John Ames - Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 128, No. 5. Whole No. 783, November 2006

The next day, Monday, a young girl who’d been on that porch came to him for pastoral counseling. She knew who did it, she said, she’d gone to high school with those boys, and one of her cousins was among the wounded. But she had a baby and the baby’s father had been killed in a previous shooting, and even though she knew the right thing to do, she didn’t think she could come forward. Was there some way he could intervene for her? Maybe tell the po-lice, but withhold her name?

Damned if he knew what to tell her, except that he could intervene and he would. But he didn’t add that that wasn’t going to get the shooters convicted, that the police were going to need her testimony. Confronted with a real person with a real problem, that was just something he couldn’t bring himself to do. So what did he believe, he asked himself? Was he just an old bag of wind when it came down to it?

He talked to Maureen about it and then he talked to God. And he realized that what he really thought was, things were so rotten in Denmark — meaning Pigeon Town — that he didn’t really know where to start. Because this was all about the drug culture getting out of hand, so out of hand it had spawned the hip-hop culture, which told innocent kids that the thuggin’ life was the cool life, the good life. That differentiating yourself from white people was the primary virtue of the ghetto, even if it meant you couldn’t get a job because you couldn’t speak good English and had no education and wore jeans so baggy you looked like a clown. In fact, that you didn’t need a job because selling drugs was the “black” thing to do.

But who in Pigeon Town was going to buy that? Who under fifty, anyhow? Saying something like that would make him an object of ridicule, a black man pandering. That was the thug’s-eye view, and it was so pervasive no one dared disagree. Only thing to do, he decided, was to tackle the problem from the bottom up. Start with the kids. He’d announce an outreach program he should have started long ago. He’d distance himself — for the moment — from pleading for cooperative witnesses; he’d focus on the only people in the neighborhood whose minds were still supple. Because Bill Cosby was right about the way kids were brought up these days, the twisted things they believed. Baggy pants and bad grammar didn’t make you a man or anything at all except a clown. He liked that line. He put it in his next sermon, and it went over. Everything he had to say was just dandy with the over-fifty crowd.

It’s gotten to the point, he said, that if you’re going to teach English in a black neighborhood, you’d better teach it as a second language. And I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, he wound up, we’re going to do exactly that! Ain’ no kid in this hood can get a job long as he talk like a thug. He paused for everyone to get the joke and then he said, Hey, don’t go away — y’all know what I meant.

That got him a laugh.

First thing he was going to do, he said, was start a class in standard English, right in the church, as an after-school program. And not only that, he was going to teach the class himself.

That actually got him applause.

But on Wednesday, the day of the first class, exactly one student showed up, his own seven-year-old grandson, Darnell, wearing baggy thug pants and a sullen face. “Mama said I had to bring him,” his daughter D’Ruth said. “So here he is. Just don’t tell his daddy, you mind? Marcellus finds out, he’ll kill me.” She meant her husband, the reverend’s worthless son-in-law.

“Why?” the reverend asked.

“You know why, Daddy. It’s not his scene.”

“You telling me he’s got some problem with educating his son?”

D’Ruth answered with a shrug.

The reverend stifled the urge to ask her why she’d married him, anyhow, and turned to Darnell, who wasted no time in asking, “Why I gotta do this?”

“You mean, ‘Why do I have to do this?’, don’t you?”

Darnell looked at him suspiciously. “Whassup wi’ dat?”

It took the reverend a moment to realize the boy wasn’t smarting off, he really didn’t know. So there was hope here. Ignorance beat attitude by a mile in his book. He ended up spending a reasonably pleasant hour with his grandson, and wished he’d thought of this before. Maybe it wouldn’t keep the kid off the streets, but it was bringing the two of them closer, anyhow.

So he preached about that on Sunday: the rewards of working with your kids, of helping them with their homework. All the gray heads nodded, but except for D’Ruth and Darnell, gray heads were all there were. This was going nowhere.

That Tuesday there were two more shootings, which meant another funeral at his church. This time, the reverend noticed, the Dead Men’s Shirts announced the victim’s dates of birth and death with the labels “Dude-rise” and “Dude-set.” This kid, Le’devin Miner, was also going to be “Thuggin’ Eternally,” if the shirts were to be believed.

The reverend didn’t keep his mouth shut this time. He told the story of his older son, Thomas. There used to be a famous drug dealer lived in these parts, named Rafael Conway, y’all remember Rafael? When my boy Thomas was fourteen years old, he just had to have a certain pair of shoes. What’s so important about shoes? I ask you. How’d a thing like sneakers get to be a symbol of how rich and important you are? Well, my boy Thomas wanted a pair of forty-dollar Dr. J sneakers and we were too poor to buy ‘em for him.

So Thomas asked a kid he knew worked for Rafael if he needed a little help selling pot. The kid said he’d get back to him, and the very next day, who you think came to school to pick up Thomas? In a big ol’ purple Cadillac. Rafael Conway himself, that’s who. And Rafael said to my boy, “Thomas Thompson, I catch you selling drugs or even talkin’ about selling drugs, I’m gon’ put a whippin’ on you.” Everyone under thirty-five gasped. No one expected that.

Rafael Conway said, “You play football, don’t you, Thomas? I’m gonna give you ten dollars for every sack you make this season.”

So Thomas says, “Why you do dat?” Now if he’d been speaking proper English, he’d have said, “Why would you do that?”, but Thomas was just like all of y’all, thought it made him more of a man to talk like he’d never been to school a day in his life. So he said, “Why you do dat?”, just like he didn’t have a day’s worth of education, and you know what Rafael Conway says?

He says, “Listen, man, you’ve got a way out of here, and that’s sports. Me, I’m stuck. Either I’m going to die before I’m forty or I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail.” And then he popped open his trunk and handed Thomas a brand-new pair of Dr. J’s.

And his prophecy proved true. Five years later, he was gunned down in the courtyard at the Iberville. That was the year my boy Thomas was a freshman at Dillard.

Now the point of all this is: That’s the story not from me, not from your mama, not even from God. That’s the story straight from the horse’s mouth. From the biggest drug dealer this town has ever known. And the story is this: If you’ve got a way out, you take it; if you haven’t, you make one for yourself. I wish — He paused here, looking very sorrowful — I just wish I’d’ve been able to tell Le’devin Miner that story. Maybe we wouldn’t all be here today.

Then he got even more sorrowful before he said, “Let us pray.”

Maureen, who’d cried while he was telling the story, congratulated him later on having the courage, but D’Ruth just looked sad at him, and Marcellus looked like he’d like to hit him with a baseball bat. Other than Maureen, nobody mentioned his sermon, except for young Junior Heavey, who came up to him (wearing pants so baggy he had to hold them up) and thanked him for it. “By the way,” Junior said afterward, “I think I remember Thomas. How’s he doin’ now?”