Worthy, p.12
Worthy, page 12
I decided to audition with one of my favorite monologues from Antigone—when she must plead for the right to bury her brother. I had done it countless times in class, and I knew it like the back of my hand. Donald had worked me to death on it in monologue class, helping me to fine-tune every moment. That drama department at BSA had brilliant teachers, and I have yet to meet their equal.
When the day came, unfortunately, Donald had to provide one last push to get me in the room to audition. I tried to make an excuse for why I shouldn’t audition. “Donald, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time. I’m never going to school in North Carolina.”
“Jada, you have more talent in the tip of your pinkie finger than most people have in their whole bodies. You don’t want to see where that can take you? What are you going to do here? Huh? Keep running around with your friends, not giving yourself a real opportunity to do something with your life?” Donald was at his wits’ end.
So I sauntered my reluctant seventeen-year-old ass into that room and auditioned. Donald was relieved. He’d done his job. The rest was up to me.
It cannot be overstated how much my mind was completely and resolutely made up. Winston-Salem could have been on the planet Mars for all I knew or cared, because I was not going there. I was not going to give control of my future to anybody. I was in these B-more streets, and I was gonna make my mark.
* * *
Keesha was the first person to really call me out on the choices I’d been making. She knocked me off my high horse—a bit.
This had been building for a while. I could feel a growing rift between us. To smooth things out, I took her to a fancy seafood restaurant and brought along a gift as an olive branch—a piece of jewelry. Something I’d bought from a local jeweler. We both LOVED jewelry. I really believed my gift would close the distance and ease whatever tension was between us.
When I handed her the present, she sadly sighed and took a beat before opening it. To my shock, she was not impressed in the least. Instead, she had an air of disappointment and fear.
“I can’t take this,” she said, and handed the gift back to me.
I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, knowing exactly why.
“What are you doing, Jada?” she asked.
That was not a question I was ready to answer.
Keesha went on to tell me she couldn’t understand why I was throwing my life away, that I was going to end up in jail. Or dead.
I wasn’t ready to make a change, but I didn’t forget what she said. Apparently, I needed a bigger warning.
That reality hit me right before graduation, when we all received devastating news about one of our beloved classmates and my friend, Isha Moses. She was such a light, so sweet and funny, and suddenly, she was gone. She died in a car accident, coming home from a weekend trip with her boyfriend. That was a cruel blow and evidence that things out of our control can take a fatal turn. It seemed so unfair and random. Her death made me take a closer look at my choices.
The fact that I graduated was a miracle. My attendance record for academic classes was so disastrous, I had to do a lot of begging. My diploma was more or less a gift that came with the understanding that I had potential—if I would apply myself to positive endeavors.
And as the summer moved on, I saw exactly what a positive endeavor was and what it was not.
* * *
One night, on my way to go skating at Painters Mill—dressed to a tee, my pockets loaded with cash, and a bunch of jewelry on—I went on a quick run to Cherry Hill. I NEVER went to Cherry Hill laced like that, but I didn’t worry. I wasn’t planning to be there longer than fifteen minutes to drop off some product.
While I was there, a dude—whom I had previous bad dealings with and promised myself to never serve again—came to the door saying he was looking to buy.
Suspicious, I say through the door, “Show me your money.” Through the peephole, I see that, sure enough, he’s got a wad of cash. “Aight, hold up,” and I turn to make sure I’ve got the amount of product requested. Once I have it in hand, I open the door, leaving the chain on, to make the transaction.
Before I can grab his money, two dudes jump out, both holding 9-millimeters as they kick the door open, breaking the safety chain, and point their guns at my face.
In terror, I fall back into the recliner I’m usually posted in and pee my pants.
One of the dudes presses closer to me and points the 9 to the middle of my head. The woman who lives there, in similar terror, hides under a small round dining table as the second dude starts to scour the apartment.
“Take off your jewelry,” says the dude with the gun to my head. He is so cool about it that I, terrified as hell, in pissy pants and all, can’t help but talk shit.
As I’m taking off my bracelets, I jabber, “Why you fuck’n with me? Oh, so you wanna take my lil bit a shit.”
This dude is not paying me a bit of mind as he looks over his shoulder at his homeboy, who’s searching for any other stash I might have there. He yells, “You see anything?”
“Naw,” his homeboy yells back.
He looks at me, icy as hell. “I want all the drugs and all your money.”
I dump my pockets of cash and give him all the product I have on me. He takes it and some of the jewelry I’ve already taken off. “I want all of it. Even those . . .” He looks down at my ankles and the gold chains wrapped around them. I start to take those off, and he turns to survey the entire apartment, looking to see if there’s anything else worth taking.
In that moment, I quickly rip off a white-gold necklace with a small diamond solitaire pendant attached that was given to me by my stepfather Tony and throw it under my tongue. They were not getting that piece no matter what. Not that I was so sentimental, no. That diamond necklace had become a symbol of my worth as a human. So much so, I was willing to risk my life for it.
The main dude, let’s call him Cee, grabbed the rest of my jewelry, then proceeded to move out. His homeboy left first, and as Cee was backing out of the apartment with his gun still pointed at me, our eyes locked.
I could see the thoughts running through his mind: Should I kill her, she knows who I am. I could kidnap her, rape her. I knew he was trying those thoughts on for size. But he backed out slowly, paused for one more glance . . . then closed the door.
As soon as he left, I called Fawn, letting her know what had gone down and that I’d be late. That’s what you do. You keep it moving and stick to the plan. Near-death experiences and all.
Then I called BP. His first question was “Did you have your gun on you?” Of course I had the .22 that he’d given me, but it had NEVER crossed my mind to use it. I’m not built like that. It was clear I’d been set up by the dude who came to the door with the wad of cash. How could I have been so stupid? BP immediately identified the stickup dude as Cee, who was notorious for robb’n folks in that area.
BP arranged a meeting at my request, because I wanted my shit back. BP, who came along to make sure I was straight, thought I was out of my mind, and warned me I’d be lucky to get back whatever jewelry Cee hadn’t sold. The cash and the drugs were a no-go.
When we met up on a side street in the Hill a few days later, as BP predicted, Cee gave me back a few pieces of my jewelry that he hadn’t sold. Our meeting was brief, but before we left I had to ask something.
“You left me there—how come?”
He looked at me for a second, with eyes that appeared as if he had never felt a warm touch in his life, and said, “You were too pretty.”
You know what’s crazy? That was the very first time I actually believed it.
And that was the last time Cherry Hill saw the likes of me.
Two weeks later, Cee was arrested for the murder of two drug dealers he’d shot up in the trunk of a car and was sent to prison for life. It still didn’t register how lucky I had been.
Chet and I met at a car wash for me to give him whatever cash and product I had stashed at my house. Stressed big-time that I owed him a lot of dough (to recoup the loss from the robbery), I didn’t want him to be in the hole because of me. I told him, “I promise I’ll get you the rest when I can.”
Chet looked me in the eyes and said, “You good with me, shawty, I’m glad you’re still alive.” He was not stressed over my setback. Besides, in the future, I would pay him back tenfold.
For the time being, I was deflated and defeated. I had been doing so well, and just like that, I was broke and in need of another hustle. So when BP told me he needed my help with a situation, I was glad that he still had trust in me. What we were trying to do is lost in the haze of memory. Something about how the basement in the house of one of BP’s relatives—which he used as a stash house—had flooded. We needed to go there to move some product, along with some money, from a safe.
It was a typical summer night when BP came to get me. We pulled up to a row house on a quiet residential street in a working-class neighborhood. But as soon as BP parked the car, I felt a flash of unease. Ignoring it, I told myself, I’m with BP. I’m good.
The front door was open, with a screen door to allow fresh air into the house. We opened it, and as we walked through the small living room, I noticed that the house was quiet. We reached the basement door and headed down the steps.
At the bottom of the stairs, I could see about two inches of water on the floor. Other than giving off a musty smell, the water looked clear to me, not foul. So far, so good.
Then, just as BP was about to open the safe, a dude with a 9-millimeter charged down the steps. He pointed the gun at me first and demanded I go stand on top of a cot in the corner of the basement. “Back up,” he ordered.
Oh shit, not again.
Everything in my nervous system went cold.
I put my hands in the air by my shoulders. Scared as I was, I didn’t want to piss myself again. With whatever control I could muster, I stayed calm and did as he said. I did not break eye contact with him. I knew he meant business: His eyes had no soul, no fear, just animosity. My heart was POUNDING. I was very aware that this was a moment that could go very wrong—very fast.
I climbed up on the cot and stood there, all five feet and ninety-five pounds of me, trying not to show my fear. The dude kept the gun pointed at my chest, making it clear to BP that if he did anything stupid, I would be shot.
BP had no options. If I hadn’t been there, he would have handled things very differently, I’m sure. The dude with the gun, continuing to point it at me, put his focus on BP, who was stooped down, an already compromised position, on a wet floor in order to open the safe. The dude proceeded to tell BP that he was looking for T-Row, a friend of ours who apparently owed this guy money.
A helpless spectator, I had to stand and watch as the dude took his gun off of me and pointed it at BP while the two of them went back and forth with an aggressive exchange of words about T-Row. T had disappeared weeks ago. BP was adamant he didn’t know nothing about whatever money T owed.
Suddenly, in the middle of the exchange, BP seized a moment and charged at the guy. The two went at it as they began to tussle in the water. It was slippery, but the dude with the gun got his footing and enough leverage to violently pistol-whip BP across the face.
My fear was matched only by my complete shame. I was helpless.
The gunman demanded, “Open the fucking safe!” BP did as he asked, and the dude made him hand over all the product and all the money and left.
BP looked to me with a busted mouth full of blood and asked, “You okay?”
“I’m okay,” I said, and tried my best to muster a steely exterior. But the truth is, I was not okay. Not at all.
We were still alive. But what played in my head was a cold truth.
There will be a day when you won’t be so lucky. A day when you may not make it out alive.
* * *
My mother’s first wake-up call was finding empty bags of product in my room, which led her to assume, incorrectly, that I had become an addict. She may have decided to search my room because girls who came to the ob-gyn clinic where she worked—Total Health Care, deep in West B-more—were constantly telling her, “You know we be see’n your daughter hanging out in Cherry Hill.”
“My daughter? She does not go to Cherry Hill,” my mother would reply.
“Your daughter be down ’nare all the time.”
So, when she found empty plastic bags with white powder residue in them—in a hole in my wall—she came at me. “Jada, how long have you been using?”
“What?”
She showed me the bags.
“Ma, I’m not using,” I replied, frustrated.
I tried to make up all kinds of excuses—let’s call them lies—none of which she bought.
Eventually, I confessed that I had dabbled in selling. She didn’t believe me and demanded I take a piss test.
I did and I was clean. She got off my back. For a minute.
The shit really hit the fan when she heard through the grapevine—because the streets talk—about the robbery in Cherry Hill. She couldn’t believe it. “You were dealing in Cherry Hill? Have you lost your fucking mind?” Adrienne had gone red. I stayed cool because she was quick with her hands.
A few weeks prior, I’d gotten into UNC School of the Arts. I had told my mother that I didn’t want to go. Before she found out about Cherry Hill, she was patient with me around my hesitation. With this new information, the patience was gone. “All this talk about you not going to school! Fuck that! You gett’n the hell up out of here, I bet you that. You understand me?”
I had my stoic “whatever” expression on my face.
Adrienne stepped over to me and snarled through her teeth, “Play wit me if you want. I’ll take your ass out on that concrete.” With this, I needed to pull back and get myself in respectful alignment. I had promised myself that there would never be a day when my mother and I had a physical fight. I humbled myself quick.
Adrienne was no longer in a cheery “time to go to college” mode. “Start pack’n your shit. Now.”
School was to start in two weeks. But after a college loan, I still needed fifteen hundred dollars to go.
In the not too distant past, I could have paid that money no problem. I could have collected the money from all the dudes I knew with a snap of a finger. I refused. I wasn’t going out like that. Besides, I was hoping the money wouldn’t come through and I wouldn’t have to go anyway.
But of course, Adrienne rose to the occasion and found the money.
I was being forced into exile. Insult upon injury, I wasn’t allowed to take my car or have one on campus as a freshman. I procrastinated on packing until the night before I was supposed to leave.
“You listen to me. Pack your shit and be ready to go in the morning. I’m not play’n with you!”
The next morning, despite my resistance, I packed up my stuff and got in the car. There was no need for tearful goodbyes with my closest friends. In my mind, I’d be seeing them next weekend.
I didn’t say a word the entire six-hour drive to North Carolina. Mom, Rodney, and I sat in silence.
But the closer we got to Winston-Salem, the more relaxed I felt. I could feel some peace in the slower tempo. I thought about my last conversation with Chet, when I’d told him my mother was getting me the F up out of B-more. Chet was on the come-up, and I was mad I was going to miss out.
“I thought we was gonna be Bonnie and Clyde, shawty,” Chet said, laughing. “I’m sad you’re going.” Then he went on, “I’m happy for you, too. You do need to get up outta here.” I could see in his eyes he meant it.
Maybe Chet was right. Maybe it was time for me to just be a theater student on the straight and narrow. The closer we got to the school, the more willing I became to let it all play out.
* * *
For many reasons, UNC School of the Arts was exactly where I was supposed to go. For starters, it turned out that Mia Pitts, one of Fawn’s best friends and a dance major at Baltimore School for the Arts, was a sophomore there. We hadn’t been tight back at home, but in our new setting, we struck up a close and lasting friendship.
Mia was chocolate brown and fine as hell, with thick bowed legs. She talked unlike any Black female I had heard before, with a preppy, proper, upbeat manner. She didn’t sound like she was B-more at all.
People often mistook her “proper” speak for softness. Those folks would have a most unpleasant surprise, because Mia had no problem throwing hands, going from zero to a hundred in seconds. She was not to be tampered with, especially when she was prancing down the halls of her dorm in only patent-leather high heels and a G-string, preparing for one of our nights out. I witnessed her mop a chick up real quick in that getup one night, after the girl came for Mia one too many times.
Mia liked to go, GO, like me, and that’s exactly what we did all through my only year in college. We’d go to parties, clubbing, to homecomings, on road trips to Greekfests, to concerts—nonstop, without missing a beat at school. Mia would later work in professional dance companies, eventually landing in Hollywood in the 1990s to make a name for herself, before I asked her to work with me.
We had been in college barely a minute when she talked me into going on the first of countless weekend road trips. A six-hour drive was nothing to get us both up to Baltimore on a Friday and back to Winston-Salem on a Sunday. The beautiful part of the experience we had in North Carolina is that I could be on the go as much as I had ever been—but without the dangers I met at home. Don’t get it twisted, the streets of North Carolina—and the hustlers who kept them—found me, and I had opportunity and temptation. But I got focused on becoming the theater arts student on the straight and narrow. Besides, my housing and food were basically covered, so why not be broke and make the best of being a college student? I was starting to like it.
I hadn’t been in North Carolina long before I had a pep talk from Pac. “I’m proud of you. Stay focused on school. If you need something, you let me know. Don’t get stupid down there. I’ll send you a lil something whenever you need it.”
