1 post tagged “inner-city”
I hated coming home from college during the breaks. I mean, I'd experienced all of the excitement that the projects had to offer at the time. Maybe seeing what rural Pennsylvania was like sans student body wasn't such a bad idea and there wasn’t anyone in particular that I really wanted to see at home. But, shit, my money started drying up and a nigga gotta eat, right?
As it turned out, the summer wasn't going to be so bad after all. Plenty of nice girls out wearing hoe-ish outfits; my niggas on the corners: freestylin, bustin' (the dozens). It was actually kinda fly.
My cousin Joey came through one Wednesday night with his cousin, Tone. I hadn't seen either of them in a serious minute. It was good to see Joey, though. He was telling me that he had just "gotten his act together". He had recently taken his Shahada and converted to Islam, got a promotion to shift manager at the now defunct Sizzler restaurant, and had been awarded partial custody of his daughter. Not the hallmarks of an over-achiever, per se, but he had come a long way and I was proud of him.
I remember coming in late one night, one week and one day after Joey had stopped by. My mother waited up for me to tell me that Joey had been shot. I thought about how much that must have sucked for him, but people get shot all of the time and it's never that big of a deal. "He'll live", I thought. I was almost sure that he would exaggerate the extent of the gunshot wounds and boast about how tough he was. But almost as if in response to my unuttered comment, she followed with, "He was pronounced dead at 2:15 this morning."
I was stopped in my tracks. I stood frozen in the hallway for a half hour as the conversation that we had had a week prior flashed before me. It was so vivid that I could hear his voice ringing in my ears as if he were right in front of me. Our entire conversation replayed in that moment. I couldn't believe it. I mean, he had just gotten his life together. After having processed it, I went into my room and cried.
The following weeks proved to me that Joey’s death had indeed shaken me at the very core. I mean, I had always heard those wild statistics that said that black men 15-25 were something like 200% more likely to die from handgun violence than the next group in line, but I wasn’t worried all that much. I was “The Scientist”, after all. I was known for being studious and staying out of major trouble. I was sure that as long as avoided trouble, it would avoid me. But Joe’s death had implications in my own life for which I was scarcely prepared.
It assured me that the straight and narrow were unwilling to guarantee my safety. Here was irrefutable evidence that I could do everything right and still be forcefully removed from this plane.
"What happened?”, I responded to my mother's news. She told me that after a heated argument with his daughter's mother, the girl came after him with a fork. In his attempt to defend himself, he accidently struck her child by another man. With no warning to Joey, she called her son’s father to come and rectify that which was clearly a mistake. Approaching Joey’s car without a question or a concern, the angry father fired a shot into the back of Joey's head and another into the chest neck of his passenger. Joe’s friend survived and was pivotal in the conviction of this maniac. But Joey died that night in the Celebrity wagon parked in front of his mother’s West Philadelphia home. I lost a good friend in Joey—one of my favourite cousins. And I also lost the dream of security that I thought protected me from the underbelly of the inner-city. I with that graduate school meant being out of harm’s way, but I know that as long as people in this city recognize my face, I can have the wrath of any demon visited upon me.
