Baby had to creep onto the ledge under our window and
above the back door. After he was inside, he tucked clothes under our blankets to look like sleeping people, and helped us
out the window. The next day, authorities from Human Resources came. This funny-looking white man, dressed in a suit, took
us to our apartment. He identified himself to our mother and told her he alone would question my brother and me. She gave
him a nervous “okay” and looked at us sadly, as if she knew her wrongdoing had finally caught up with her. Before the white
man started, I whispered to my brother to tell the man we were okay. My brother looked disappointed, as though I were messing
up his chance to get away from the Hitler camp.

As for me, I had gone along reluctantly with Bad Baby’s plan, but this was too much. From snatches of conversations at the
corners with the dope dealers I had heard about these strange white people from the state who destroy black families. I had
been warned to avoid them at all costs. But more than any verbal admonishment, my instincts compelled me not to trust them,
especially after the policemen. She was my mother. This was our home.