[5 of 5] Buck: A memoir, Chapters 37-45. by M. K. Asante (2013)
Author: M. K. Asante
Asante, M. K. (2013). Buck: A Memoir, Chapters 37-45. Spiegel & Grau.
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37
Breakfast on J Street
I've been at Crefeld for a month now. Every day when I come home from school, my mom is out of her chair and off the meds. It's like watching a flower bloom. Today I come home to a dance studio. I walk in and am swept away-by sweet, sad symphonic strings, by mournful French horns, by a marching snare drum that ushers Amir into my thoughts, and by the silky sandpaper voice of Sam Cooke singing "A Change Is Gonna Come."
My mom directs two dancers, a guy and a girl, as they float around our little living room on tippy toes like black angels. The duo crash to the floor, then rise, jump in place, kick to the sky, and interlock like long-lost lovers, telling a story with their glistening bodies.
My mom cues their movements. "Ba-da-da ba-de-ba-da-ba-da ... Ba-de-da-da-da," she sings. She's wearing a leotard and looks good. Her face glows like it's backlit. She stops the music and tells me they're preparing for some big dance competition. I can hear it in her voice-she wants it.
"Cross your fingers," the male dancer, Kemal, says.
"And . . . one of these is for you." My mom hands me two envelopes. I recognize Uzi's handwriting. I scream, "Yeah!" and jump around like l'm at a Cypress Hill concert.
The other letter is for Ted. I pocket my letter to read later and head out to give Ted his.
Back to 10 Gs.
I spot the crew, standing where they always stand, between the liquor store and the corner store, next to the Fern Rock Apartments fence, under the train tracks, and across the street from Rock Steady, this bugged ngh who sits on a crate all day with a broken radio, rocking his head back and forth to a beat no one else can hear.
Scoop and Ted both look gone. I give Ted the letter.
"Thanks, Malo. Where Uzi at? The crib?" Ted looks horrible. His Afro is dry and uneven, his clothes dirty, his speech slurred.
"He's locked up in Arizona," Scoop reminds him, wiping his drippy nose. "You know that." Scoop looks bad too, like he's aged ten years since I last saw him.
"Yeah, that's right... Yo, Malo, can you take us to get some breakfast?" Ted asks
"Breakfast? You know what time it is?" I laugh.
"You know what I'm talking about." Actually, I don't.
"Where?"
'Down J Street," Scoop says. "Come on, take us down there real quick." I don't feel like taking them omething tells me not to, but I do anyway.
Let freedom ring with a buckshot, but not just yet
First we need to truly understand the nature of the threat
("Nature of the Threat," Ras Kass, 1996.)
Jefferson Street looks like the "Thriller" video, all zombied out. Fiends, as thin as crack pipes, dance-the dancing dead—in the shadows and then, like Houdini, disappear . . . reappear somewhere else. Everything ghostly. Here—gone. Everybody's eyes curry yellow or smog gray, dead as sunken ships.
This is where hope gone goes. It pulls hard at my spirit. I wonder what happened to Right Knowledge, to all that shit Ted was kicking last time.
The dealers chant inventory like a chorus:
"Crack out, crack out."
"Coke out, coke out."
"Her-ron, her-ron."
"Ted Money," one of the dealers yells, and rushes the whip. He pulls out a case with all different pills in it. "What you need?"
"Yo, right here?" I say, tapping Ted and checking my rearview for the jakes.
"It's cool, Malo, it's open air out here. Free market. No cops on J Street. Everything goes. Anything goes."
"Just got off, now imma 'bout to get on." I hear someone buzzing by. Shadows wipe past in stumbling zigzags.
"Bruce Lee," Ted shouts.
"Bruce Lee?" | look at Scoop.
"China White, heroin." Ted's on heroin now?... The fuck?
Black windows on boarded-up cribs like hollow eyes.
A fiend taps on my window. She looks like ET.
"I'll suck ya dick so good make ya ass lock up and snatch off da fitted sheet," she says . . . The fuck?
I roll the window back up.
In the rearview I catch Snoop snorting a line of coke off his fingernail.
"Want some of this eye-opener, Malo?" His head shoots back like whiplash.
"Pancakes," Ted says, holding the Xanax pills—zannies. "Syrup," with a Styrofoam cup full of lean—promethazine and codeine syrup. He drops the pills in the syrup. "Breakfast."
"Go ahead," Ted says, and passes the cup to me. "I call this shit the Incredible Hulk." I look at it.
Look at them.
Pass.
I'm driving down Broad Street. Ted and Scoop are arguing, but the drugs got them on this crazy delay. Scoop will curse at Ted, but it takes Ted like thirty seconds to respond. It's like they're in outer space.
I'm mad at myself for even being here. It's fish-tank clear: nghz like Ted and Scoop can stay in my heart but not in my life.
Scoop's elbow brushes my face as he chokes Ted from the back. "Pussy!" Scoop shouts, and sits back in his seat hard. He lights a cig, zones out.
I yell, "Chill!" and focus on getting them back to Olney and the hell out of my whip.
After like a minute, Ted slurs: "You stabbed me, yo?"
I look and see the handle of a knife sticking out of Ted's chest.
". . . the fuck, Scoop?" I scream, swerving like I'm drunk.
Ted's whole shirt is dark and wet with blood, drenched like how Patrick Ewing's jersey is from sweat—
"Scoop?"
"Man, fuck that ngh!" he mumbles, taking a cold drag.
Ted just sits there, dazed and confused, bleeding, melting like a candle. I hit the gas, weaving in and out of traffic. I speed in the third lane, the gutter, racing to Albert Einstein Hospital.
"Hold on, man, hold on."
Woop-woop, woop-woop.
The police, hyena deep, surround the car.
Never again, I tell myself on my way to jail.
38
The Kite
"Another day in paradise," the guard says, looking at me like l'm a piece of shit.
They cuff Ted and take him to Einstein, book Scoop somewhere, and take me to a holding cell in the
Thirty-fifth. This is the same place Uzi first got locked up at.
Think: Every wall is a door.
I'm biting my nails like they're sunflower seeds.
The cop that brought me in calls me "a piece of shit." It's cool. I ain't even mad at him. I mean, FTP all day, but it's really on me. On us, playing right into their hands like Play-Doh. Giving the cops and the prosecutors and the judges and the politicians who don't believe in us anyway exactly what they want.
Decisions lead to options, options to choices, choices to freedom. We all design our own reality, write our own script, build our own house . . . or prison . . . or coffin. Me Against Law and Order is about being a true rebel, pushing against the grain, making my own path. Bucking the system.
I think about this show I saw on the Nature channel the other day about elephants. About how despite weighing up to twenty-five thousand pounds and standing thirteen feet tall, they can still be chained. How? I wondered. It starts when they're babies. Some asshole puts a metal chain attached to a wooden peg nailed into the ground around the baby elephant's foot. The baby elephant struggles but fails to break free and learns at that very moment not to struggle, that struggle is useless. Later on, even when the elephant can easily break free, it doesn't. I look around at all the sad hard gray black faces and see elephants.
Reaching for my wallet, RIP Amadou
I'm writing sentences like ya honor do
But I don't do the judging, no COINTEL,
I don't do the bugging, can't you nghz tell
Email to the system, Re: bel
I'm on some other shit like I'm on the mother ship
They say I can go if a parent or guardian picks me up. I don't want to call my mom-she's feeling so good, this shit will bring her right back down. Haven't talked to my dad in forever, so I don't want to hit him up like this. I can't call him anyway because I don't even know his number.
I call Kianna, thinking about all the stories this phone must have. It just rings and rings, dry humming. I leave a message and wait in the cell. They drag people in all night. One guy, out of his mind drunk, with his forehead split open, is spinning around, spitting up, asking people to believe him.
"Please testify?" he says. "Will you testify for me?"
The only pull you got is the wool over your eyes
Getting knowledge in jail like a blessing in disguise
(Me.)
I remember the letter my mom gave me before I went to 10 Gs, the one Uzi wrote to me. I find the envelope still there in my back pocket. I hear Uzi's voice:
Malo,
Wassup man? Hope everything is good with you, yo. I'm in this hellhole wondering my fate. When they transferred me here I wasn't 18 yet so I was on the 7th floor, where the other minors who have been transferred as adults are housed. We stayed in our cells 23 and 1, meaning we were in our cells for 23 hours a day and one hour out to take a shower and make a phone call. That shit makes u crazy, u find yourself thinking out loud, standing at your door for hours on end watching the guards watch you. I've read the whole Bible like 5 times cover to cover . . . Psalms is cool, keeps me calm. I'm still trying to get a Koran, but u know, this is Arizona! Haha. I can tell the fuckin time just by the way the sun hits my cell through my sun slit, which pretends to be a window ... just by the shadows it casts on my cell walls. I'm on some monk shit.
I still can't get used to the constant noise in here man, it's something I can't explain, it's a fucking roar, a constant roar, like hard wind blowing in your ear all the time, u don't forget about it. People never stop talking, yelling, or screaming in here. I kind of think of it like how a black hole would sound, cuz this place is a void—a fucking hum of pain. The kids in there did some serious shit, mostly murder though. I used to think that a killer was a certain type of person. I now know that killing is an emotional reaction, cuz most killers aren't crazy people, shit is crazy.
The kid next door to me was an ese named Pelon, in for murder. He's in a gang outta Phoenix called Duppa Villa, his dad is in it, his mom is in it, this shit is like a right of passage to the eses, they take this shit in stride. When I first got here he gave me some food. Uncle Jabbar said in prison don't accept nothing from nobody, but fuck that, I was hungry! It was a Snickers bar and a bag of corn nuts, maaan that shit made me feel like I wasn't in jail anymore—just seeing the wrappers! Ain't that some shit? He sent it on a "kite." That's a long-ass string made from sock thread and boxer-short elastic . . . and that's how we send shit from cell to cell, letters, food, and other shit like that. When the guards see u doing it they take ya string from u, mothafukas go crazy when they get their strings took, it's like losing ya house phone!
On my 18th birthday, at midnight, three guards came to take me downstairs to the main jail general population. The muhfuka told me, "Happy birthday, kid, welcome to hell." The day before, Pelon passed off a shank to me made out of paper—yes, paper!—the shit is hard as metal and the shit has a spear point on it! Paper, yo! He told me they like to fuck with us young bucks cuz we're small and shit. He said if a punto fucks wit me bang em in the stomach right where the navel is. I feel that, but I just want to come home, Malo . . . but I guess I gotta do what I gotta do, yo.
Man, one thing I learned in here is that killas can be punks and punks can be killas, it don't matter. Just stand your square, never retreat-fuck that! If somebody wants to steal my respect, they gotta pay in blood, dog.
Pain is weakness leaving the body, Malo, remember that.
So yeah I'm in GP now with the adults, been here for a minute. They got me in the maximum-security block, red card status. It's better than the 7th floor shit, though. At least I can play ball, walk around, have some real human contact, and watch TV.
Out here on the West Coast they gangbang crazy, shit goes down every day. My cellie is my boy B-Brazy, he's a Blood from Mad Swan Blood Gang. We look out for each other, the ngh is down as shit. Check this: he never uses the letter C! When he talks he replaces the letter C with B, and when he writes he crosses out the letter C and anything else that reminds him of Crips! Hahahaha. There are like 10 Crips for every Blood, so Bloods be ridin hard with each other, cuz they r outnumbered. Because I roll wit Brazy, I'm what they call Bulletproof, 80 Proof, and Shotgun, meaning not Blood, but bangs with Blood . . . fuck it!
Uncle Jabbar said I'll probably do 5 years, I guess I can live with that. It's better than the 20 years the public defender told me I was facing when I was in juvie! I know one thing though, Malo, the boy in me has died, l've been forced to be a man. Mom and Dad can't help me in here, nobody gives a fuck about Afrocentricity or African dance in this jawn.
Malo, don't ever come to a place like this, it breeds violence, hate, and ignorance, and u never relax, u always have to watch what goes on around you, every little gesture, every word can b the difference between chilling or getting ya face tore off man . . . it's fucked up. It will change your "eyes"—do u get that? Ya spirit changes. The next time Mom sees me, she won't see her baby looking back at her, she will see someone else, someone different.
I've had a couple run-ins since l've been in here. I got into it with this OG Crip dude name Cisco Kaddafi. We were playing ball and the mothafuka kept hacking me. I got tired of it, and I threw my hands up at him. He told me, "Not here, we gonna do this at the pod." Brazy told me to "soap him," which means take bars of soap and put them in a sock as a weapon. When we got back to the pod, I b-lined for my hut, but he came to my door and said, "Naw, lil' loc, we gonna do this like g'z, ain't gonna be no weapons." I had to man up. We went to the showers and I just started swinging. Cisco is like 6'5", 270, but I was connecting! . . . till he grabbed me though and slammed the shit outta me ... but I got right the fuck back up . . . then the guards rushed in and choked us out on their SWAT team bullshit. They kept asking me if he attacked me, cuz he is known for shit like that. I was like "Fuck no! I attacked him!" even though it wasn't exactly like that. Haha. They wanted to know if I wanted to transfer to another cell block, or did I fear for my safety? What? Fuck no! I'm not a bitch, and I'm not gonna have a bitch jacket following me . . . in here u don't go out like that, even if it's not in ya best personal interest. They let me back in the pod and I was chillin. Cisco called me up to his cell, and was like "Yo, homie, I like ya heart," and he shook my hand. Then he gave two "tailor mades," which is a full cigarette, it's like giving someone 10 bucks.
See, Malo! Stand your square . . . Nghz respect u for that shit, no matter what! If u want my stripes, they not Velcro, u gotta rip my arm off to get them ... yahmean!
I'm still writing my rhymes, though, I got this crazy-ass song called "24 Hours." The hook goes:
24 hours anotha soul loses power
Some bring sun rays, some dark days and showers
Some never see they visions so believe u blessed
Life is just a test u got the right to be stressed
("Respiration," Black Star, 1998.)But Malo, on some real shit, I wish I could go back to 707 and being a kid again, chillin in my room doing card tricks for you ... hangin with Ted ….. u know? I wish me and u could rewind and play hanger ball in my room, or tracker wit Akil and Ahmed in the yard.
I've seen and heard too much, yo, it'll never be the same.
Think about the shit u do Malo, don't dick ride nobody, be yourself, and fuck drugs. Weed ain't a drug,
though, it's spiritual stimuli . . . haha.
Protect Mom, pray for me, and sooner or later we will unite again.
Your bro, Uzi
39
Soul Food
Monday morning my dad comes to get me. He's standing at the desk, talking to one of the cops. He looks like he hasn't slept in a minute. I'm happy, mad, excited, nervous, anxious, thrilled, relieved, and angry to see him.
Outside the light hits me hard, squinting my eyes.
I can taste his disappointment. He can feel mine.
"What's your problem?" he asks me in the car, his angry Georgia eyes just staring straight ahead. The horizon is a trembling orange scarf. He doesn't even know that Amir is dead, that I'm not hanging with UPK anymore, that I'm writing, that l'm in school and I'm taking it seriously; all he knows is I got locked up. I do have a problem.
"You dumped your problems on me when you left."
"All separations are painful, it's the nature of things being ripped apart. When I left Valdosta at eleven to go to the Nashville Christian Institute it was painful. Tearing something away from something else is like that, but it doesn't have to be like that forever."
I can't help it. Everything he's saying is pissing me off. I'm angrier than I've ever been. I sit there and my blood just boils like my seat's a stove. I hear my mom's cries all those nights. I think about how we struggled. Fire in my eyes.
"I don't care what you have to say."
"You talking to me like that?" My dad squints in disbelief.
"Who else?" I'm starting to bite my lower lip. I taste my own salty blood. "Fuck you!"
"Trouble is a bitter tree, but sometimes it produces sweet fruits."
"What?"
"You're looking for trouble . . . and you found it," he says, pulling the car over.
"Talking to me like that you must want to squabble," he yells, his southern accent coming out.
"Let's go."
The car stops. We're at Broad and Erie in front of Checkers. He opens his door and is outside.
"Get on out here, then," he says, and slams the door. I come out and he's standing in front of me waiting for me to make a move. He's in a defensive stance like a wrestler. He probably hasn't rumbled since like the sixties. Amir would say, He's so old he farts dust. Amir would also say, What are you doing? Man, at least you got a pop. At least he's trying. Nobody's perfect but at least he's in your life.
For a second I can't believe we're doing this, but I throw my hands up anyway. I want to make him feel the pain me and my mom felt. I swing ... he grabs me under my arms, I feel his strength as he lifts me off the ground while I beat his back with the side of my fist.
We're on the hood of the car. He's on top ... now me... him ... Cars roll by and honk peace. He's on top of me and looking straight into my eyes. It feels like he's looking right through to my soul. All my strength leaves. I can't move.
"I love you," he says hard under his breath, holding me down, pressing his words into me.
"Get off of me."
"I love you, boy," he yells now. I realize how much I missed his voice. We're panting, gasping for air.
We stay like that for a while, not fighting, just bonded, tangled together, and I feel at peace. Like we're one. Whole again.
"I'm so hungry" is how it ends. We walk across the street to Dwight's Soul Food.
BBQ chicken and catfish.
"Your mother and I were married in 1982 in Zimbabwe. She was the most incredible dancer l'd ever seen. Your birth was remarkable. I took her to the hospital twice in twenty-four hours and the second time you were born. You were the first American to be born in Zimbabwe. A true African American. You were celebrated and praised and held up as an example of African babyhood. Ministers of government and high officials like Makunike, Chimutengwende, and Shamuyarira blessed us and you. "
Mac and cheese and string beans.
"She suffered from hurts from childhood that I knew little about and could not repair regardless of my actions, love, and devotion. She had been brutalized by others, from what she told me, but I never treated her brutally nor ever raised my hand toward her. I loved her. I thought I could help her control it. I was the first person to insist that she go see a psychiatrist, which she did. I was with her when the top psychiatrist in the country declared that she was manic-depressive and prescribed lithium right on the spot. She had a couple of major surgeries that caused her to go into a deeper depression."
Yams and corn bread.
"She started spending money we didn't have, paying far too much money for things that we either did not use or did not need. She didn't want me to know that she had been stretching money from one place to pay another, using more than twenty credit cards to handle the juggling. Neither your mother nor I could survive in misery. We struggled to pay your tuition. Each month we got deeper into debt."
Black-eyed peas and collard greens.
"The day I left I believed that I was making the best decision I could. My commitment to you has never wavered. I have always thought that my responsibility was first to my children. I have never wished your mother any harm or ill. None of us choose our own demons."
Hush puppies and okra.
I'm listening to his story but it doesn't matter anymore. I don't care what he's saying, only about him . . . and my mom . . . and Uzi and where we all go from here. Amir was right—I'm lucky to have a dad who cares, who's down to fight with me, for me, for us.
"I love you," I say for the first time in years. He tells me his love for me is unconditional.
Sweet potato pie.
On the way home, he plays a speech from his friend Jeremiah in Chicago: "What makes you so strong, black man? How is it that three hundred and seventy years of slavery, segregation, racism, Jim Crow laws, and second-class citizenship cannot wipe out the memory of Imhotep, Aesop, Akhenaton, and Thutmose II? What makes you so strong, black man?... How is it that after all this country has done to you, you can still produce a Paul Robeson, a Thurgood Marshall, a Malcolm X, a Martin King, and a Ron McNair? What makes you so strong, black man? . . . This country has tried castration and lynching, miseducation and brainwashing. They have taught you to hate yourself and to look at yourself through the awfully tainted eyeglasses of white Eurocentric lies, and yet you keep breaking out of the prisons they put you in. You break out in a W. E. B. Du Bois and a Booker T. Washington. You break out in a Louis Farrakhan and a Mickey Leland; you break out in a Judge Thurgood Marshall and a Pops Staples; you break out in a Luther Vandross, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Harold Washington, or Doug Wilder. What makes you so strong, black man?
40
The Most Beautiful Country
The blank page begs me to tell a story—dares me to tell one—one that's never been told before, and to tell it like it will never be told again.
The blank page lights up a room in my heart that I didn't know existed.
I'm standing outside of Crefeld, staring into the endless green of Wissahickon Park, when my purpose finds me.
I hear Uncle Howard's voice in my head as I race through the hallway: Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
This is the come up, writing to the sun come up
I never get enough of the nighttime, so I write lines
That rhyme over linoleum beats, for kids scrolling them streets
Conquer the beast, cock and release
(Me.)
I find Stacey in her classroom.
I declare it: "I want to be a writer."
"That's great, Malo," she says, moving to the bookshelf. A sign above the bookshelf reads: Every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, "Grow, grow."
She pulls out a book and says, "Means you have to be a good reader, though." She hands me On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
That night, sitting on the terrace overlooking G-Town, I enter the world of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they wander across the highways of America, just like me and Ryan did a few months back, finding adventure and trouble and girls and drugs and themselves all at once.
The next day I ask Stacey for another book.
She chuckles. "How about finishing On the Road first?"
"I did." She looks at me like she wants to believe me but doesn't. She squints for me to 'fess up. I pull the words from the back of my eyes: " 'The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.' "
I tell her I didn't just read On the Road, but that I understood it, related to Sal and Dean's journey, what they were feeling, their quest for freedom and dream chasing.
She gives me a stack of books.
I devour them, finishing a book a day. I push myself hard because I feel like I'm behind, like I have to make up for lost time. Before Crefeld, the last book I read was in sixth grade. I starved myself and now I'm hungry for words, phrases, stories, and knowledge. The more I read, the more I want to read.
José Martí, a Cuban writer from back in the day, says literature is the "most beautiful country." For me, each book is a journey, a voyage into new land.
I finish Stacey's stack and hit the library. A sign above the entrance says Lys Ce Que Voudra (Read What You Will). And that's what I do. I walk through the aisles of books, touching spines with my fingertips, rubbing dust jackets with my thumbs, and reading everything with my heart.
WHITMAN: "Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."
GINSBERG: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz."
I spend a night at my dad's apartment in Levittown. It's small, even smaller than my mom's spot in G-Town, and barely furnished. I crash on the futon in the living room. He cooks eggs, grits, and toast in the morning. I eat slow, savoring each bite like it's my last. Over breakfast I tell him that I want to be a writer. He tells me that writing is in my DNA, that my grandfather loved to write.
"He was always a man to speak his mind," he remembers, leaning back in his chair. "I remember when I realized I had to return to Georgia to see him. It was when he told me on the phone, 'I can't hold the pen anymore! That was the most frightening thing I had ever heard him utter because he wrote something every day, a tradition that he started after finding himself confined to his bedroom. It was in his blood to speak his mind and to have his say. If he could not speak it vocally to an audience, he would write sermons and poems and songs. And he did so until the day he could not hold the pen, the day he died."
Before I bounce to go back to Philly, Pops gives me a few books: Assata, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Miseducation of the Negro. The books show the world not just as it is but as it could be, should be. They connect me to everything that has ever happened and to everyone who has ever lived.
WOODSON: "When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his 'proper place' and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary."
BALDWIN: "People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. An hey pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."
DU BOIS: "Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done and not some future day or future year. It is today that we fit ourselves for the greater usefulness of tomorrow. Today is the seed time, now are the hours of work, and tomorrow comes the harvest and the playtime."
FANON: "Who am I? Am I who I say I am? Am I all I ought to be?... Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it."
HURSTON: "The present is an egg laid by the past with the future inside its shell."
WHITMAN: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."
DEVLIN: "We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it."
BALDWIN: "We live in an age in which silence is not only criminal but suicidal... for if they take you in the morn-ing, they will be coming for us that night."
BAKER: "Give light and the people will find their own way."
Now I see why reading was illegal for black people during slavery. I discover that I think in words. The more words I know, the more things I can think about. My vocab and thoughts grow together like the stem and petals of a flower. Reading was illegal because if you limit someone's vocab, you limit their thoughts. They can't even think of freedom because they don't have the language to. I think about all the nghz I know with limited vocabs, the ones who keep asking, Nahmean? Yahmean? because they don't have the words to express what they really mean. I don't want to fall into that trap, so every day I learn new words: ascetic, mizzenmast, aft, estuary, diaphanous, sedentary, trireme, drapetomania.
ASSATA: "People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave."
Against all odds, the math's off
Forcing us into the night
Where we bargain with death for discounts on life
We get half-off
(Me.)
I read Animal Farm and think about all the crooked cops in Philly.
ORWELL: "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
I read Sistah Souljah and think about Nia: "Only a hardworking man, a sharp thinker who doesn't hesitate to do what he gotta do, to get you what you need to have, deserves you."
SIDDHARTHA: "Make the effort to obtain information that will allow you to best guide your destiny. Make your voice heard in the world through your life and works and do not be lowered into inaction by status, tradition, race, ethnicity, gender, or affiliation. Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down to many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."
I write in between reading. I write everything: poems, rhymes, stories, essays. Sometimes what I want to say is a poem, sometimes it's a story, a movie, or a song. Each form of writing is like its own language. I want to be fluent in all of them so that I can speak to people in whatever language they understand.
Stacey says being a good writer is about making connections, connecting the dots. I start connecting everything back to writing. Like how in science class today, George, my science teacher and basketball coach, was talking about the difference between a thermostat and a thermometer. The thermostat changes the temperature; the thermometer just reflects it. I want my writing to be like a thermostat.
Writing is just like the streets: don't hide anything at the beginning, don't reveal anything until the last possible moment.
41
Y2K Hustle
Y2K hangs on the horizon like sunset. The supermarket shelves are empty. Gas station lines look like rush hour traffic. Everybody's stocking up on everything, panicking, bracing for the last days. It's like that Prince song: And tonight we're gonna party like it's 1999. Action News 6 says all the world's computers are going to crash. I think about 10 Gs and how their spaceship, Nibiru, is supposed to come and take them away on Y2K.
Despite all the Y2K chaos, word on the street is that Bone and Damien are still gunning for me. "Dead man walking," they call me.
Kam tells me this on the phone. His voice cracks with fear. "So what you gonna do?"
I don't know. Philly's only so big and I'm bound to run into them eventually. My brain storms on legal ways to get money . . . not just to pay Bone off, but for myself and to help my mom.
Thead back to Olney.
A hustler, an entrepreneur, is about seeing opportunities and seizing them. Like 2Pac said, a real N.I.G.G.A. is Never Ignorant Getting Goals Attained. It's about looking around and peeping all the possibilities. The entrepreneur sees the world as the writer sees the blank page-as a chance. The game changes but the hustle stays the same.
I walk into Fresh Cutz and find Mike. He tells me that there's a few people in front of me, waiting for haircuts.
"I'm not here for a cut," I say.
"What's up?"
I reach into my pockets and grip all the money I have in the world.
"You still got those vending machines?"
42
Full Circle
I watch my classmates stock up on snacks before class. Juice, soda, water, candy, chips, cookies, crackers, gum, all courtesy of my vending machines. I pitched the vending machine idea to my school-"It's what the students want," I told Michael, "supply and demand"—and they green-lighted it. I stock up on product at Sam's Club for a nice discount, fill my machines up, and voilà!
Wrappers crinkle around the circle of love. The whole class chomping and munching and slurping. In the circle of love, I come out first: "I want to read."
All eyes on me.
"This is a story l've been working on ... I'm not done yet ..."
This is it.
"The fall in Killadelphia. Outside is the color of corn bread and blood. Change hangs in the air like the sneaks on the live wires behind my crib. Me and my big brother, Uzi, in the kitchen ..."
I get home from school, my mom rushes me, pushing a letter into my hand.
"Read it," she says, antsy.
I unfold it, thinking it's probably from Uzi.
I read under my breath: " 'Dear Amina . . . demonstrated exceptional capacity for exceptional creative ability in the arts . . . ' " I stop reading and smile at her. "You won?"
"I won! I got it."
My hug tells her how proud I am of her. I think about how strong she is to win something like this in the midst of all the chaos and sickness. She's like Jordan in the flu game.
Glowing in the dark like a fuzzy star in the black night, the TV says, "The big story on Action News tonight . . . It's being called one of the biggest drug and weapons busts in Philadelphia history . . . three suspected drug and weapons dealers have been arrested in a million-dollar criminal operation..." They show Bone and Damien being hauled into police headquarters in cuffs. Bone has his T-shirt pulled up over his face. They flash his mug shot. It's surreal. I think about how that could have been me. The TV shows the police behind a table with all of the drugs, money, guns, and ammunition they seized. I think about how Bone and Damien wanted to kill me, tried to kill me, and maybe they even killed Amir? I think about how Nia warned me all of this would happen, how she loved me enough to say something.
I remember what she told me: Love is learning the song in someone's heart and singing it to them when they forget.
43
The Five Spot
Black Jesus mosaic looking right at me. I'm sitting in the pews of Bright Hope Baptist Church waiting for Nia, watching her choir rehearsal.
"That's the largest stained-glass black Jesus in the world," one of the church elders whispers to me under "Go Tell It on the Mountain." Go, tell it on the mountain/Over the hills and everywhere . . . Sun pours through.
Nia sees me when I come in, sees me, and it's like when we first locked eyes at Broad and Olney.
I'm not the average savage that curse queens
I'm something from his worst dreams
("Don't See Us," The Roots, 1999.)
We watch Y2K fireworks explode, big and bright like electric sunflowers in the night sky, above the Art Museum.
Our hands interlocked, I apologize to her.
"Everybody is going to hurt you in some way," she says. "You just got to find the ones worth suffering for. And I did."
"Thank you." She says that espera, the Spanish word for "waiting," comes from the word esperanza—"hope." She asks if I see the connection.
"I feel it."
She tells me about this concept the Mayans have: in lak esh, meaning "You are my other me and I am your other you."
"In lak esh," she says.
I look into her eyes and see all the seasons changing at the same time.
"Malo, do you know what my name means?" Nia asks.
"No."
"Purpose."
Time passed, we back in Philly now she up in my spot
Tellin me the things I'm tellin her is makin her hot
("You Got Me," The Roots, 1999.)
Nia leads me through the darkness of Old City. We walk past a smelly place called Bank Street Hostel, cut across a parking lot, and end up standing in an alley under a colorful flag that says The Five Spot. It feels like a secret place. Outside the entrance is alive with energy. Cyphers, laughter, the click of heels on concrete, and music from inside pours out like warm air.
"If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing," the host says. "Poetry is the voice of a sea
animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air."
One mic, glowing onstage like the most precious jewel in the diamond district. It's dim, crowded. A spotlight throws a beam around like a lighthouse.
All types of peeps in here: races, styles, vibes. Beautiful brown girls with Coke hips and tribal tats. Backpackers with backward fitteds and notebooks. Divas in dresses, long legs, pointy shoes. Braids, dreads, weaves, perms, baldies, everybody nappy, happy.
The host spots Black Thought, ?uestlove, and the band. "The legendary Roots crew from Philadelphia!"
It's an open mic. Anybody can go up and rip it. A blur of underground talent blesses the stage. Poets Black Ice, Ursula Rucker, Post Midnight, Just Greg rip it. Emcees Bohemian Fifth, Suga Tongue Slim, and King Syze rock the mic. Then this lady, Jill Scott—"Jilly from Philly" they call her—sings, brings the damn house down, and gets a standing O.
Nia sings "Tell Him" by her favorite singer, Lauryn Hill. Her lips glow as she sings. People ad-lib: Get it girl, get it . . . tell him . . . uh-huh, don't stop . . . work, girl.
"Now if you don't like that," the MC says, "then something is wrong with your eardrum, your anvil, and your damn hammer!"
"Next up to the stage . . . Malo," the MC calls out. Nia must have written down my name. She smiles and claps for me to go up.
BALDWIN: "Your crown has been bought and paid for, all you must do is put it on your head."
I walk up to the stage. It reminds me of the blank page. I start with the word I wrote in Stacey's class: Buck.
Young buck, buck wild,
buck shots, buck town
Black buck, make buck
slave buck, buck nowBuck fitty, buck block,
buck down, buck sacred
go buck, buck me,
buck system, buck naked
The drummer from the house band starts drumming a beat for me. I flash a smile at Nia. Over the deep call of the drum, I respond with my story:
G-Town, '98, me and my mother
and mother-fuck the cops, they knocked my brother
He's state-roadin it, 23 and 1
Telling time by the shadows of the sunSis in psych ward, seeing neighbors
And I stay suspended, fuckin behavior
No savior, just danger
And Pops left so now I got the bangerMan of the house, North Philly to South
And my ol' heads punched me in my young mouth
They told me to get up—I got up
They told me to hustle—| got my knot upOutside, pulling my socks up and
Bombing on anybody that's not us
In Illadel, where they shoot the cops up
Shoot, it's that, or get locked upDreams like ground balls, they don't pop up
Getting rocked up to get locked down
And where them daddy's at?
They don't come aroundAnd where that message at?
(W)rapped underground
Searched the streets for myself
Lost and found
The audience starts clapping, snapping, and nodding to the beat. The whole Five Spot trembles with rhythm.
Uzi in the cage filled with rage
Best friend murdered—all I got is this page
And Pops' 12-gauge, few options
They on J Street, tossin toxinsPurple rain cuz the pain knockin
But I can't afford to bug my mind frame
If you saw how far my mind came
And could see how far my mom cameThen you could understand my grind frame
Hustle insane in the Langston Hughes laneKnown rivers, ancient dusky
Known devils too, tryna corrupt me
Get me to sell my soul for a couple dollars
Not knowin I got the mind of a couple scholarsAnd a few hustlas, child of Black Power,
The move meant to move this, I'm fluent
Shapes and shadows—my angles congruent
Missing student, most times I was tru-antPeep the distance
'Tween education and schoolin
See the difference
One frees, one ruins
Most of the audience is on their feet now, throwing adlibs and affirmations onstage, encouraging me.
Auto focus with a Canon lens
Love the hood but I feel like I'm gamblin
Might get lucky, no Peterson
And fuck blind haters who can't see me winLove of my life: secret ingredient
Good bruva but always so deviant
Late at night, ridin on the median
And fuck the news—time to ride on the mediaI follow nobody just leadin ya
Toothbrush rap, tracks reachin ya
On all cylinders, you numb, you ain't feelin this
Inauthentic if you can't see the real in thisNot hit or miss it's—just hit or hit
Me and cousins in the Bronx in the pits
Tracy Tow brown foul, been a while now
And all the wild childs Rikers Isle pen palsCome again now? How we get to this?
Generation where we proud of our ignorance?
And common sense ain't common—just call it sense
Life or death, stop ridin the fenceKilladelphia, Pistolvania
Where they clap at strangers
And spit poetry like a banger
I learned how to play ball on a hangerThey used to cut ya balls off when they hang ya
Balls like these so rare they endangeredSo I'm ready, armed and deadly
My mind is my sword—I'm edgyI polish these odes to conquer my Foes
Break the beat down, demolish the flowOn the road, driving fast
Young King, free at last . . . So
Miss me with the bullshit, like how them
Shells missed me when that tool spitLunar eclipse, I'm moonlit
Wasn't headed nowhere, now I'm movin
Wasn't doing nothin, now I'm doinBecame a doer, dream pursuer, purpose-driven
Past meets the future
In between no longer and not yet
Rise up, young buck, never forget
44
Bearing Fruit
Graduation. Birds crisscrossing above our heads. The audience is under a white tent. The graduates, we're out baking in the loud June sun.
The graduation is laid-back, like everything else at Crefeld. It feels like a picnic or a family reunion. My mom, overflowing with joy, is the star of the show. Her smile, an endless flood of white light, is set in stone.
Present is a gift, that's why it's called present
Troubled adolescence had my mom stressin
Now a different story, Doris Lessing
No matter where I go from here, Philly reppin
(Me.)
My dad sits next to her. It's the first time they've been together, in the same place, since he left. I smile at both of them and inhale summer.
All of my teachers are here: George, Kevin, Debbie, Stacey.
George speaks to our class: "Ralph Ellison once said, 'I don't know what intelligence is. But this I do know, both from life and from literature: whenever you reduce human life to two plus two equals four, the human element within the human animal says, "I don't give a damn." You can work on that basis, but the kids cannot. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.' "
45
Rivers
A scarf wrapped around my head like the locals. No clouds, just 120 degrees of Egyptian sun. It glows above the desert like a giant halo. My Timbs are the color of the pyramids I'm standing in front of.
"Welcome home, my Nubian brother," the sellers yell, pushing product in my face. It's all smiles, love, can't knock the hustle.
"You were born on this continent," my dad says.
Me and my pops: riding camels with colorful Persian rug humps, kicking up sand in front of the Sphinx at Giza; steering little boats down the Nile while old men with ancient feet and smiles wider than the river watch and laugh from the grassy banks; crawling into limestone to see etchings older than everyone I've ever met combined; mazing through huge columns that shoot up into the sky like space shuttles; seeing the dusky black faces on the walls of the history they don't teach in school; and eating ta meyya and laughing into the night.
I pull Amir's chain out of my pocket. I see his smoky face in the silver.
SHONAGON: "When you have gone away and face the sun that shines so crimson in the East, be mindful of the friends you left behind, who in this city gaze upon endless rain."
We end up in Abu Simbel. It's early morning. The call for prayer goes out and sounds like an ancient song. I think all prayer should sound like a song.
Inject the thesis, spoke to my pops and left him speechless
He saw me sprout, goin through worlds that wore me out
("How Ya Livin," AZ featuring Nas, 1998.)
We walk down a hill, along a mountain, and then turn to face it.
Facing the mountain. Four faces, huge black faces with crowns, cast into an enormous limestone cliff.
A tour guide tells a group in front of us, "These colossal statues were sculpted directly from the mountain, cut from the natural rock of the mountain . . ."
I think about that: how these bold, brilliant faces were trapped inside the mountain the whole time . . . waiting to be discovered, waiting to reveal the beauty underneath, waiting to be seen, waiting like an untolc story. I see my family in the stone faces.
"The young, handsome face is finely carved. He wears a crown on his head . . . The line of the smiling lips is more than a meter long," the guide goes on.
I am the mountain and the sculptor, losing myself, finding myself, revealing what was there all along.
HUGHES: "My soul has grown deep like the rivers."
We stand there, together, at the peak of one mountain and the foot of another, facing the rising sun.
To all the young bucks.
Much Love
To the Most High and the ancestors.
To my mother and father for their unshakable love.
To my big brother for showing me how to rise and shine.
To Maya, my queen, and Aion, my prince, for their divine light.
To Ben Haaz, Jan Miller, and Lee Steffen for helping make this book a reality.
To my editor, Chris Jackson, for being brilliant. To my publishers Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, and Random House for providing a platform for me to tell my story.
To my sister, Eka. To my cousins: Ahmed, Akil, Nikia, and Chris. My aunts: Sylvia and Georgia. My uncles: How-ard, Abdul, and John. My nephew Nasir. To the Freelon family.
To my teachers and mentors: Joel Wilson, Kevin Howie, Deb Sotack, Debbie Nangle, Stacey and Dan Cunitz, George Zeleznik, Charles Fuller, Owen Alik Shahadah, Lawrence Ross, Saul Williams, Jim Brown, Kenny Gamble, Walter Lomax, Kofi Opoku, Samuel Hay, lan Smith, Lee Upton, Maya Angelou.
To my team: Nina-Marie Nunes, Jeff Schuette, David Sloan, Dwight Watkins, Rassaan Hammond, Errol Web-ber, Ryan Bowens, and Jeffery Whitney.
To my homies: Jon, Dustin, Jordan, King Syze, Shalana, Ted, Scoop, D-Rock, Struggle, and King Mez.
To my extended family all around the world for their support and encouragement.
To my brothers and sisters locked down (they can't imprison your soul!) .
To the voiceless whose voice I evoke through pen strokes.
To Philly, my city. To hip-hop, my sound track.
To you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MK Asante is an award-winning writer, filmmaker, professor, and hip-hop artist. A recipient of awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Langston Hughes Society, he is the author of the seminal hip-hop text It's Bigger than Hip Hop and the poetry collections Beautiful. And Ugly Too and Like Water Running Off My Back. He directed The Black Candle, a Starz TV movie he co-wrote with Maya Angelou, who also narrates the prize-winning film. He wrote and produced the film 500 Years Later, winner of five international film festival awards as well as UNESCO's Breaking the Chains award.
Asante studied at the University of London, earned a BA from Lafayette College, and an MFA from the UCLA School of Film and Television. Asante has lectured and performed in over thirty countries as well as throughout the United States at hundreds of colleges, universities, libraries, concerts, and festivals. He was awarded the Key to the City of Dallas, Texas. His essays have been published in USA Today, the Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times.
Asante is a tenured professor of creative writing and film in the Department of English and Language Arts at Morgan State University.
Visit the author's website https://mkasante.com/
Find the author on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/asantemk
Follow the author on Twitter https://twitter.com/mkasante
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