The second time Tyrell hadn’t been able to sleep all night was the night before his friend Legrand Hollis was executed. It had been a very odd night. They hadn’t even been in the same prison. There was no death row at Malvern. If you were going to die, they sent you over to SCI-Rockview; and you sat there, usually for years. Egrand had sat there for five years, and most people were expecting him to sit for five more, when all of a sudden it was over. Tyrell hadn’t understood much about the death penalty then, or the courts, or the laws, or how any of that worked. He didn’t understand much about any of that now, but at least he had a foothold on it because getting a foothold on it after Legrand was gone was what had made him start going to classes. On the night Legrand had died, though, it might as well have been magic. Now you see it, now you don’t. Now he’s just sitting there, waiting forever and complaining about the food. Now he’s gone and it’s as if he vaporized in front of your face, exploded into a cloud of smoke.
Tyrell was not from a churchgoing family. He wasn’t from much of a family at all. By the time he’d come along, “family” had reduced itself to mothers and children all over the neighborhood, and men who belonged to nobody and nothing who went in and out. Sometimes, in his last days at Malvern, when he was cleaned up and trying to make himself do right, he would go to motivational classes given by an earnest young reverend who was trying so hard, he sweat when he talked. The reverend was white and obviously nothing like poor. He was even more obviously somebody who had never been really poor. He talked about faith and love and letting God do it. He talked about the way crime and violence hurt not only its direct victims but the men who committed it and their wives and families and children. Tyrell had wanted to take the reverend by the hand and lead him down to the very streets on which he’d grown up. He’d wanted to show him what he didn’t know but thought he did. The reverend talked sometimes about “homelessness” and “families without fathers,” but it was as if he were reading a picture book.
Here, Tyrell had wanted to say. Here, look at this. On these three blocks, there are only three married couples, and all of those couples are over sixty-five. On these three blocks, every single woman over the age of twenty-five has had children by at least two men. So have most of the girls under eighteen. Nobody goes to a job. Even the old people are on Social Security. The only employment most of the people here know is prostitution or pimping or dealing, and almost everybody deals. Even the people who hate drugs deal. It’s one of the few ways money comes into this place. There are two local public schools, an elementary and a middle school. The elementary school has no heat in the winter except in one wing. The middle school has doors that lock and unlock automatically, like the doors on prison cells. Most of these people have never been five miles away from this neighborhood. The only way they know there are other ways of life is by what they see on television. Even then the only part of it they believe is the stories about rap singers on VH1. Most of them do not learn to read well enough to function at a desk job. Many of them do not learn to read at all. It isn’t entirely the fault of the schools. The level of casual violence is so high that most teachers wouldn’t dare give a failing grade for fear of being hit right at the front of their class or knifed when they walked out to the street to go home.
Everyone is hurt here, all the time. Everyone lives at a level of rage so high, all the time, that it’s almost impossible to think. The world goes by in a fog of something toxic and debilitating. There is neither past nor future. There is only a bubble. This bubble. And inside this bubble, you’d might as well be dead.
Tyrell had thought of telling the reverend that, but he hadn’t, and he wouldn’t, even now. The reverend meant well. All the reverends Tyrell had ever met had meant well. The problem was they couldn’t understand what they were seeing. They put it down to “the black underclass” or “black culture” or something else black; and if there was something Tyrell was sure of, it was that “black” had nothing to do with it. It was harder than that.
Legrand Hollis wasn’t a victim of racism in the system. He had committed the three murders for which he was executed. He and his good friends, Jason Lacke and Morrisall Kendall, had kidnaped three Bryn Mawr teenagers who were in town to buy drugs, raped the hell out of them, and then cut them up with these big chromium-plated chef’s knives they’d shoplifted from a store downtown. Tyrell had never had a moment’s doubt about exactly what it was that had happened. He could see Legrand standing back against a wall and those three boys out on the street, walking back and forth in the night with their L.L.Bean canvas windbreakers and their hair cut short and combed back and their clothes so clean they could have been hospital scrubs. Tyrell had seen kids like that himself over the years, ambassadors from a fantasy world open only to white people. Except that wasn’t true. It was open to Koreans, too. They went back to their nice neighborhoods every night when they chained up their stores. It was even open to some black people, if they were odd alien black people, unlike any black people Tyrell—or Legrand—had ever known.