Wrath White - Yaccub's Curse

I pulled out the baggy and the box of papers and rolled us the fattest joint I could manage. We lit up and passed it back and forth as we watched the sun crash into the horizon and explode across the sky in fiery reds and oranges.

“Tank would have loved this shit. You know how that nigga loved his weed.”

“Yeah, he stayed high. I don’t know how he could function as much weed as he smoked.”

“I remember one time we were doin’ a driveby on these JBGL muthafuckas and Tank had just lit up this fat ass joint. So we roll up along side these niggas and Tank pulls the AK out of his lap and while he’s swinging it out the window he knocks the joint out his mouth. You know that crazy muthafucka puts the AK down to pick up the joint? By the time he picked the rifle up again them fools had scattered. I laughed my ass off. Scratch was mad as hell that night and Tank just looked at him like ‘Hey, shit happens,’ and kept on smoking his blunt.”

Huey and I laughed hard at that even as the tears continued to fall. When we finally left the river I could hardly see straight I was so high.

“Damn, that was some good weed!”

“Hell yeah it was. Maybe I was wrong about that gray bitch. She might come in handy after all. Where you want to go now?”

“You ready to go back ’round the way?”

“Naw, ain’t shit to see there now. Besides, I don’t want to go watch my mom cry or deal with Iesha askin’ me a bunch of annoying ass questions trying to get me to express my feelings and shit. Don’t bitches realize that men ain’t like that? The last thing a man wants to do when he’s depressed is sit around and talk about why he’s depressed. You just want to forget about that shit. Get high. Get fucked. Whatever. You just want to forget. You know what I’m sayin’?”

“True indeed. Let’s just drive around for a while then.”

I hadn’t intended on driving back to the cemetery but somehow we both knew that was where we were going. We pulled through the gates of the Cheltenham Cemetery just as twilight darkened into night.

There were no lights in the cemetery. Huey and I staggered around in the dark for the better part of an hour trying to find Tank’s grave. Since we hadn’t attended the burial we didn’t even have the faintest clue which direction to look in and checking each headstone with no illumination except my disposable Bic lighter was tedious.

Huge gravestones, monuments, and crypts the size of small garages crammed every corner of the century old cemetery casting eerie shadows that recalled memories of old horror movies. We were so intoxicated that we were actually enjoying the search and the crawling superstitious dread that followed us as we stomped on earth beneath which the dead slumbered. We giggled as we tripped over gravestones and bumped into the large statues that marked many of the older graves.

“This is the older section. He ain’t buried over here. He should be over there where all those little plaques are.”

We were in total darkness by the time we found Tank’s modest little headstone, which was little more than a plaque stuck in the ground as Huey had said. We collapsed upon it in exhaustion and cracked open our forties. I eulogized our brother in my own way as Huey stared on in silence.

“I remember how we all met. Remember how we almost killed each other and then wound up becoming best friends? Who’d have believed that shit? We terrorized that neighborhood so bad them niggas ain’t never gonna forget you. I won’t ever forget you, bro. You were my dog, my brother. Even if we didn’t share the same blood or come out of the same womb we shared the same spirit, the same soul. We been tighter than any two muthafuckas ever could be. We fought together. We laughed together. We got high together. We killed together. After all that time it was just in the last two or three days that I really got to know your big ass. I loved you man. You was one bad ass-kickin’ muthafucka and the game won’t be the same without you. I’m gonna miss you, bro.”

We poured our forties out on his grave.

“I wish there was some way we could have gotten him a cheesesteak hoagie to take on his journey. I know he’s hungry. That nigga’s always hungry.”

“I was just thinking about planting some weed on his grave. That would guarantee everybody from the hood would visit him.”

I stared at Tank’s modest little gravestone and something about it started to annoy me. They had put Tank’s real name on it, Anthony Turner, instead of the name by which he was known to all his friends and family. I took out a paint marker and wrote over the name in big silver letters; “Tank”.

“Rest in peace, my brother.”

We laid down on Tank’s grave, resting our heads on his stone. We rolled up some more of the weed and I took the seeds out and planted them in front of the headstone. We both inhaled deeply, choking and coughing, as we watched the clouds uncover the moon and the few stars that were visible through the city pollution wink on and off like Christmas lights. We were both wondering if Tank’s soul had made it into heaven.

“I hope Tank is up there kickin’ God’s ass right now.”

“Man, don’t say shit like that, Snap.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause it ain’t cool to be talkin’ about God like that.”

“Don’t tell me you still into all that Muslim shit? I thought you gave that shit up when the Trade Center got smoked.”

“Man, don’t start dissin’ my faith. You could stand to have Allah in your heart.”

“No offence my brother, but Allah has done about as much for the Black man as any of these other gods, which is to say not a damn thing. You might as well be Catholic or Jewish for all the good any of that shit does.”

“Allah is the only way we can save the Black community. If Tank had been down with it he might still be here today.”

“Tank was down with the only God that ever helped anybody out ’round the way, the all-mighty dollar fuckin’ bill. But let’s not get into this. You don’t want to have this conversation with me now, Huey. You might get your feelings hurt. I just wish there really was a God up there. At least then I’d have somebody to blame for all this shit. It’d fuck me up to think we brought all this shit on ourselves and that White folks were able to fuck our shit up for hundreds of years without any help from the Great White overseer in the sky.”

“See, that’s just what your problem is. You always lookin’ to blame somebody else rather than admit that you’re responsible for your own fucked up destiny. Now, I ain’t sayin’ them White devils ain’t conspired at every turn to keep the Black man on his knees. You know that don’t nobody hate crackers more than I do. I’m just sayin’ that brothers have sabotaged themselves so much that it ain’t been hard for them to do it. And if it wasn’t for Allah, the God of the Black man, who loves and protects us despite our ignorant self-destructive behavior, we would have never survived half the shit them devils have put our people through.”

“Naw, man. It don’t work that way. I mean I hear what you sayin’ and all, but it don’t work. See ’cause this Black God who’s supposed to love Black people, he created White People. And Yeah, I know you’re gonna say that Satan or Dr. Yaccub or some aliens from space created White folks, but see god created Satan and if there are aliens then God created them too. If God is truly all knowing then when he created Satan, before he created Satan, he knew the man would rebel against him and create White people and that they would oppress and enslave black people. So if God knew what Yaccub or Satan or whatever was gonna do, but he created these muthafuckas anyway, than he’s directly responsible for what happened to Black Folks as a result. And I ain’t even sayin’ I believe that all White people are devils. I’m just sayin’ that, based on your theories, that’s what you get. If they were all devils then there wouldn’t be any nice ones. They would all be evil, but there’s no more evil ones as far as I can see than there are evil niggas.”