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Everyone must know that your success benefits the community in one way or another, or you
become a target.
The township polices itself as well. If someone’s caught stealing, the township deals with
them. If someone’s caught breaking into a house, the township deals with them. If you’re
caught raping a woman, pray to God the police find you before the township does. If a woman
is being hit, people don’t get involved. There are too many questions with a beating. What’s
the fight about? Who’s responsible? Who started it? But rape is rape. Theft is theft. You’ve
desecrated the community.
The hood was strangely comforting, but comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a
floor but also a ceiling. In our crew, our friend G was like the rest of us, unemployed, hanging
out. Then he got a job at a nice clothing store. Every morning he went to work, and the guys
would tease him about going to work. We’d see him headed out all dressed up, and everyone
would be laughing at him. “Oh, G, look at you in your fancy clothes!” “Oh, G, going to go see
the white man today, huh?” “Oh, G, don’t forget to bring some books back from the library!”
One morning, after a month of G working at the place, we were hanging out on the wall,
and G came out in his slippers and his socks. He wasn’t dressed for work.
“Yo, G, what’s going on? What’s up with the job?”
“Oh, I don’t work there anymore.”
“Why?”
“They accused me of stealing something and I got fired.”
And I’ll never forget thinking to myself that it felt like he did it on purpose. He sabotaged
himself so that he’d get accepted back into the group again.
The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you
leave. Because by making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you and
made you and never turned you away. And that place fights you back.
As soon as things start going well for you in the hood, it’s time to go. Because the hood
will drag you back in. It will find a way. There will be a guy who steals a thing and puts it in
your car and the cops find it— something. You can’t stay. You think you can. You’ll start doing
better and you’ll bring your hood friends out to a nice club, and the next thing you know
somebody starts a fight and one of your friends pulls a gun and somebody’s getting shot and
you’re left standing around going, “What just happened?”
The hood happened.
—
One night I was DJ’ing a party, not in Alex but right outside Alex in Lombardy East, a nicer,
middle-class black neighborhood. The police were called about the noise. They came busting
in wearing riot gear and pointing machine guns. That’s how our police roll. We don’t have
small and then big. What Americans call SWAT is just our regular police. They came looking
for the source of the music, and the music was coming from me. This one cop came over to
where I was with my computer and pulled this massive assault rifle on me.
“You gotta shut this down right now.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’m shutting it down.”