Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

As our mothers talked, Tank came walking up with a chocolate ice-cream bar that was dripping down his hand. He bit chunks out of it and chewed them up like a regular meal. In seconds the ice-cream was gone and Tank was licking the remaining chocolate from his pudgy fingers. It struck me then how much he looked like any other fat kid and not the fearsome bully who was terrorizing the whole school. Huey didn’t look like a kid at all though. He looked like the leading man in a romantic movie, but miniaturized.

It was weird, but, watching the two of them standing there huddled around their mother, I found myself wanting to know more about them. I wanted to be their friend. I saw how they stared at my Mom, who I knew was a stunning beauty, and I knew how I could keep our moms from fighting and maybe even establish a friendship with the two thugs. I ran outside to stand by my mother’s side.

“…I don’t care what you say my kid did. It was your kid who—”

“It was my fault.” I mumbled through my locked jaws, interrupting the two women whose tempers were just beginning to rise.

“What did you say?” my mom asked, as if unable to believe what she was hearing. It was hard for me to speak with my jaws wired shut and she was obviously hoping that she had misinterpreted my muffled mumbling.

“I started it!” I yelled and this time there was no mistaking what I had said. “I wanted to see if they were as tough as everyone was saying they were and they are. Nice kick man. That shit still hurts. You’ll have to show me how to do that sometime. I don’t want to fight them no more, but after Huey broke my jaw I couldn’t go out lookin’ like no punk. So I had to do what I had to do, you know, to maintain my rep. I didn’t really mean to hurt him.”

Everyone was amazed. Even though they could barely hear most of what I was saying, I could tell they had heard enough. Huey’s mom didn’t know what to say and the two boys looked dumbfounded. My mom was about to say something when I cut her off by stepping right up to Huey and holding out my hand.

“My fault, man. We friends now or what?”

Huey stared at my hand like something that had floated up from the bottom of a toilet. His face went from amazement to disgust then to rage and then back to wonder.

“Are you fucking kidding me, man?”

“Go ahead and shake his hand, boy! Black folks ain’t got no business fighting each other. I done told you that time and again. Now you two make up!”

Huey looked at his mother as if he was about to argue the point, but then he decided it wasn’t worth the effort. He stepped forward and shook my hand, giving me a look to let me know that if this was some kind of trick then I was as good as dead. I smiled as big as I could with my wired jaw and pumped his fist. He returned the smile with a nervous confused version that was full of unanswered questions. Savoring this minor victory, I stepped up to Tank and held out my hand. To my surprise he took my hand into his huge paw with no reservations and shook it enthusiastically, a broad grin breaking open across his face.

“Looks like I owe you an apology, Mrs. Turner.” My mother whispered bashfully.

“I’m sure there’s more to this story than either of us will ever know. No apologies needed. And call me Charlotte.”

“Then at least let me have the three of you over for supper?”

“Only if you can tell me where to find some weed in this neighborhood? I’ve only been here a couple of weeks and I don’t know nobody yet.”

“I got some shit you should try then. If you like it then I’ll tell you where you can get hooked up. Come on in.”

As unlikely as it would have seemed, a day after hospitalizing each other, Charlotte Turner and her two warrior sons became my new best friends. Our mothers soon became interchangeable. So much so that when we brought home a bad report card we were just as likely to get punished by one as the other and sometimes by both. Even though I was tall and skinny, my appetite was every bit as ravenous as Tank’s and sometimes we would eat dinner at his house and then run over to my house and have dinner again.

The three of us became the terrors of our school and neighborhood. We were like our own little gang and used to extort the kids at school for their money, sneakers, jewelry, jackets, anything we wanted and they had.

I found out why Huey looked so different from his brother too. Huey and Tank had different fathers. Tank’s dad was another victim of the war in Vietnam. He had come back from ’Nam a hopeless heroin addict who discovered, like so many others, that where the drug had been cheap and plentiful during the war, stateside it was worth more than lives. He fathered Tank just months before getting himself killed in a convenience store hold-up.

Huey never knew his Dad and his mother only knew him for a few painful hours.

Back in 1985, Charlotte Turner was snatched off the corner and whisked away in a patrol car for no apparent reason other than being a Black woman selling Black Panther newspapers at a time when militant black organizations were no longer in vogue. There were two cops in the car that day. “I Spy” cops. One white and one black.

The black cop was in the driver’s seat when they pulled the police cruiser alongside her. Charlotte stood on the corner wearing a black beret over her afro, a black leather coat and bellbottomed jeans.

“What are you supposed to be? Public Enemy or something? You trying to fight the power?”

“Fuck you pig!”

“Fuck me? No, bitch. Fuck you!”

The black cop leapt out of the car and smacked the newspapers out of her hand. The white cop slipped up behind her and jerked her arms behind her back. Charlotte fought them when they tried to handcuff her.

“What am I being arrested for? If I’m under arrest then read me my rights. I demand to know why I’m being arrested!”

“Bitch, you ain’t got no rights! Now are you going to resist?”

They began punching her and then cracking her across the thighs and buttocks with their nightsticks until her protests subsided. They nearly broke her arm getting the handcuffs on, twisting it behind her back and wedging a nightstick between her shoulder and elbow then wrenching up on it until she cried out. When she screamed and kicked the white officer pulled the club out from behind her and cracked her across the face with it. Her left eye still droops from that blow.

Once cuffed, he slid her limp bleeding body further into the vehicle and slid in beside her. He slammed the door and ordered the Black cop to drive off. Instead of driving to the police station they drove down to the train station at the end of Tulpehocken Street and took turns raping her while the other held her down.

Charlotte remembers looking up while the white cop was grunting and groaning inside her, poisoning her womb with his vile seed, and seeing the other cop, who looked like he could have been a relative, holding her arms over her head and urging the white cop on to a faster climax so that he could have his turn. When both of them had spent themselves inside of her, they raped her again, with their nightsticks. They then threw her exhausted body onto the railroad tracks assuming she wouldn’t have the strength to drag herself to safety before the train came to finish the job they had begun. But Charlotte had the strength and she passed that strength on to the son they’d planted in her belly, Huey, the son of her rapist, who she named after Huey Newton the Supreme Servant of the Black Panther Party who he remarkably resembled. She also passed on her newfound passion for the martial arts and her hatred of anything white. When I talked to her about what Elijah Muhammed said in his book about the White man being the devil she was quick to agree. I was smart enough to know that her opinion was biased though.