A Knock at Midnight(92)
Through emails and phone calls, Chris filled in the intriguing sketch Taylor had presented in Vice. Chris’s story exemplifies the role that extreme poverty, intergenerational trauma, and societal neglect play in both the War on Drugs and the mass incarceration crisis. We talk a lot in the United States about the right to a second chance—“We are a nation of second chances,” Obama reminded us. But every time Chris and I talked or wrote, I was left with the same overwhelming feeling: Freedom from his life sentence wouldn’t be a second chance at life for Chris. In so many ways, it would be a first.
Chris’s first memory was of a little shotgun house on a dead-end corner in the epicenter of an area ravaged by unemployment, drug infestation, and gang violence. His very earliest memories, like mine, are joyful ones: running wild with his older brother, Robert, and their dogs, riding around town in his grandfather’s spectacular limousine. Chris’s grandfather owned the local funeral home, and Chris remembered its shiny floors, its funny smell—flowers, formaldehyde, air freshener, death. He never knew his father. His mother was young, single, and poor; he remembered the grip of her hand when they went to the local Mapco station on the corner in order to use the payphone, how she admonished him to watch where he stepped to avoid the crack pipes and used condoms littering the pavement. For a time they stayed with his mom’s boyfriend, Mickey, in a house across town, and were happy.
By the time Chris was seven his mother’s relationship with Mickey was unraveling. He and Robert spent hours at the house of their cousins Cudas and Ree, soaking up knowledge from Cudas, whom they idolized. For both boys, Cudas served as a role model. He had a nice car with shiny chrome wheels, the dopest outfits, beautiful girlfriends. Only sixteen himself, Cudas guided his younger cousins through boyhood. He looked out for them, bought them shoes for school, notebooks for class. Like many young Black boys with few role models, Robert and Chris turned to the hood’s own version of success to emulate. Cudas was a symbol, for both boys, of what successful young adulthood should look like. He was also a drug dealer.
Cudas introduced Chris to the music of the hip-hop artists he dreamed of emulating—Tupac, Master P, UGK. Chris sat in Cudas’s room whenever he could, listening to the thump of his cousin’s fifteens, memorizing the lyrics to every song. Whenever no one was around, Chris slipped Cudas’s gold herringbone chain around his neck and rapped into the mirror, imagining himself a star. Cudas was the “flyest, toughest, most charismatic guy” they knew, Chris said, and they were so delighted to be in his presence that at first they didn’t mind when their mom started leaving them with him for longer stretches, sometimes days at a time. Cudas’s house, where they went when she needed to “unwind,” was around the corner from the dope spot.
Eventually, Mickey put their mom out after another brutal fight, and for a time they moved in with their grandfather, then into another tiny house in the hood. Chris’s mom’s addiction worsened. Around the same time, when Chris was seven, he began experiencing his first sickle cell crises. The pain attacks came without warning and lasted for days. His mom and Robert traded off sitting with him as he screamed and writhed. Sometimes he landed in the hospital, and there was an African American sickle cell specialist in Nashville that his grandfather took him to when the pain grew intolerable.
By this time Chris’s mom didn’t bother to hide her habit from her sons anymore. Chris got to where he could tell whether she’d been smoking out of a can or from a plastic rose stem holder by the sting in his nostrils when he got home from school. The family had been on food stamps for a while, but that didn’t pay for electricity or water. The neighborhood matriarch, Big Mama, who was Robert’s paternal grandmother, let the boys take baths at her house when they asked, and she fed them when she could. Sometimes they stayed with her. But for the most part, the boys were on their own.
Concentrated poverty never tells the whole story, and it doesn’t define a person. Neither does having an addicted or incarcerated parent. Chris was very, very bright, and despite the absence of social support and programs to alleviate the economic stress of his home life, he continued to achieve in school. He was analytical, questioning, and intellectually curious, with a tremendous aptitude for math. He had an incredible gift for memorization, but he also understood what he memorized on a conceptual level, or sought more information until he did. He constantly got in trouble in math class for failing to show his work, although his computations were always a hundred percent correct. “I can do it in my head,” he told his teacher. “What I got to write it down for?”
Chris was ten years old and in the fifth grade, walking home from school, when his grandfather’s girlfriend pulled up next to him and shouted at him to get in the car. She took them three blocks away where a crowd had gathered and an ambulance waited, lights flashing. Chris jumped out of the car and pushed through the crowd just in time to see first responders lift Cudas’s lifeless body onto a stretcher. He had been shot in the head. In the red lights of the ambulance as they followed it to the hospital, the red lights of the traffic signals, the red flowers in the waiting room, Chris saw only his cousin’s blood, pooled and puddling on the sidewalk.
Cudas’s murder was a turning point for both Chris and his brother. Robert was three years older than Chris and considered Cudas his mentor, father figure, and best friend. A few months after the murder, at age fourteen, Robert was arrested for the first time, for selling fake drugs; Chris remembers that half his brother’s face was scraped raw from where the police ground it into the gravel. In the aftermath of the trauma sustained from seeing his cousin bleed out on the pavement, Chris’s own grades dropped dramatically. The boys’ mother had entered a series of abusive relationships, and they witnessed the worst of it. Robert would throw himself in front of their mother every time, trying to fight grown men to protect her. Chris woke up at night in a cold sweat, dreaming of Cudas. He started acting out in ways typical of schoolchildren who have witnessed extreme violence—struggling with anger management, challenging authority, fighting.