Five Years Ago


Jaleel Evans was the last one to come downstairs to the final breakfast the Evans family would ever eat at the 6035 S. Eberhart address. Already DeShawn and Laneka had turned up their bowls, sipping the last drops of cereal-sweetened milk, before placing the bowls in the sink one final time. Regina, Danny and Danny’s best friend Tiny were eating bacon and scrambled eggs. Everyone ate in silence; the only noise was the muted scraping of plastic forks on plastic plates. “Mama,” DeShawn almost shouted into the relative silence, “can we have some bacon?”
Regina quickly surveyed the bacon draining on the paper towel on the counter, “Two strips apiece, leave some for Jaleel.”
The each child walked up to the counter and took two strips of bacon and sat back at the table to eat them. Jaleel walked over behind them and took a strip of bacon as well, he stood over the sink eating it, “Ma, “he started between bites of bacon, “you gonna fix me some eggs?”
“You shoulda had your ass down here when I was fixing breakfast, I called your ass ten times. Now you can fix your own damn eggs.” Regina said, without looking up from her plate.
“Dag Ma, its just some eggs.” Jaleel said reaching for another strip of bacon.
“Well it since you know all the ingredients, it oughta be easy for you from there. Damn, don’t you see me eating? I fixed everyone in here breakfast and you come down here all late and shit and wanting me to stop eating my breakfast to fix yours. Nigga please. You better fix your own damned eggs and you better hurry, we gotta get all this shit on the truck.” Regina said.
She rolled her eyes at Danny; there was no reason to take the shit from here to the new place. It was supposed to be about getting a new start, but they were dragging all this old shit with them, it did not make any sense. The money was there to buy new furniture and clothes, but Danny decided that they would not make buy any new things immediately. At least that is how he put it.
Danny ignored Regina. He ate until he was finished, then he got up, dropped his plate into the garbage, put it in the sink and left the room. He walked through the front room and onto the porch. “Where the fuck is Reginald with the damned truck?” he wondered aloud.
Danny stood out on the porch looking for Reginald to bring the truck down the street any minute now. He pulled a pack of Newports out of his jacket pocket, shook one loose from the pack and lit it up. He laughed to himself to thinking of Reggie and his gay assed friends doing some heavy lifting. He imagined they would be like a bunch of little girls whining about how they broke a nail or something.
It seemed warm for a December morning, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the temperature was what it was supposed to be and everything else was out of order. It had been a long, draining, rollercoaster of a year. In August, not a week after his mother, Dorothy, died in her sleep, his cousin Anthony killed what was officially known as ten, but Danny knew it was eleven, people before being shot to death by the police in the middle of State Street downtown, at the beginning of rush hour. It was on the news for days on end.
There had been reporters all over the block interviewing everybody who they thought might even know Anthony’s name. Then there was the remembering of the victims, 8 office workers in Woolworth’s and two police officers. No one on the news remembered Sweets’ black ass, but there was no surprise in that at all. But there were surprises; Danny was shocked to find Anthony in a suit when he went to officially ID what was left of Anthony. Not only was he in a suit, but also he had shaved his face and cut his hair. If it weren’t for the 37 bullet holes the police put in him, Danny could see how someone would have mistaken him for a businessman.
He was killed while impersonating a businessman, at least that is the way the news made it seem. From where Danny saw it, he was not impersonating anyone, he’d taken care of business and he had been a man about it. Danny could remember somewhere in all of Anthony’s rants, that he talked about how the TV news was a tool to make people think the worst they could about black people. They would never understand what he did or why he did it, but they did not need to, they were free to speculate wildly and pass on their half-assed ideas as facts to their audiences. They had been doing it for years and they were good at it.
They’d found Sweets dead ass over on the West Side in the back yard of some abandoned building. They wrote it off quick as drug or gang related even though Anthony killed him only hours before he’d went downtown and massacred those people in the office of the Woolworth’s. The news people called it a massacre, like he had invaded a fort or slaughtered a village full of women and children. For years they will remember it as the Woolworth Massacre, because for them that was all it was.
Danny thought about it, there really was no holiday like what it was that Anthony did for them, no holiday at all. If there had been, something like a Slavery Liberation Day, then that would have been close, because he had liberated them. Even after he did it, they were not going to let them go peacefully. The insurance company fought with all kinds of legal bullshit. More than once Reginald had to step into the negotiations because, Danny thought it was time to commence fucking someone up, then all that bullshitting would stop for sure.
That was what they were always afraid of, that is why they would make him come to their offices downtown to talk to them, the people from the insurance company only came to the house one time. And they left in a hurry. Even when he would go to the offices downtown there was always some big assed nigga in his security/doorman get up right outside the office door. That whole episode was a trip, it was some shit that one of Reginald’s gay friends did that got them to moving that paperwork. Reginald seemed to have friends every damned where, all of them working in offices, but they knew how to get shit done, they knew the right people to get shit to. Whenever it came to handling shit that involved offices and paper shit, Danny realized it was best to involve Reginald early in the game. Reginald was a lot more used to dealing with white people and people who wanted to be white, and he had that gay network shit working for him.
In the kitchen, Regina was washing the last of the breakfast dishes, for what she hoped, was the last time. She really wanted to break them and set them on fire in the back yard, so that she would never have to see them again. She now regretted agreeing to do anything with Danny. He decided that none of them could do anything with the money unless all of them agreed to it. It seemed like it made so much sense at the time. But when she wanted to get new furniture and new dishes, Danny would not agree and so they didn’t.
Why couldn’t they move in to the new place and come into the New Year with some damned new furniture instead of this old raggedy shit that had been around since she as a teenager. It did not even make any sense to pack this shit up and move it. Danny was always talking that shit about how a dumbass and his money hardly got to know each other, especially when a dumbass was a nigga. Danny was watching the money like a hawk, at least he did get the kids some new clothes for school, but after that he shut it down.
Regina rinsed the last plastic plate and left it in the drainer. Since Reginald had not shown up with the truck, it could wait to dry. She looked at Jaleel, who was sitting at the table, hunched over his plate of bacon and eggs. He had to have scrambled 4 eggs this morning, along with three pieces of bacon. He ate like there was no tomorrow and he looked like he was suffering from starvation. That shit did not make any sense; he could eat his way through a farm and still be skinny as a rail. She was sure that if the people from DCFS would see him, they would have her arrested for not feeding him. “What time did you get in the house last night?” She asked him.
“It was about ten, maybe ten-thirty.” He said between chomps and gobbles.
“You a damned ten to ten-thirty lie.” She shot back at him, “I was sitting in the front room until at least midnight and your ass was not in this house before then. You better not be trying that shit in the new house, cause I ain’t standing for it. You are going to go take your skinny black ass to school every damned day and you will come in the house at a reasonable damned time. Your ass is in high school now; you ain’t got time for all that bullshit. You can fuck around and get your ass kicked out of school if you want to, but you will not be staying with me, laying around the house and running the damned streets all the time. I ain’t the one.”
Jaleel sat at the table barely listening to his mother. “You hear me nigga?” She shouted at him.
“Yeah, Ma, I heard you.” He said, his face hovering inches over the plate of bacon and eggs.
Regina wanted to hit him; she wanted to knock the shit out of him. She wanted to beat his ass until he could see he was getting on the fast track to jail, just like his goddamed Daddy did. She was frustrated because she knew, she could holler at him until they both had turned colors, but it would not amount to shit. He was doing what he wanted to do, and she wanted to beat him until he did what she wanted him to do.
She wanted him to want a better life. Not that better life he thought about with the cars and stupid women following him around everywhere. No big rolls of money where dollar bills were rolled up in tens and twenties, that was all fake assed bullshit. She did not even know how he came to wanting shit like that, but she knew that is what he wanted. This shit could not have been her fault, with his goddamned daddy in prison his whole life and Danny’s dumbass dealing drugs. Jaleel did not have any role models to look up to, not one. All the men he knew, with the exception of Reginald had been in the justice system on way or the other. She definitely did not want him to be like Reginald’s gay ass, that was for sure.
Hopefully when she got him out of this damned neighborhood, he would see better people and he would want to change. She silently thanked God that they had already spent the last night in this house.
Before her mother and her cousin Anthony died, Regina knew their situation was hopeless. Now here was a little hope for them but when it came to Jaleel, it did not seem like this little would be enough. He would be going to the same school, but at least he would not have to come over here. He went to a high school on 55th and Lowe. They would be living on West 79th Street; there was no reason for him to ever come east of the Dan Ryan highway.
Maybe keeping him from the majority of his little nigga friends would be the best thing for him. Already he’d been in fights at school. The last one because of the way someone was ‘looking’ at him. She remembered, she did hit him then. She hit him a few times. She wanted to know how the hell someone could ‘look’ at him to make him start a fight. She’d hit him a few times, and it did not faze him at all. Then she hit him with the broomstick, but that did not bother him for long. She knew there were things she could hit him with that would make him cry, but crying was not what this shit was about.
Maybe now that they were leaving and Danny was not going to be selling drugs anymore, maybe he could get Jaleel out of that ghetto, bullshit mentality that he was taking on. She shook her head; that was not something that was going to happen anytime soon. Danny had not gotten his own ass out of that ghetto assed mentality. That nigga was smoking weed like forty going north. He was not putting rock in it, at least not that she could tell, but that nigga was firing up joints in the basement like it wasn’t shit.
He still had big assed 40s two or three times a day it seemed, so he needed to clean up his own act, before he could help Jaleel do anything. Danny was supposed to be starting school in January, but here it was he was not preparing himself in anyway. They had all this shit riding on him and she knew he was going to fuck it up somehow and there was not a damned she could do about it. At least that nigga can’t get all the damned money to smoke his way through.
Jaleel got up from the table, scraped his plate into the garbage can and put his plate in the sink. “Nigga you better wash that shit, dry it and put it in the damn box too.” Regina said, handing him the dishrag while she walked out of the kitchen.
She walked to the front porch where Danny was standing smoking a cigarette. “Reginald ain’t got his ass here yet?” She asked, standing in the doorway.
“Naw, that nigga probably can’t drive the damn truck.” Danny said.
Regina turned around and went back into the house. The kids were sitting in the front room watching that little color TV of Danny’s. She walked up the stairs, listening to the familiar creak of each step, glad that she would not be hearing them too many more times.
She looked in the kids room, the shush of her house shoes echoed in the empty room. DeShawn and Laneka had spent the night on mattresses in the living room, they thought it would be fun, like camping out or something.
There was a time when this had been Regina’s room, but that had been so long ago. Her having a room to herself came to an abrupt end when Jaleel was born. She stood in the middle of the floor remembering the way the room had been arranged, the crib across the room from her bed. She always thought that her mother did that on purpose just so she would have to get up in the night and walk across the room when the baby cried. It never occurred to her to move the crib closer to the bed, instead she wound up having the baby sleep with her most of the time. Something she later came to regret.
Jaleel had gone from being ‘the baby’ to hardheaded assed nigga in, what felt like, no time flat. People always would tell her that the time with children flew right by, but damn, there was no way to ever see it coming. It moved through slow, but all of a sudden it was gone, and it was always gone way too fast. Even worse, there was no way to go back and fix the things that she now knew needed fixing. Now always felt like it was way too late to fix anything.
She walked out of ‘the kids’ room into what had at one time been ‘the boys room’, and then it became ‘Reginald’s room’ or ‘Anthony’s room’. They both stayed in the room at the same time, but it never seemed that way. When Danny left to join the Army, Anthony must have gone to jail for the first or second time right around then. Then by the time Anthony got out of jail, Reginald was running the streets and going to every church function imaginable. There were a few times when it was very apparent that they were in the room together, it was usually when Anthony was going off on Reginald. Anthony must have hated the church as much as Reginald loved it, because they were as far apart as they could be on the matter. Regina never really knew why Anthony hated the church as much as he did. He had been talking all that nonsense about politics n’shit ever since he was a little boy.
Well he would not be talking about it anymore, not where he was. Well maybe that was all they talked about where he was, that would sure have been Heaven for him. If he were in his idea of hell, he would be sitting in church services for eternity. Regina smiled thinking of Anthony in a suit and tie sitting on a pew with a frown on his face, tortured by some screaming preacher’s eternal sermon. It was hard for her to decide whether or not Anthony should be in Heaven or Hell.
It was an easy decision about Laneka’s father, he would be in Hell, no questions asked. But what Anthony did made it hard for her to just think that he would go to Hell. Yes he did kill those white people downtown, even though he did not know them from Adam, but he got his family out of that house, out of that neighborhood, hopefully out of the fucked up, go-nowhere lives they were living. Doing that, he sacrificed his life. That had to be worth something to God. While it was probably true, that he did it in the worse way possible, killing people who may have been innocent, sacrificing your life for your family had to mean something.
She walked across the room and opened the closet door to look inside. It was empty except for dust and a small pile of dirt in the corner. They had been through the rooms in the house so much; she knew there would be nothing left. Along the edge of the door frame on either side were notches in the wood. She lightly traced her finger over them and smiled, they were from the great height race between Anthony and Danny. Between the ages of eight and eleven, they could not decide which of them would be taller, so every month they would have Regina and Reginald notch the wood for them. Regina would always notch Anthony’s side and Reginald would notch Danny’s.
She and Reginald were two years old when Anthony came to live with them, so as far as she was concerned, he had been in their home all of her life. Even though she always referred to him as her cousin, he was as much her brother as Danny or Reginald was. She was already used to not seeing him for long periods of time, so him not being around was easy to get used to. But the fact that he was dead was a separate issue all together.
She closed the closet door and left the room. She walked past her room into Dorothy’s room. The bed was intact; but they decided that they were not going to take it. But she was glad that Danny, Tiny and Jaleel managed to get her Grandmother’s dresser out of the room. She wanted to make sure she got it, it was something she’s always liked. Before her Grandmother had gotten sick, it was like that dresser was full of magic.
Her Grandmother’s neatly folded pastel clothes set in those dark wood drawers. There were those little drawers in the middle where her Grandmother kept her jewelry. It was probably all fake shit; no matter, it was all gone now. But when she was a little girl, she played in her Grandmother’s jewelry and it made her feel like a princess. Strings of pearls, rings with big blue and yellow stones on them, gold and silver bracelets, it had to be fake because Grandma let her play with it all the time. They would play dress-up while her mother was away at work or out shopping, but never when her mother was in the house.
Then Grandma got sick, which was when the world started to fall apart. Late one night, an ambulance came and took her away. She came back months a much different person. It was like she got in that bed and never got out again. There was no more playing dress up, there was only “Be quiet, Grandma needs to rest.”
They were quiet for nine months and Grandma never got any better. She went back into the hospital and never came home. Maybe it all was just part of growing up, maybe every nine year old is pushed into a world that they do not want to be part of. When Grandma died, she took the princess with her, the prince, the fairy godmothers, Santa Clause, and all the magic, a wide-eyed child in her Grandmother’s treasure chest, could hold. Maybe that is just the way it was and after that there was nothing to do but grow up.

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