Life Sentence (eBook)

1

The Game
(or, The Greased Path)

Violence becomes a homing pigeon floating through the ghettos seeking a black brain in which to roost for a season.

—Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice

When he was a boy, his mother briefly removed him and his baby sister from the apartment in Sandtown where they lived with their grandmother and two older half siblings.

His mother, Annette Burch, brought them to the Poe Homes, a notorious West Baltimore housing project. This would have been in about 2002, when the boy, Montana Barronette, was seven, and his little sister, Sahantana Williams, whom the family called Booda, was two. Less than a mile away, it would have been a sharp change for the children. It took them “over the bridge,” south of the sunken, divided Franklin-Mulberry Expressway (US Route 40), a roaring moat that formed the bottom of the world they knew.

The area over the bridge had been long defined by the brick towers of the Lexington Terrace housing projects. Built in the 1950s, in part to house those dislocated by the beginnings of Baltimore’s massive modern downtown renewal, the five eleven-story towers were a universally acknowledged disaster. In them were all the ills of the urban poor, compressed. One resident described them as “a living hell.” After the buildings were imploded in 1996, their occupants were resettled in the Poe Homes, rows of squat red-brick town houses that filled roughly three large square blocks. This did not resolve the problems of the towers, just spread them horizontally. The neighborhood remained virtually all Black, poor, beset with violence, and a central hub for heroin distribution—a small step down from Sandtown, which was all those things, too.

The removal of Montana and Booda must have seemed a blessing to Annette’s mother, Delores, and might have come at her insistence. All four of the children were Annette’s. Delores had taken them into her Harlem Avenue apartment one by one, after raising her own brood of five. She worked full-time as a custodian at Baltimore City Hall and had no help from her estranged husband. Annette was always nearby, adrift in the circle of neighborhood drug users, shifting for herself. Eventually her fifth child, James, would come to live with Delores, too. The fathers of these children were truant.

Mother and grandmother were opposite extremes, Annette dissolute, Delores pious and stern. Delores belonged to a local Pentecostal church, and as her daughter delivered child after child, she was trapped by her own sense of responsibility. The children could not be abandoned, or blamed for the sins of their mother or fathers. They had to be taken in, even if this enabled Annette’s behavior. So Terrell and Shanika Sivells, Montana Barronette, and Booda and then James Williams were reared on their grandmother’s sometimes bitter forbearance. They were not mistreated but felt the bitterness. Because their mother was around, they were caught in a contradiction. At home, Delores dragged them with her to worship so often the neighborhood kids taunted them, calling them “church kids,” which they hated. But work kept Delores away often, so they spent a lot of time in the streets with their mother, learning the ins and outs of the corner drug markets. This left them always out of step, teased on the corners, an enemy camp in the Harlem Avenue apartment. “We all went through our own separate hell when we was kids,” Shanika would say years later. Annette’s decision to take the two youngest with her to Poe Homes may have resulted from an ultimatum or perhaps a fleeting good intention. Whatever the reason, it didn’t last.

One morning, not long after the move, the children woke up alone. Montana waited all day, until nightfall, and when their mother failed to return, he left with Booda and flagged down a police car. The officer took them back to Harlem Avenue.

Several things of note about this: It shows the tenor of his upbringing. It shows him to have been poised and capable at age seven. And it also shows him to have been unafraid of the police.

Given the stories told by his older sister, this last is surprising. Shanika grew up in terror of cops. In particular, she remembered a night when police crashed into their apartment, guns drawn, looking for Montana’s father, Delroy. Montana was then an infant, named after a paternal Jamaican uncle. Shanika was only three, so her memory is mostly secondhand and probably exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the raid was traumatic. Delroy wasn’t there. Annette was nabbed trying to climb out a back window and was taken away. Seeing their mother arrested would be enough to sear the night in the children’s memory. For the rest of her childhood, Shanika would blame the raid for her nervous problems and nightmares. Ever after, Delores would shake and pray when she heard a siren. Shanika firmly believed that the police, local and federal, had a vendetta against her family. Delores would say, simply, “I just don’t like them.”

Yet Montana, at seven, abandoned in a strange place with his baby sister, sought out a cop.

He would have had no memory of the raid. The only police he knew were kindly ones who bought treats at the corner store for neighborhood kids. Montana would sometimes go with other children to the precinct station and beg. For a long time after being abandoned at Poe Homes, he would say that when he grew up, he wanted to be a cop.

It was a dream not destined to last. In Sandtown, cops were seen less as protectors than as an occupying force. The neighborhood might as well have been an adjunct to the Maryland prison system, so many of its men were either locked up or enjoying a brief taste of freedom between jail terms. The neighborhood had the highest incarceration rate not just in Baltimore but in all of Maryland. Nearly everybody knew or loved somebody who had been jailed at one point or another or had been locked up themselves. Like most people convicted of crimes, few felt their punishment was just. Most in the community distrusted police and judges, a rational apprehension with deep historical roots. Such places are a breeding ground for criminals. Writing in an era of lynching and overt Jim Crow restrictions, sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois had noted this more than a century earlier, observing oppressed Black communities in the rural South.

For various reasons, Montana’s immediate family had fallen into a condition of petty crime familiar to Sandtown. Delroy was arrested three times in the 1990s. He served at least one prison term and was deported to Jamaica when his son was four. Annette had her share of arrests, and out on the streets she schooled her children in The Game, the ongoing hustle of selling illegal drugs, learning how to work street buys and avoid those who would steal from them or arrest them— sometimes one and the same.

Montana Malik Barronette was born in 1995 in the richest country in the world. Yet by virtue of his race and gender, statistically speaking, he had from his first breath a much smaller chance than most American children of reaching adulthood alive, avoiding prison, or enjoying even modest legitimate success—a college education, say, or a steady job. If he failed to finish high school, he stood a less than fifty-fifty chance of holding a full-time job by the time he was thirty—for white Americans the chances were close to 90 percent. If he did everything right, finished high school or even college and found employment, he would likely earn 20 percent less than a white man. The poverty of Montana’s family alone would drag him down, but so would his race—a white child born into a similar situation was three times more likely to escape it. The community around him further reduced his chances; there were few examples of legitimate success and many of failure. In this, he was no different from many other Black American children, particularly those from blighted urban districts and, in Baltimore, even more particularly those from Sandtown. Writing about the neighborhood in his book Black Baltimore, published two years before Montana was born, author Harold A. McDougall noted that, in the “virtually all black” district, “unemployment is high, and there are a significant number of female-headed households living at or below the poverty line,” and its overall crime rate was the highest in West Baltimore.

Statistics are not destiny, of course, and there are many things that can and do help defeat those odds—good parenting, a strong family and community, good schooling, role models, opportunity, and, not the least, character....