Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Shut everybody out.

Shut everybody down.

Just go.

But I still smell him. I smell him now.

— Nurse? Nurse?

A Brief History of Seven Killings

— A Crack House, A Massacre and the Making of a Crime Dynasty

Part 3.

By Alexander Pierce

Monifah Thibodeaux meant it this time. Her mother knew she meant it because there was something final in her voice. Except she had heard that final before, and such is the tricky dance of somebody like Monifah, that final is fluid, final means a different thing each week and just when you think a person could not sink any lower, they fall to new depths that a poor mother could never have dreamed of. But this “meant it” somehow felt different from the others even if the stakes didn’t seem all that different. She was going to kick her habit tomorrow.

She said so to her mother, Angelina Jenkins. She repeated it to her best friend Carla, who had cut her off three years ago when she found Monifah in her bathroom with a needle stuck between her toes. She even told her ex-boyfriend Larry, who wanted to marry her once, and went as far as picking out a ring at Zales to surprise her. It was as if she had just returned from a twelve-step program and was on a mission to repair the damage done to loved ones hurt.

Monifah was going to kick tomorrow. But kick meant overcoming her self-devouring drug habit and turning back from being what her own mother called a crack ho. And with Monifah tomorrow was always a day away. She was going to kick tomorrow only two months ago. And five months before that. Seven months before that one. Sixteen months before that. But this time, tomorrow, was August 15, 1985.

August 14, 1985, Monifah had been straight for almost a week. A high school dropout from Stuyvesant and pregnant at seventeen, she would have been a cliché’s idea of a ghetto cliché had she not complicated her own narrative so much. Dropping out of school after scoring 1900 on her SATs and staying clean for most of her pregnancy. Growing up shuffling between her mother’s apartment in Puerto Rican Bushwick and her family in Bed-Stuy and the Bronx, she was, according to her sister, hell-bent on escaping the life that fate had all but drawn up in lines with just numbers left to color.

— With just numbers left to colour? You did feel really cute when you write that, don’t?

— Boss, what him mean by straight? Him mean the gal was a fucking sodomite too?

— Ren-Dog, you think any woman not fucking you is a sodomite. One: the proper term is lesbian and two: straight here mean she leggo the coke. So my girl stop licking the crack pipe for a week.

— Zeen.

— What me want to know though, in part one you say is eleven people get kill. So how come you only write ’bout seven?

I don’t know if I should answer. Five minutes ago I told them I needed to pee and the Eubie dude said, Me not stopping you. I got up and Ren-Dog punched me square in the face and loosened my left molar. Before that, Pig Tails kicked me on the floor. Before that, Eubie told Ren-Dog to deal with me and he grabbed my shirt and ripped it off. Then somebody behind me hit me in the head and my knees hit the floor. Can’t remember when they pulled my pants off or my boots. They dragged me upstairs by my hands, making my head bump into each step, and they were laughing or shouting or screaming, I don’t know. Ren-Dog grabbed me by the neck and we’re in my bathroom and somebody laughed again and he pushed me and I tripped backways and landed in the tub and I tried to get up but slipped and he’s so fucking strong. He grabbed me by the neck again and I punched and scratched and slapped and tore at him, and somebody else just laughed and shoved me right underneath the tap and turned it on full blast. Water hit my forehead and eyes and I tried to remember not to breathe, but water got in my nose anyway and my mouth and every time I tried to scream my mouth would fill up. I felt a boot pinning my chest down and couldn’t move my hand and the water was just blasting and punching and slapping my lips and punching my teeth and digging into my eye and in my nose and I started to choke and cough and cry and he still held me by the neck and that’s all I remember. I came to on the chair wet and in my brief and choking. Eubie threw The New Yorker at me and told me to read.

— I… I really need to pee. I really need…

They look at me and laugh.

— Please. Please. I need to use the bathroom.

— You just come from the bathroom, little boy.

They all laugh.

— Please. I need to—

— So piss, fool.

I’m on the stool and I’m a fucking man, I want to say I’m a fucking man and you can’t treat people like this and I… I want to sleep so bad and I want to stand up and I want to hold it, just to show them I can do something, but I can’t do so many things, I can’t even remember to breathe deep, and my eyes burn and the front of my brief gets wet and yellow.

— Boss, him really a piss up himself?

— What, him be six-year-old? Nasty r’ass.

— Guess him couldn’t hold it. Detention for this little boy.

They laugh. All of them but Eubie. I have to rub my eyes every few minutes because they get blurry. And I read this thing slow, because once I get to the end of the article they’re going to kill me. I can smell myself and feel my toes in my piss.

— Couldn’t find any info on the other four. Besides, seven is a good round number.

— Baby need a nappy, Ren-Dog says.

— Continue, Eubie says.

He’s walking to me again and I push back so hard I fall over. He pulls me up and I’m crying again and he says, Collect yourself, boy.

— Now continue.

— But… but… but… but then, but then, but then came a—

— Brethren, from the last sentence. You think we still remember it?

— I’m sor… I’m sorry.

— Is alright. Take control of yourself. We not going nowhere.

— She was… she was, according to her sister, hell-bent on escaping the life that fate had all but drawn up with just numbers left to color. But then came a boy.

“There’s always some f — boy,” her sister says. At Shelly’s Diner in Flatbush she has already cried twice in between quiet sips of her ice cream soda. Short, chubby and—

— Why you have to describe her so ghetto?

— Huh? I don’t unders—

— Short, chubby, and I remember the rest, “dark with hair that looked like the extensions were just removed.” What the fuck, white boy, you think she going like to read that?

— It’s what—

— It’s what, what?

He was right behind me and I was trying not to shake. My face hurt every single time I opened my mouth.

— How you like if me write “Alexander Pierce step out of the bathroom having shaked the piss from his one-inch penis.”

— You… you telling me how to write?

— I see the smartass Alexander Pierce finally coming back. I’m telling you I don’t know shit about your fucking penis. And you don’t know nothing about black woman hair.

His hand is on my neck. He just grasped it. Not soft as I can feel his calluses rub against me, but not firm either and I just don’t know. Then he squeezes slight.

— You understand me yet? I want you to understand I not playing. Me is the man who will cut your head off and ship it to your mother. And I not saying that for dramatic effect. You understand me?

— Yes.

— Say it.

— Say it?

— Say I understand you.

— I understand you.

— Good. Continue.

I cough for one minute.

— Ex… extensions were just removed. “Money-Luv was just about to get out, you hear me? She look at Bushwick and girl was like, see yah. You could just feel it, you know what I’m saying? I mean, she was just wicked smart—”