CHAPTER 1

MEASURING SUCCESS BY HOW FAR YOU GET AWAY FROM YOUR COMMUNITY

The woman’s folded arms provided a shelf for her boobs as she leaned on her windowsill. Her window was on the ground floor of the apartment building on my corner. I don’t remember what she looked like or even her name, but she was always enrobed in a flowered housecoat, perched at her window when I came home from school.

She didn’t seem to know the given names of any of us kids, but she knew who our parents were and which buildings we lived in. She knew whether we were the troublemakers or the quiet ones or something in between. After making eye contact—because she wanted to make sure you knew exactly whom she was talking to even if she didn’t address you by name—she would yell out all sorts of things at us as we passed by.

Boy, I saw your momma today. Miss Garcia said you better get straight on home and stop messing with them no-good boys. They ain’t gone do nuttin but bring you and your momma and papi trouble. G’awn now.

Miss Carter ain’t got nuttin to worry ’bout witchu. She whoop your butt good if you do like the rest a these fast girls, but you got a good head on your shoulders—she say you got a honor mention in that Highlight magazine? Keep it up! Thank ya, Jesus!

She was one of the cast of characters that made up my neighborhood. I was fascinated that someone learned so much about other people by keeping her head stuck out a window while wearing a housecoat. I literally never saw what her lower body looked like.

Her building had a little courtyard in the center of it that separated the building into two sections. The side she didn’t live in was mostly abandoned because it had been torched earlier that summer. People were still living in some of the apartments that escaped the flames, smoke, and water, although they had to walk down stairs past floors where apartments had been burned out. Squatters, sometimes drug dealers, had taken over some of them.

It took what seemed like hours for the fire department to get there when the building was actually burning. Nobody blamed them. Firehouses were being closed all around New York City and in Black and Latino neighborhoods especially, so neighbors pitched in as they could.

I saw Peto, a young man whose family lived two doors down from mine, carefully helping a very old lady down the fire escape. Others helped too, but I remember Peto the most. He was so gentle with that lady, who could clearly not move very fast, and he got her down safely. He was and still is a hero to me.

Some believed the building was torched by the landlord to get insurance money. Others said it was started accidentally by the kids in a family full of mean kids that lived in the building.

Those kids didn’t seem to have any adult supervision; they were always beating up on someone, and they knew how to fight dirty. I saw one of them bite the cheek of another kid. Even though the skin wasn’t broken, there was a nasty-looking bruise there for weeks.

I took no chances. Even though I was tall for my age, I had never even thrown a punch and wasn’t keen on trying, especially with that family. I would cross to the other side of the street whenever I saw any of them coming.

Either way, the mean-kid family was burned out of their apartment and I never saw any of them again.

Later that summer, the side of the building with Miss Housecoat was torched as well. And overnight, she was gone too.

It was August 23, 1974. One of the cops was a little paunchy with sandy blond, greasy-looking hair. His skin was slightly pockmarked. He had a kind but worried expression on his face—probably because my mother was crying softly, leaning into my father’s shoulder. Another cop was there, but I don’t remember him at all.

I was seven. I crouched down and peeked around the door of the living room, hoping that they wouldn’t see me. I heard snippets of the conversation.

I knew that my beautiful big brother, Lenny, was dead—shot in the head above the left eye.

The cops were trying to understand how he ended up where he was, what got him killed. It was “suspicious.” One of them asked my parents if they could search his room.

I scurried back to my bedroom before they started to move and took a post just inside the door. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying in the other room, but I convinced myself that Lenny was in the top bunk and that the kind but worried cop just so happened to be a surgeon and was extracting the bullet from above his left eye and Lenny would therefore, miraculously, come back to life.

That fantasy lasted about two minutes as my other family members started to wake up.

Lenny had what is now commonly known as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). Once, I overheard my mother telling her friend Ms. Mattie that when she went to wake him up for his shift with the US Postal Service, he jumped out of bed and lunged at her as if she were a Vietcong soldier. Thank God he didn’t sleep with a gun, she’d said.

Many years later, I discovered that my brother, like some young men in the South Bronx and other poor communities of color around the country, got caught up in the illegal drug trade in the late 1960s–1970s.

Lenny served two combat tours in Vietnam. I wish I could find the letters that he wrote to me in his perfect penmanship. He would enclose little gifts for me in the envelope, like a handwoven ribbon made in Vietnam that I wore as a headband around my tiny little afro.

I was so happy when he wrote that he was coming home and wouldn’t have to go back to that vicious war that I saw on the news. Unlike the rest of my siblings, he never made fun of me for being an awkward little bookworm, tall for my age with an afro that never grew beyond an inch in the era of big afros.

Sometimes, Lenny rode me on the handlebars of his bike, let me hang out with him even when his friends came over, and led me to believe that I was a graceful dancer worthy of the most skillful Soul Train line—I definitely was not, but I liked hearing him say it.

Lenny was my brother.

A very good brother, indeed.

But he’s dead now,

Killed with the slightest of ease.

I was crying at his funeral wishing he were back,

But he’s in the hands of the Lord now

And he cannot come back.

I wrote that poem for him shortly after his murder.

I knew what to do. I had a good head on my shoulders after all; the lady in the housecoat confirmed what I already knew to be true.

At the age of seven years and ten months, I was determined to grow up and get out of there. I started planning my escape from The Bronx.