Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

“Fuck that old tired pussy! Over-sexed hooker gets too much dick as it is. Shit, don’t you know you gotta make them miss it sometimes? That bitch ain’t missed a day of dick since she was twelve. She done got spoiled on it.”

“Fuck your little yellar ass, nigga. You wish you could get some of this pussy.” Yolanda yelled from behind me.

“If that nigga don’t get da fuck down here I might just come up there and break your big black ass off with some of this.” It was kind of funny to see Huey clowning with Yolanda. It was a mood you didn’t see from Huey everyday. He was usually so serious and intense. I was enjoying their little verbal sparring match.

“You ain’t gonna do nuthin’ with that little yaller dick of yours.”

“Hooker, I’ll slap you in your fat-ass mouth with this yaller dick!”

“Little yaller dick, nigga. Little yaller dick.”

I came out the front door and shook Huey’s hand.

“Man, why that bitch of yours always got to have the last word on everything?”

“Why you always got to be antagonizing her?”

We started walking off down the street before Huey even told me where we were going or what he wanted.

“I’m just fuckin’ with the bitch. Besides, I hate how that hooker always tryin’ to play mommy to everybody. She thinks she knows everything and she ain’t shit herself. Sittin’ on her fat ass sellin’ beer and weed and collectin’ welfare checks. You can do much better than that shit, bro.”

“I could have Iesha, but, since you got her, Yolanda is about the best thing going.”

Huey knew how much I cared about Iesha so he just let the matter drop. In all the years Huey and I had been friends we never argued, mostly due to Huey’s deft handling of my volatile moods, but lately we’d been disagreeing more frequently.

“So, peep this, bro. I’m bored out of my muthafuckin’ mind and Iesha’s getting on my goddamned nerves. I was thinkin’ we could go on one of them payback missions up in the Northeast like we used to do you know?”

It had started back before we all got arrested and sent to reform school. Huey and I would go on these missions in the white neighborhoods. What we would do is go up to Northeast Philly and beat and rob white folks on their own turf just to let them know that there was no insulation from the streets. We wanted to let them know that just because they lived across town from us didn’t mean they were safe from us. It didn’t mean they could ignore us.

It started when my homeboy dirty Frank got stabbed. Frank was a thief who was too stupid to go outside the neighborhood. He would steal from his own neighbors. Any fool could figure out that nobody was making a special trip to our poor-ass little community to steal a few used TVs, stereos, and VCRs. So, anytime something came up missing you’d more than likely be able to recover it by knocking on Frank’s door. I had to step in his ass once myself over my Mom’s VCR, but still he was my boy.

Frank and I went to grade school together and he used to live right across the street from me when he was staying with his grandparents while his mom was in rehab kicking heroin. He still lived only two blocks away and in G-town that almost made him family. Then, one day, he gets stabbed right in front of the police station in broad daylight and his attacker just walks away. Police just yards away saw nothing and no one was ever apprehended. Even worse, as Frank lay bleeding from a gut wound, the cops searched him and then harassed him about a couple vials of rock they found in his pockets, treating him like a suspect instead of a victim. Frank could have died and nobody would have been convicted. There would have been no story on the eleven o’clock news, no public outcry, and no change in police policies and procedures.

Nothing ever changed for the better until it started happening to white folks and they began writing letters, and calling their congressman, and talking to the newspapers, and threatening lawsuits. So we decided to make it happen to white folks. We decided to bring the ghetto to their doorsteps. That very night, while Frank was having his intestines stitched together at Germantown Hospital, Huey and I took a bus up to Northeast Philadelphia for some payback.

In our neighborhood the Northeast was endearingly known as “Whitey Land”. It was notoriously racist, home to the KKK, skinheads, a Nazi biker group, and several other White Power organizations. Back then most people believed that a Black kid would have had to have a deathwish to walk through that neighborhood. It was perfect for what we wanted.

We imagined fat rednecks sitting at home watching Black kids dying in the streets and simply changing the channel, not giving a fuck about drugs and crime as long as it stayed in the ghettos and out of their lily white neighborhoods while their own kids were in the backyard smoking meth and huffing paint. To them every Black casualty was just one less nigger to compete with for jobs and women. It enraged us to imagine them living safe and comfortable while our homeboys bled to death in front of police stations and no one seemed to care. So we were going to give them a taste of the fear and anxiety, the helplessness and frustration and impotent rage that we all lived under. We meant to bring the fury of the Black ghettos into Whitey Land and plop it raw and bleeding on their doorsteps.

We started out robbing other kids of their cash, jewelry, clothes, and sneakers, we even rolled some fool for a can of Pepsi once. It wasn’t about the goods or the money. It was all about payback. We actually believed we were doing some good in some grand karmic way. We thought we were giving balance to the universe. It was about not allowing the middle-class to forget about those below the poverty level that they left behind imprisoned in economic dungeons, boiling in nihilistic rage and desperation as we waited out our life-sentence. Sometimes we didn’t even jack them for their money at all. We just beat them down on general principles.

The last time we went on one of these missions we succeeded only in chasing ever larger groups of white teenagers around. They were all too cowardly to fight even though in one case they outnumbered us nearly five to one with nine to our mere two. White boys weren’t like brothas around the way. They didn’t have the same manhood issues we did or if so they certainly managed to handle it better. In the hood you don’t have much but your respect and most of us would kill or die for it. These kids had everything so losing a little face to a couple grimy-looking Black thugs meant little to them. They could always tell themselves that we probably had guns or that we were on PCP and they wouldn’t miss a moment of sleep over it. We thought they were all a bunch of candy-assed over-privileged pussies and every time they ran from us increased our anger. Tonight we weren’t about to be denied.

Huey and I left Yolanda’s house and walked down Green Street to Chelten Ave to catch the J-bus up to Frankford. We both had our gats on us, but we had no intention of using them unless we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by the Klan or something, which wasn’t likely. This wasn’t the South and we weren’t some passive, Jesus-whipped, handkerchief head niggas that would hide in the closet and pray while Klansmen burned the house down. If we ran into the KKK there would be a fuckin’ white sale in the hood that night.

After we got off the bus it started to rain so we walked quickly up Frankford Ave, afraid that the rain would chase any would-be victims in-doors before we could get to them. We walked up the street with no umbrella for nearly an hour with no luck. The streets were deserted. We were just about to give up and go home when we passed a Burger King and some fools yelled out, “Niggers!” It was the first time I could remember being so happy to hear that word.