Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

This was what we had been waiting for. We didn’t know who had said it. We didn’t know how many there were or how big they were. We didn’t know if they had guns and knives or pitch forks and torches. We didn’t care.

We ran into the parking lot in back of the Burger King where about a dozen white kids stood, sat, and leaned on their cars. About eight of them were boys with another five girls with them. I was less pissed off that they had yelled nigger than by the fact that kids that young already had cars. I was sure that none of them had ever had to kill anyone to get it either.

They looked like wet alley dogs. Their stringy hair was plastered to their faces and dripping with rain. Even through the rain I could smell their fear. For not the first time or the last it amazed me that these pale, anemic-looking creatures could have conquered and enslaved anyone, especially my proud Black race. Even the biggest one among them, who was clearly Tank’s equal in size, struck no fear in my heart. They just looked pathetic and pitiful in their faded Levis, wrinkled Heavy Metal T-shirts, and scuffed Doc Martins.

How could people with so much money dress so poorly? I wondered.

“Who tha fuck said that?” I growled.

The girls looked genuinely frightened. They were expecting a serious brawl to break out. Obviously, they knew their own people less than we did. These weren’t poor crackers from Fish Town, or crazy Irish sons of bitches or Italians from South Philly. Those bastards were just as hard as we were. These were rich WASP kids, or at least middleclass, which, in our eyes, made them rich. They didn’t know shit about the street. They didn’t have to. They were insulated by their money and their little middleclass neighborhoods. The only thing they knew about violence was what they heard in rap songs and watched in movies. They weren’t going to fight when there was a chance they could run or talk their way out of it. If one of them spoke up none of his boys would back him up and they all knew it. They’d just stand there petrified while the two of us beat one of their homeboys half to death.

No one said a word as we stalked in between them glaring at each one of them. Huey was in a rage to hurt someone, not for what they had yelled but for a thousand other offences they had indirectly committed against him. He wanted to kick someone’s ass for the sins of the entire White race. He grabbed the biggest muthafucker among them, just ’cause he looked like he was thinking about challenging us, and began to beat him like he owned him.

“You said that shit didn’t you? DIDN”T YOU? You white peckerwood muthafucker!”

Huey launched into him so viciously that three of his boys actually steeled their hearts to confront us, but I knocked one of them out cold with the butt of my nine millimeter and slowed their roll with the quickness.

“Don’t none of ya’ll bitches try to jump in that shit. Unless somebody wants to fess up and take the beating this big pussy’s takin’,” I looked from one face to the other. One by one they dropped their heads, “I didn’t think so. Ya’ll just gonna let your boy here take the ass-whippin for you, huh? Pussy ass muthafuckas,” I hissed.

They all backed up and just stood there watching. The big White boy that Huey was dealing with ran straight at him with his fists cocked back in what looked like some super-hero pose. The comic book stance left his midsection exposed to Huey’s devastating kicks and punches. The wind exploded from the big kid’s lungs and he doubled over grimacing in agony as Huey’s shin slammed into his ribcage with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a watermelon. He kept coming though. I’ll give him that. There were tears running down his cheeks from the pain, frustration, and humiliation. He tried to close the gap and grapple with Huey, but no way was Huey going to let this big cracker get his meaty paws on him. The guy took so many blows trying to get a grip on Huey that by the time he grabbed hold he was too weak to do shit and Huey simply slung him to the ground. The guy fought hard though. Somehow he managed to get back up.

There were cuts above and beneath both of the white boy’s eyes, which were rapidly swelling shut. His lip was busted, his nose was broken, and he was holding his side where Huey had kicked him and I suspected that at least one rib was broken. Still, the guy managed to surprise me by actually landing a few solid punches on Huey this time as he lunged clumsily forward. Huey’s nose started bleeding profusely and soon his face was covered with it. I started to get worried when I saw Huey stagger a little after the last punch caught him right on the chin. The White boy’s friends cheered at this latest development and I was so angry it took everything I had to keep my finger from squeezing the trigger on the nine which was once again tucked away in my pocket. Then Huey grinned, with a mouthful of blood, and teeth turned a crimson hell. It was the most evil expression I had ever seen. Even the big cracker’s friends stopped cheering. They knew their friend was about to catch a bad one.

This time Huey charged. He grabbed the big kid by his hair and brought his knee down into the boy’s face repeatedly, his body a frenzied blur of savage motion until the kid slumped unconscious to the blacktop. Still, even after the white kid was unconscious, Huey continued to smash knees and elbows into the guy’s face in a blind rage. The kid’s skull began to lose shape as bone was pulverized.

“Huey! No! Stop! Stop! You’re going to kill him!”

Blood had started running from the White boy’s ears, nose and mouth, and he had started convulsing.

“We got to get out of here, bro!”

I snatched Huey off of him. The kid’s face was destroyed. It had lost all integrity and was little more than a bleeding pulp of hair and skin. It was the most gruesome sight I had ever witnessed. I barely pulled it together in time to run. I had frozen in anticipation, waiting to see if the kid’s brains would run out of his ears.

We took off back the way we had come and left the kid bleeding in the Burger King parking lot surrounded by his horrified friends who were too scared to even scream. They stared in mute shock and didn’t even see us leave. I was in shock too as we ran. I felt like I was in a dream.

He did it with his bare hands. He killed that kid with his bare hands!

There was no doubt in my mind that I had just witnessed a murder, a barbaric and senseless murder of incomprehensible savagery. No way could that kid have survived a beat down like that. If he did he would never be the same again.

My feet barely touched the ground as we ran. I was high on adrenaline and the smell of blood and fear— the spectacle of violence.

My God, what did we just do?

It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him or felt any guilt or remorse whatsoever. Fuck a white boy! What really had me trippin’ was the degree of hatred a person would have to have in their hearts to do that to someone with their bare hands. I could never imagine hating anyone like that unless I had loved them first or they had hurt someone I loved. To do that to a complete and absolute stranger who’d done nothing to me I’d have to be insane. I’d capped fools plenty of times, but this was hands on, it was intimate, passionate. Not the cold detachment of pulling a trigger. Shootin’ a fool you could almost imagine that it was the gun and not you that had killed him. But…this? The blood was literally on his hands. That type of hate completely defied my reason.

It occurred to me that Huey had problems that ran far deeper than anything anyone could see. There was something monstrous and cruel in him. Maybe we all had problems like that, deep down. Because, as monstrous and inhuman as Huey seemed to me right then, I had still killed three times as many people as he had in the last year alone. If Huey was a psychopath then what the fuck was my excuse?