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  At thirteen, I was arrested for the first time and charged with shoplifting. A friend set me up. That must sound like the lamest excuse on the books, but it was true. I had walked up Ludlow Street to the Food Town grocery in the bordering city of Elizabeth with a seventeen-year-old friend who told me that he was planning to start a carpet-cleaning business. As we were leaving the store, he said he had paid for a high-powered vacuum cleaner-steamer and needed my help getting it home.

  “Grab that for me, man,” he said, motioning to a large vacuum cleaner against the wall near the exit. “My hands are full.”

  We had split up for a few minutes in the store, so it never occurred to me that he was lying. I casually walked over to the machine and pushed it out of the store. I was halfway down the street with it when a police officer rolled up behind me, jumped out of the car, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on me. My friend took off running. I was dumbfounded.

  I was detained for a few hours at the Elizabeth police station and then released when the same guy who had been with me in the store and planned the scheme sent his older brother to bail me out. Eventually, the charges were dropped. But the crazy thing is, I kept hanging with the guy who had set me up. I didn’t know any better. To my friends, my arrest was one big joke. I never told any of them how scared I was sitting in that police station. That wouldn’t have been cool. I just played along. Yeah, man, real funny.

  When I look back over my life, I realize that at the most critical stages, someone was there to reach me with exactly what I needed. A martial-arts teacher named Reggie was one of those people. My brother Andre had taken kung fu lessons from Reggie and had introduced me to him when I was ten. Reggie was in his early twenties himself, and he worked as a security guard in the cemetery across the street from my house. I looked up to him. He made an honest living, didn’t do drugs, and took good care of himself. He was cool and the only man I knew who was respected by some of the toughest guys in the community for doing good. He was looked up to in that bigger-than-life way more often reserved for drug dealers. In Reggie, I saw what I wanted to be: a good guy who commanded respect from the streets in a way that was different from everything I had seen.

  Kung fu was popular at the time. I watched it on television every Saturday morning. Reggie was a highly ranked black belt, good enough to star in a movie, and he taught lessons free of charge at the cemetery to any kid in the neighborhood eager to learn. I never knew anything about Reggie’s background, but I wonder now where he got the insight at such a young age to provide a diversion to kids who could so easily drift into trouble.

  On Sundays, a small group of us—Lee, Cornell, Crusher, Eric, and some other drifters—walked through huge, mahogany doors and gathered in an empty room that converted to a chapel for memorial services. Reggie worked behind a desk there. Sometimes he wore his security-guard uniform as he led us in practice; other times he practiced with us. We started with warm-up exercises, then spent at least an hour perfecting old sparring moves and learning new ones. Then Reggie led us in meditation. He taught us how to remove ourselves from our environment through deep concentration. As we sat on the floor with our eyes closed and minds blank, Reggie delivered little messages. They were mostly clichés, like “If the blind leads the blind, both of them will fall into a hole.” Or, “If you feel weak, you will be weak.” But something about sitting there with your mind clear, totally focused on what he was saying, gave his words power.

  At the end of each session, we exercised again for an hour, jogging around the cemetery several times or through the neighborhood. We looked like soldiers, jogging in unison with stone faces, right past the tall granite tombstones inside the cemetery gates or the drug dealers and hustlers hanging around outside. The sessions made me feel physically and mentally strong. They had another benefit: they kept me from roaming the streets. I looked up to Reggie and didn’t want to disappoint him.

  For four years I was dedicated to learning everything I could about martial arts from my mentor-teacher. But by age fifteen, I had started to slip. I was hanging out until one A.M. with guys who were four to seven years older. We sat around drinking forty ounces of malt liquor and talking trash. At first, I just listened as they shared war stories about their dealings around Dayton Street. In time, though, I would have stories of my own.

  A year later, I stopped going to kung fu lessons. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that about the same time, my life shifted gears and began speeding toward trouble.

  No matter how much I hung out with my friends and pretended not to care about school, I always managed to excel. Moms couldn’t help me with homework, but she stayed on me to do well.

  “Go to school, Marshall,” she said so seriously, as if my life depended on it.

  I saw close-up how she suffered without an education, and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to me. I aimed as far as I could see: finishing high school. Beyond that, I had no ambition. My teachers seemed to like me. As tough as I acted outside school, I paid attention to them in class and usually did what they asked. Sometimes, though, I had to be creative in explaining a good grade to friends. I lied to them frequently. “I cheated,” I’d say, trying to minimize any accomplishment. Kids who did well in school were considered nerds. I wanted to be cool. And more than anything, I wanted to fit in.

  Moms had placed many of her dreams on me. She had sacrificed her education for her family, and she pushed to make sure I took advantage of the opportunity she never had.

  Most students in our neighborhood attended Dayton Street Elementary until the eighth grade, then went on to high school. In the sixth grade, I was looking forward to returning to Dayton Street as a seventh-grader, an upperclassman, running things. But my sixth-grade teacher, Ms. Sandi Schimmel, approached me and recommended that I take an examination to apply to a magnet program at University High School the following year. University High was one of the more prestigious high schools in the Newark school system and the only one that accepted seventh- and eighth-graders.

  I didn’t want to be bothered with going to another school. Everyone I knew had stayed at Dayton Street until eighth grade.

  “Why?” I asked the teacher.

  She explained that attending University High would give me a better shot at getting into college and making something of my life. College was far from my mind. But Ms. Schimmel and the principal talked to my mother. They told her that I was reading on a ninth-grade level and needed to be at a school where I would be academically challenged. Moms pushed me to take the test.

  It helped that I wasn’t the only one handpicked from my school to apply. One of my boys, Craig Jordan, was encouraged to take the test, too. On test day, we rode the bus together to University High School, a boxy two-story structure in the middle of a working-class residential neighborhood. It took us an hour and a half on two public buses to get to the South Ward, where the school was located.

  At University High, we walked into a room of unfamiliar faces. George was in the room somewhere, but we would not meet until later. I felt uncomfortable, but practically everybody there was from somewhere else, so we all looked a bit out-of-place. I tried hard to concentrate on the test. It wasn’t as difficult as I expected. A few weeks later, I got the news: I had made the cut. I was about to become a student at University High.

  3

  MA

  Rameck

  FOR MUCH OF MY CHILDHOOD, my mother and I lived with her mother, Ellen Bradley. She was more than a grandmother to me. She was like my mother, too.

  I called her Ma.

  She was the steadiest person in my life. But my mother and grandmother didn’t get along, and I often felt torn between the two. My mother, Arlene Hunt, was just seventeen, a junior in high school, when I was born. She says she planned the pregnancy in hopes of having a child of her own to love. She blamed Ma for an unhappy childhood and as a teenager turned to drugs—first marijuana, then heroin, then cocaine, then sleeping pills—to dull her pain. Slowly, her addiction tran
sformed her from the ambitious, loving, attentive mother I adored into a needy woman I struggled to forgive. My father was a heroin addict, too, and he spent most of my early years in jail, doing time for petty crimes he committed to support his habit.

  Ma’s house was where I felt most secure.

  Ma grew up in Newark and at sixteen married my mother’s father, Raymond Hunt, a fair-skinned, half-Jewish man known around town as “Sugar Shoes” because he always sported the latest in crocodile, alligator, or lizard skin on his feet. My mother was a “daddy’s girl,” the second-oldest of four children the couple had together—Raymond, my mother, Richard, and Venus. But Mom was just a toddler when her parents divorced. Ma began dating a truck driver named Theodore Green, her on-again, off-again live-in companion until his death in 1979. He was the father of Ma’s three youngest children—Sheldon, Victoria, and Nicole.

  The family lived in Newark until the summer of 1971, when the state offered families money to relocate if they lived in the path of a planned new state highway, Route 78. To Ma it was a blessing from God, a chance to provide a better life for her children. She found a nice, two-story house on Clinton Avenue, a busy residential street in Plainfield, about eighteen miles away. Back then, the neighborhood was mixed, with mostly working-class white, Irish Catholic, and black families. But over the next two decades, as I was growing up, my grandmother’s community would become nearly indistinguishable from Newark, as white families fled, poor black and Latino families moved in, and drug dealers crossed the borders.

  Our house had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, a dining room, a kitchen, a full basement, and a sun porch that Ma converted into another bedroom. To my mother, then fifteen, the move from a bustling city to a boring suburb was devastating. As the oldest girl, she bore most of the responsibility of caring for her five younger siblings while Ma worked. She began dating my father and soon began trying to get pregnant so she could return to Newark to attend an evening high school for pregnant girls. It worked—at least for a while. When she got pregnant with me, my mother moved back to Newark to care for a cousin’s children during the day and attend the special school in the evenings. But when I was born, we returned to Plainfield to Ma’s house, where her five younger siblings still lived. Uncle Raymond, who later joined the Nation of Islam and changed his named to Rahman Shabazz, had moved out and was living on his own.

  We shared bedrooms and fought for time in the bathroom. On Friday nights, Ma and her older children sat around the kitchen table and played cards—poker, spades, and tonk—often for money, all night long. Ma loved playing cards. Sometimes her friends came over for all-night card games around the kitchen table. Beer flowed, music played in the background, cards slapped against the table, and laughter filled the room. I would perch somewhere in the kitchen to watch, too young to join in the fun. We also had family tournaments of Monopoly. And on Sunday, Ma cooked huge country dinners—turkey, dressing, collard greens, cornbread, macaroni and cheese, and sweet-potato pie. Even as her children grew older and began moving out, Ma still cooked those big Sunday dinners that drew everybody back to the house.

  I was the designated family entertainer. My aunts and uncles loved to watch me dance. They’d gather around me in the middle of the living-room floor as I showed off my latest moves. They would clap, laugh, bob their heads to the beat of the music, and shower praise on me. I was just four or five, and I craved the attention.

  I was in preschool when my mother and I moved out for the first time. Mom had gotten a job at Bell Laboratories in 1976 and was earning enough money to make it on her own. She found an apartment, which she decorated and kept meticulously. I had my own room with a Mickey Mouse telephone and all the latest toys. She and I went everywhere together; when I was six, we even traveled to Disney World with one of her girlfriends. Those were the happiest days I ever spent with my mother.

  One night, as Mom and I were watching the Miss America pageant, I turned from the television screen to her.

  “Mom, why don’t you try out for that?” I asked. “You’re prettier than all those girls.”

  She was, of course, flattered. I was quite serious. I thought my mom was the prettiest woman I had ever seen. She was slim and shapely with honey-colored skin and dark brown hair that flowed down her back and matched her dark eyes. Men loved her.

  Mom was young and still loved to party. She sometimes hosted parties at our apartment on Saturday nights. When she sent me to my room, I could hear the laughter of her friends mixing with the soulful sounds of the top ’70s jams. A few times when I sneaked a peek into the living room, I saw my mom and her friends dancing or chilling in the haze of an odd-smelling cigarette. I realize now that it was marijuana.

  Mom left Bell Labs in 1980 and moved from job to job. By the time I enrolled in first grade, we were moving around a lot. Mom began having trouble paying the bills, so we moved from one apartment to another or back to Ma’s house. I attended a different elementary school every year, except in third and fourth grades. But I was always a smart, curious kid who made good grades without much effort. In the second grade, I scored high enough on a placement test to enter the Plainfield public-school system’s “gifted and talented” program.

  A big component of the program took place after school. A bus would pick us up from various elementary schools that participated and transport us to the local middle school, where we received several hours of academic enrichment. The director of the program, a kindhearted woman in her forties named Mrs. Hatt, seemed to take a special interest in me. All of the kids in the program were smart, but she always singled me out for praise—or, at least, I thought I was being singled out. Maybe she pulled other kids aside, too, and said nice things, but she made me feel special.

  “You know, Rameck, you are so smart,” she would say, as though she were telling me something that was just between us. “You really are gifted.”

  She said it so often that I started to think, well, maybe I was. She taught us science and how to use a computer—in the early days when few schools had computers. The weirdest thing sticks out in my mind about her: she taught me how to spell and define the word “hypothesis.”

  No matter which public elementary school I attended in Plainfield, I remained in the program through the eighth grade, except for the third and fourth grades, when I attended Catholic school. As I grew older, I always complained about not having any money, so Mrs. Hatt began inviting me to her house to help her in the garden. I think she just wanted to put a few dollars in my pockets because I never did more than pull up a few weeds.

  I was surprised to learn that she lived in Plainfield in a neighborhood not too far from Ma’s. I thought all the white people had moved out by then. She was married to an artist, and their house had a stucco face with a long garage and huge front and back yards. Inside was filled with expensive-looking sculptures and framed art. I remember looking around the house with wide eyes, thinking, “I want a house like this someday.”

  Despite my mother’s drug use, she always pushed me to excel. When I brought home my report card, she let me know that she expected A’s. In her mind, a C was failure. Ma thought she was too tough on me. But Mom argued: “My son ain’t settling for no C.” Most of the time I did as well as she expected. I wanted to please her. But I also knew better than to fail. My mom didn’t play when it came to school, and I knew I would get a serious butt-whuppin’ if I brought home bad grades.

  As difficult as our relationship eventually became, I always knew she wanted me to have the best. She aspired to be middle-class, and she was determined to have fine clothes and furniture and a child in private school, even it meant living well above her means. When I was in the third grade, she enrolled me in St. Mary’s Catholic School, where she thought I would get a better education—although, knowing my mother, I’m sure she enjoyed telling people she had a son in private school. But my class spent much of the year on tasks I had learned the year before in public school. I started misbehaving in cl
ass. My behavior was so disruptive that the teacher recommended I be placed in special education. But my mother wasn’t about to let that happen. Her son in special education? Hell, no! I was too smart for that, she argued. I just wasn’t being challenged. She won that battle, but after the fourth grade, she moved me back to public school, where I returned to the “gifted and talented” program.

  I always longed to be close to my father. So even when he was in jail, my mother took me to visit him. He went to jail three different times for stints of eighteen months to two years. I was just one year old in 1974 when he was sentenced for the first time.

  I thought jail was where my father lived. When I visited him there, we mostly spent time in a picnic area behind the jail. We sat across from each other on wooden benches and posed for pictures together as though we were in his backyard. It didn’t seem abnormal because many of my friends’ fathers were in jail, too.

  This was far from how my father’s life had begun.

  He was born in October 1953 outside Wilmington, North Carolina, the oldest boy of six children Fred and Winnie Jones had together. They gave him his father’s name, Fred Howard Jones. In 1960, Fred and Winnie moved their family to Newark to find work. My grandfather worked in printing shops, and my grandmother found jobs in various factories. Years later, she enrolled in college and became a registered nurse. I’ve always admired my grandmother for that. The two of us would grow close in high school when I bought a car and was old enough to drive myself to visit her. Later, I sometimes stayed at her house during breaks from college.

  Like Ma, my paternal grandmother taught me a lot about the importance of family. Many times I saw her give her last dollar to make sure her children and grandchildren had what they needed. My father is a lot like her in that way. When I was in college, she used to say, “No matter what you do in life, it’s gonna be hard, so you might as well do something positive. At least you can reap the benefits in the end.” She was absolutely right. Some of my old friends who were drug dealers used to tell me that they felt stress all the time, worrying about getting robbed, going to jail, even dying. School was hard, but at least it would pay off someday.