I was at my parent’s house recently, looking through my old family photo album. Most of the pictures from my youth are in Ladoga; the city has changed a lot in the past 20 years or so and many of the backdrops in the pictures have ceased to exist. The playground from pictures of me and my brothers and sisters that was walking distance from my house no longer exists. My parent’s home is closer to the Northside Projects than the Bottom’s row houses in the south and the park was a street over from the east/west divide, though they have since completed commercial development where the park used to be and replaced it with the park adjacent to the Northside Projects.
The park that I remember walking to as a kid was simple. There was a swing set, a merry-go-round, a jungle gym, and a big grassy area that my siblings, cousins, neighborhood friends, and I used as the stage for epic games of tag or football. We tried capture the flag once, and it quickly devolved into a bloody mess. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but we decided to make the game more exciting by incorporating weaponry and each team was allowed to throw pine cones in defense of their flag. We didn’t realize it was a bad idea until the game grew into an intense struggle for victory. I was on a team with my oldest sibling, Daphne, who is 4 years older than me, my brother, Sam, my cousins Tamala and Jack, and a few other neighborhood kids. From the start Daphne took the helm and gathered us into a huddle in the sandbox of the swing set and drew out her plan with a stick. From an early age, my sister took an interest in war strategy; she idolized her elementary school teacher who was a retired army commander. Daphne organized a flank against the other team that was led by my oldest brother Zach. She always found ways to emasculate Zach in social situations when they were younger, and even today, and he wanted nothing more than a victory against her at her own game. Daphne could beat him at the board game Risk, at Chess, even games of chance like Boggle and the seemingly never ending card game War, which we referred to by its full, proper name ‘I Declare War.’ I had no vendettas going into the battle, though Job was on the other team and he had wrecked my bike one time I let him use it. He said that he was riding and didn’t see a stick in some tall grass, and flipped the whole thing over. Other people told me that they saw him jumping makeshift ramps. Either way, I was sure that I’d hit as many people with as many pine cones as I could manage in defense of my sister’s flag. My sister stood point on the flag; one of the ground rules was that no one could touch the flag from their own side during active battle, only during brief ceasefires (the rules had evolved as we played, to correct blatant abuses that had been perpetrated in play that were not explicitly forbidden at the start). She organized a covert team that would gradually make its way to the southeast corner of the park (I remember her saying, “act like you ain’t doing nothing at first, just be regular, but later on, start moving toward the basketball courts, not all at the same time, Jack and Tamala, y’all stay right there with half your people and y’all throw as many pine cones as fast as you can, make sure you got a lot so they can’t get close to you, and while that’s happening, the other half, go up that hill and take that flag.”) Sam and I set up in front of my sister and we created a perimeter by perfecting the art of injuring someone with a pinecone. The ones in the park were about the size of a potato and the barky petals came to points that could easily lodge into skin if thrown fast enough. Maybe the game wasn’t innocent from the start, maybe I had every intention of making someone bleed, but it didn’t seem like a big deal, I didn’t think I would mind if someone managed to make me bleed. Until, of course, someone drew blood when a cone hit me on my right cheek so hard it made a sound on impact and part of it broke off the back. It hurt and I didn’t even take the time to cry, because I might have if I wasn’t so mad, and I charged in the direction the cone came from, not knowing who had thrown it. The cones were steady hitting me too, but I was determined and next thing I knew I had tackled one of theirs to the ground like we were in a football game. We had agreed to cease fire if a fight broke out, but by that time, there were so many fights that mine was over before very many others noticed (it was Job and I hit him twice in the face, then went back to my post). I could see Daphne’s covert team in a brawl at the other team’s flag. The other team called for reinforcement and Daphne went charging after them. She ran right into the heart of their strong hold and wrestled away from them with the flag in hand and my team cheered in triumph. Zach was livid and his first thought was to blame his soldiers, which was unfair because they had taken a beating and still kept going. He insisted on another game, best three out of five, but the second game was so intense that parents intervened when they heard us battle crying in unison. We were not allowed to play capture the flag after that. My aunt dressed our wounds after we had all been punished with a switch for essentially gang fighting and using neighborhood children to play out our family vendettas, like we were world leaders or something. I remember she had to drag me off of Job in the park that day, I was clearly beating him up, but I wouldn’t stop throwing punches, and he wouldn’t stop coming at me, and even when my aunt was yelling at me to stop, I kept swinging, kicking. When we were inside she said, “I feel sorry for whoever get on your bad side. You was possessed out there. That’s the thing about fighting, you get lost in that hate you feel until you snap out of it. Hopefully you snap out of it before you kill somebody.” Circumstance is a huge influencer of personality. I haven’t been in a fight since and I have since reconciled with Job who today has the house in the mountains with the tricked out basement and, quite frankly, a pretty bleak world view.
Nature is a scary thing. Talking to Job recently had me thinking about the dark things that humans cause, the traps we set for one another for our own advancement. And talking to him had me bitter, wanting to be better equipped than the next man. That bitterness has not subsided, really, but it’s scary to think that there are bound to be situations in our lives when we won’t be able to control our actions; we will be in autopilot, doing something we never imagined ourselves capable of.
My family has a lot of photo albums and I sat in my parent’s dining room with them stacked around the kitchen table like I was cramming for an exam on my own family history. There are a lot of us. My grandmother, my father’s mother, who I have only ever known as an elderly woman and it’s surreal to see pictures of her as a young woman, had a total of eight children. She has ten brothers and sisters, who all have children of their own. She has grandchildren that number more than 20. I didn’t know my father’s father very well, and neither did he, so there is no way to know how many other half uncles and aunts that I have. My mother’s family is just as big. I love my family and I look forward to the times when we all get together, usually my grandmother’s birthday or holidays, reunions. They are very good at reminding me about the life that I knew and the Ladoga we enjoyed will never die because we animate it every time we’re together remembering old times. But if we only reminisce when we’re together then we are never together in the present. I feel like I depend on my family for a retreat from the things in my everyday life that are stressful. Grown up stuff, like earning money and worrying about bills.
There is a picture of my uncles Ronnie and Clint, my mom’s brothers, when they are kids, about eleven, sitting on the couch during Ronnie’s birthday party. My mom loves the picture and says it describes their relationship perfectly; Ronnie is cheesing in the foreground with his arm around Clint, while Clint’s head is turned to one side and his mouth is full of birthday cake that he had apparently gabbed with his hand from the thing that had not been cut. “Ronnie loves Clint, he always looked up to him,” my mom told me. “That’s his older brother, but Clint will take the shirt off your back and you won’t even notice. I love my brother, but he is the definition of a con man, and Ronnie falls for it every time.”
My mom believes that at the sight of money, my uncle’s eyes light up neon green and could probably glow in the dark. She said that money was the worst drug for him. “He wasn’t on drugs either, that’s the funny thing, but he always made sure he had nice clothes, nice car. I swear, he’s had a car since he was fourteen, before he could drive. Clint does not go without. And he won’t just steal from you either, he knows just what to say to make you think it’s a good idea to give him your last cent.”
Apparently, when the two were in their early twenties, Ronnie had been working as a bank teller in Charlotte making decent money. Clint had recently leased an expensive car though he was only working at Captain D’s and could definitely not afford it. My mom says that there have always been get rich quick schemes for as long as there has been money to horde, and Clint roped Ronnie into one of his own design. Clint, inspired by the success of George Foreman’s grilling machines, had decided that he could improve on the design. His vision was to expand the size so that you could toast whole sub’s if you wanted to, or really long pieces of garlic bread, I guess. He only needed seed money for parts and labor. Of course Ronnie wasn’t easily sold by the pitch, but Clint was persistent and had made a prototype himself with hotplates and sheet pans. “He just knew that if he made one good one he could sell it to those people who used to have that commercial about invention ideas, with that caveman and the wheel.” Clint assured Ronnie that whatever amount he invested would come back to him three times over. Even Clint was surprised at the three thousand dollar check Ronnie wrote. “I knew that he was doing OK, but I didn’t know he had money like that,” my mom said. “I tried to talk him out of it. Clint can spend a thousand dollars in thirty minutes, he got more pairs of shoes than you and me combined, and his car payment at one point was my house payment.” When Clint got the check, he skipped town for three months, one for each thousand.
“I’ll never forget when I saw Clint again after he came back. He was dressed so nice. I got a handsome brother. He tried to act like nothing had happened, he told me he took a trip to Atlantic City. I asked him why he didn’t go to Vegas, but I guess it was all the same to him. When I asked why he did it, he said that when he had that money in his hands he just lost his mind. I know what it’s like to get something after you get used to having nothing, you feel like you got the whole world. But I would never take from someone that trusted me to do the right by them, let alone my own brother. We was all mad at him for a while after that, but you can’t hold a grudge forever. You just gotta keep that man away from your money.”
I like money. I won’t do a lot of things for money, but the opportunity to have the whole world is enticing, indeed. This is one of those situations where it’s hard to speculate on how I would react if presented with enough money to turn my eyes green like my uncle, whose threshold for the green possession was unfortunately low. If presented with the opportunity to have a large sum of money at the expense of doing something immoral, so as to cause disadvantage or dissatisfaction to a loved one, I can only hope that I will make the right decision. I don’t think that it’s in my nature to be so self serving.
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