The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston's Racial Divide (6 page)

Two thirty-one West Selden Street seemed like a three-story home, but that was because it was built into a rocky slope, meaning the basement was above-ground and at street level. The front door was up a flight of fourteen steps. There was a tiny yard on the right side, atop the ledge, in the shade of a half-dozen oak trees. The house itself, and the yard, were a mess. The Browns went to work. They installed yellow aluminum siding and cleaned up the yard. “I made it nice, so the kids could play there,” said Mattie. Her husband put up a picket fence around the yard and installed outdoor lighting.

Leaving the project was a big deal. “I had my own backyard now,” said Smut, who was eight years old when they moved. Instead of the smell of urine, he said, “the air smelled clean.” Smut also noticed, “The roaches were gone.” Smut sometimes rode a city bus up Blue Hill Avenue to visit his friends from the project, but he also took to the woods of the nearby sanatorium, riding his bike on its paths with his new friends.

Mattie tried to be there for her son. Having gone to work driving a city school bus, she parked the bus at home and used it to take Smut and his neighborhood friends on outings. In the summer, it might be a day trip for a swim at Hogan’s Pond in Milton, or to ride the roller coaster at Riverside Park in Springfield, Massachusetts. She’d take Smut and his friends on the bus to Providence to attend a concert.

Smut was in the fifth grade riding the bus to elementary school one day when he saw a girl he could not take his eyes off. “It was her hair, man, her silky hair. Everything about her, she was so smart.” The girl was named Indira Pierce, and she was also in the fifth grade. Slowly, on bus rides, the two became friendly, and then Smut made his move in the sixth grade. He passed Indira a note on the bus. It had two questions on it:

“Do you like me? Circle Y or N.

“Do you want to be my girlfriend? Circle Y or N.”

Indira circled yes to both. “It was on!” said Smut. They were together from that moment on—all through school and into adulthood. Indira was an anchor in Smut’s life.

They rode the same yellow bus from Boston, but actually went to different elementary schools. Both were enrolled in the state-funded METCO program, where kids from Boston were bused to schools in the suburbs. Mattie Brown wanted Smut to have a chance at a better education than the troubled Boston school system would provide. “The suburban schools had more to offer,” she said. “Kids were more advantaged out there.”

Smut and Indira went to school in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Wellesley was known as a W town, the nickname for a trio of affluent, mostly white communities just outside the city: Wellesley, Wayland, and Weston. The daily bus ride from Smut’s house to school was just about eighteen miles, but in so many ways Mattapan and Wellesley were different planets. Once, a teacher took Smut aside and talked to him about his nickname. She said Smut was demeaning and not a good nickname, in terms of his self-esteem and identity. She encouraged him to drop it.

Smut listened respectfully. “When I got home from school I said to everyone, ‘I don’t want you callin’ me Smut anymore. No more! My teacher said Smut is a dirty name.”

Mattie was taken aback by how upset her son was. She told him if that’s what he wanted, so be it. But then her girlfriend, the one who’d first come up with the name, would have none of it. “She starts sayin’, ‘We call you Smut, you like it or not! You is Smut.’”

Smut later came to see his teacher was well-intentioned but off the mark. He saw it as an example of a culture clash, the teacher’s misunderstanding of street talk and black vernacular, or Ebonics. “Like ‘phat,’” said Smut. “‘Phat’ doesn’t mean fat, ugly. ‘Phat’ means cool. And ‘Smut’ doesn’t mean dirty. ‘Smut’ means love.”

In Wellesley, Smut became friends with a boy his age named Derek Roman. In the eighth grade, the two got jobs at a local supermarket as “bag boys.” For the skinny kid from Mattapan, the job meant status. “That was the biggest thing,” said Smut. “I was the only kid in eighth grade with a job.” Indira was impressed. “She was really on me then,” he said. “‘My baby got a job!’ she’d say.”

In junior high Smut occasionally spent the night at the Romans. He sometimes tagged along on family outings, like fishing, and envied the boys’ closeness with their father. “That’s what I wanted with my father.”

At home, Bobby Brown made clear his disappointment with his son and would hit him regularly. One time his father yelled at him for putting too much milk on his cereal. Another time he got whacked when his father found fault with the way he raked leaves. “He’d snap,” said Smut. “He’d tell me, ‘You ain’t ever gonna be shit.’” Mattie tried to referee and shield Smut from her husband’s habit of demeaning him, but to no avail.

It was true Smut did not shine in the classroom. He was much more likely to have his head in a comic book than a schoolbook. He never earned good grades. Mattie had her son tested for learning disabilities, but none was diagnosed. “He was just so itchy—he couldn’t sit still,” she said. Smut was disruptive. “He was the class clown—always doing things to keep the other kids laughing.” The behavior led to umpteen meetings at school. “I always heard the same thing,” Mattie said. “Robert was a clown and troublemaker, but they liked him.” Teachers told Mattie that Smut listened to them when scolded and told to stop the horseplay. “He wouldn’t give his teachers any lip,” Mattie said, “but when they turned their back, he was at it again, always fooling around.”

Clowning around in class was one thing. On the street, the stakes were higher. Mattie tried to steer Smut straight. “I was always talking to him and he was listening and respectful and then behind my back he’d do something different with his friends.”

When Smut was fourteen he was arrested for the first time—charged with stealing a car in March 1986. “I had a habit of hanging out with older kids, eighteen and nineteen.” He watched them steal cars left running by owners warming them up for work. But when Smut tried copying them, he got caught. His mother came to the rescue; she helped convince the juvenile court to give her son a break; the case was dropped.

Smut then had a few other run-ins in “juvie,” including one involving Indira’s mother. Indira was a repeat runaway from home, staying with Smut in the Browns’ unfinished basement bedroom. “She’d come looking for Indira,” Smut said. Trying to keep them apart, she complained to police that Smut was contributing to the delinquency of Indira, a minor. “She didn’t approve of our relationship,” Smut said. But that case also was eventually dropped. His chief defender—always—was his mother.

Smut straddled two worlds—kidhood and adulthood. The little kid in him was crazy about his comic book collection. “I had like sixty thousand comics.” His favorites were Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man and the team of superheroes known as the X-Men. He wrapped covers in plastic and hung them on his basement bedroom wall. Then there was the first taste of drugs and drinking. His early steps on the wild side included the missteps that come with being a novice. The first time he inhaled marijuana when he was fifteen, he gagged. “I thought I was going to die.” He was alone in his basement room when he lit the joint. He choked and completely freaked out. He ran upstairs. “He was all paranoid, all hot and spitting,” Mattie said. Smut wanted his mother to drive him to the hospital. “Robert was begging me.” Mattie refused. “I told him to call an ambulance. I said, ‘I told you not to smoke.’” In a panic, Smut dialed 911 but hung up before the dispatcher understood the nature of the emergency. Instead of an ambulance, a police cruiser pulled up in front of the house. “They were asking, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’” said Mattie. “I told them Robert smoked some weed and he’s hallucinating, like he’s gonna die.” The officers studied Smut. More amused than anything, they told Smut to take a shower.

The clumsy start aside, Smut was soon getting high regularly, inhaling without a hitch. He complemented the weed with chocolate-flavored liqueurs and wine coolers, while never taking to hard liquor. He was no longer going to school and hardly saw the Wellesley family he’d met through the METCO program. He was barely seventeen, but he fashioned himself as an up-and-coming small businessman with an entrepreneurial streak. When he tried cocaine, for example, he didn’t much like it, but he did like the drug’s earning potential. “So I started selling,” he said. To get started, he and a friend each chipped in $75 to buy an “8-ball” from a supplier. They cut the coke on a plate into thirty chips, or “jumbos.” They wrapped the jumbos in tinfoil and sold them for $10 apiece—doubling their investment when they were done. The two set up in a crack house about a ten-minute walk from Smut’s house on West Selden Street.

When he suspected his partner was keeping more than his share, Smut decided to split. He began dealing by himself on the street. He picked a spot along Blue Hill Avenue near a skating rink, right across from the neighborhood police station known as B–3. He quickly learned he had to pay to play—meaning pay off a police officer who was notorious for hitting on the street dealers working in Mattapan and Roxbury. Smut saw the fee as a business expense in the stream of illegal commerce that made him good money. “Got me better clothes, better sneakers,” he said. He also discovered he had talent for sales. Being lyrical of mind, he’d come up with a winning ditty for the pitch he made quietly on Blue Hill Avenue: “If you pass me by you won’t get high.”

Nineteen eighty-eight was a big year for Smut. For one, he and Indira were past puppy love. They were inseparable and acting beyond their years of seventeen and sixteen. By summer’s end Indira was seven months’ pregnant. Fatherhood was on Smut’s mind. But it wasn’t his only concern. The year was also defined by deepening troubles at home and in the street.

Smut’s parents smoldered in anger and tension. Mattie, saying she could not take her husband Robert’s abuse anymore, moved out. “I’d just had enough,” she said. Her husband, she said, was a “control freak,” always yelling whenever she went out with friends—Where the hell you goin’? They argued about his drinking. “I wanted him to stop,” she said. Robert never hit her, she said, but when he drank he was “abusive with his mouth. I got sick of hearing it.” Mattie moved in with another man.

Mattie was Smut’s anchor, and suddenly she was gone. He took it personally. “This hurt me a lot because I didn’t understand why.” Mattie was no longer there to stand between Smut and his father. “My father changed for the worse and my home life became a living hell.” Smut got mouthfuls from him—how he was no good—and Smut wanted out of his father’s line of fire. He stayed at friends’ apartments. He sold coke. He spent his time with Indira.

“I was running the streets.” There were also secrets and lies. Smut and his older sisters knew where their mother was staying, but their father did not. They lied as he angrily tried to figure out Mattie’s whereabouts. To see Smut, Mattie picked him up at one end of West Selden Street in her new friend’s car. She’d take him out to dinner. Smut pleaded with her to come home. Mattie assured her son that she loved him. Eventually, six months after she’d left, Mattie returned home. “I came back to my children.”

Nineteen eighty-eight was also the year Smut’s luck on the street ran out. Mattie had been home only a little while when one of Smut’s friends came by the house late one night. It was October 5. Smut climbed into the friend’s car and the two drove to Canton, a suburban town located south of Boston. They left their car and, in the dark, snuck to the back of the Coleman’s Sporting Goods store. They broke a window, got inside the store, and grabbed some guns. Driving away, north on Route 138 toward Boston, they were pulled over by the local police. They were arrested the moment police saw the automatic weapons.

Smut had broken into the big time. Within weeks, he was indicted for breaking and entering with the intent to commit a felony, malicious destruction of property, two counts of theft of a firearm, and possession of a firearm without a permit. The charges carried heavy prison time. “Before this, when he got in trouble, he got out of trouble. I posted bail, whatever,” said Mattie. “But I told him there’s going to be a time when I can’t help.” Smut’s timing also could not have been worse. On October 12, seven days after his arrest, Indira gave birth to their daughter. They named her Shanae.

Smut found himself juggling court appearances with hospital appearances. “I was a knucklehead, the things I did,” said Smut. But self-awareness did not stop him. Over the course of the next twelve months while the gun case was pending, Smut ran up a slew of new criminal charges. In December, he was charged with receiving stolen goods. Four months later, on March 14, 1989, he was caught in the suburban town of Norwood popping the ignition on a car. The next week, he and three friends were arrested by police in Waltham, Massachusetts, driving two stolen cars, a Chevy Camaro and a blue Oldsmobile. The next month, he was busted by Boston police for coke possession. In August, he was caught trying to use a screwdriver to steal a car in the West Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, and later that month, he was stopped by police for driving while his license was suspended. In October, he was arrested again for coke possession.

Smut faced seven new court cases in the year since his arrest for breaking into Coleman’s. Mattie Brown scrambled to find lawyers and keep her son out of jail on bail. Then, in the midst of his year of living criminally, Smut made his biggest mess ever at home. He burned down the house—literally. Smut and Indira were living in his basement bedroom. She had run away from home after Shanae was born. The baby slept in a bassinet in Smut’s parents’ bedroom, while Smut and Indira occupied the partially finished bedroom. The room was unheated. Smut’s father had warned against using a space heater, but Smut ignored him. The heater cut the nighttime chill of late winter.

Smut wasn’t certain how the fire began. “I must have thrown a pillow on the space heater.” He awakened to Indira’s screams, Fire! Fire! His first thought was how his father was going to kill him. Smut tried throwing water on the flames, but it didn’t help. The flames spread, running quickly up the walls, fueled by the comic books he’d hung like wallpaper. Smut ran upstairs.