The Pact Read online

  Mr. Jackson always let me know he believed in me. When I told him while I was in high school that I’d enrolled in the Pre-Medical/Pre-Dental Plus Program at Seton Hall with two of my friends, he wasn’t surprised. From that point on, when he talked about my future, he always prefaced his remarks with “When you become a doctor…”

  I was still barely able to imagine that myself.

  In many ways, Mom was my father, too. She was, until she married my stepfather, the family’s sole provider. We were lucky to have a babysitter who treated us like her own children—Miss Willie, an old-fashioned woman who lived three blocks away. Sometimes, when she was working full-time, Mom dropped us off before sunrise and couldn’t pick us up until nightfall because she had to work late. If either of us was sick or if it was too cold or stormy outside, Miss Willie insisted that Garland and I stay overnight at her house so Mom wouldn’t have to drive us back and forth in the bad weather. She even took care of us for several days when my mother went into the hospital.

  But when I turned six, Mom gave us keys to the apartment, and we started going home alone after school. We had to call her at work as soon as we made it indoors.

  Because of her steady job, our pantry and refrigerator were always full of food. We didn’t move around constantly like some families did but lived in the same apartment for the rest of my childhood. And Mom kept the utility bills paid, too. I was fortunate; most of the guys I know who got into trouble in my neighborhood had circumstances at home that weren’t as stable. Many guys I knew sold drugs because they felt they had no choice. And I believe that kids who grew up in less stable environments were more susceptible to pressure from friends to do the negative things that everyone else seemed to be doing.

  Sam and Rameck faced those pressures all the time.

  I wasn’t any smarter or more special than the guys around me. For some reason, throughout my life I was blessed with people who told me positive things, and I believed them. I believed my third-grade teacher when she told me that I could go to college and have a great career someday if I just stayed out of trouble. So I hung out with kids who were like me, trying to do the right thing. Most of the time they were either my age or a bit younger. The older guys seemed too advanced, too ready to rush into the life I was trying to avoid.

  Even when, as a teenager, I tried to hang out with Garland and his friends, he wouldn’t allow it. He wasn’t necessarily trying to protect me. He just didn’t want his kid brother hanging around. But it kept me away from a group of guys who weren’t the least bit interested in school. I always wished for a little brother or sister, so I became a big brother to my friends.

  Sure, I wanted other kids to think I was cool. What kid doesn’t? But I’d decided then that I wasn’t going to do certain things, like sell drugs, and I just stuck to my decision.

  Guys in the neighborhood, even the gun-toting tough guys who stayed in trouble, didn’t hassle me about doing well in school. If they laughed at me or called me punk, geek, nerd, or corny, they did so behind my back. I walked the same dangerous streets as the guys selling drugs and stealing cars, and I was cool with many of them. I didn’t look down on them, and they didn’t bother me. It was as if there was some silent acknowledgment between us that they were doing what they believed they had to do, and so was I.

  As soon as I was responsible enough to work, I got a job. I was thirteen when Blonnie Watson, president of the board that operates High Park Gardens, hired me as a groundskeeper at the complex. She liked me and went out of her way to be kind and encouraging. I earned minimum wage picking up trash around the building and doing minor chores, but I was thrilled to be able to afford some of the trendy clothes and shoes that my mother refused to buy.

  Because Mom worked so much, she had little time to visit the schools my brother and I attended or talk to our teachers. She went to open-house meetings every now and then and fussed if we brought home bad grades on our report cards. But she was not a check-your-homework-every-night kind of mom. She was too exhausted when she got home from work. My brother took full advantage of her leniency. He chose to tolerate the verbal punishment at report-card time rather than buckle down, study, and bring home decent grades.

  I loved school. My third-grade teacher, Viola Johnson, was largely responsible for that. By then we were out of the projects, but like most of the kids in my class, I was poor. That meant nothing to me then because I never felt deprived, especially in Miss Johnson’s class. She was a tiny ball of energy with a high-pitched girlish voice and the same honey-colored complexion as my mother.

  Miss Johnson had lived in Newark since she was four years old. She attended public schools and followed her father’s trail into teaching. Once she began teaching, she was always taking classes somewhere—a drama class here, a literature class there. And she brought what she learned to her classroom.

  When I met her, Ms. Johnson was in her mid-forties, single with no children. I guess her students filled that space in her heart, because she nurtured us like a mother. She told us that college was not just an option, but the next step to advancement, like the thirteenth grade.

  “Everybody has a chance to go to college,” she said. “Never say you can’t go because of money. Get that degree. You must get that degree.”

  She regularly got discount tickets for us to attend Broadway plays. She asked parents to pay for the tickets, and we rode to New York City on a bus that she usually rented herself. And we did not dare dress tacky. Miss Johnson required the girls to wear dresses and stockings and the guys to wear nice slacks and shirts.

  She also secured the scripts of popular plays, assigned roles, and rehearsed us so that we could perform for the entire school. When we put on a production of Annie, I played Daddy Warbucks.

  Miss Johnson introduced us to algebra and Shakespeare with books written for kids. We even formed a Shakespeare club that met on Tuesdays after school. I was elected president. We read and discussed Shakespeare at our meetings. At one meeting, the club voted on our official uniform: burgundy sweaters with the group’s name, “The Shakespeare Club,” embroidered over the pocket. Once, we wore our sweaters to a concert at Symphony Hall. Several people in the audience asked Miss Johnson which private school we attended. She smiled, held her head high, and announced with great pride that we were from Louise A. Spencer Elementary, a public school in the Central Ward, which practically everyone in Newark considered the ghetto.

  Our teacher loved to travel, and she always sent us postcards and bought us souvenirs from wherever she went. Some days, she pulled the globe from the corner of the classroom, gathered us around her, and told us stories about places that before were just spots on a map to us.

  Noise didn’t seem to bother Miss Johnson, as long as children were engaged in learning. She stayed with us after school to dye eggs for Easter, make gingerbread men for Christmas, or bake cookies, just because.

  Miss Johnson retired from Newark’s public schools in 1993 after thirty-two years of teaching and moved to Johnsonville, West Virginia, a tiny town named after her great-grandfather. I lost touch with her when I left Spencer and for years didn’t know where she had gone.

  But I never forgot her. She made a lanky, mild-mannered kid growing up in a tough place feel smart and special. She also made me curious about the world I had yet to see. That was the curiosity the dentist saw in me the day I showed up at his office to get braces.

  2

  HOME

  Sam

  I WAS EIGHT YEARS OLD, walking one afternoon with Moms toward Broad and Market streets in downtown Newark, where we’d come to do some shopping. In those days, Woolworth’s, McCrory’s, and other discount and department stores, and low-budget restaurants and movie theaters, brought people in from all over the city. The streets were bustling, and I held Moms’s hand and gazed up at the store signs and placards in the windows, putting letters together to figure out words.

  My eyes were fixed on a sign outside a store.

  “What’s th
at word?” I asked.

  My mother was silent for a moment.

  “I don’t know, Marshall,” she said softly, calling me, as usual, by my middle name.

  She tugged my hand to go. I planted my feet to stay.

  “I gotta know!” I screamed. “I gotta know!”

  Moms often tells that story when people ask her what I was like as a child. I don’t remember it, but I do remember always asking questions. My eyes took in everything, and back then, Moms was the first person I turned to for an interpretation. It was not the first or last time she would not be able to provide an answer. Though she tried hard to hide it for much of my childhood, I soon figured out her secret. My mother, Ruthener Davis, had never learned to read.

  She was born in 1933, the fourth child of a rural South Carolina farmer and a housewife. She was just seven when her mother died, leaving her in the care of a grandmother for the next five years. Moms has always been a nurturer, so when she returned home to live with her father, two older brothers, and a sister, she dropped out of school to wash, cook, clean, and care for her family. Back then, education seemed a luxury to her. She wanted to go to school, but her obligation to family was more important. At fifteen, she married my father, Kenneth Davis, after spotting him, dressed in his Army uniform, at a local carnival. He was a handsome man with medium-brown skin and a slender build. She’s always been petite, only five feet tall.

  Pop was discharged honorably from the Army, and he and Moms lived with his relatives in South Carolina for their first ten years together. My three older siblings—Kenneth, Jr., Roselene, and Fellease—were born there. Around 1958, Pop took the advice of an aunt who lived in New York and migrated north with his family in search of a better-paying job. They landed in Newark.

  Pop found a job fueling airplanes at the Newark airport with a company called Butler Aviation, where he would work for the next thirty-five years. Pop loved his job and periodically took his three youngest children—Andre, Carlton, and me—to the airport to see the planes. We would sit in the cockpit and pretend we were flying them. Moms was pregnant with my brother Andre in 1968, when Pop suggested they use his GI Bill to buy a house. Their search ended at a modest two-bedroom wood-frame house with a finished basement on Ludlow Street. It was a poor working-class community with a mixture of black and Latino families in an area known for a notorious public-housing development called the Dayton Street projects. A row of small single-family houses sat on one side of the street; a graveyard and the sprawling high-rise projects, officially named the Rev. Otto E. Kretchmer Homes, sat on the other.

  Even then, the projects had a reputation for regular stabbings, muggings, and shootings, but the 1980s, the decade when I came of age, would usher in a level of crime and violence that would make it hard for me to imagine surviving to the age of twenty-five.

  I was born at Beth Israel Hospital in Newark on January 19, 1973, and brought home to Ludlow Street. One of my earliest memories is heading to preschool with my shoulder-length, curly black hair parted in the middle and braided into long plaits. Moms refused to cut it, despite the suggestion from school administrators who told her that some teachers and students were mistaking me for a girl. Finally, Moms relented and took me to the barber. When he snipped off my plaits, she got down on her hands and knees and began stuffing my hair into a plastic bag. Once we made it home, she pulled out the family Bible and placed my hair inside.

  “I’m keeping you in here,” she said.

  Moms relied on a power greater than herself to raise black boys in an era when the streets were claiming too many. I’ve often thought about my hair in that Bible, especially when I found myself in tight situations with seemingly no way out, and then, unexpectedly, a door opened.

  Three years after I was born, my brother Carlton came along. Moms describes those years as the happiest of her life. It was as close as she would ever get to the picket-fence life she had always imagined. Neighbors and parishioners from St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church, which sits in the middle of the block on the single-family side of Ludlow, came bearing food and gifts after the birth. When Pop cashed his paycheck, he placed the crisp bills in a legal-sized envelope and brought it home to Moms. She could stretch a dollar farther than anyone I had ever seen, and her sole job was to take care of the family.

  Moms was known as the mother of the entire neighborhood. She rose every morning about four A.M. and picked up the empty soda and beer cans, potato-chip bags, candy wrappers, and other trash left along the walkway the night before. Then she swept the street, working her way up to the church. She did this faithfully every day. I wasn’t mature enough then to understand that this was her contribution to her church and community. She had little else to give. Instead, I felt embarrassed. And I took some serious ribbing from friends who found it funny that my mother was up at four in the morning sweeping the streets.

  My pop loved music, especially jazz, blues, and gospel quartets. On some holidays and weekends, he dragged his guitar and amplifier into the living room, put on a Dixie Hummingbirds, Ray Charles, Mills Brothers, or Count Basie album, turned the volume on the record player as loud as it would go, and strummed along. The music filled the entire house and drifted outside, far down the street. I would sit in the doorway between the living room and kitchen or on the stairs with one of my brothers, playing with our plastic green Army men, watching our father, who seemed oblivious to our presence. The music took him someplace else. We usually got restless and scurried off to play, leaving him still strumming in the living room.

  I couldn’t stand that old music. Life is funny, though. Those days in the living room with Pop, his guitar, and his music were among the times I missed most when he left.

  Like most kids, I wanted my family to be like the ones I saw on television, the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Huxtables. But I never saw those parents argue and fight the way mine did. I suppose the constant pressure of trying to raise six children on blue-collar wages in a world often hostile to black families, especially black men, created an environment full of tension. Our house at times felt like a gunpowder keg, and on Saturday nights, the least little spark would cause it to blow.

  “Your daddy ain’t shit,” Moms would yell to us after one of her heated exchanges with our father.

  Just as often, those words came from Pop: “Your mama ain’t shit.”

  He sometimes hit her. She slashed his tires. He drew his gun. Those were terrifying moments for my younger brother and me. We listened from another room as our parents’ angry voices and the sounds of blows came crashing through the walls. When they fought in front of us, my brother and I clung helplessly to each other until one of our parents walked away.

  But even with all the fighting, it never occurred to me that one of them would actually leave us. Things always seemed to blow over pretty quickly, and life became normal again, Pop going off to work and bringing his entire paycheck home, and Moms cleaning, cooking, and washing all day. We didn’t own a washing machine for a long time, so she scrubbed our clothes by hand on an old washboard she’d brought from South Carolina, then hung them out to dry on the clothesline in the backyard.

  Then one day, Pop walked in and announced that he wanted a divorce. Moms suspected he’d met someone else. She pleaded and prayed he would come to his senses. But she had long ago learned that by the time Kenneth Davis, Sr., opened up to reveal his feelings, he had already worked out a resolution in his mind. Sure enough, a few days later, Moms responded to a knock at the front door and found a stranger standing there to serve her with papers.

  I was eleven when the divorce became final. During the court hearing, which we all attended, Carlton, then just eight, cried all the way through. Pop had tried to reassure us that he would always be a part of our lives, but as a kid, you can’t help feeling abandoned when a parent leaves so suddenly. I remember wondering: What are we going to do now? How are we going to make it?

  It wouldn’t be fair to say that Pop walked out completely. He did what
he agreed to do and more. He paid the mortgage, which kept a roof over our heads. He came around to visit. We visited him. If one of us was sick, he rushed home or to the hospital to check on us. He sent what money he could for gifts during holidays. And for most major events in my life—baseball games, school programs, and graduations—he was there. I loved my father then, as I do now. But when he left, so did his regular paycheck and the security of knowing that all the bills would get paid and that my little brother and I would always have something to eat. My older brothers and sisters were in and out.

  Moms had never worked, and with little education she had few marketable skills. We had to go on welfare. Moms was already leaning on me for things she couldn’t do, like reading her mail, making deposits at the bank, and helping to write money orders for bills. It felt good to be responsible for such heavyweight duties at my age, but it was a burden that no eleven-year-old should have to bear. I felt responsible for helping her take care of the household. That might sound strange, since I was one of the younger ones and had four older brothers and sisters. But they were going through their own stages of rebellion and upheaval and were little help.

  I couldn’t do much but worry. There were days when we woke up with not enough food in the house to make a decent meal and no money to buy more.

  “I’ll make a way,” Moms would say.

  I’ve always admired her survivor instinct. Just as she’d promised, she came through, even if it meant calling to ask an out-of-town relative to wire some emergency cash or relying on neighbors or members of her church to bring us food. When the electric company turned off our power, we ran an extension cord from our house to the one next door until the bill could be paid. When the boiler went out in the dead of winter because we couldn’t afford to buy more oil, we gathered around the stove in the kitchen, sometimes the only room in the house with heat. She chopped wood for the fireplace to help keep us warm in the winter. And she wore the same clothes year after year so that she could buy us sneakers and clothes for each new school year.