If Peach Fuzz Could Talk

I was sitting outside of a cruddy vacant home across the street from Canaan Missionary Baptist Church, waiting on my little brother Tuane to come meet me. His best friend, who was also like a little brother to me, Poody, was murdered a week before, and this day was his funeral. Tuane pulled up after twenty minutes of me being out here alone. He pulled up with vodka inside of an Everfresh bottle and a pack of Black & Milds, and we embalmed our bodies with the poison to suffocate our feelings, until it was time to enter the church. Poody was nineteen years old and was loved by the people in his neighborhood, and I got to see a glimpse of the young father he was coming to be, leaving behind his baby boy.

I always dread going to funerals—yes because it’s emotional, but honestly, it’s the preachers for me. Plain and simple, they just be lying too much. The same children that they call thugs 364 days out of the year are now angels with hearts of gold on the day of their funeral because they’re getting a check. The old folks are always semiannoying with their Bengay-scented clothes and the smell of Newports busting out of their mouths— and they’re always saying things like “Oh my God, baby. You’ve grown so much since the last time I saw you.” As if the last time they didn’t see me were when I was ten.

Every funeral I’ve ever attended in the past of someone who was slain, I always think about life-threatening situations that I’ve barely made it out of.

You ever heard of six degrees of separation? It’s the idea that everyone is six or even fewer social connections away from one another. It’s sometimes even referred to as the six handshakes rule. Baltimore? It’s more like two degrees.

The summer sun was fat and bright on this particular day, I had to be around twelve or thirteen. Me and my homeboys decided to go swimming at Patterson Park’s pool, which was a summertime ritual for us. We attended the pool at least three to five times a week. The pool experience wasn’t fun if you didn’t break the rules. We’d run over all of the “walk,” signs painted on the ground, diving and doing flips in the “no diving” sections of the pool, and ignoring the lifeguard’s whistles. We never brought towels with us, because we’d dry off on the walk back home, talking about how we’re gonna inhale turkey sandwiches, potato chips, and Hawaiian Punch once we got back to the block. On this particular day, we arrived at the park but never made it to the pool.

Me and my homies all shared one bicycle, and we called it “the block bike.” If someone needed to use the block bike to make a store run, or had to visit a friend, it was there for you. Block bikes get trashed and traded in quickly for others because they are always throwaway material—beat-up frame, mismatched colored wheels, faulty brakes, if any brakes at all, and chipped paint. The block bike always stayed outside and wasn’t brought into anyone’s home, so it could be accessible to everyone. We felt comfortable doing this because the majority of my friends and I lived on the same block, and the ones who didn’t, you would’ve thought they did because of how much they were around. At this point, our block bike had been missing for a few days, and when we arrived at the park, we saw the dude Shawn on it, who was not a friend of ours, or part of our clique. Off the bat we didn’t accuse Shawn, because it’s normal for people to steal things, and let others borrow, not letting them know its stolen. That still wasn’t going to stop us from making Shawn aware that he was on our bike, and we needed it back.

We made our way to Shawn, and I said, “Yo, where you get that bike from? You know that’s our shit, right?” In the calmest tone.

Shawn responded, “What the fuck y’all talkn’ bout? This my bike. Y’all niggas really wanna beef over a bike!?” As if he were trying to scream his eyeballs out of his sockets.

Me and my homies looked at one another, trying to decide if we should just beat his ass in front of everyone out there. I had no doubt in my mind, that’s the reason he was showing off in the first place because of how embarrassing it was for an eighteen-year-old to get pressed by thirteen-year-olds in front of a crowd of people.

My homie Rece said, “Yo, Shawn, you ain’t gotta do all of that, we just tryna get our shi—”

Shawn cut Rece off midsentence, “Man, fuck y’all! What y’all tryna do!?” still screaming.

Rece handed me his phone, took his shirt off, and asked Shawn, “Yo, what you wanna fight? You could’ve just said that off rip.”

Shawn stiffened like a broomstick, because he knew that getting physical with Rece wasn’t a smart move. A week or so prior to this day, Rece demonstrated how lethal his hands were after beating up one of Shawn’s friends, Quille, who started a beef with Rece because he disliked the fact he was dating his sister—a bunch of bullshit that could’ve been avoided if I’m being honest. Shawn declined Rece’s offer by screaming, “I be right back, I got something for you niggas,” as he peeled off on the bike, heading toward South Linwood Avenue. Unless you have a pistol on you, or one in close proximity, and someone says, “I be right back,” you never wait on their return, because they’ll have a gun with them. We left the park and headed back toward the block and were talking about how much of a clown and sucker Shawn was, especially for going to get a gun for some children. Still on our journey to the block, we halted at the corner of Glover Street and Fayette Street, waiting for traffic to stop so we could cross. THUMP THUMP THUMP, we heard footsteps behind us and turned around. It was Shawn using his feet for brakes on the bike. “Oh, y’all wanna beef over a bike,” he said, trying to yank the pistol out of his jeans. We turned back around, scattered, and I heard “click click, click, click,” his gun was jammed. Everyone ran in different directions, and one of my homies even hopped in the bed of a pickup truck that was in motion. I wasn’t friends with Shawn; however, that same hand that pulled a gun out on me was the same hand that I shook at a Chuck E. Cheese Party some years ago. Remember I told you that Baltimore was small? Shawn was a blood relative of my younger brother Fidel. It wouldn’t make me and Shawn blood, because Fidel and I have the same father, different mothers.

It was just our luck that the next day Rece and his brothers had to play in a basketball tournament at an outdoor court, located a few blocks from where we lived, but smack dab in the middle of Shawn’s stomping grounds. We knew that something could’ve popped off, but we all decided to go anyway. Twenty minutes into the game, Shawn pulls up on the bike, on the opposite side of the gate where the games were being held. Next to him was one of his homeboys, who he handed the bike over to. His homeboy rode the bike over to a pile of trash bags in an alley, reached in, and pulled out a pistol—tucking it in his waistband. I couldn’t tell if it was the same strap that Shawn had the day before, but I was thinking, what if it doesn’t jam this time? We were tense the entire tournament but felt no need to run because at that stage in our lives we believed that there was no such thing in ducking murder. We believed if something was going to happen, then it was just gonna happen.

The tournament ended with everyone going home unharmed. The evening consisted of mean-mugs, and constant grabbing of waistbands, and basketball. I look back at this incident and think about how desensitized we were to violent murders. We knew that these guys had bullets with our names on them but still placed ourselves in a position to get hurt. Violence has been a norm, since we were babies—we was born in it, molded by it. Almost as if we were inviting to the trauma.

I sipped more of my vodka on the steps of the cruddy vacant home and passed it to my little brother as we made our way to the church entrance. It felt like a Friday night how packed Poody’s funeral was. Tears and screams controlling the room, people passing out, kids crying and saying how much they miss their big brother—and the preacher, lying, just making me wish that I had more vodka. I walked up to the casket and stared at Poody, looking at the peach fuzz on his face. Thinking about all of the other babies in suits I had to lay eyes on. Thinking about how this country never gave him a fair chance. He didn’t even get to experience adulthood, and what it would have to offer him. I was standing there thinking again, how I would have looked inside of the casket, if Shawn’s gun didn’t jam. What would my funeral have looked like? How my family would’ve had to go into debt or scrape up funds to bury a body that they used to pray for— prayers that hardly ever seemed to be heard. Violent murders are always untimely. Even if there’s a dark cloud lingering over a person, you never truly know when it’s going to storm.

Statista reported that in 2019, the market size of funeral homes in the US was over 16.8 billion US dollars.¹ According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the median price for a funeral including embalming, a casket, a viewing, and a burial costs $7,000 to $8,000.² After contacting March Funeral Homes in Baltimore, I was told that the average cost is $6,600.

Spending money that you don’t have and going into debt is commonplace for poor Black people in America. I know families who had to put liens on their homes, borrow money, take out loans, and start GoFundMes just to bury their loved ones. In a country where capitalism sucks the energy, blood, and soul out of individuals, especially in poor communities, no one has thousands of dollars lying around for a funeral. Aside from the financial debt—that person who died used to be an extra source of income to keep bread on the table—we suffer from emotional, mental, and spiritual debts, as well.

I’m still at Poody’s funeral, just thinking about how I was never taught about death and the big business behind it. No one taught us anything close to understanding how violence in our communities was related to racism. All we were told was to try and “stay out of the way,” which is impossible when you live in the middle of the chaos. We were also told to pray, which became our safety net. Prayer is a home base we can slide to when things are good or bad. You want that dream job, then pray. Your homie is laid up in the hospital suffering from gunshot wounds, you pray. There’s not a song that’s sung in heaven powerful enough to stop the violence that goes on in my city. No one told me that prayers, psalms, or songs can’t shield Black bodies from bullets.

I’m sitting in the funeral asking myself, what’s the point of voting new people into office, if it doesn’t matter, because bullets run this town? The bullets wear the pants in Baltimore’s political relationship. We need to realize that prayers don’t stop violence, but antiracist laws, policies, and ideas are what have the ability to stop violence. I can’t count how many times I felt stranded in a dark tunnel, and I prayed to God. I asked God to give me an exit strategy that I could follow—I prayed for him to show me the light. You see the light at the end of the tunnel, only to realize that it’s not a way out, but the light is just another train coming.

Every chance I get I have to bring awareness to gun violence, and the effects it has on people like myself who come from similar communities. Zora Neale Hurston once wrote, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.” There’s no way that I can be silent.

1 Mazareanu, E. “Market size of funeral homes in the United States from 2015 to 2020.” Statista, April 3, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/883227/revenue-of-funeral-homes-in-the-us/.

2 National Funeral Directors Association, https://www.nfda.org/news/statistics.