A Knock at Midnight(93)

    A school principal who’d noted Chris’s potential attempted to intervene by knocking on Big Mama’s door; she was the backbone of the community and the woman to turn to in a crisis. The principal asked her to take Chris in for a time, to offer him some stability and keep him out of the hands of child welfare. She agreed, and by the end of sixth grade, Chris had brought his grades up again. He had Big Mama’s affection, electricity, a warm meal every evening. He loved Big Mama, and he told me on the phone that he owed his life to her; his greatest fear was not getting out in time to tell her so as a free man. But Big Mama cared for a lot of kids, and her resources stretched only so far. There were no more trips for Chris to the sickle cell specialist; she had no means to get him to Nashville and no way to pay for the sessions if she had. During Chris’s pain crises, which happened with more frequency in his early adolescence, he writhed alone on the bed, sheets a soaking wet tangle.

Though he improved in school, his isolation and trauma continued to manifest in his behavior. He fought a lot, acted out with teachers whose classes seemed so dumbed-down he could have taught them himself. A new seventh-grade teacher, Ms. Groves, noted Chris’s exceptional intelligence from the beginning. When a local paper featured her classroom, she chose Chris to be in the photos taken to accompany the article, and he was pictured on the front page, working diligently through a set of advanced math problems as Ms. Groves looked on proudly. He’d always been good at math, really good. Now people would know. It felt good, Chris told me. He felt seen. Like he was somebody. For a time, he thrived under Ms. Groves’s watchful eye. She broke up fights before they happened, encouraged his voracious reading habit, made sure he had lunch, even bought him a Christmas present—a series of Harry Potter books that he consumed over the holiday in a binge of nonstop reading. But when a scrap with some neighborhood kids prompted Big Mama to put him out again, he found himself back in his mother’s house, in as dire straits as ever.

    His mother’s addiction was worse and she was no longer working. Chris wanted more for himself, a different life and a future, but didn’t know how to get it. Meanwhile, he needed to eat, but no one would employ a fourteen-year-old for the number of hours he needed to help his brother buy food for the household and pay the bills. Chris wasn’t looking for spending money. He needed to put food on the table. Trying to stay away from drugs—disgusted by the filth they sowed around him, and the chaos—he asked his grandfather if he could work in the funeral home. Chris’s grandfather had distanced himself from his daughter as her addiction spiraled out of control, and as a result from the boys, too. But he relented, putting Chris to work mopping floors and cleaning up after the embalming procedures, sometimes pointing out some interesting feature of anatomy as he worked on the bodies. Chris liked being away from the streets, back in what had felt like such cavernous, echoing rooms in his youth, which now felt much smaller. But his paycheck was only two hundred dollars every few weeks. His brother and friends made that in a day. Almost all the young men Chris knew in the Main Street hood swapped drugs for dollars. Most did it just to get by. Main Street was a dilapidated area under the yoke of suffocating poverty. The pull of the streets began for most as economic necessity.

Working in the funeral home exacerbated Chris’s sense of isolation. His brother had been less open with him—in part because he’d started to use himself, though Chris didn’t know it at the time. Alienated in his youth due to sickle cell—his pain crises struck without warning, causing him to miss school functions and social events—Chris acutely felt the distance between the funeral home and the streets where his friends hung out. He doubled down on his rap game, expressing himself through introspective lyrics that eased his stress through creative release. As for many Black boys in the hood, rap beckoned as a way out, a road to success that didn’t depend on peddling poison. But Chris was self-aware enough to know he wasn’t particularly talented. The bottom line was simple: To get money in the hood, you had to sell dope—the same poison that had ruined his mother and put him in this predicament in the first place. It was a sick cycle, one he was astute enough to be aware of but not worldly enough to break. He started selling weed, a few dime rocks, continued to work sporadically at the funeral home, relied on his big brother. He stayed on and off at Big Mama’s house, but lived mostly at his mom’s in conditions below the poverty line. They ate what he and his brother could provide. At the end of his junior year, after missing weeks due to a sickle cell crisis and exhausted from late nights on the grind, he dropped out of school to hustle full-time.

    Chris stopped by his mother’s house one night to pick up some clothes and found his brother there, high. They argued, and when Chris left the house things were still heated. Robert texted him, something about Chris looking after his daughter when he was gone. Robert had been struggling with stress and depression for the past few years; Chris knew he’d shake out of it eventually. He didn’t respond to his brother’s text. When Chris returned to the house a few hours later, Robert lay splayed out on the sofa. The blood pooled thickly around the outline of his body, just as it had with their cousin Cudas. Robert had shot himself in the head.

Devastated, Chris felt he’d lost the only person in the world who knew and understood him. He was eighteen; Robert had been twenty-one. His brother had sat by his side during every sickle cell crisis of his childhood, begging him to stop screaming. “I wish I could take the pain from you, lil bro. You gotta be strong.” They’d fought side by side all their lives, scrapping hard whenever someone insulted them for having bedsheets over their windows instead of curtains, holes in their shoes, that unwashed smell in their hair. As boys, Robert had scraped together change from around the house and on the street so they could eat, splitting the cheeseburger into two perfect halves. He’d even taken the heat for Chris’s first drug stash so Chris wouldn’t have to go to juvie. He had taken care of his little brother all of his life, and the weight of their final argument was a heavy burden for any man to carry. Now Robert was gone, leaving Chris with a hole in his chest and his brother’s beautiful baby daughter to look after. He did what he could.