Page 27 of Down With the King of the South 4

I’ll be damned if I let her see that shit. She would need therapy for the rest of her damn life after seeing some shit like that. Because I was raised in projects similar to this one, this wasn’t my first time seeing a dead body, so honestly, this was nothing to me.

“Take her outside. Let me see what the fuck is going on,” I said and handed Maya over to Shae.

“Toddrick, no! That crazy bitch got a fuckin’ gun. I’m not leaving you alone in there. Let’s go. This don’t have shit to do with us,” Shae yelled over Krystal’s mother screaming at the top of her lungs and crying after witnessing the shooting.

“I got my piece on me too, Shae. Take her to the fuckin’ car, yo. I’ll be there in a minute,” I yelled back.

This time, she took Maya and got out of the apartment.

“Why would you do thissss? Whyyyy? Just get the fuck outttt! Get the fuck outtttt,” Krystal’s mother cried, down on her knees holding Krystal in her arms, but she was gone. She was dead.

Krystal was leaking blood from the dime-sized bullet hole in the middle of her forehead. Blood was leaking from her chest where the other three bullets had struck her.

“I let this bitch into my fuckin’ home! I let her come and live with me. Live with my fuckin’ kids. She was my first cousin, so I trusted this hoe around my motha fuckin’ man! I never thought that she would do this! I had to find out from my own motha fuckin’ son that he caught her in the bathroom fuckin’ his daddy. Why the fuck you think she brought her ass back down here? She knew I was going to be looking for her ass. Fuck your daughter!” she screamed, still with the gun in her hands, which I was pretty sure is the main reason why Krystal’s mom wasn’t talking big shit or trying to beat her ass.

At the same time, the whole living room was now filled with everyone who lived in this fuckin’ house. I wasn’t even sure who called the police because when you stayed in the projects and gunshots rang out, nothing ever happened because this was a community of people who didn’t believe in snitching. That type of activity generally happened in the white community.

As if the cousin in there with the gun was a black man, the cops came over to her and tackled her ass to the ground then put her in cuffs. Out of all the times that I could have brought Maya over there, I chose to bring her on a day when some bullshit like this had to fuckin’ happen. I was a witness to a fuckin’ murder. As badly as I thought of Krystal, no woman deserved to lose her life like that. Shit wasn’t even fuckin’ worth it.

If her so called nigga would even stoop to the level of fuckin’ her family, then she needed to walk the fuck away from a dog like that instead of killing her fuckin’ family behind that shit. I just listened to this woman mention that she had kids. Now, she was in a situation where she was going to be taken away from her children, all because she reacted to some shit way too fuckin’ fast.

I ran my hand over my face and released a sigh. All the fuck a nigga wanted to do was bring Maya down there to see her ole girl, and then after that, I wanted to take Maya and Shae to brunch. Now, look! Life was so fuckin’ crazy, I tell you.

Giovonni “Trip” Young

“How many of you little niggas in here for murder charges and serving a life sentence?” I asked.

Damn near every hand in the room went up. I took the things that Raynell had told me into consideration, especially her telling me to go to the warden and propose the new club that I was thinking about creating at the prison. She was for real when she told me that there were a lot of younger boys in this prison who looked up to me.

It was no secret that I banged Miami Boyz, and a lot of the boys who came in there wanted to be down, even if that meant being down while incarcerated. Crazy how they came in and thought that shit was cool to be out there killing motha fuckas, robbing, and all of that other dumb shit that comes along with being young and dumb. Back then, I was like them too, which is why it meant a lot to me now to get knowledge instilled in them before it was too late.

I didn’t have anyone in my life to pump knowledge into me. My own mama had pretty much written me off once she realized what I was choosing to do with my life. By the time I was eight, she had pretty much already guessed what my future was going to consist of. I hate to say it, but she was right. She’d been telling me for years that I was going to end up gunned down in the street or a permanent member in somebody’s prison. There was no daddy in my life to teach me how to be a man, so, of course, I was going to naturally run to the streets.

I also hate to say this, but everything that happened to be needed to happen in order for me to change. I needed to be sentenced to life, I needed to lose my son, my girl, all of that. This was the only thing that would force me to sit down on my ass and realize my fuck-ups. The past couple of weeks, I had been thinking really heavy. The thing that took up a lot of the space in my mind was the escape that Raynell and I were supposed to do. I would have died right there on the fuckin’ spot trying to run out of this fuckin’ prison, and my mama would have been burying me the next week.

That part of my life was now over, and that chapter was closed. Finally, I could say that I was glad that Raynell had switched out on me. I was looking at a room filled with boys as young as eighteen and as old as twenty-seven. I looked at these young, black men, and I saw Vonte. This could have easily been Vonte, and the same way that I wanted to save Vonte from everything, I wanted to somehow save these boys, although I didn’t have much to give but a story and some good advice.

“And how many of you little niggas got kids? A woman at home? A mama who raised you on your own?” I asked another question, and this time, every hand in the room went up.

I didn’t necessarily know which question pertained to each individual, but it didn’t matter because we pretty much all had the same damn story.

“I got with my shorty at a young age. I was thirteen, and she was eleven. I was a little ass nigga who didn’t give a fuck about nothing but selling that little dime bag of weed to help my mama out with the groceries and shit. I don’t know what it was about Jashae, but I knew I loved her. That girl saved me from a lot of shit. I would have been involved in way worse shit than what I was already involved in, but then her face would pop up in my head, and I would talk myself out of it.

“I got her pregnant when she was thirteen, and I was fifteen. I didn’t know shit about being no damn daddy. I didn’t have one, so right off the bat, I knew that I wouldn’t be a good father. Neither she nor I was talking abortion, so our son forced us to grow up. A son who I only got the chance to spend seven years outside of these fuckin’ walls with because I committed a murder, killing an innocent little girl with my bullet, and for that, this is my present and my future. Y’all like y’all kids having to come down here and visit y’all? What about your shorties? Y’all know women can be sensitive as fuck, so those visitations ain’t easy.

“I had to give the birds and the bees talk to my son over the damn phone. I had to hear about his basketball games and shit over the phone.

When my son graduated from middle school, I wasn’t there. When he went to homecoming and all of that other shit, I wasn’t there either. Y’all can think that street shit is cool all the fuck you want to, but guess who doesn’t think it’s cool? Your motha fuckin’ kids. When my son got older, I could tell by the way he would look at me that he was disappointed in me. Although he never voiced that shit out loud, he didn’t have to because I could see that shit in his eyes.

“What did it for me is when I lost my son a year ago. These motha fuckas in here couldn’t care less about me needing to attend that funeral either because straight up, they told my ass no without even batting a fuckin’ eye. For some of y’all who still have a chance at freedom, this shit is not too fuckin’ late for y’all. Don’t be like me. Y’all see these Miami Boyz tattoos on my hands and my neck, and y’all think that shit is cool, but look deeper into this shit. Think about the fact that I done spent eleven Christmases in this bitch, eleven birthdays in here, eleven of my son’s birthdays.

“I’m only telling y’all this shit because when I was y’all age, I would have killed for somebody to stand in front of me and tell me some shit like this. I swear to God I would have listened,” I said, telling them the God honest truth.

I saw the good that came with doing bad, like the respect in the streets, the money, the bitches, all of that, and that’s what I wanted. At the time, no one was worried about the cons, like the fact that my ass could actually end up behind bars for the rest of my life if I kept doing what I was doing.

I stood up for another five minutes or so, telling my story for a little bit longer. Then I took my seat right in the middle of the circle since I was the one hosting the class. One by one, each boy in the class stood up, and they all told their story. Crazy how pretty much every one of our black asses had the same story. Hustling for us first started out as just something to do to survive and to help out our single mothers who were doing this shit on their own. Then, it progressed to us doing it because everybody else was doing it, and all we were trying to do was live in the American Dream, but in the midst of us trying to do that, we’d lost our freedom.

“That’s a good thing that you’re doing for these young men, Mr. Young. They need this. I saw the look in each and every one of their eyes, and I can tell that somebody has finally gotten through to them,” Warden Smith came over and said it to me.

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