Voices of the Endangered
American Black Male
Patricia Smith
Thomas Whalen. Nathaniel Lackland. Rodney Mathis. Darryl King. Dwight Brewer. Robin Harris. Tyrone Gunn. Christopher Rogers. John Doe I. John Doe 2d. John Doe 3d.
These are the names of a few
of the black men who died in the
Each year, the stats are flashed in urgent typeface across the front of newspapers, picked apart on the talk shows, analyzed in official magazines of thought. At some point, every black man is asked the inevitable question: "How does it feel?"
The problem was that usually the
numbers don't have faces, or voices. Now
they do.
·
The life expectancy for
black males in
An ambulance sits across the street
from the Roxbury Men's Club on
The all-too-familiar scene becomes a topic of conversation outside the club.
"They picking up that man again? Looks like they take that man outta there every two, three days."
"He an old man?"
This time, the question is met with a humorless guffaw. "Ain't no older than you. Ain't no older than you."
The ambulance sits for a long time. Grizzled men peek around the club's doorway, stare at the ambulance, shake their heads. Some draw closer to look through the windows. Conversation grows softer. When the ambulance finally pulls away, without lights or siren, it's as if a veil has been lifted.
"That mean he dead, don't it?" one man says to no one in particular. In a place where black men don't usually wear Red Sox caps, his is dirty, missing its brim, looking as if he picked it up off the street. His eyes refuse to leave the spot the ambulance has just vacated.
"When it leaves with no noise like that, don't it mean he dead?"
No one knows the answer.
·
Twenty-two percent of blacks under 65 have no
medical insurance; their tendency to delay medical treatment leads to a higher
incidence of chronic illness.
Inside the club, shouted boasts and rough laughter threaten to drown out the cool click of pool balls. A sign says "Positively no drug or drinking or peddling of stolen goods in this place," but a bleary-eyed man teeters on a bench next to an open, nearly empty bottle of Dewar's White Label. Two members study a checkerboard, making their moves in silence. There are many red eyes, much slow walking, many missing teeth. The dingy club breathes dust—the furniture is battered, most of the tiles on the clay-red floor are warped or missing, and there is a bullet hole in the Coke machine.
This is a club for black men who
aren't ready to die. It is insulation
from the outside, a tiny haven in a world gone crazy. On the outside, the men of the Roxbury Men's
Club feel outnumbered and overpowered by the young turks, kids with guns and
drugs, kids who are governed by rules the old guys just don't understand. In Roxbury, where so much loss is attributed
to the foolish young, these men speak about "them kids" as if Death,
sporting a Raiders cap and carrying a beeper, had finally been given a
face. Forgetting that there are other
ways to die, they are hiding from an end that will find them surely as the sun
finds its way into the sky each morning.
After all, they are black men.
And black men have nowhere to hide.
·
The homicide rate for black
men is 6 to 7 times higher than the rate for white men.
On the bench, the bottle of White Label is lifted to waiting lips. A cigarette trembles in the drinker's other hand.
"We were just a regular pool hall before we made it membership," said Emmitt Perry, who manages the club. His red baseball cap, cocked just a little too high on his head, sports the slogan "Clean 'n' Serene."
"Now we know who's comin' in. We keep drugs and kids with guns out. It's mostly older guys here. We can't hang with those young people. In the beginning, older guys were too scared to come here. We got 40 members, and some of them still scared. We have to stay together. It's a brotherhood thing here."
"Any new member got to be brought in by a member already here. We don't want nobody dealing or selling drugs. Drinking, we deal with that. That's legal. One of the boys drink too much, we make sure he gets home. Keep him from getting robbed or killed out there."
He looks out the back door of the club, listens to the giddy screams of neighborhood children, shakes his head.
"Quite a few members have been robbed. One member was robbed right on the church steps over there. Young boys, 'bout 10 and 12 years old, ripped his pants right off him. I tried to help, but one of them came out with a gun and shook it at me. I thought, 'He's just a kid, but that gun it real.' For weeks, I couldn't stop shaking. I know that boy woulda used that gun. He woulda used it. Ten-year-old boy would have killed me dead as sho as I'm standing here talking to you."
...
Point 1
Last year, firearms were used in more than 80
percent of homicides among black males under 25.
On the avenue outside the club, young men pace like caged panthers. They sniff at the doorway, stare boldly into the club, past the sign that says "Members Only." Perhaps it is the camaraderie they crave. Perry is more realistic. "They looking to see if we got anything in here look like money," he says. "That's what they out there killing each other for, and they wouldn't think nothing 'bout coming in here killing us."
To the members of RMC, all the dying is about drugs. The lure of fast money fills kids with bravado. "Even if they really are afraid of dying, they got to say they ain't," says Perry.
"Big-time pusher out there furnishing them with guns and drugs, kids not smart enough to realize this guy is setting them up. A kid shoots another kid to put in his place. Ain't no skin comin off his bones."
"Rich people distribute drugs
to poor people and let them kill they ownself," says Willie President, 64,
just back from a trip to his home state of
...
·
In 1989,
approximately 16,353 black men were involved in emergency-room episodes related
to the use of cocaine.
Lafayette Neal is reed-thin, 53, and
speaks with a self-conscious mumble.
"I was raised in
The men here have grown weary with
fear. But it is their stories the young drug couriers, whizzing up and down the
avenue on their bicycles, need to hear.
Perhaps Willie President's tales of hard work, sweat and reward in
The consensus among the members, many of whom grew up in the South, where the rod was seldom spared, is that a good ol' Southern ass-whupping would straighten out some of the young troublemakers.
"All kids is bad," says Prez. "But if some of these parents had been lightin' those butts up at home, their kids wouldn't be in the street now killing folks."
Many of the men, no longer able to work, come to the club with the sun and leave when the place closes up. Some of the luckier ones cruise around the block again and again in their gas guzzlers, but don't go much further. The area around the club frightens them, but the shabby little building is home.
...
Point 2
*In 1990, there were 148
homicides in
"When I watch TV and see
killing in the same spots, over and over, I get the feeling we here all
alone," said Perry. "As many
people done got killed, as long as they black it seem like nobody cares. Any guy shot in
In a lot just behind the Roxbury
Men's Club, there is a garden, nourished and tended by Emmitt Perry, who's from
On the other side of the club, right
over the fence, there is a large tree, its base littered with makeshift seats,
wads of paper and plastic cups. In full
view of the
And we're back to death again.
...
·
The
mortality rate per 100,000 people for cirrhosis of the liver is 29 for black
men, 15 for white men.
Back out front, two women sit on
black plastic milk crates just outside the club's front door.
"Ain't nothin' wrong with this sweet wine if you just know how to go with it and leave it at that," he says.
From inside: "
"It is Wild Irish.
"Bring it on in here," someone says.
·
The odds
of a black child dying shortly after birth is consistently twice as high as
those for a white child.
On
"Red, white and blue, blue, white and red
A brother dead, bucked in the head."
The music blasts out in the warm, unmoving air. Carl grins, spouts a few rhymes of his own, and continues his walk towards trouble.
"Most people who die get shot in the head. These days, if you don't shoot someone in the head, they're probably gonna live. You got to get 'em in the head."
If Mesfen Manna showed up at the Men's Club, the wary members would slam the shutters. At 18, he still has a child's face, but he has a way of wearing black that screams, "You can't touch this and never could." In lean jeans and hooded sweatshirt, with a walk that shouts arrogance, Mesfen could be almost any young black man on the streets of Roxbury. He has seen death drain the faces of his friends. And so far, he has walked away.
"The first time someone I knew got killed, it was funny. It didn't really hit me. I was still expecting to see him on the corner. But it hit when I went to the wake. He was 16. He had just got down with this crew. I mean, he wasn't even down with them when they started beefin' with this other gang. But they liked him, so he got into it. One day, people from the other gang got a hold of him and shot him up. Even the kids he hung with didn't know what gang was the one that got him 'cause they were beefin' with so many different gangs." Mesfen snickers nervously. By treating death simply as a bad roll of the dice, he can keep its presence in his own life blurred and indistinct.
Point 3
·
During 1984 and 1985, the
murder rate for black males 15-24 rose by 68 percent; for black males 15-19, it
rose 100 percent during the same period.
"That was Billy, he got killed about two years ago. Then my buddy Jules got shot in the head. Someone called him, he poked his head out the window and they shot him up."
"You don't grow a shell, sometimes it just comes. You go to a wake and people you grew up with got on all this makeup and wearing a wig because they got shot in the head. It's gonna affect you."
Even when his voice is relaxed, there is a tenseness in Mesfen's body, as if every muscle were coiled. You know he would not hesitate to crouch, dive or break into a heated run the minute anything hot went down on the street—the barrel of a shotgun poised in a car window, the staccato pop of bullets settling an argument between friends.
"Every second I always have to look over my back, always," he says. "You lose the fear and just get cautious. If I hear a car driving up, if something keeps me watching it, and it stops, then all my focus is on it. You can't trust certain people, no matter how you think you're cool with them because every time you see each other, you stop and talk. That don't mean nothing. Some people are just sick, crazy in the head. Some people have to be sick in order to deal with the people who are crazy.
"You just can't be nice out there. Every time I try to be nice, that's when people try to take advantage of me. Then my mind just flips, because I can't deal with that."
Mesfen speaks often of "flipping," "snapping" and "goin' off," emphasizing the thin line black men walk between control and chaos. "Pressures build you right up to the point," he says. "You always feel just that close to goin' off. You get into a fight, that's a way to relieve a lot of that pressure. But it builds right back up. Quick."
...
·
Black men represent only 3.5
percent of a national college enrollment of almost 13 million.
Mesfen's brother Tarik is taller, quieter. He has a habit of talking into his hands. At 14, he has developed the same instincts as his big brother, and already he speaks with the savvy of someone who knows the beat of the streets.
"A lot of other places, people
just kill each other for stupid reasons," he says. "
"But sometimes it just to start trouble, you got to show them you're not scared. Or you want to be somebody who everybody will say, 'Hey, don't mess with him 'cause he's crazy.' If not for the name or rep, it's money."
...
·
Nearly
half a million black men are behind bars in the
The guys who are thought of as crazy, the ones who clear sidewalks, usually build their reputations by carrying a gun and not hesitating to use it. An angry moment, an imagined slight, the cock of a trigger, another black man lost. Even for someone Tarik's age, a gun is easier—and often cheaper—to cop than a new pair of leather basketball shoes.
"You just go to have the money," says Mesfen. "A couple of years ago, everybody had old guns they stole from older people, or somebody passed the guns down to them, all taped up and stuff. Now they're brand new, right out the box. People sell them out the trunk of their cars.
"Not everybody got the heart to us a gun. And I know kids who don't care if you got a gun or not. If you're not acting crazy enough to use it, they'll take it away from you. And some folks don't really want to be doing what they're doing, but they get real high and they just do it."
Loss of control. The snap, the final straw, the guts with their roots in a needle, bottle or pipe. The nerve to murder.
"And don't even think about looking to the police for help. Police just like another gang." Mesfen laughs, without humor. "I seen a kid get shot in the head twice while he was talking to the police. Kids right across the street aiming at him, they shot him right there, and the police didn't catch nobody."
"And there ain't no role models on the street, older folks who can talk to us about what's goin' down. Most of the people who are doing good keep to themselves and take care of their business. Most older people don't have anything to do with younger ones because they're scared. Or they think it's a waste of time because the kids are already out of control."
The men of Roxbury Men's Club would agree. With no one telling them or their brothers on the street any different. Mesfen and Tarik know that they're on their own. Their peers are telling them that it's a kick to court death. When they do, and they win, it's a turn-on. But when death wins, it wins big.
·
Forty-five
percent of black males are likely to become victims of violent crime three or
four times in their lifetime.
"Sometimes it's even fun hanging out in places most people are scared of," says Mesfen. "Like down at Dudley Station at night. Part of the fun is not knowing if you're going to be there when something goes down. Say someone gets shot, and you don't really care about that person, you say, "Yeah man, it was fun down there man, yeah, that dude got smoked, y'all shoulda seen it.' It's kinda glamorized. Some people will be saying, 'You see the way he got shot, how he fell, how he screamed like a girl?'"
"Glamorized. Like the movies. Another guy jumps bad, gets smoked, dusted, blasted, capped, bucked. The new guns gleam, bodies fall dramatically to the pavement. People gather 'round, point, laugh, scream. No one yells "Cut!," and the young black man on the ground doesn't look up to a second take.
Mesfen's been shot once. He didn't scream. He settles into the tale like a storyteller spinning his favorite yarn.
"Me and my friend were sitting on the stairs, kids came up and just started shooting. My cousin started running. They chased him and he got shot in the foot. He ran to his grandmother's house, and this older guy who lives there was gettin' ready to come into the house, I guess to smoke his hick, 'cause he's a basehead. They lit him up. He got it worse than anybody, and he wasn't even out there with us.
"I got shot in my thigh. I didn't know whether I was hit or not, then a friend saw the bullet holes in my pants, two holes where the bullet went in and out. It was bleeding just a little. I pulled my pants down and say, yeah, two big holes.
"My instincts got real good after I got shot. I know my eyesight got better." He smiles a wide smile, the panic and gunpowder smell far away now. After all, hey, nobody died.
Mesfen and Tarik are not gang members. Tarik, who's good at sports, doesn't head for the court with a 9mm tucked in his gym bag. A kid with a smart mouth and a good head, he's worked his way into an exclusive private school. Mesfen, who admits that he must work to control his temper, works sporadically, reads voraciously and used to anger teacher by taunting them with evidence proving God was a black man. Both young men are curious and aware. They are statistics, but not dire ones.
Point 4
·
In 1985, black female-beaded
families were 50 percent of all black families.
Their mother, Robin Scott Manna, looks more like their sister. Listening to her sons talk about the streets, her eyes look frightened. Just the other night, her boys left for a showing of "Boyz N the Hood," and didn't return until 5 a.m.
"I get numb," she says. "I can't sit up and look out the window for them anymore. That makes me crazy."
The night Mesfen limped to an ambulance with two bullet holes in his thigh, Robin Scott Manna felt a sense of hopelessness that lapsed into panic.
"I felt two emotions simultaneously," she says. "I knew one day the phone would ring and one of my kids would be hurt or dead. I felt relieved at not having to wait anymore.
"Later, I sobbed like a baby. I knew this was no way to live, anticipating the deaths of my children. I need to be living someplace safe, but my kids say they don't want to run. Any normal kid would want to get away from this kind of violence. I want to get my kids the hell away from here."
Panic becomes anger. "He knew who shot him, and we couldn't do a damned thing about it. If he'd died, I couldn't speak out because someone would take revenge on his brother. It's like living in prison. This is not a life that makes sense."
* A black male infant born in 1989 has 1 in 27 chance of losing his life in a homicide, compared to
a 1 in 205 chance for a
white male infant.
Since her sons have grown too old to be called back from the streets, Robin Scott Manna has been haunted by a picture she saw in a newspaper. At first, she had no idea of what the picture was. Then her eyes traced a mass of tubes to a gaunt, naked black body. It was a picture of a young black man being embalmed in preparation for burial.
She carries it in her wallet.
...
·
Blacks suffer greater incidence of and
mortality from cancer than whites; the incidence of the disease in black males
in 25 percent higher.
Floyd Williams leans forward in his chair and slaps the fist of his right hand into the open palm of his left.
"I don't wanna bury no more babies," he says softly.
For 18 years, he has operated the
Floyd Williams Funeral Home in
"There was time all I would do is bury young black men," he says. "But now I'm getting men in their 40s and 50s dropping dead because they've run out of options. Heart attacks. Strokes. Cerebral vascular accidents. Pressure."
...
*In 1988, cerebrovascular diseases caused 57.8
deaths per 100,000 black male population, compared to 30 per 100,000 for white
men.
Floyd Williams shakes his head. "Brother downstairs right now, spent 20 years as director of personnel at a big corporation, " he says. "They terminated his position. Here was a man who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He was brought up to do things the American way. Now that boy is laying downstairs in my chapel. And his position has not yet been filled."
Floyd Williams is a big man, his anger barely contained. There is a bit of the preacher about him, perhaps because he ministers to so many. He stalks his carpeted office, touches down in a plump chair, begins pacing again. The sun streams in and gets caught in a tangle of silver bracelets on his left arm.
"We got nobody to blame but ourselves," he says. "The white man makes liquor, but he doesn't make you drink it. He sells and makes guns and gets them into the community, but he doesn't load the bullets or make you pull the trigger on your brother. When your brother is in distress, the white man doesn't make you turn you back on him. If we ain't shootin' each other, we're drinking ourselves to death or getting all tangles up in a game with rules that won't let us win.
"We live because we want to live, die because we want to die. We're just sitting back, letting the white man do us in. He's got all the tools he needs. He's saying, 'We know they've got high blood pressure, eating all the pork, all we got to do is stress the hell out of them.' And we let them do it. My Bible says the Lord helps those who help themselves. We got to get up off our knees and get on the good foot."
·
Hypertension causes more
than 5,000 excess deaths a year in the black community.
For Floyd Williams, there is no calm clinical viewpoint, no stepping back to assess the situation with a cold, professional eye. His position does not allow him to tsk-tsk the dismal stats while secretly rejoicing in the boost they give his business. For him, there is no "me" and "them; for he is as black as the men he buries. He has felt the same pressures, struggled for breath in the same tight corners.
"In 1988, I told a white boy in a federal agency that he wasn't going to disrespect me in front of my wife," he says. "Since then, they've been trying to get me at every turn, hauling me into court, trying to take by business away. They wanted my kids, my dogs, my home, everything I had. They said, 'If you got any dreams, we want them too.' If it hadn't been for the support from my wife and family, I would have turned to the bottle. I had already turned to the bottle. I would have gone under. I was drinking myself crazy, but I had somebody grab me by the face and say, 'I love you, and I don't want to lose you. But if this doesn't stop, you are going to kill yourself.'"
"As a race we are losing hope. We look at our women and babies and say, 'I can't even be a man out here.' These young brothers shooting each other, I'm not saying they're right, but at least they got some balls. If they're going down warrin'. Too many of us just sit down, shut up and give up. Then we die."
·
In 1988, deaths resulting from HIV infection
were 31.6 per 100,000 for black men, 9.9 per 100,000 for white men.
Williams reconstructs wrecked faces so that mothers can have a last, comforting look at their sons. He struggles against the ravages of loss, restoring color to lifeless cheeks, replacing hair where hair was lost, giving tortured souls the illusion of peace. He has tricks to make death look much kinder than it is.
It is too late to help those already gone. It is the men he encounters on the street—those with fallen shoulders and shattered hopes—he speaks to now. He does not need their business. The bodies just keep coming.
"Black males hurt, love, cry and worry like everybody else worries," he says. "But we hold it all inside. We won't even talk to each other. There's no buffer in this community, no union of black males of different ideologies that says when one goes down, we all do down.
"White boys can kill us. They get into our heads, and if they can get
the head they can sure as hell get the tail.
We've got this plantation mentality that white folks are supposed to
take care of us. We should know well that works, as many of us as there are
in
·
In
Williams is constantly pushed. Every day another black body requires his handiwork. Each one hurts. And he'd like to give the brothers somewhere to turn—before they have to turn to him.
"Young black boys are out there killing because we ain't showing them nothing. The older guys are dying because they're running out of alternatives. I see these people die. I have to deal with their families. I watch those mamas cry.
"Our longevity is up to us. No preacher or politician dictates our future. We as black men have got to start demanding excellence from ourselves and our male children. We've got to do things the black way, not the American way. When we stop being good colored boys, we'll see there are forces out to destroy us, and that there's nothing in the community to stop them."
Floyd Williams sits back in his chair. Downstairs in the achingly silent chapel, a 48-year-old black man lies in a gleaming wooden coffin, waiting for his family, and friends. The phone rings, and Williams sets his mouth in a straight line. There's another body coming in.
...
In his opening statement for the first
board meeting of the 21st Century Commission on African-American Males, held in
"Although statistics and horrifying anecdotes are of interest, and have their value, we cannot allow them to dominate our deliberations," he said. "In short, we must do far more than merely talk about the problems of black males, lest our posterity talk in disparaging terms about this generation's inertia and indifference."
Wilder's speech delivered at 2 p.m. on April 17, 1991, took approximately four minutes. Afterward, the governor huddled with committee members. Perhaps later he had a leisurely dinner.
That same day, approximately 362 black men died.
The streetlights have winked on in
Roxbury, Harlem, Dorchester,
No one seems to want to give up to the darkness. Long into the night, these streets still pop with music and noise. The sky hints sunrise before these black men give up and go in to their beds, falling into a dreamless sleep that feels like death. Point 5