Yaccub's Curse Read online

  Chapter 4

  “Hell is other people.”

  —Jean Paul Sartre

  ««—»»

  In school I was always getting into trouble. Even though I made good grades, got perfect scores on all my tests, and did most of my homework, I was constantly getting into fights.

  Anyone who dissed me would wind up with missing teeth and because of my raggedy clothes I got dissed a lot until they saw how fearsomely I fought. They started calling me Snap because of my bad temper. Even my teachers called me Snap. My viciousness even caused Nikky to distance himself from me. We hung out around the way, but at school he treated me like a wet food stamp. I understood where he was coming from though. I would have preferred to be anonymous and invisible like him, but he wasn’t getting teased like I was. Warlock saw to it that Nikky was never out of fashion. He never wore the same jeans two days in a row. His clothes didn’t fit too tight because he’d grown out of them before the income tax return check came. His shoes didn’t have holes in them and his jacket didn’t have the name of the kid who’d owned it before your mother purchased it from the goodwill written on the inside collar. But for me, with my exhausted retrograde wardrobe, life would have been unbearable if I didn’t hold the entire school in fear. Even still their whispered insults shadowed me through the halls as they hurled them silently at my back.

  When Tank and Huey transferred to our school, everyone began trying to instigate a war of the hoodrats. They couldn’t wait to see us get that shit on.

  “Did you see that big muthafucka from North Philly? You know him and Snap ‘gonna wind up thumpin’. I hope he kicks that crazy nigga’s ass! Snap think can’t nobody beat his ass. I can’t wait to see Tank get a hold of ’im.” Every hallway in school echoed with some variation of this same refrain. I wanted to squeeze each and every one of their voiceboxes shut to keep that noise out of my head.

  After hearing so much about these new kids from North Philadelphia’s notorious Richard Allen projects, I wanted to see what they were all about. I had already subjugated the entire 5th grade with ease and I wanted to know if their really were two kids that were my match. At that time I considered myself unbeatable. I was eager to fight these two fools and get it over with. They had already tangled with several guys whom I had fought in the past and beaten them just as easily as I had and to be truthful it was making me kind of anxious. When the day finally came it was like high noon in a spaghetti western.

  I was on my way to lunch when the biggest blackest kid I could ever remember seeing lumbered towards me. He was at least 5’5” tall and about 160lbs (which was gigantic for a ten-year-old) and as black as death and sin. He was too solid to be called fat. He seemed to be stuffed full of sand or rocks like my dad’s old handmade punching bag and even though his gut stuck out about five inches in front of him nothing on him jiggled. His hair was all nappy and uncombed though he had one of those big wooden brushes sticking out of his back pocket.

  His clothes were outdated, ill-fitting, and dirty just like mine, but you could tell he didn’t give a fuck just as easily as you could tell that I did. His eyes were big and round with heavy eyelids that covered half his eyes making him look constantly tired or bored. As he lumbered toward me down the hall I could hear his loud ponderous breathing reminding me of the way the shark Darryl had caught once on a deep sea fishing trip had sounded before he clubbed it to death and threw it back overboard. I remember feeling sorry for the shark that day, but right then I kind of wished I had a club myself.

  In “The G,” and I suspect in every ghetto in Philly if not the entire East Coast, when two males pass each other on the street or in a hallway a contest of wills begins. It’s called who will yield and move out of the other one’s way. First we look into each other’s eyes to assess the degree of threat. If the guy looks away or smiles at you then you hog the entire sidewalk and make him walk on the grass or in the street. But if he mad-dogs you like this big angry thug was doing to me and doesn’t give up any ground then it’s on and you have to choose whether to be a bitch and back down or be a man and fight. Sometimes you both look at each other and mutually decide that you’re too evenly matched and silently consent to both yield a little ground each so that you may pass without bumping shoulders. The entire “contest” takes seconds and happens dozens of times a day, but only rarely results in a fight. There are only so many alpha males and most of the betas know their place. But when Tank came swaggering down the hallway we both knew that neither of us would back down. For no good reason than that it had become my instinct to fight, I put myself even more directly in his path and gave him my hardest look. We slammed into each other chest to chest.

  “Nigga is you crazy bumpin’ into me! I should kick your fuckin’ ass!” Tank bellowed in a voice that sounded way too deep to have come from a kid. He put both his hands on my chest and shoved hard. At first I was amazed and didn’t quite know what to do. It had been a long time since anyone had treated me that way. There seemed to be no fear in his heart at all. I stared at him as if I had discovered a new species, then he played himself by pushing me again instead of just flat out punching me. This muthafucka wasn’t taking me seriously and was gonna try and embarrass me like some bitch before kicking my ass. It fucked me up cause back then I was the baddest brotha on the block and definitely the baddest thing at that little school. Even the junior high school kids knew that if you fucked with me you’d better protect your neck ’cause I would more than likely be back to stick a blade in it. The only people who didn’t know what a terror I was, was Mom, my grandmother and Tank and his brother Huey.

  Tank thought he was hard coming from North Philly and all. The brothas down there think everybody else is soft ’cause they ain’t on welfare and their moms ain’t on crack. But even though we had marginally nicer homes and better schools in G-town, we were still just as poor, just as desperate, and just as mean, and many of us were on welfare and had parents who were hitting the pipe as hard as them fools in the projects. We were every bit as angry, as bitter and hopeless, as jaded and hardened and lost. In my mind I was going to prove all of that with one punch.

  Tank shoved me a second time and I dipped and threw an uppercut to his solar-plexus with all the strength I could muster, a Tyson punch, thrusting upwards with my legs so that I nearly rose off the floor myself. I knew that at 5’3” and less than 100lbs there was no way I was going to knock the much bigger kid out going toe to toe with him but I knew just where to hit to cause the most damage. I figured I could knock the wind out of him and then fuck his shit up while he struggled to catch his breath. He bent over with the punch and I kicked him right in the face trying to shove my worn-out Nike right into his mouth and succeeding in splitting his lip open and cracking a tooth. The huge kid staggered backwards holding his face and I kicked him in his gut like the SWAT team kicking down the door to a drug warehouse, putting all my weight behind it like I was trying to drive right through him. An explosion of air came out of his lungs and he went down on one knee gasping and wheezing as he fought to replenish the oxygen I’d just deprived him of. I leapt on him and began pummeling him with my tiny fists.

  There were other kids in the hall now, but I was only peripherally aware of them. They were just shadows dancing and raging at the edge of my sight which was filled only with the tremendous ten-year-old.

  “Get ’im! Kill that dirty mutherfucker! Fuck his shit up!”

  I didn’t know who they were cheering for and didn’t care.

  Tank lashed out blindly trying to fend off my attack and caught me right between the eyes with the back of his fist. Blue lights flashed in my skull and I staggered backwards. That’s when Tank got up. I’d never seen a kid come back after a beating like that and my eyes widened in surprise and fear. It was like watching Micheal Meyers or Jason Vorhees rise up after being stabbed, shot, and burned to death. It seemed supernatural and damn did he look pissed.

  He charged me and swung a right at my head. I leaned back to a
void the blow and he swung a left uppercut into my gut. Just to pay me back I supposed. Air evacuated my lungs in a great rush and my eyes teared up. The whole world seemed to shift as pain overwhelmed my senses. It took everything I had to remain standing. I turned away from him and he punched me in the back so hard I thought my spine would snap. Another blow struck me in the back of the head and the light bulbs flashed in my skull once more.

  I wanted to black out. My body wanted to sink to the floor and succumb to the painlessness of dreams, but instead I kicked at his unprotected head with some fake-ass Bruce Lee move as he charged me again and shocked myself by connecting, catching him on the ear and knocking him face first into the wall. There was a sickening wet “Smack!” and a great splatter of blood sprayed across the wall. This big, black, mean-ass thug screamed when he saw his own blood and ran past me, down the hall, to the principle’s office. The motherfucker was going to drop dime on me.

  In no mood to face the principle, I decided to skip out. I pushed past all the spectators who had gathered to watch the gladiatorial games and slammed through the fire door setting off alarms and not giving a fuck.

  I started running and was halfway home when I realized that I couldn’t go home at noon without my grandmother getting suspicious and calling the school. So I took a detour and went to the library. It was the only place you could go during school hours and not get questioned.

  Northwest Regional Library was one of the newest and nicest libraries in the city. It amazed me that it was right in the middle of Germantown. In the children’s section they had a big wooden sculpture of a dragon that was almost twenty feet long and upstairs they had computers and thousands of books. I loved this place.

  I checked out a book on Shaka Zulu and sat enthralled for hours reading about how he’d nearly taken over all of Africa. I felt as if I had been born at the wrong time and in the wrong place. On the plains of Africa I felt like they would have appreciated my skills, my ferocity, my aggression. I would have become a great general in Shaka’s army or maybe even a king myself. Here, I was just a thug who would no doubt wind up in prison someday.

  I read the entire book in a few hours and then made my way back over to the shelves and picked up a book I’d never seen before, but whose title called out to me just as it was meant to do. It was called “A Message to the Black Man in America” by some cat named Elijah Muhammed. I checked it out and started reading it as I took the bus back home.

  It was almost five o’clock in the evening when I made it home. I walked past all the kids playing in the street and all anyone was talking about was how I’d kicked Tank’s ass and how his older brother Huey had been around looking for me. I had only read the first ten pages of Elijah Muhammed’s book, but already there were thoughts in my head of black unity and how the social diseases of poverty, racism, and oppression had corrupted our brains and made us self-destructive creatures who fed on one another turning all our rage and hatred inward rather than turning that aggression outward towards our oppressors. Old habits die hard though.

  “Shit, I don’t give a fuck! I’ll kick his ass too! Them North Philly niggas ain’t shit!” I said boldly and loudly. Too loudly in fact ’cause my grandma overheard me.

  “Is that you cussin’ like that Malik? Boy, you’d better get your fresh behind in here ’fore I take this belt to your hide!” Sometimes I wished she was half deaf like most other grandmothers. But at forty-seven years old she was the youngest grandmother I knew.

  “Did you hear me boy? Get your bad behind in here! I want you to clean up that filthy room of yours before your momma gets home and haves a fit!”

  “Damn!” I said under my breath as I skulked up the steps and into the house.

  Grandma could talk real mean sometimes, but it was all a front. Deep down she was as soft and sweet as cotton candy. She just yelled when she was lonely, just to get attention. I don’t know why my mother couldn’t see that. It was probably ’cause she was so stressed out from working all day and, in her words, “Takin’ shit from white folks.”

  I went inside and Grandma was all over me as soon as I stepped through the door.

  “Where’ve you been boy?”

  “I went to the library after school.”

  I put the book down on the kitchen table and Grandma’s eyes zeroed in on it then seemed to stay fixed on the book. She stared back at me in shock like I’d just set a decapitated head on the table instead of a book.

  “You got that at the library?” She asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who told you about this book?” she asked.

  “Nobody. I just saw it sitting on the shelf and it looked interesting.”

  “Mmmhmm.” She replied and then turned away from both me and the book.

  “Well, get upstairs and clean that nasty room of yours.”

  I went to work on her.

  “But, I’m starving, Grandma. Do I have to wait for Mom to get home to get something to eat?”

  “You didn’t look that hungry when you was outside runnin’ that filthy mouth of yours.”

  “Them boys was sayin’ some kid from North Philly was gonna beat me up.”

  “Who’s gonna beat you up, boy? What have you done now?” There was worry and concern on her face. It wasn’t just me getting into a fight that scared her. It was that around our way fights had a way of turning deadly.

  “I ain’t did nothin’. This kid just wants to fight me ’cause he wants to prove he can beat me. I don’t even know the kid.” That seemed to relax her a little. This was just typical adolescent machismo and not the type of thing kids got murdered for. It was much better than her knowing that I’d trashed the kid’s brother and he was out looking for revenge. She’d have worried herself sick if she knew that. Just like I was doing.

  “Well, ain’t nobody gonna beat you but me if you don’t clean up that room. Ain’t nobody gonna lay a finger on you as long as I’m around.”

  I loved hearing her say it, but even she knew that parents couldn’t protect me from everything. That life was bigger and stronger than Mom or Dad or even Grandma. Some kids make it all the way through college before they learned those lessons. But those kids never lived in the ghetto.

  “Do I have to clean my room now? I’m hungry grandma.” I made the most pitiful face I could muster and could see grandma’s resolve melting like an ice-cream castle.

  “Lord, child you gonna be the death of me. Don’t them people feed you at school?”

  “That food is nasty! I don’t eat that mess!”

  “Well, you sure got fine tastes for a little boy with no job and no money. Get in there and do your homework while I make you a sandwich. And don’t tell me you ain’t got none ’cause I know better.”

  “Oh, alright.”

  I picked the book up off the table and marched with it into the family room. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grandma’s eyes latch onto the book and follow it out of the room. Now I was really curious. What was it about this little book that made her so afraid?

  Grandma went shuffling into the kitchen to scrape the meat off some left-over chicken legs to make me a sandwich and I sat down at the huge ornate dining room table that would have been a gorgeous antique in a nicer home but in ours, covered with cheap plastic placemats that smelled like airplane glue, it was just another piece in a cluttered maze of junk.

  I opened the book by Elijah Muhammed and began to read about Dr. Yacub and how the white man was the devil. I laughed as I thought about it. All the white boys I knew were far too soft to be devils. They were more like those bitch-ass cherubs in the renaissance paintings at the art museum. Then again I hadn’t been a slave nor had I been forced to deal with the degradation of the Jim Crow laws as most Black people did back when this book was written. Poverty was the only burden that Black people today had to bear and it seemed that much of it was our own doing. Dropping out of school, having babies at 15 years-old, getting thrown in prison before we could legally vote, voiding our
minds with drugs, men abandoning their families to start new ones over and over again without supporting any of the children they produced. I didn’t see the devil involved in any of that. I saw our own self-destructive ignorance. Even my own family seemed to have a fear of success, afraid to risk everything to go for their dreams, but rather content to stay in the ghetto and complain about what they didn’t have.

  Even Grandma could have gone back to school if she wanted to. I’d heard of lots of middle-aged people who went to college to try to better themselves. Every day I heard my mother and grandmother complaining about the depressed economy and non-existent job market in Philadelphia, but yet they stayed here suffering, too afraid to leave the comfort and familiarity of the goddamned block. I made a promise to myself that I was going to get the fuck out of Philly the first chance I got. I tossed the book aside and started my math homework.

  All of a sudden I heard loud voices cussin’ and arguing outside. One of the voices was speaking in an almost indecipherable Jamaican patois’ and the other was speaking in the most exaggerated ghetto slang I’d ever heard. I could barely understand either of them.

  “What! Nigga, what! You betta act like you know and stop slangin’ that shit on my turf ’cause I know you don’t want no drama from me, fool!”

  “Go on bloodclot! Lickle peckerwood wannabe! Jah Warrior say ’ow tings go down ’ere and ’e say ya naw can claim nut’ing in G-town. Ya wan’ sell in G-town ya ’ave ta pay! Dis ’ere Jah Warrior territory! Now go on way from ’ere for I take it in my mind ta stop ya breat’ing!”

  “You know who you steppin’ to fool? This here is Scratch! I ain’t nuthin’ ta play with, son! I ain’t nuthin’ nice! You think shit is sweet up in this piece? You think you can run up in here and take my shit?”

  I had run to the window when I heard the dread refer to his adversary as a peckerwood because I just couldn’t imagine a white boy in our neighborhood, talking cold street, and stepping to one of those ruthless Jamaican dealers like he was some bitch.