A Stone of Hope Read online

  I had an optimistic, even naive sense that with school, things were going to improve. I didn’t realize that moving away from Haiti wasn’t going to solve all my problems. So many issues that I thought I left behind in La Plaine weren’t geographical; they traveled with me.

  Back in Haiti, I was known as a vagabond, a reckless kid wary of authority, forever wandering, always pushing boundaries and limits. I had a reputation for being aggressive and angry—a constant fighter; if there was a fight in the neighborhood, I was usually involved.

  People in the neighborhood would say, “Jim gen gwo san,” which literally translates to “Jim has ‘big blood’” but means I had anger issues, a bad temper. I’d be playing with someone and just like that, we’d be fighting. Parents would tell their kids not to play with me; even my dad would warn kids not to play with me.

  By the time I was nine years old I was fighting teenagers. It was the only way I knew how to communicate. But I never thought myself the instigator—I was protecting someone, retaliating for something unfair, or trying to prevent or right a wrong. I was meting out what I saw as justice, defending my family members or other kids who wouldn’t fight back.

  If there was a fight with ten kids, and one of the kids wouldn’t fight, I would go back into the scuffle and fight for that person. I defended my older brother Colin all the time; if he got hit, I’d ask him to point out who did it and no matter that kid’s size, I’d go at him—with rocks, a bottle, or just my fists. I absolutely refused to back down, which is a whole lot more important than any fighting skills.

  Considering the tightness of our living quarters in La Plaine, I was fighting my own brothers as well. When I was about eight, I grabbed a jagged rock from the ground and smashed it into Colin’s head. It busted open and left a hole there that was gushing with blood. I had to go on the run for days because my father was looking for me. When I returned he made Colin whack at me with a tree branch. My dad was all about evening things out like that. I almost felt bad for Colin, though. He couldn’t defy my father but he knew that once my father was out of sight I would beat the hell out of him.

  In Brooklyn, even among the black and Latino immigrants, Haitians were singled out. We were picked on, called things like “Haitian booty scratcher,” laughed at for being too foreign. I didn’t know back then about my country’s proud history, that it was home to the most successful slave rebellion in history. I just reacted.

  The barriers were thick. Adolescence is challenging anyway, but not being able to communicate, not knowing how to interact with other kids, is isolating. The world became a threat, and the most common and effective interaction was through my fists, the most effective voice I had.

  The first real schooling I ever got was in an American sixth grade classroom. Lefferts Junior High School was an enormous, industrial-looking building with endless white tiles, caged-in windows, and humming fluorescent lights. And it was chaotic: squeaking sneakers, metal slamming, guys wrestling, bells ringing, kids scattering. I was on high alert at all times and everything mystified me: the classroom setup, the winding hallways, the vending machines, things like fire drills and assemblies.

  And I was totally lost in the classroom. In my eleven years in Haiti, I attended maybe two years of formal school total. If my grandparents in America sent money we could go to school for a couple of months. But it would always run out or have to be used for something else—usually food or medicine—and then we’d miss the rest of the year. Then maybe my father would hit the lottery numbers or win a cockfight, and we’d go back for a few months. At one point my father’s friend, Mr. Eddy, started a free school with homemade wood benches outside, a blackboard hung from the back of a brick wall, a few out-of-date books, but the pay schools found a way to shut him down.

  Brevity and instability were the only constants throughout my education. School was too inconsistent to ever hold my interest or teach me anything. Since my mind had nothing to attach to, no concepts that the information could build on, my mind would wander.

  In Brooklyn, not asking for help—not wanting anyone to know I needed any—set me back even further. I was trying to process this new world and answer my own questions, all the while wearing a tight mask that showed none of this. Adolescence is one big blending game. No one could know this was the biggest school I’d ever seen, that I barely understood what anyone was saying, that even the food and the clothes were totally alien to me. But no matter what, my face stayed stone.

  I recently found my passport picture, a faded black-and-white image of a little boy, locked in time. I’m wearing my father’s dark suit from when he was a kid, slightly baggy, his old shirt and tie, crookedly knotted. I recognize that expression I wear, remember it from the inside. It’s a fierce look, like someone was trying to take my soul from me with that picture. But I can tell it’s a front, what I put out to the world to make sure everyone knew I was serious. At school my face was always like that passport photo—I wouldn’t let anyone know what was going on inside. I wouldn’t let them use that knowledge to take from me.

  Recess was held after lunch in an enclosed cement space surrounded by trash and metal. Kids flooded into the playground that spilled out and rubbed up against the city sidewalks. The boundary was fluid and the street element leaked in: older brothers, unemployed fathers, hustlers, and junkies. Some boys snuck off to the apartment buildings next door with their girlfriends or to get high.

  On my very first day I was playing football outside and keeping an eye on Colin, watching him on the basketball court through the holes of the metal fence. I might’ve been the younger brother but since I could stand I’d been Colin’s protector. He was just too soft to take care of himself in that environment; we used to call him Butter. At some point that day I lost track of him and scanned the schoolyard. When I spotted him again he was walking back to the entrance, head down. I tossed the football back and stormed across the asphalt. I could tell from his body that he was crying.

  “Butter!” I yelled. “Wait. Slow up, man. What happened?” I caught up to him and grabbed his shirt. He looked away, his sleeve covering half his face.

  “What’s going on?” I said. I reached for his arm and he yanked it away. A big mark hugged the outside of his eye and a small cut was trickling blood.

  “What the fuck, man?”

  “Got punched in the face,” he said.

  “Wait, what?!” My blood simmered. When I was upset, things got biological. My body changed: my face tensed and I was incapable of hiding anything. “Hold the fuck up. Who?”

  “Some kid—”

  “Show me.” I dragged him by the shirt back to the basketball court. He dragged his feet at first, but that was just pride. He wouldn’t have told me unless he wanted me to take care of it. Colin pointed to a quick kid with braids who was dribbling the ball.

  I stormed right out onto the court and shoved him in the chest. The ball rolled off and the kid stumbled back.

  “What’s good, man?” I said. “Why you hitting my brother?”

  Adrenaline focused me. After a morning of being totally lost, I was back in my element. Fighting is what they call a transferable skill, able to travel across all boundaries.

  The kid whipped his jacket off and came back at me with a cocked half smile.

  “You touch my brother, I fucking kill you,” I said, my English still sharply accented.

  The rest of the kids circled around us, shouting, egging him on:

  “Shut him up, Devon.”

  “He trying to play you, D!”

  “Fuck him up!”

  Devon spread his legs apart, bent slightly at the knees, and put his hands up in a boxer’s stance, rolling his fists in a little circle.

  I froze.

  Back in Haiti, we’d kick, bite, wrestle, put someone in a headlock, throw him to the ground, go Van Damme on each other. I never saw anyone put his hands up like that—except maybe in a Muhammad Ali poster.

  “C’mon, man,” he said, spitting
on the ground. “Let’s get it crackin’.”

  I had to look like I knew what I was doing, so I mirrored him, fists up and out. We traded punches back and forth but it felt like I was holding back. I was used to ambushing people, going all out, dirty as hell, clawing and tossing in the dirt. This was like fighting in a straitjacket.

  After a couple of minutes of trading punches, the dean of the school, Mr. Walton, came running out of the lunchroom door.

  “Yo! Stop it now! What you all doing?!” he yelled.

  He jumped in between us and stuck his muscled arms into each of our chests. A big guy with thick dreads like tight ropes, he cut an imposing figure in his fresh dark suit.

  “Hey, hey!” he bellowed in his deep voice. Mr. Walton could silence a crowd with a word.

  He dragged us both by the back of our jackets and led us upstairs to his office. We sat down across from his desk and he turned to Devon first.

  “Devon, we’ve been here too many times, man,” Mr. Walton said, hands folded, exasperated but calm. Devon didn’t even make eye contact. He stared at the windows, playing with the shoelaces on his new Jordans. Those jumped out at me. I wondered where he got them, where the money came from, how I could get them.

  “If this pattern doesn’t stop,” Mr. Walton was saying, “I have no choice but to expel you. Is that what you want?” Devon behaved like he had already checked out. “You hear me?”

  Stone silence.

  “Devon?” His head swiveled to Mr. Walton, as if noticing him for the first time. “We good?”

  “Yep,” Devon said, already pulling himself up.

  I was polite when the dean turned to me. I tried to show him that I was willing to try, lots of “No, sir” and “Yes, sir,” and a “thank you.” But Devon had already graduated beyond adolescent mischief. He was embedded in the gang life, drinking, smoking, and hustling with guys twice his age. He was a known quantity, willing to break jaws at the slightest provocation. Kids I didn’t know came up to me in the hall after that fight. “Aw man,” they said, “I can’t believe you trying to fight Devon.”

  The first thing they tell you in the streets is to hit the biggest guy to send a message to everyone else. Respect was crucial. If I hadn’t retaliated, I would have given everyone a free pass on my brothers and me. But it was a lose-lose: once I went at him, everyone came after me.

  In public school conflicts spill out of those halls and follow you home: to the playground, the sidewalks, the walk home, the parks near your house, off your stoop and outside your window. Devon lived on my block. That first day was a domino: more fights with him, his brothers, then his friends, then kids who wanted Devon to have their back.

  Devon was aligned with the Crips, a gang that ran much of my neighborhood, and things escalated quickly. I had to worry about much bigger dudes who carried knives, guys who could go to their OGs and borrow a gun; street-hardened guys with chains, hammers, and brass knuckles, who had to prove themselves to one another. I was already a tough kid but those months hardened me into something solid. It was impossible to focus on schoolwork while I was consumed with getting home in one piece.

  Growing up in Haiti, the fights were one-on-one, a winner and a loser, a closed loop. In a tight-knit community like that things get solved. But Crown Heights didn’t care about fair fights. Everyone’s clique got involved once you fought any one of them. Going anywhere alone became dangerous—it’s why gangs evolved in the first place. It was like I had declared war on a bunch of people I didn’t even know—but who all knew me.

  The school lunchroom was an unruly arena, at a constant roar. A woman named Miss Bess would patrol, yelling “Sit down!” and “Stop it!” in a piercing wail. I learned about free lunch, and was even more baffled when I saw how it was treated. Kids would take those hamburgers and pizzas and toss most of them in the garbage. As shocking as it first was—I had just left a place where food was a luxury—I soon had the same reaction to the free food. There were rules about how to behave and blend in, and lunch was a prime example of how powerful those forces were. Most kids brought lunch, or money for the vending machines, and the last thing they wanted to do was take the free lunch. It was the stamp on the forehead, which is the kiss of death at that age.

  “Line up!” Miss Bess would yell. The kids who got on the free lunch line were usually from other countries and wore hand-me-downs and no name brands. The girls didn’t talk to them and they got picked on in the halls and punched in the schoolyard. They were on display in that cafeteria, and mocked ruthlessly for it, carrying their stigma like heavy chains. The cool cliques would knock the trays out of their hands, throw plastic utensils and ketchup packets at them, and mock them across the lunchroom. That harassment was brutal; society makes kids pay twice for being poor.

  Adolescents work against their own self-interest all the time and I was no exception. Already stigmatized for being new and in the bilingual classes, I wouldn’t eat. I was starving, and I’d come from a place with barely any food at all, but America can do that to people, make them question their worth or measure it in strange ways. It’s why you’ll see Mercedes in a public housing lot, or kids, like me, starving but thinking about brand-name sneakers.

  My saving grace was that I was a born adapter, trained in the dirt roads and shanty houses of one of the poorest places in the Western Hemisphere. I’d grown up where adapting was a matter of life and death. So at school I caught on quickly and mirrored all of it: the glide through the packed hallway, the tone that skirted trouble but didn’t make you a punk, the casual flirtation with the girls. I learned enough English slang to get by, though I’m sure the teachers thought I understood more than I did.

  That first fight with Devon helped develop my reputation as a fighter, and gained me some respect. Other guys would step in and bargain for me. “Nah, man, chill out,” they’d say. “Leave him alone. He just got here.” Or, “Shoot him a fair one”—meaning let me fight one-on-one, give me a chance at least. In the schoolyard I quickly absorbed football, a more physical version of soccer. I was always pounding kids on the soccer field anyway so it was a natural fit. Like water taking the shape of its container, I formed into my world.

  2

  Five Square Blocks

  It is easier for a lot of young people in this city and in some of your communities to buy a gun than buy a book. It is easier in some communities to find a gun than it is to find some fresh vegetables. . . . That’s just a fact.

  —PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA

  Bless her soul, my grandmother did the best she could. But she couldn’t teach a boy about becoming a man. That was a hectic apartment: constant and escalating arguments over space, clothes, and food; fights that quickly got physical and ugly. If someone came in late at night, they’d get dead-bolted out and have to bang on the door, screaming for someone to open up. No one would answer, mostly out of spite. There was a lot of that in that house: You did this to yourself. Many times I slept in that cold hallway under the window, waiting for the morning.

  My grandmother had enough to worry about—my grandfather left the day to day of that house to her—and I was a willful kid. She told me to stay off the streets, avoid the circles that drew the wrong kind of attention. But my adolescent mind couldn’t comprehend that there was more available to me beyond the five square blocks of my world.

  From a young age I’d been a social chameleon with a survival mentality. Dropped into this world, I made the choice to assimilate, to absorb the surrounding culture and habits, and to wear it like a shield. I had to make a name for myself or people would do it for me at my expense.

  There is luck, there are exceptions, and there is the reality of your four walls, and your five square blocks. The boundaries of your world. Your “no” has no power and no reach; your only agency comes from your “yes.” You said yes the day you moved in. For many, it was the day they were born. The residue of generations piling thick and heavy around us. Those who grow up in the right household, with the right rol
e models, find access to resources and beat the odds. They develop the engine to get out and find the tracks to lead the way. That just didn’t happen for me. At least, not then.

  I was not even thirteen years old and every day was some kind of initiation. The combination of my inexperience, the street environment, and my frenzied home life pushed me with overwhelming force in one direction. I was just swimming with the current, trying not to drown. I had to defend myself when threatened, ally myself with those who took charge. Kids do what they know; they navigate based on what they have available to them. The adolescent mind isn’t capable of seeing the end result, especially when their world is a concentrated threat.

  That summer I was fighting Devon again, this time scuffling on the sidewalk in front of my building. My brother Colin and Devon’s friend Pana were there too. Pana was a Latin King, not a Crip, but he and Devon were close. When Pana tried to jump in, my brother stuck his arm out to grab him.

  “Yo, what you doing?” Colin said.

  Boom! Pana turned and hit my brother quick and hard on the side of the head. Colin dropped the issue so quick it was almost comical. He was called Butter for a reason. He held the side of his head and walked off to watch with the rest of the small crowd.

  I had started carrying a work knife in my pocket for protection, a box cutter with an orange handle and a sliding button. I was tired of looking over my shoulder on every sidewalk and the knife showed I meant business. Once Pana jumped in, I pulled the knife out and held it tight in my left hand, close to my body. In the ensuing scramble I got the knife up near Devon’s throat. Pana was trying to pull me off from the side as Devon pushed my hand back, and we struggled like that, locked tight.