Thomas Greene
April 19, 2021
Finding the Otherness
“I’m the master of my fate. I’m the captain of my soul”
Nelson Mandela, Invictus (2009)
Life in the Bronx in the early 80’s was very interesting. Everything seemed to move at a
fast pace. I was a child who learned and grew up fast. My cousin “Maine” and I use to emulate
all the gangsters and drug dealers in the neighborhood. Everyone in the neighborhood knew us
because our uncle “Mike” was the local drug dealer for the area. Mike was murdered in this same
neighborhood by a neighbor, his friend.
While Mike and his friend sold drugs me and Maine played games. We played this game
called “Pushing the Rocks” where we had a bag of rocks and sold the rocks as if we were
drug dealers. The hustlers thought the game we played was funny and cute. My grandmother on
the other hand didn’t think it was funny, one day she caught me and my cousin playing this
game. She was furious as a mama bear protecting her cubs. We then received a beating, so bad
that I had to sit with a pillow for about three weeks. I didn’t know why my grandmother was so
angry at me. I didn’t see the harm in the game we were playing. It took my grandmother awhile
to explain why she was angry. Eventually we sat down at the kitchen table and she explained to
me her reason. She said “you see what scrambling (drug dealing, as she calls it) did to my son?”
“I don’t ever want to see you play that game again!” My grandmother didn’t have to go into
details because I knew she meant whatever she was trying to explain. That was a rare whipping
from my grandmother because I never received whippings from her. She never had to speak
twice to me, once was enough.
In my youth years I didn’t fully understand what came with being a hustler or gangster,
but how could anyone at such a young age know. The dealers thought it was cute and
funny because it was their lifestyle that we were imitating. My grandmother seen it as straight
road to jail or death. In the mid-1980’s crack cocaine took over many American cities. Black
families in these cities were shattered by this violent drug. Unspeakable things went on,
mothers were selling their young children to people for drugs in dark alleys. Women and men
were doing unspeakable things to entertain their drug dealers. Some sold their property and
themselves to support their habit. My father stole anything that wasn’t nailed down. I
remembered one time he climbed through my window while I was at school. He took items of
value out of my room and sold it. I returned home from school and was shocked to see my
Nintendo game set and other items were missing. My grandmother came home from work and
called my cousin “Steve.”
Steve eventually got most of the items back. The relationship between my father and I
was tense. To steal from other people was one thing but to steal from me was another thing. I
had no respect for him after that and it still affects our relationship today.
In Dawn Lundy Martin’s essay “When a Person Goes Missing” she writes that “being
black is mostly about containment”. (1) She unlocks the meaning of being black in America of
today as if we have to conform to the culture of blackness. Today black people have adopted so
many different meanings of black culture. The pushing the rock game I played as a child or me
idolizing drug dealers and gangsters of my neighborhood is one meaning of black culture. How
can you adopt a culture like that without being corrupted into conforming to your environment?
People in the community thought the games we were playing was entertainment, but they
should’ve been talking to and showing us how to better our lives. What we were doing was
playing a game that had real consequences in our lives. As black people we contain ourselves in
a mental and physical sense by not educating each other on the dangers that prowl the streets
looking for another black body. In black neighborhoods we contain ourselves by the latest
fashion, hottest cars and coolest sneakers.
I remember being 11 years old, standing out in the parking lot in front of the 7-eleven,
watching a crew of older boys standing near the street. I stood there marveling at the older
boys’ beautiful sense of fashion. A boy with a long head and small eyes was scowling at
another boy, who was standing close to me. It was just before three in the afternoon. I was in
the sixth grade. School had just let out, and it was not yet the fighting weather of early
spring. What was the exact problem here? Who could know?
The boy with the small eyes reached into his ski jacket and pulled out a gun. I recall it in
slow motion, as though in a dream. There the boy stood, with the gun brandished, which he
slowly untucked, tucked, then untucked once more, and in his small eyes I saw a surging rage
that could, in an instant, erase my body. I felt myself drowning in the news reports of murder.
I was aware that these murders very often did not land upon the intended targets but fell.
upon great-aunts, PTA mothers, overtime uncles, and joyful children-fell upon them random
and relentless. I knew this in theory but could not understand it as fact until the boy with the
small eyes stood across from me holding my entire body in his small hands”. (3)
In Ta-Nahisi Coates’s “Letter to My Son” Coates writes about his past and growing up on the
West side of Baltimore. This area of Baltimore was dangerous to children and adults. No one
was excluded from facing the dangerous environment of illegal guns drugs and other crimes.
This is something that most people in black and brown neighborhoods experience. To witness a
homicide at any age is traumatic. Knowing that life is priceless and then to see it so easily taken
away cause you to wonder what is it really worth. Life can be an illusion in the black culture that
contains the blackness of today. Big cities like Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles,
Baltimore, New York and, Mount Vernon contain many generations of black families. Young
black and brown adults and children adjust to this life style of doing what seem right but its
wrong morally and legally. Some act negatively to their environment because this is their only
way to agree to the conditions. A positive way will make you appear as an outsider to your
neighbors. It is a stigma but truth to facts of life in urban communities across America.
In her essay, “Eating the other: Desire and Resistance,” bell hooks writes that “sameness
is a provocation that terrorize”. Kids are like sponges, they take in whatever information they see
or hear. What they seen and heard begins their life story. Not knowing that the ending of the
game had three possibilities, but a black person’s life is where things get tricky. The three
possibilities are jail, graveyard or quit. Going to jail or to the graveyard is the ultimate way from
a means to an end, quitting is an option. The problem with quitting is once you reach a certain
status in life you cannot quit, because you still have a connection to the streets. No matter how
much you try to disconnect yourself, you boxed yourself in. I was attracted to the lifestyle
because I liked the sensation of feeling money in my hand and being popular in the
neighborhood. The problem was my decision was contrary to my grandmother’s. She wanted
better for me and I wanted better for me. I was stubborn and uneducated which didn’t help me to
get a positive outlook on life. Life got worst for me when my mother got drug free and she
wanted me to live with her. I lived a worry-free life with my mother, she never scolded me about
my negative ways in the community. I did just about everything I wanted to do and it was as she
didn’t care.
I’m not saying my mother didn’t care about me. I’m saying my mother had a previous love
for the street and she wanted me to see if the streets loved me back. Her son was getting the
money and things he wanted. I followed a certain way of living because I knew she loved me.
She didn’t know how to be a parent and give me the proper guidance I needed because she seen
me as her friend. Friends support each other in their wrongs or rights. Parents will only support
their children if they’re right, this give them a lesson to learn when they’re wrong.
I was thirteen years old traveling with an older age group going to Dansville, Cleveland,
Atlanta and many other cities transporting drugs and guns. The seriousness of committing
crimes across state lines was unknown to me. I would be away from home for weeks. I gave my
mother money to stay out late or away from home. This money paid to allowed me to do
whatever I decided. I bought a license run the streets at all hours. So many young people in
America are living the life I did. Their parents are on drugs and do not care. Having a child as
a teenager most often cause the parent to not care so much about their child. This teenager is also
a child trying to enjoy life, so the parent is a baby trying to raise a baby.
This is the containment of blackness, Martin wrote about—the otherness in what black
and brown culture has turned into. bell hooks spoke about this also “Encounters with otherness
are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the
combination of pleasure and danger.” (370) The lifestyle of being in the streets running with
these older men and getting the respect was intoxicating. I felt as if I was an adult and did things
before my time.
I was the boy Coates wrote about “with the long head and small eyes aiming without a
purpose and destroying a body”. My friends really didn’t care about me because they never asked
or told me to go to school. No one questioned me about my hanging out with grown men instead
of my peers. My mother did not stop me from playing the game “Pushing the Rocks”. All of this
was a false love that did not make sense. It didn’t make sense until I was in my twenties and
going through a life crisis of social and mental destruction. Why else would that boy with the
long head and small eyes untucked, tucked, then untucked once more before killing another? It’s
the same reason why the older guys had me transporting illegal drugs across state lines. They
didn’t care about me and knew I feared them. Fear is the common denominator in this equation
of blackness. To solve this fear problem, we must learn to not fear the wild or unknown. They
were in fear of getting caught where I didn’t realize the consequences of what I was doing. I
know I had a mind of my own, but I held the belief of why should I care if nobody else did. Yes,
I had my grandmother support and care. She raised me but she wasn’t around to slow me down.
My mother and father were not strong enough to pull me up out of my madness. I had to find
my own way in this world.
Martin talked about how she hosted a party for a writer Maggie Nelson and that she read
from something she was writing about on freedom:
We hardly even know ourselves in our ongoing encounter with the other, producing on
the one hand what Du Bois calls double-consciousness, and on the other, for black people
in 2017, a radically distorted version of black selfhood. What else is possible given the
prolific, penetrating, and ongoing looking at oneself through the eyes of another? (4)
Consciously or not we as black and brown people subject ourselves to conform to our way of life
according to environment we live. We have a way of trying to impress each other in the wrong
way except in a positive way.
There was a young man who was not from the neighborhood. I grew up around him
because he came around every day from another area. He sold drugs and did everything along
with the other hustlers and gangsters to fit in. You could tell that he wasn’t about the fast money
life by his reaction to normal occurring things like hearing gunshots. He ran when he heard
gunshots, most people remain still and look in the direction of the boom boom sound. I
eventually discovered that he was a good guy with stability. His mother was a surgeon and his
father a civil attorney with partnership in a Manhattan law firm. This man played with his life
to live out something he wasn’t. He found a way to quit by telling on his friends when they got
busted for trafficking drugs across state lines.
This is another element where people don’t understand another person situation.
This
situation is a pressure that’s stronger than a boa constrictor. When you are in the dangerous street
playing a negative role, you must be prepared for the negative consequences. Nelson Mandela’s
above quote says to me that the decisions we make today determines where we will be
tomorrow. His quote is so powerful because when faced with adversity, you have to make
a choice that can be good or bad. This choice will be something you have to live with at the
end of your day.
Today I understand what it means to be a product of your environment which I don’t like
the term personally. I believe if you make a choice you need to stick to that choice, but
being around your peers the same people that go through the same struggle you do has a way
of bringing you in the gutter with them. When I use to do the youth assistance program
(Y.A.P) I always tell the kids, “I understand nobody wants to be left behind, but strive to be
different and be a kid for as long as you can before it’s to late!” My reasoning is simple, it is
easy to get in trouble and do the wrong things, but the hardest thing to do in life is the right
thing. It took me to pay one of the three ultimate price’s and spend twenty-six years of my
forty-two years on this earth in prison to find my way out of this life. I don’t want my
children to follow on the same road, because it’s nothing productive. I want to have my
freedom back, give to my kids, nieces and nephews. This is something I didn’t have a chance
to do. To do everything right in life instead of being idolized as a hustler, thug or gangster.
Those titles are not for living a decent life and for anyone to be a part of.
Works Cited :
Coates, Ta-Nahisi. “Letter to My Son.” The Atlantic. July 4, 2015.
hooks, bell. “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance.” Black Looks: Race and Representation.
Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Invictus. Dir. Clint Eastwood. December (2009). Tablet.
Martin, Dawn Lundy. “When A Person Goes Missing.” N+1. 30 (WINTER 2018).