A Stone of Hope Read online

  Devon and I were frozen, tussling. He was holding; I was cornered against the spiked railing, pushing the knife toward his neck, him holding my arm back. At some point the knife dropped out of my hand and someone in the crowd yelled, “The boys coming!”

  Then the siren, one quick and jarring whoop. With that chirp, the spectators scattered.

  A police car pulled up and two cops rushed at us. It was my first run-in with cops, so the uniforms and swirling lights still had the power to scare me. My eyes darted around looking for the knife; I spotted it five feet away, on the other side of a low railing, its shiny tip in a grass patch below a window. I looked for Colin, hoping he might read my mind and grab it. A weapon was a guaranteed ride to the precinct and a booking.

  A barrel-chested white cop grabbed me and forced me to sit down on the sidewalk. “What’s the story here, guys?” he said.

  Devon immediately mentioned the knife and I tried to talk over him to distract them. “Officer, they were jumping me,” I said, sticking with a polite and scared pose. As I rose the cop pushed me back down. “Both of them. I was protecting myself. I—”

  “Okay, just calm down,” the officer said.

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  The other cop, a stocky Latino, took Devon aside. Then my cop yelled over, “What’s going on, Devon?” The fact that they knew him relaxed me.

  “He pulled a knife on me, man,” Devon said. “Trying to stab me.”

  The cop escorted Devon over to the police car and propped him up against it, his hand pinned to Devon’s chest.

  “Yeah?” his cop said.

  “Oh yeah?” my cop said. “This one?” He pointed at me sitting on the ground, not yet thirteen. I guess I didn’t look like much. “What knife? Where’s this knife?” he said.

  “Right there,” Devon said, pointing to the grass strip. “He just dropped it.” Devon started to walk toward it, but the cop fixed him back to the car.

  “Hold it, hold it, Devon,” he said. “Stay right there.”

  “He had it at my neck, man,” Devon said, imitating the motion.

  His cop went over by the bushes to look for it, kicking his feet around in the grass. My heart pounded fast, and then rose up into my throat. The moment my grandmother had repeatedly warned me about was inevitable and I couldn’t stop it.

  But the knife was gone.

  The cops’ radio rumbled alive, a staticky voice calling out numbers, and they let us go. I walked inside, trying to get my heart to slow. The culture hits snitches pretty hard, marks them forever. I didn’t want to get arrested, but I didn’t want Devon locked up either. Devon’s arrest would’ve rippled and made me even more of a target. Things could’ve been fatal—for either of us—if he hadn’t held me off.

  A few nights later I was in my lobby about to walk up the stairs. A Puerto Rican woman named Maria who lived on the first floor called me over. She knew me from around the building; I used to throw the football in the hallway with one of her sons. Standing at her door in a nightgown, she motioned with her finger to come close. I anticipated her giving me a hard time for making too much noise.

  From her open door I could see through her apartment. Her window looked right out onto the sidewalk, a straight shot to where Devon and I had been fighting a few days before.

  “You live upstairs?” she said.

  I nodded.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jim,” I said, my voice cracking a bit. Female authority figures had the strange effect of pinning me down more than any male could.

  “You’re the one with the knife. I took it away. Did you know that?” she said.

  “What knife?”

  She gave me a save your shit look. “The other day,” she said, “when the police came up.”

  “Oh yeah.” I looked up at her. “You took it?”

  She nodded.

  “Why?” I asked.

  She waved her hand like that didn’t matter. “Just be smart,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You’re young. Be careful. That boy—” She pointed as if Devon were still outside. “That boy is bad news.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She eyed me tight. “I know your grandmother. You seem like a decent kid,” she said. “Don’t become bad news.”

  I nodded and ran up the stairs.

  That was the first time I felt like my building was its own community, a compacted version of what I had had in La Plaine. Haitians embrace the idea of shared responsibility and selflessness. The people reject the idea that in order for me to have more, you need to have less; it’s more like if you don’t have enough then no one does. People in Haiti don’t just mind their own. Anyone could discipline you, look after you, feed you. We were all family to a certain degree—the terms “aunt,” “uncle,” and “cousin” all hung loosely around anyone you knew well. That moment with Maria was like a bridge back to that world. She didn’t want any of us arrested because an us-versus-them mentality pervaded. People would rather protect a guilty neighbor than help the police.

  There was a vampire-like element to what was happening to me, like I’d been bitten. I was getting into scuffles with Crips and Bloods, or allies of someone I fought in school, or enemies of someone I was seen with. A network of gangs and cliques was orbiting around me. Exposure leads to curiosity.

  I wanted to know about these gangs, their prevalence and necessity. About their red and blue bandannas, their tags that blanketed concrete walls and electrical boxes. About their hierarchies of workers and bosses. About the music that blasted and thumped out of their parked cars. I tried to absorb the whole culture, learn the differences between a Crip and a Blood and a Latin King, understand what triggered certain beefs and who was involved. From my window, I’d watch the rise of their smoke, the rattling energy of their dice games, their intricate greetings. I could see the entire front and side of my block, with a view of the whole neighborhood. That window exposed an entire world to me and gave me an itch that kept me awake at night.

  I hitched myself to the right people, those experienced enough to know the map and generous enough to look out for me. Pierre was about eighteen at the time, with light caramel skin and swollen cheeks. Everyone called him Big Head. He lived with his uncle in my building and they welcomed me into their home, sharing their food even when they didn’t have extra and their clothing that had gotten too small. Pierre had also moved from Haiti to Brooklyn as a young kid, so there was comfort in talking to him, like I could retread tracks he had already made. Watching him was like looking ahead to a future I wanted to mold for myself.

  Pierre and his friend Mackenzie taught me the lingo of the street, how to mimic the swag and decode the gang language kids spoke on sidewalks. I picked up which blocks were fighting, who were the robbers versus who were the shooters, what certain girls would let you do and what others wouldn’t. I had no swagger and couldn’t afford the kinds of things that signaled to girls that I was somebody. Listening to their stories about women’s bodies—what they were going to do to them, what they had done—was like a peek to the other side of the mountain.

  “Mack thinks he’s got her, but I got the jump. Trust me.” Pierre was talking about a girl on our street he was eyeing. We were sitting outside the stoop of my building in the hazy evening, the sun drifting down and the block coming to life.

  “Why? What she say?” I asked.

  “She didn’t have to. Shorty was having it. I could tell.” He touched his temple. “Sixth sense, cuz.”

  “You called her?” I asked.

  “Nah man, you can’t just do that.” Pierre was scanning the block with slight moves of his eyes. “You just get her digits and then say ‘I’ll see you around’ or something. Or else you look like you’re interested.”

  “Yeah, but aren’t you?”

  “Shit, yeah. You see that onion butt?”

  I’d heard this before. Makes a grown man cry.

  “But you jus
t say ‘what’s up’ when she passes,” he said, “and then go back to what you’re doing. Even if I’m doing nothing. Make it like I got business to take care of.”

  Success on the street was linked to never being tied down. Mobility, deniability, ghosting. I would pick this up quickly.

  Mackenzie came out of the bodega drinking a Mountain Dew, which he would down all day long. “What happened with Shorty up the block?” he asked.

  “The one with the—” Mackenzie put his hands out in front of his chest. They both laughed. I laughed a half a beat behind.

  “You saw that?” Pierre threw his hand out and gave him a dap. “I was trying to get her to come over to my crib.”

  “And?”

  “She was frontin’, said she had to work.”

  “I hate that bullshit,” Mackenzie said, spiking both syllables. “That’s some bullshit right there.”

  My experience with girls was limited, but the desire was there. It was a hard, biological fact, just sloppy and unformed. My arrival in New York coincided with the arrival of my hormones and it was like an overload. In Haiti, most of the girls were ones I had grown up with and they fell into two categories: family and practically family. In Brooklyn, the number of available girls and opportunities exploded. Every one was a question, a possibility, a door.

  “Shorty, you got a fat ass!” Pierre yelled out to a girl passing by—tight jeans, large hoop earrings. He meant it as a compliment. Usually they ignored him, but this one turned around, flirting it up, moving her ass around. Then she kept walking.

  “Damn, bro, you see that ass?” Pierre asked me. “Shorty got a fat ass, bro.”

  It was rare that a girl walked by and we didn’t say something to her. I learned the language from these guys, who were persistent until one left earshot and a new one passed.

  Yo Shorty what’s good?

  Can I walk with you?

  Shorty, can I talk to you for a second?

  Let me holla at you. Shorty, can I get your number?

  You looking fine, Shorty. Where you going?

  You look sexy, girl. Let me get your math.

  Pierre was relentless.

  When we got bored or restless, we’d drive around the block blasting Nas or Jay-Z, our heroes who grew up poor and troubled a couple of miles away. They didn’t just rap about the street and violence but about police, racism, and oppression. Jay-Z wrote about being raised by a single mother, about his missing father and the hole left there. DMX rhymed about being lonely, growing up homeless and hungry. I lived vicariously through him, his voice and stories mirroring my own. To live is to suffer, he said, but to survive is to find meaning in the suffering. Nas was gritty, gutter-angry, and resilient. He mixed street gospel with honest pain. His lyrics became my mantras, his voice my guide, his world my ghetto sanctuary.

  An older group of guys on the block also took me under their wings. Jay was in his midtwenties and had lived on Crown Street his whole life. Solidly built with a goatee, Jay had real style: smooth tailored suits for the workweek and North Face bubble jackets or Polo hoodies on the weekend. He was educated and street-smart, Haitian roots with American swag. As a young child I attached myself to older figures to get fed; now in Brooklyn, I shadowed mentors to learn the street. I was forming an American identity, looking to these guys to decipher this world to me. They didn’t try to be my father or give me lectures, and because of that, I took heed of the lines they drew. The respect, the lack of condescension in that crowd, made me all the more willing to listen. I was drawn magnetically to Jay, his calm intelligence, his hawklike awareness of his world.

  Jay’s crowd hung out on the Orthodox side of Nostrand at a spot in front of a Hebrew school we called the Jewish Steps. On summer nights, twenty or so of us would pile around those steps, smoking blunts and drinking malt liquor, rolling dice on the sidewalk, blasting music from parked cars. I was the youngest but being around the older crowd conferred some maturity on me.

  As long as we respected the Orthodox who lived nearby, they left us alone. They owned the few buildings on that side that still had black residents but they never gave any of us a hard time about the noise, smoke, or late hours. If we were sitting in front of the school’s doors they’d say, “Excuse us, please,” and we’d move out of the way.

  On Saturdays, the Sabbath, they couldn’t use any electricity, so they would ask us to come inside their homes and press the elevator button or turn on their lights. I was intrigued to see the inside of those houses and always jumped at the opportunity while the older guys sat back. They were more spacious than our small apartments and the only other kind of living space I had ever seen in America. I was half curious and half frightened, but I was always willing to help and learn, and figured this was my opportunity. I didn’t know a thing about Jewish people except that they lived in their own isolated world, dressed the same, prayed a lot, and owned the buildings we lived in. For various reasons they were able to build a level of self-reliance and economic independence that I admired.

  We coexisted peacefully with the Jewish population, both sides letting the other be. We were both a forgotten class, both with histories of oppression from not being wanted anywhere, and that shared experience created some kind of unity. We were both pushed into a specific corner and, in Brooklyn, our corners were side by side.

  Jay and his friends would tell stories—the ongoing saga of the hood—and I soaked it all up. It was history absent from the school textbooks but the kind that shaped my world: it was embedded into the sidewalk and built into the asphalt. Most of those guys also accumulated the kind of conspicuous wealth that I found seductive: Gucci clothes, Rolex watches, Benzes and Lexuses and Range Rovers. I’d sit in their parked cars with one leg dangling out, and change the music on their sound systems. I’d press into that smooth interior, check myself in the rearview. As I switched out CDs and messed with the bass and treble, spaceship lights beaming, a sensation would shoot into my fingers. I wanted this.

  Jay stood out by being low-key, with a steady job and little interest in the illegal side of that world. He could tell I was getting captivated by the extravagant and tried to bring me balance. When he noticed I was getting into too much trouble, he told me about a football program run by the city. It was designed to both get at-risk kids off the street and to prepare them for high-school football, which could bring structure and discipline, and perhaps counteract the street temptations. In that world, any activity that keeps a child off the streets is lifesaving. Sometimes the activity is called warehousing—literally putting them somewhere else, eating up their hours that could be spent in danger or hustling. Other times, the activity is more root-based, establishing new expectations and new assumptions. Football was both and it also gave impressionable kids the mentorship of a coach, the type of male role model they may not encounter anywhere else.

  There’s an identity element at work too—we can only conceive of available options. When we watch television the only successful people that look like us are professional athletes and entertainers. Television’s largest role in a lot of our homes is not as distraction or escape. It is as a mirror.

  So for over a year I traveled on a bus on Rockaway Parkway out to Canarsie High School, a well-known football powerhouse in Brooklyn. We played a few games—it was mostly practice—but I took to it. At first I thought organized football was nuts: Why were they running into one another? Why not run through the open spaces? But I caught on easily, becoming a disciplined defender, and the coaches encouraged me. I turned into an imposing strong safety and felt like I had a shot to turn it into something. Some players from the New York Giants came out to talk to us and run some drills, and the effect on me was palpable. It broke through the wall that I had put up regarding my future.

  Sports, especially at the youth level, are the great equalizer, a true democratic activity. Everyone knows who can play and neither your family nor your money impress on the field. It’s played in the poorest slums in the world because
it costs nothing—all you need is a ball and another person. You create everything else yourself. On the weekends and after school on Crown Street, we played behind the school on my block. It was touch football on gravel but everyone would always trip and get cut up. You had to learn how to plant yourself, how to roll when you fell. There’d be crowds along the sidelines, sitting on the metal benches, burger wrappers and beer cans strewn everywhere. It was a raucous scene down there and fights would break out from time to time.

  I was younger than just about everyone, with a big chip on my shoulder. One cold Sunday morning, I was on the sidelines, trying to get in on the next game. A wiry teenager named Laurence started to yell back at me when I was calling next. He was eighteen and always talking shit on and off that field.

  “He thinks he getting in,” Laurence said in his squeaky voice, which sounded like Eazy-E. He turned to me, smoking his cigarette like he had never held one before. “You can’t play, little man. What about kickball? They got kickball at the nursery school.”

  “Fuck out of here,” I said. “I can play. I can fuck you up, too.”

  “Shit, you don’t even know what you doing.” He was peacocking at my expense, talking for other people’s benefit. “You’re into that Haitian soccer shit.”

  “Fuck out of here. What you got?” I said, walking toward him. “You ain’t got shit, you pussy.”

  “Pussy?” He flicked his cigarette and started toward me, chest out. “You’re the pussy. Fuckin’ booty scratcher. Let’s get it.”

  As he ran forward I caught him in a headlock and started to swing his body from the neck. We both fell to the ground and rolled, tussling over by the wooden picnic benches. When we got up I swung at him. As he blocked my punch with his forearm something popped in my right wrist, like I had punched concrete. The nerve pain shot up my arm like fire flowing through my body. I had never felt such pain. I walked off shouting backward at him, all adrenaline and agony, holding my arm like a dead kitten.