Purpose Read online

  “What are you doing, Nel?” Melky would ask.

  “I am bowing to the Temple of Shaolin.”

  We later learned that it was a juvenile home.

  The weekend before this confrontation with Walter I had watched Five Deadly Venoms, so I thought I could take him with a combination of my favorite styles from the film. I saw myself as a union of Toad, the best defense, combined with Snake, the best offense. Walter was big, so I went right after him, attacking him Snake style and landing a few blows. I backed up and took a flying Snake kick at his head, at which point Walter grabbed my legs in midair and body-slammed me into the pavement. Then he sat on me and started punching.

  I blacked out, because Walter was no joke. Then I came around to the sound of my sister Melky yelling, “Get off my brother!”

  I was dazed, in a semiconscious state, but when I heard her voice, my instinct was that my sister was being attacked. Like the Hulk, I got an adrenaline rush, picked myself up, and started swinging wildly. I connected, a fist connected back with me, and as I became aware of my surroundings again, I realized that Melky and I were single-handedly fighting off a mob of boys and girls that had circled around to watch. Once I got my bearings, she and I went back to back and proceeded to punch and kick our way home. From time to time we would falter: she would get thrown into the bushes or I would fall down, but we picked each other up and kept going. The entire time our brothers, Sam and Sedek, were across the street watching but not helping us at all.

  When we got home, Melky and I were pretty jacked up. My eyes were blacked, her lip was bleeding, and we had bruises forming all over our bodies. Once we caught our breaths, we turned to our brothers in disgust.

  “Why you didn’t help us?” I asked them. Melky just stared at them; her face said it all.

  “You let us fight all of them alone,” I said. “You just walked home across the street like you wasn’t even part of the Jean family.”

  “All of us couldn’t fight,” Sam said.

  “Why not, Sam?”

  “If you two got killed someone had to report it to Mom and Dad.”

  The next day I went to school determined to slap-box myself some respect. I found myself a fight and in front of everyone I won it. Slowly, day by day, week by week, I challenged every bully I thought I could take, and every time I beat one down, I won a little bit of ground for the Jean family. It wasn’t some huge coup, but just like those girls in Marlboro, the kids in school got the message that we weren’t going to back down.

  My campaign to stop getting harassed got a boost when I caught the eye of a guy named Hasade, who was the most feared kid in school. He had been clocking me and he respected my courage for taking on the bullies. Somehow he became my best friend.

  “I like the way you be slap-boxing those fools,” he said to me one day out of the blue. “You ain’t scared at all.”

  “Nah, I’m not.”

  “There’s more of them than there is of you.”

  “Yeah I know. But what else I’m supposed to do?”

  “Hang with me, man. You’ll be alright. My name’s Hasade.”

  Hasade wasn’t like anyone else in school. He was my age but he seemed years older. We were only in elementary school, but Hasade had his own moped, and no one fucked with it. Some days he was picked up in a white Mercedes-Benz. He was the man and nobody messed with him.

  At recess he held down his own area of the playground, and in that area he did gymnastics, which was a big part of the street culture at the time. It was an extension of break dancing, so being able to backflip was something all the kids wanted to do. It was dangerous, because we were doing it right there on the concrete. So those of us who could do it stood out. Hasade was the best at it and he taught me how, which earned me more respect, especially with the girls.

  Nassau Elementary was a rude awakening in every way. Not only did I realize that being Haitian made me different from every other black kid, but I also learned that getting girls took more than a smile.

  I had learned about love back in Brooklyn, in the Marlboro Houses the day I met Magdelena. We were just little kids, but when I kissed her on the cheek by the elevator I understood what love was. I didn’t see her before we moved, so I never got a chance to say good-bye. I thought about her all the time, and I developed a crush on a girl in my class because she looked like Magdelena. It felt like I was getting a second chance.

  The girl sat next to me in homeroom. The first thing I noticed about her was that she carried a raggedy bag. She lived with her mom and they were on welfare and her mom was on drugs, so this girl was taking care of both of them. She couldn’t afford a new bag or new clothes or anything like that.

  “You are too beautiful to carry a bag like that,” I told her one day. “You look like a bag lady.”

  I was always asking her to spend time with me because I liked her, but she always pushed me away. I had to find a way to make her like me.

  “If there’s one thing I could do for you, what would it be?”

  “Bring me a bag,” she said.

  “If I do that will you spend time with me?”

  “If you want me to spend time with you, bring everyone in class a bag. If you can do that, I’ll walk you home every day.”

  I was in love. She was the one for me, not only because she was beautiful and made it hard to get her attention, but also because she wasn’t just thinking of herself; she was thinking of everybody. I went back to the house daydreaming about her and wondering where I could get that many bags.

  Then fate stepped in and set me on the path toward learning a lesson. At that time one of my aunts’ daughters was living with us and she had bought a bunch of fake Louis Vuitton bags that she was going to sell for triple in the ’hood. I’d say she had about two hundred of these things, all stacked up along the walls of her room. I didn’t know what a knockoff was at that age, so to me, these were the real deal, just about the best bags money could buy.

  Here was the answer to my problem.

  I waited until she left the house and then I went to her room and tossed twenty of the bags out the window into the garden, where they landed without making a sound. The Lord has answered my prayers, I thought. I have enough bags for the entire class.

  The next morning I fetched all the bags out of the garden and brought them into school. I gave my entire third-grade class, including the teacher, a Louis Vuitton bag.

  My teacher knew something was wrong with this picture.

  “Where did you get these bags, Nel?”

  “Well, my mom is a missionary and she brought them back from a trip. She believes that everyone should be living equally so she told me to bring enough of them to school that everyone could have one.”

  It was a pretty good day in class that day. Everyone left happy with a Louis Vuitton bag and the girl I liked became my girlfriend. She gave me a kiss before we walked home from school together and when we stopped at the corner store she bought me a lollipop. Life couldn’t have been any sweeter for me: my girlfriend had a Louis Vuitton bag, I was sucking on a lollipop, and everything was good because it looked like I’d gotten away with robbery.

  I was wrong, of course. My teacher had already called my parents and asked them about the bags. I was walking home feeling like Robin Hood, but the Sheriff of Nottingham was there waiting for me. This was the start of a theme in my life: whenever I see people who need stuff that I know other people have in excess, I get it for them. In my mind, if someone isn’t living off of something that someone else is desperate for, I try to bring it to the less fortunate. In my mind, by taking those bags, I was following my father’s orders and obeying his morals as I understood them from his sermons.

  I rolled into the house that evening, sucking on my lollipop like I was the king of the world, to find my mother standing there waiting for me.

  “Where are the bags?”

  “Uh … what bags?”

  There was no hesitation: out came the slapping and the hair
pulling. My father relied on his belt; my mother used a wrestling slap that started way back behind her shoulder and came at you in slow motion. That never mattered, because there was no way to avoid it. This time she caught me in midair trying to move, and hit me so hard that she threw my entire body backward onto the floor.

  “You will get those bags back.”

  That really was the hardest part of all. I would have taken ten more beatings to avoid that. I was the man one day and the next I was a beggar. It didn’t go over well, either: most of the kids returned them, but all the kids who lived in the projects on Walnut Street looked at me like I was crazy.

  “You can go fuck yourself, man; we’re keeping these bags,” was pretty much what they said.

  Worst of all, my girlfriend gave hers back. The one person I had done all of it for was so sweet that she understood the kind of trouble I’d gotten myself into for her. Still, she didn’t feel any obligation to remain my girlfriend once she’d returned her bag. In the end, my mother had to pay my aunt’s daughter for the bags I couldn’t get back, and I paid my mother in chores for months and months.

  When I was about twelve, I started getting into all kinds of trouble, mostly for shoplifting. My cousin Nason and I had these down parkas like so many street kids in Brooklyn, and besides keeping us warm, those coats were great for stealing all kinds of shit. Our biggest heist was foiled though. We planned on lifting a few cases of army men to sell to the kids in school. We were like drug dealers, buying a large amount of what was in demand, with a plan to break it into smaller numbers and sell each one. In our instance, it would be pure profit because we’d stolen the shit in the first place.

  Those parkas were big, but you put two cases of plastic army men under one and it sure don’t look right. But we didn’t see that; we were too close to victory to be sensible.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  It was the security guard, one hand on each of our shoulders, right as we got within sight of the door.

  “What have you got under there?”

  “Nothin’,” I said. “My stomach just hurts. I’m sick.”

  He reached into my coat and grabbed the boxes of toy soldiers.

  “This is nothing, huh? What do you want me to do, call the police or call your mom?”

  I wanted them to call the police, but Nason told them to call our parents.

  My mom came and got me and whipped me all the way back to the house. Then she sent me to my room. When I walked in, something was different: there was a red blanket on my bed. I turned around and she was standing there.

  “Do you know why this red blanket is on your bed?”

  “No.”

  “Because I’m going to chop you up and I’m going to put your body parts under this blanket. The red will hide the blood. By the time the detective shows up, they won’t be able to tell which parts are the bed and which parts are your organs.”

  This wasn’t a very logical plan, but to a twelve-year-old it made sense. I was terrified.

  “Your father did not sacrifice everything he did to get you to this country to raise a shoplifter. Do not leave this room. I will be back.”

  My mother left me there in silence and closed the door. I started pacing around, my brain going wild, trying to decide if I should run or if she’d just catch me and start slashing me with her butcher knife. I was a wreck for the whole night, and my mother didn’t talk to me until the next day. She didn’t kill me either. But she did make her point. Until then I had never thought about any sacrifices she or my father had made for us. I had only thought of myself.

  MY FATHER HAD DECIDED to move us to New Jersey back in 1985 because of a vision he had. He told us that one day, while driving in the car, he passed a WELCOME TO THE GARDEN STATE sign on the highway and he knew that would be our home.

  “New Jersey—the ‘Garden State,’” he said to himself. “This is where I will build my garden of Eden.”

  From all the stories I’ve read, the Garden of Eden was never as crowded as our house. My father was a proud homeowner, but after a short amount of time, he realized that he’d gotten in over his head. My parents couldn’t afford their mortgage, so they were forced to rent the top two floors and move our family into the rooms on the first floor, which also served as the church. They also got us out of the public school system after Nassau Elementary by enrolling us at Our Lady Help of Christian, the local Catholic school.

  It was partly my age, but the Catholic school environment inspired me to investigate my true nature. I am named after a holy man and a rebel and in that holy environment, the rebel came out. I began to test the boundaries of what I could get away with in every possible way. My first year there, the nuns and the priests decided to raise money by giving each student a certain amount of candy to sell in the neighborhood. Whether we wanted to sell these chocolates or not, each kid had to take boxes of them home and had to return with the money to fund whatever program they were supporting that year.

  The total dollar amount the school would receive per student if we sold all of the chocolates was, like, $242.50, which was a lot of money to me. I got the boxes up to my room, saw how much all of it was worth, and decided to see for myself. I opened a box and took out a chocolate.

  Let me see what these things taste like if I’m going to sell them, right? I thought.

  Eating one chocolate from the box meant I had to pay for the whole thing because the school hadn’t given me the chocolate so I could eat it. This exact moment was when I fell in love with chocolate, and I’m still crazy for it. I opened the foil wrapper and ate one—and it was incredible.

  In the course of two weeks, I went through most of my supply, a whole $250 worth. The problem was that I didn’t have $250 for my teacher when she asked for it, so the school sent a letter to my mom asking for the money.

  My mom went to the school to ask why she owed them $250 dollars and they told her, “These chocolates were to be sold, and your son took them home but brought nothing back. We assume he ate all of them, so you owe the school this money or we’ll kick your kids out.”

  I ended up getting a West Indian beating at the time for being a glutton to the tune of $250 dollars’ worth of church chocolate. I still had a few boxes under my bed, so my mom took those and returned them. Still, she had to pay $200 and she wasn’t happy about that. I hadn’t even wanted to take those chocolates home, so I was not liking my school too much.

  As time went by, another incident added to my negative opinion. We had a priest at school named Father Sheen who taught my Bible class. By that time I had my own concept of the Bible and knew all of the stories from hearing them in my dad’s church. When somebody told me something about the Bible I didn’t agree with, I didn’t care who it was, I would debate him. It’s what I believed my father would do.

  One day in Father Sheen’s class, he was preaching that the devil is bad and that God is good.

  My hand shot up from my desk.

  “Yes?”

  “But at one time the devil was good,” I said.

  “What?” Father Sheen said, glaring at me. “What are you saying?”

  “Yeah, Father, at one time, the devil was good, wasn’t he?”

  I was right; the devil was an angel in heaven before he fell. I was just telling the truth. But it cost me my ears getting pulled by Father Sheen because this was a very hard-core school. I yelped like a kicked dog when he did it. In any other situation like that, kids would laugh at the guy in my position, but in Our Lady of Help, the students knew better than to do that if they didn’t want to be next.

  Still bending my ear, Father Sheen walked me out of class and down to the principal’s office where I expected a beating followed by a blessing with holy water to exorcise the evil spirits. I sat in the hallway while Father talked to the principal. Then they brought me into the office and we sat in silence. More nuns and priests filed in, called down to make sure I wasn’t Damien or some shit. Once a crowd of our teachers was ass
embled, Father Sheen asked me to repeat what I had said in his class.

  “Um … I said that … well, the devil … he was good at one time … wasn’t he?”

  As soon as I said it, the nuns crossed themselves and no one answered my question.

  They held me in the principal’s office until my mom and dad came to pick me up. With my parents now in the room, the principal asked me to repeat what I’d said one more time.

  “Did you hear that, Mr. and Mrs. Jean? Your son said that the devil was good at one time.”

  As an adult man, I understand why this was such a big deal in that Catholic school. They didn’t want me spreading the idea to the other kids that the devil was ever good, even though, according to the Bible, I was correct. He was an angel that was led astray, who fell from heaven. If that idea was misinterpreted, they would have a riot on their hands.

  My parents stood on either side of me, looking at me, while across the desk my teachers stared at the three of us.

  “Son, is that what you said?” my mother asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I turned to my teachers. “Father Sheen, wasn’t the devil once an angel of light who lived in the heavens with God until God cast him out? Until that happened and he decided he wanted to do his own reign, he was just like any other angel. So, he wasn’t bad at that time. He wasn’t born bad; he got bad later.”

  It was so quiet in that room. I looked up at my dad for approval and though he didn’t come out and agree with me, because he couldn’t, I know I saw a smile in the corner of his mouth. He never told me so, but I think he was proud that his son had interpreted the Bible for himself and told these Catholics how he saw things. I was taking after my namesake John Wycliffe.

  I ended up getting suspended from school for a week and I took that shit mad personally. I mean, look, I was right. My Bible knowledge was correct, and they knew it, too. But they couldn’t admit it, so they punished me. That wasn’t right, so I decided—and my brother Samuel Jean agreed to help me—that I should blow up the school. We would take this Catholic school out so it wouldn’t teach any more lies. Father Sheen was not telling the kids the truth, so this school shouldn’t be there—simple as that. I was intense as a child; my life could have gone in any direction.