The Final Testament of the Holy Bible (34 page)

We walked right down the middle of the tunnel, in the area between the two tracks. Occasionally there’d be an overhead light, but mostly it was black. I could hear dripping water and rats, and once or twice I heard some yelling. When the trains would come by, I’d put my hands over my ears, and the wind was really strong and the girders holding the tunnel up would shake a little bit. The trains were only a few feet away, and the people in them were a blur. Even though Ben was with me, I stayed scared. I felt like we were walking into Hell and the trains were full of souls of the damned, rushing towards eternal fire and pain. And though I would have once thought, having seen what I saw with Ben Zion, and having disobeyed Jacob, and having forsaken my mother, that I was going to join them, this time I didn’t. If I was walking into Hell, I knew I’d walk out. Or if I felt like we were walking into Hell, I believed that there was no such thing. There is only life. This life that we live. If it is Hell, it is because we make it so.

I saw lights ahead of us, and we came to a platform and we climbed up and waited for the next train. There were a few other people on the platform, but they paid no attention to us and didn’t seem to be
bothered by the fact that we had come walking out of the tunnel. We got on a downtown train and switched to one going to Brooklyn. Nobody on the trains spoke or really even looked at each other. Ben held my hand and closed his eyes and leaned his head against the window and breathed through his nose, and though he looked like he was asleep, I don’t think he was. Once a thin white man in a nice suit got on with a briefcase, and Ben immediately opened his eyes. The man was sitting across from us and further down, and Ben stared at him. He didn’t give him a dirty look or a mean look, just stared at him. At the next station the man got off the train.

It took an hour or so. We got off and walked to the hospital. When we arrived, our mother was sleeping. The doctor said she was fine but not good. Ben Zion took me to the waiting room and left. I asked him where he was going and he said
for a walk
. I asked him where and he just smiled and walked away.

He came back three hours later. I had tried to pray while he was gone, but had had trouble doing it. It seemed strange to be talking to something that wasn’t there, or that I didn’t know was there, or that I believed was there but had no evidence was there. And I saw other people in the waiting room who were praying. I watched them carefully. Two of them were praying to a Christian God, and I know because one had a Bible with them and the other made the sign of the cross before prayer, and another was a
Muslim, and had a copy of the Qur’an. They were praying very hard, and they were very focused. I was used to praying with other people, sometimes many other people, especially at Bible conventions and Christian Youth meetings, so that wasn’t it. I just couldn’t do it at that moment, and wanted to see other people do it, and wanted to see what, if anything, happened. There were magazines in the room, magazines with movie stars on the front of them and silly headlines and bright pictures of pretty people in fancy clothes. I picked one up and looked at it. While I looked at it, I watched the people praying. If the outside of the magazines seemed silly, the insides were worse. The stories were about people who were very concerned with how they looked and dressed, and how much money they made, and the houses they lived in. And while I could understand worrying about those things on some level, they seemed incredibly insignificant in a hospital, a place where people were sick and diseased and dying, and where the people who loved them came to watch them suffer. At the same time, what the people praying were doing seemed equally insignificant. They were all begging for help, for aid, for some way to relieve their suffering, and to relieve the suffering of whomever they were praying for, begging to characters in books, characters that no one had ever met or seen or spoken to and was sure even existed. They were praying to whatever God or Savior they believed in to save them, and in the same way that some people worship the silly people in the magazines, who we at least know are real, they
worshipped the people in their books, who we don’t know anything about. I watched a doctor come in to see one of the Christians, and he had some type of bad news, because the person immediately started sobbing. A family member of the other Christian, or someone who I assumed was a family member because they looked exactly alike, came in to take the person away, and the family member had clearly been crying. The man with the Qur’an saw what I saw, that the prayer had clearly done nothing, but kept clutching his book and praying anyway. I wondered, and I still wonder, if I had replaced their books with the silly magazines I had been looking at, and if they had worshipped the silly people in those magazines, if they would have gotten the same result.

When Ben Zion came back, he smiled and told me to come with him. I stood and we left the waiting room and walked to our mother’s room. When we went in, she was awake and she smiled at me. The tubes were out of her mouth, but there were others still in her arms, and she was still covered in bandages. I sat next to her and took her hand and told her I was so sorry and that I loved her and I started crying. She pulled me towards her, and though she was too weak to really do it, I understood what she wanted, and I stood and put my arms around her. I kept telling her I was sorry and that I loved her, and she put her hands on the back of my head and held me against her chest. Ben Zion stood a few feet away and watched us. After a minute or two, our mother let me go and I pulled away and sat back
down, though I still held her hand. Ben Zion walked over and kissed me on the forehead, and leaned towards my mother and whispered something in her ear, though I did not hear what it was. She smiled and kissed his check, and he stepped away and sat with me. He stayed until she feel asleep, and when she did, he stood and kissed her forehead and turned and started to walk out of the room. I asked him where he was going, and he stopped and turned around and looked at me and spoke.

I’m leaving.

Where to?

I’m going to see Jacob.

Don’t.

I’m going to make sure you never have to see him again.

Don’t hurt him.

I wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Then why go?

I want you to be free.

I’ll be fine.

Fine is no way to live. Take care of Mom.

You call her Mom?

When I was little I called her Mommy, when I got older it was Mom. Only when we were alone. It was our little thing, away from the rules and formality of our home.

Is she going to be okay?

I don’t know if she wants to live anymore. She’s had a long, brutal life.

She didn’t deserve it.

None of us deserve it.

He turned and walked to the door.

Don’t let him hurt you, Ben Zion.

I love you, Esther.

I met Ben at his arraignment hearing. It was at the Queens County Criminal Courthouse. He had been arrested and charged with attempted murder and arson. I am an attorney and work for the criminal defense division of the Legal Aid Society. In simple, layman’s terms, I am a public defender. I literally drew his file out of a basket. In doing so, I have been irrevocably changed. In almost every way for the better. Except for the rage I feel when I think about what was done to him.

I became what I am because of my father. He was a drug dealer. He was not a drug lord or anyone of importance in the drug trade. Rappers have not glorified him in their songs. Writers have not written books about him. Hollywood has not made his life into an award-winning drama. He was, like many black men, both now and in the ’70s, when he was active, a street-level drug dealer. He literally stood on a corner and sold drugs. He did so because he believed there were no other options. He was not well-educated. There were no jobs available to him. He did not have parents who were able to support or nurture him. We lived, and still do, in Harlem. He and my mother were married, and still are, and they had three children, me and my twin sisters, who are a year younger than me. We lived in a fifth-floor walk-up. My mother worked as a checkout
clerk at a grocery store but made very little money. My father looked for legitimate employment but was unable to find anything. He did what he had to do. He took the only job that was available to him.

As I said, he was a street-level dealer. He stood on a corner and sold heroin and cocaine. His customers were mainly whites from the suburbs and the more economically privileged areas of Manhattan, though there were plenty of local customers. In 1973, New York State passed a series of statutes known as the Rockefeller drug laws. The purpose of the laws was to stem the flow of drugs into the state by instituting harsh penalties for the sale and distribution of them. If an individual was caught with more than two ounces of either cocaine or heroin, and there was the intent to distribute, they faced a minimum sentence of fifteen years to life, and a maximum sentence of twenty-five years to life. When my father was arrested after selling cocaine to an undercover narcotics officer, he was in possession of a total of 2.5 ounces of cocaine. The cocaine had been processed into crack. It had been placed into small vials that held doses he sold for ten, twenty, fifty, or one hundred dollars. It was 1984. I was three years old, and my sisters were two. After a two-day trial, my father was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life. While I don’t condone what he did, the idea that he was given a harsher sentence than many murderers, than almost all child molesters, than the rich white-collar criminals who have bled this country and its people dry, than corrupt politicians destroying our cities,
makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. My sisters and I were left without a father. My mother was left without a husband. My father was sent to a maximum security prison, where he still resides, and where he believes he will die. My sisters and I spent the rest of our childhood visiting him on his birthday, and on Christmas, and on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t until I was older that I understood the irony of the July visit. Let us celebrate life in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.

Having lost my father, my mother was determined to keep me from following in his footsteps. She took a second job, also working as a cashier, at a second grocery store. She enrolled us in a preschool at our church. She was able to dress us in secondhand clothes that looked firsthand, and she drilled into us that the system, the system of opportunity in America, and everywhere in the world, was rigged against us. We would have to work twice as hard to get half as much. We were poor and black and we lived in a ghetto. The schools we were supposed to attend were not going to educate us in a way that would prepare us for success. No doors would open for us because of the color of our skin or because of our last name. We would have to behave twice as well, work twice as hard, achieve twice as much. And if we could do those things, we had a chance. If we could not, we would end up like her, and almost all of the women in our neighborhood, working eighteen hours a day to support her family in a single-parent home, or like our father, and a large number of
the fathers of children in our neighborhood, in prison for taking the only job available to him.

Though I do have happy memories, it was not a happy childhood. I studied most of the time. I was mocked and beaten by the other boys in my neighborhood, boys destined to follow my father’s path. I started working part-time when I was fourteen in anticipation of college. The job was at one of the grocery stores where my mother worked. I took a weekend job picking up garbage in Central Park. I graduated third in my class in high school and got a partial academic scholarship to a large state school. I worked in the school cafeteria to cover what the scholarship didn’t. I went straight into law school, which I did in New York, also on a partial academic scholarship. I worked in the school library at night and went back to my weekend job picking up garbage in the park. As soon as I finished law school, I became a public defender. And while I am not always successful in helping people like my father, or women who might have been my mother or my sisters, who both became doctors by working as I worked, I fight like a motherfucker to do what I can. I scream. I yell. I try every trick in the book, because I know the government is going to use everything they’ve got. I spend most of my free time studying areas of the law that I believe might apply to my work. I seek out experts in other fields who might have applicable knowledge to share with me. I don’t bother speaking to young men to warn them of the evils of the drug trade, or of crime. They know the evils, and they know the potential
consequences. They know the system has been rigged against them since the moment they were born. They know the world is rigged against them. If you aren’t born with a silver spoon in your mouth, regardless of your race, religion, or sexual orientation, you might as well have been born in shackles. I’m not bitter about it. I accept it as it is. But I fight like a motherfucker against it.

As I said, I met Ben at the Queens County Criminal Courthouse, where I go to work every day. After an individual has been arrested, he or she goes to a precinct holding cell. From there, a prosecutor in the intake bureau of the
DA
’s office looks at the case and files charges. The offender is booked and fingerprinted and sent to central booking. A criminal history, also known as a rap sheet, is brought up, and the Criminal Justice Agency looks at both the charges and the criminal history and makes a bail recommendation. All three are then put together in a case file. The case files are put in a basket when the individual is brought to court for their arraignment hearing. We, the public defenders, draw the files out of the basket, and the individual whose file I draw becomes my client. I meet them in an interview booth behind the courtroom. The interview booth is basically a Plexiglas box, where I communicate with my client through a partition. After briefly reviewing their file, I talk to them about their potential bail options. In the best-case scenario, there is a chance I will be able to get them out. In the worst, I can do nothing.