A Knock at Midnight(77)

Part Three





DAWN


        The weary traveler by midnight who asks for bread is really seeking the dawn. Our eternal message of hope is that dawn will come.

          —DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.





Chapter 14


XVI


Black people hold church, or, as we say in the South, “chuch.” And we hold it anywhere. It had nourished me at Mama Lena’s dining table where food was like spiritual healing. I’d seen it in the Hole, our sacred space of hoodfests and classic cars, where a dap could be an ecumenical experience. I knew how to deliver a wave and well-pitched “Ayyyyeee” at the gas station to hit your soul like a Negro spiritual. It was a Southern preacher’s sermon that summoned within me the great courage to leave Red and strut forward on faith and grit. Looking back, it was all church.

The 1990s New York hip-hop scene was no different. Saturday nights were a temple of call-and-response MC battles, lyricists competing for next week’s superlatives, Black hips winding to bone-deep beats, and the fashion show of it all. The sacred was unfolding in an eight-count rhyme.

If you were lucky enough to be at the Palladium in NYC’s East Village on July 23, 1993, you would’ve had the chance to see both Tupac Shakur and—the real attraction for Brooklynites—Biggie Smalls. Fresh off the drop of his debut single, the instant classic “Party and Bullshit,” Biggie was the borough’s fastest-rising star, the hottest MC on the streets. You might have been too mesmerized by the lineup of rap superstars in front of you—not just Pac and Biggie, but also Redman, Nas, Chuck D, and multiple members of the Wu-Tang Clan—to take much notice of the man standing beside Biggie. Baby-faced, with a light caramel complexion, sporting the vibrant fashion that personified early nineties swag, he would have blended right in.

    But Corey “Buck” Jacobs was there. Just as he’d been right there the month before, nodding his head to the beat on the set of Biggie’s on-screen debut. Just as he’d been there working the streets for the months in advance, promoting Big’s first single, ensuring it was on everybody’s playlist, popping bottles in the clubs to make sure the place was hyped when the song came on. Just as he’d been at rehearsals, the sound check, behind the wheel of the car driving Pac, Big, and his best friend Puff Daddy to the show that night.

Standing onstage that night, arm around Biggie as the big man worked the crowd into a frenzy with his Fulton street flow, all his hard work seemed to be paying off. Corey could see it, feel it, taste it. Biggie was destined for greatness. And so were Puff, Bad Boy, and Corey’s own management and promotional group, Butt Naked Ent. They were on the cusp of the impossible—power and influence on a global scale.

They were young, Black, and gifted, creating trends and changing the culture. The world—as Nas would rap a year later—was theirs.

Until it wasn’t.

He had long been out of the game, but one month after that iconic show at the Palladium, twenty-three-year-old Corey Jacobs was indicted by a federal grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia on twenty-nine charges related to conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

I didn’t know any of this the first time I agreed to a call with Corey. In fact, I almost didn’t call him at all.



* * *



—

    “WHAT YOU DOING over there?” Sharanda’s friend Vickie asked on speakerphone.

“Just cooking,” said Sharanda, her voice full of the pleasure she got from her kitchen, her hands a blur as she seasoned the meat, chopped the greens, stirred the macaroni. I was laid out on her couch in the living room, eyes closed, relaxing into the smell of the food, the sound of Sharanda’s voice.

“You making your mac and cheese?” Vickie asked. “What you put in yours?”

“Cheese,” Sharanda said.

I had to laugh. She would defend her recipe secrets to the death. Vickie laughed, too. “Who’s that over there with you?”

“That’s just Brittany, my lawyer.”

“Oh, you got business. Let me let you go.”

“Oh no,” Sharanda said. “She’s just over here halfway asleep. Like usual.” She smiled over at me.

Sharanda was right. It seemed like whenever I was off work I was on her couch, dozing in and out, listening to her move around the kitchen while she tinkered with her recipes. I could finally let my guard down and succumb to the exhaustion that had been building these many, many months.

“Come on, Brittany.” I opened my eyes to Sharanda setting three gorgeous-looking turkey burgers in a line in front of me. “Time to taste-test. Which one do you like best?”

I sat up, stretching. Before biting into the first turkey burger I checked my messages. There was another message from Karen Morrison.

I sighed. “She wants to know if I’m gonna take the case.”

Sharanda already knew who I was talking about. We’d been discussing Karen and her request for weeks. “Well?” Sharanda asked. “You gonna do it? Another lifer?”

I wasn’t sure. Instead of answering, I took a big bite of the best turkey burger I’d ever tasted.