Cuz

Pre-adolescence is when the trouble started, when Michael was eleven and his mother’s brief marriage to Henry came apart before it even really began. Now began Karen’s journey through multiple jobs and the kids’ journeys through multiple schools. After Bay Springs, Baxley and Americus, now, once again, a month into the school year, in October 1991, just before his twelfth birthday, Michael moved. This time he and his family moved from Georgia to Claremont, the California college town modeled on Oxford and Cambridge, where I grew up and where my political scientist father, a Reagan appointee on the U.S. Civil Rights Commission with one more year to serve, lived and taught.

My brother and I were by then away at college, but my parents, Uncle William and Aunt Susan, a librarian at one of the local colleges, were still there and for my cousins their house was a second home, screened with laurel bushes, framed by pink-blossomed crepe myrtles, and shaded by a spreading loquat tree in front. In the back, I recall, was a glorious female ginko that burst into a bright gold blaze every year around Thanksgiving. Stinko ginko, I always called the fertile tree, for its raunchy-smelling fruits. Just past it was my mother’s rose garden, a hammock along one side.

My parents helped Karen find an apartment a few blocks away, the kind Southern California is full of, a modest two-story frame building, with walk-up apartments. Michael took piano lessons with a stern, diminutive woman who had been my own teacher and who taught us how to listen. She also taught hand position and demanded that we sit up straight, “like the Queen of England.” Michael earned money gardening for her, but resented the hectoring lessons about life that this martinet of a lady delivered standing over him as he weeded. This comfortable college town, where I went to public school, captained the track and volleyball teams, and learned how to hide my big vocabulary, is also where Roslyn fought her way into a gang to get protection from bullying.

With a November birthday, Michael was, like me, always young for his class. When he arrived in Claremont, he was already in seventh grade. He made a friend, Adam, but the two of them got in trouble together in school. They were caught stealing chocolate chip cookies from the school cafeteria. They made noise in class. They sometimes had to be separated. The school wanted to put Michael on Ritalin, but Karen was worried about drugs and declined.

Karen came home one day and found Michael gone. “Mama, I messed up at school again, and I know I can’t do what you want, so I’m leaving,” he’d penned in a note. He had skipped school, packed his hand-me-down suitcase, and gone to a friend’s house for dinner, before heading to his family’s church, which was my family’s church, too, to spend the night. He was found there before the night was very far advanced, and the next day he was back in school, after just a single day’s absence. His whole class gave him a card saying, “Welcome Home.” This, his mother takes it, was evidence of how beloved he was.

Michael was also caught shoplifting at a nearby mall during this time. Unlike that Georgia family, the store owner delivered Michael to my father, not the police. Michael’s pattern of petty theft increasingly worried my father. The weeding job was intended to be part of a solution to Michael’s need for money. The pattern also worried Karen. She signed him up for a program called “Simba,” run by affiliates of the Nation of Islam based in Pomona, a town just to the south, further from the hills, and on the other side of the 10 Freeway. She hoped that they could help instill discipline. With Simba, Michael stood on the street corner, selling bean pies. As with the peanut sales in Highland Park, he was good at selling things and seemed to enjoy it.

He also played on the school football team and was good at that, too. For Michael, that activity brought joy alongside the discipline.

But once again fire struck the tragedy-prone family in early 1993. This time their apartment complex went up in flames, caused by a smoker’s accident or something electrical. My parents had by now moved to Michigan, so the anchor had been pulled out, and with their unit condemned for smoke damage, they found themselves homeless. For the first week or so after the fire, they scattered, each spending the night on a different friend’s couch. Then Karen got a Red Cross voucher and began to look for a new place to live.

MICHAEL ON A JUNIOR HIGH FOOTBALL TEAM

A few months before the fire, she had started a new job, for an organization called Homeless Healthcare in Los Angeles. Wanting to keep the kids in school, she had been making the thirty-five-mile commute from Claremont to Los Angeles each day. But now, with the need to find a new place to live and my parents resettled in the Midwest, Karen decided to move back to Los Angeles, a charred city after the Rodney King riots, to be closer to her work. By May, she’d gotten all of them but Nicholas—who continued to stay with a family friend—into a house in Inglewood, a neighborhood still trying to lift its head up from the ravages of the previous year’s waves of angry violence.

We know something about Michael’s school experience during eighth grade because the State of California decided to survey its youth just then. The officials discovered something that any of the kids themselves could have told them: the kids were drowning in violence. According to the report, in the 1993–94 school year, 39.8 percent of ninth graders reported being in a physical fight, while 57.3 percent reported seeing someone at school with a weapon. The report also revealed that 16 percent of seventh-graders, 18 percent of ninth-graders, and 16 percent of eleventh-graders reported having belonged to a gang at some time in their life. This is an extremely high rate of vulnerability for an adolescent population. Even in the verdant college town of Claremont, gangs, as Roslyn learned, were a factor. We have to infer that all these statistics would have been still higher in the most urbanized settings, such as Michael’s new school in Inglewood. Of course, many students, like my brother and me, were able to deal with vulnerability without joining a gang. But for some significant number of young people, the gang was the solution to this experience of vulnerability. Gangs filled in for family.

After they moved to Inglewood, with just a few months of the year left, neither Michael nor his sister, having been uprooted so many times, could be bothered to go to school. The truancy officer, whom their own mother dispatched after them, never seemed able to catch up with them. Michael, now just shy of fourteen, seems to have flirted with a local gang, the Queen Street Bloods, a black street gang located on the west side of Inglewood that warred with the Raymond Avenue Crips.

Bloods vs. Crips. Red vs. Blue. That was the most important political division for black kids growing up in South Central. According to another cousin, kids in Bloods neighborhoods grew up with a lesson seared into their minds, “Blue is bad. Blue is bad. Blue is bad. Red is good. Red is good. Red is good.” Kids in Crips neighborhoods clung to the opposite mantra.

As he played hooky and roamed the streets, Michael was testing out a new world. But he also spent time that summer of 1993 returning to his old one. He often rode the big white RTD bus thirty-five miles back out to Claremont to hang out with Adam, with whom he stole the neighbor’s radio on one of those visits. That’s when he earned his two-year probation.

The narrative so far is recognizable. A kid from a troubled home, trapped in poverty, without a stable world of adults coordinating care for him, starts pilfering, mostly out of an impatience to have things. Up to this point, Michael’s tale includes not a single story of violence perpetrated by him other than the usual squabbles and wrestling matches with siblings. From here, any number of possible endings are still imaginable. But however broad the horizon of the imagination may be, events themselves unfold along a single track. Life may be a choose-your-own-adventure game, but we can live but one life. As we go, we shed all the other lives that might have been. From fourteen, Michael’s path ran from a broad horizon up and through difficult and merciless terrain.

In his fifteenth year, fewer than four years after he had stolen a jar of coins in Georgia, Michael’s life accelerated in its seriousness, instantly, into prison and beyond, like one of those pneumatic tubes whisking off your deposit at a drive-thru bank.

For the final year before Michael’s arrest, just to understand how that acceleration could happen, we need a new kind of narrative. This calls for the story of the parastate.