Purpose Read online

  To commit this act of terrorism, Sam and I started preparing a bomb. We were taking science at the time and we’d learned a little bit. We knew we should start with some light bulbs, and that we’d need gas, fire, a torch and everything. We’d learned how a battery cell makes electricity spark through copper wire, so we came up with our version of how that could be translated into a spark that would ignite our bomb. Our flawed logic was basically this: the battery cell makes light, so let’s apply that light to this gas and use a small torch to make it burn. We put this all together in a paint can, planning to start a fire that would destroy the school.

  The only problem was that it didn’t go off. It didn’t work at all. It didn’t even light up. It smelled like a gas station but that was as far as it went. We took it to school on a weekend and tried to light it and throw it down a stairwell into the basement, but nothing happened so we left it in a dumpster and went home. In spite of the teachings of Christ at home and in school, I was turning into a serious troublemaker. Thank God I found rap. It became my faith and my calling. Like my father before me, that calling put me on my path and delivered me from trouble—though my love of it got me into trouble, too.

  IN 1985, RAP WAS exploding and the sound of it could be heard all over the streets of our neighborhood. It was the start of the golden age: the Run-DMC’s, the L.L. Cool J’s, the Jeeps, and the big radios all booming. I couldn’t let my dad ever know, but I wanted to be a part of that. I loved the rhythm and I loved the music; I just had to hide it and listen to it on my Walkman when I knew he wasn’t around. What I wanted to do was blast my music while I walked down the street.

  We always had two lodgers at any given time in the upstairs rooms on South Clinton Avenue, and for a while one of them was a nice lady named Fifi who worked as a secretary or something like that. She was cool: she had a job and she made a nice little home for herself on our top floor. Her home got a lot nicer the day she brought home a big 1980s Sony radio to give the place some swagger. I saw her walk in with it, and every day after that all I dreamed of was taking it down to my room and playing the music my dad didn’t want me listening to.

  Radios like that were a status symbol on the streets; they made you fresher than any sneaker known to man. I had to have this thing. When she went to work, I snuck up to her room and there it was: it had the light-up equalizer, the two tape decks, the “loudness” button, all that shit. It took about fifteen batteries and it weighed like fifty pounds. That radio had no business hiding out up in that lady’s room. It belonged on the street, on my shoulder, so I could roll up to recess like some Catholic school version of Radio Raheem.

  My father had been raised in the hill country of Haiti and had a green thumb unlike anyone I’ve ever met. I’ve seen him turn the filthiest back lot into a garden bursting with vegetables. No matter how barren the soil, he would coax tomatoes and string beans from the concrete. In our small yard in East Orange, he grew a field of corn. There were thugs on the block out front, but behind our house it looked like Indiana. That was where I planned to hide the radio.

  The next day after the lady left for work, I snuck up to Fifi’s room and destroyed everything. I broke her mirror, her picture frames, dumped out her drawers, all of that. I wanted it to look like a burglar had come through the window and robbed her. I took the radio and carefully tossed it out the window into my dad’s field of corn where the tall plants cushioned the fall. Then I went back to my room, got ready for school, and went downstairs.

  Before we left for the day, my mother always gave us an inspection: she’d check our bags, make sure our uniforms were straight and that our homework was done, and then we were off. After that I ducked into the backyard, got the radio, and caught up to my brothers and sister. Boom! I snapped my music on—“Sucker MC’s” by Run-DMC. And it was on.

  I walked along and dudes were like, “Damn, homie, that’s a big radio!” I was living the dream. All day long I was the man at school, but come three o’clock, I had a problem: I couldn’t bring the radio back home. I didn’t want to leave it outside in the corn overnight, so I took it to Hasade’s house on Walnut Street. He was the only guy I could trust not to keep it, because he already had one.

  When I got home, my crime had been discovered. Fifi was there, screaming that she’d been robbed, that her stuff had been broken, and that her radio was gone. My mother is a wise woman, so she’d already figured her kids were behind it. How could we not be? What kind of thief breaks into a top floor room through the window without being caught and doesn’t steal from any other room in the house?

  My mother’s intuition was strong, and she had her methods to keep us in line. She made us believe that she could read our minds, and since we believed her, we allowed her to. We would tell her what she wanted to know by squirming to the right or left under her gaze. She read into every bit of body language when we were lined up being questioned by her, and always got her answer because she translated what her intuition told her into the movements of her magic broom.

  When one of us had done something wrong and she wanted to find out who it was, she would line us up in the kitchen and walk back and forth, asking questions. If she didn’t scare us into admission that way, we knew what was coming. “If you do not tell me, I will get my broom,” she’d say. “The broom knows the truth. The broom finds the one who lies.”

  Mom had us brainwashed with this magic broom. It was never used for cleaning; its purpose was to learn the truth when her children had done something wrong and were lying about it. Whomever the broom pointed to was the guilty one.

  But before she went to the broom, Mom always gave us one last chance to step forward from the line if we were guilty of the crime. Eight times out of ten that would do it, because we were so scared of the broom coming out that one of us would confess even if we hadn’t done it. The mere mention of the broom set us squirming like worms in the rain.

  Stealing the radio wasn’t something I was ready to go down for, though, because that was a big crime. So I prepared myself for the broom and kept my face straight.

  “Mrs. Fifi was robbed today,” my mom said, glaring at us. “I am going to ask you all only one time if you had anything to do with it.”

  No one said anything.

  “If I don’t get the truth right now … you know what will happen.”

  My brother Sam started crying.

  “She’s gonna get the broom,” he whispered through his sobs. “She’s gonna get … the … broom!”

  My brothers and sister started looking at each other, wondering who was going to squeal. Then they all started talking at once, all of it nonsense. I remained silent, not only because I was guilty but also because I knew the broom would choose me anyway. It always did, because my mom’s instinct, which was usually right, told her that I had something to do with it.

  That moment was pandemonium: all four kids pleading their cases, half crying and half shouting nonsense until my mother silenced us.

  “Does anybody want to tell me where is the radio?”

  We all shut up.

  “Yo,” I said. “I don’t know anything about no radio.”

  She looked me straight in the face and then walked to the broom closet.

  As soon as she opened that door my brother Sam turned green. He is incapable of lying and always has been, which is terrible because today he is a lawyer. Every time the broom came out, if Sam knew anything about the crime committed, he’d throw up. He started doing that now.

  Once the broom was out, my mother would work her way down the line, asking each of us questions to determine who was guilty and who was innocent. She was a master trickster whose show began the moment the broom appeared. My mother was a very beautiful woman who always dressed very properly, with perfect manners. It took a lot for her to take steps this dramatic to enforce her rules. When she got the broom she was no longer the mom we knew—which made it that much scarier for us kids.

  She’d make circles around that broom with
her hands while looking us in the eye, distracting us from the fact that she was using her feet to make the thing move. If she decided you were guilty, she’d let the broom lean toward you. We learned her method a few years later when my sister caught her at the store testing new brooms with her feet. Even after that it didn’t matter. When we saw that broom we all knew someone was going down for something.

  Most of the time my mother’s convictions were just, but sometimes her judgment was off, which still meant the belt and extra chores for the innocent. Our fear of this broom was real.

  Years later I used the memory of that tension to create a piece of music for the first film score I ever wrote. It was for Life, a comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Martin Lawrence, directed by Ted Demme. I was having trouble finding the right emotion for a scene. The music needed more intensity and danger, so Ted Demme told me to think of something that brought those feelings to mind. Something that made me scared and nervous. That was easy: the broom. I thought of my brother Sam and how he’d start shaking, and wrote what I imagined that felt like.

  My other brother Sedek wasn’t much better that night: he was so scared he couldn’t even answer my mother’s questions, which meant he would be convicted. If any of us started wigging out, usually my mom would just let the broom fall on us. But he was so confused and scared that she let him off that time. My brother Sam was passed over, too; then came my sister Melky.

  My mom stared at her a long time. She knew what she was doing. My little sister was like Tootie on The Facts of Life; she always got her older brothers in trouble because she couldn’t keep her mouth shut.

  “What do you know about a radio, Melky?” my mother said.

  “Well,” she said, looking at the floor, “Nel went to school with a radio. I’ve seen him with one.”

  My mother and the broom moved down the line to me.

  “What do you know about a radio?” she said.

  “Oh, the radio my friend gave me?” I said. I kept my eye on the broom handle.

  It didn’t move—but my mom’s hand did.

  Slap! She smacked me across the face. “Go to your room and wait for your father to come home! You are lying!” I was in for it.

  A few hours later my dad came home and a few minutes after that he burst into my room.

  “Where is the radio?” he said. There was no way a lie was getting me out of this.

  “I don’t have it here,” I said. “A friend of mine has it.”

  “Okay then, wait here.”

  My father had a few belts he used to discipline us, but this time he got the shocker, his thick leather cowboy belt. He gave me a few slaps with it then he stopped.

  “You and I are going to find the radio.”

  We started walking through the hood, my dad behind me wearing his flip-flops, carrying his big-ass belt. Every few steps—pow!—he struck me. All the kids on the block stopped what they were doing to watch this.

  “Damn, homie!” someone yelled. “Your dad crazy!”

  The blows hurt, but the embarrassment stung more. We walked all the way down Walnut Street, the thugs and dealers staring at us, to Hasade’s house. Hasade opened the door, took one look at my father, and started shaking his head.

  “I see you got caught, homie. Minister, I had nothing to do with it and I want nothing to do with it. Nel, get the radio yourself; it’s right over there.”

  With the radio at my side I prepared to walk back home, expecting a beating the whole way.

  “What are you doing?” my father asked me.

  “Returning the radio?”

  “I want you to hold it the way you did this morning when you were proud of yourself. How did you hold it while you showed off to your brothers and sisters? Did you hold it down at your side like it was your schoolbooks?”

  “No.”

  “Show me how you did it.”

  I put the radio on my shoulder.

  “Now turn it on. I want you to walk home just the way you walked to school today.”

  I turned on Run-DMC and started walking, with my father a few steps behind, whipping me the whole way.

  “Turn it up louder, so they all turn to see you. I want the whole neighborhood to know you’re a thief. You will wear these marks I give you so that they will know you are a thief.”

  I was like a hip-hop Jesus carrying his cross up the mountain.

  That wasn’t the end of it either. My father borrowed the radio from our tenant that weekend so that he and I could visit my grandmother. He made me put it on my shoulder and turn it up real loud as we walked to her door.

  My father dealt swift justice and you knew it was coming. My grandmother was more like the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. She would ask innocent questions in her loving grandmother voice and then pounce on you and eat you up.

  “Where did you get the radio, Nel?”

  “Oh … this radio? The radio … I stole it, Grandma.”

  “What? We didn’t raise no thieves in this family! Get over here!”

  Then the wolf came out, in the form of her belt. Then she went to her desk and got out a Swiss Army knife.

  “Thieves must pay for what they do, Nel. You must pay. Come here and take off your shirt. When I’m done with you, you will know that your grandma don’t raise thieves.”

  My grandmother cut me across the back with her knife. She left a series of small scars that healed quickly but left marks that I didn’t forget. Every time she lay into me, she made me repeat after her: “Grandma don’t raise no thieves.” She gave me a Passion of the Christ beating. Then she brought me into the kitchen, sat me down, and fed me.

  And that was how justice was dished out in my family.

  My grandmother knew how to keep kids in line, and our parents relied on her to do it, too. She was daycare for the extended Jean family: all of my cousins and I spent our afternoons there together pretty often. She would watch television and we would play in the other room, but she had ears like an owl and eyes in the back of her head. My grandmother loved television and watched it all the time, but she didn’t understand English or any of the shows very well. That didn’t matter; if it was on, all those pictures going by made her happy. The one thing she really paid attention to and took interest in was Lucha Libre—the Mexican wrestling where they wear masks. She’d turn the volume up real loud on it and knew all the wrestlers by name. She loved it so much that if you tried to argue with her that it was fake, you were in for a long, serious debate that you were not going to win. You might get beat up, too. As if to prove it was real, my grandmother liked to slap Lucha Libre nonbelievers upside the head while arguing with them. I’m serious; she was obsessed—to the point that she body slammed one of our cousins when he kept insisting it was all bullshit. Then she put him in a headlock down on the floor until he cried mercy. Grandma was fit and she was no joke.

  She had to be; she had raised a lot of kids and survived a lot of tough times. Her oldest son, Jean, was a real tough kid who ended up becoming a marine. Then later he disappeared after he served his time. No one in the family really talks about what happened to him because I don’t think anyone knows for sure. I’m pretty sure he got killed. He started rolling with a Jamaican crew in Brooklyn, doing crimes, and the next thing we knew he was gone. His last name was Jean just like mine, and his path could have been mine, too. We were a lot alike, because there were exactly four troublemakers in the family: him, me, my brother Sam, and my cousin Nason. Any of us could have gone down that road.

  They called my cousin Nason and me the Twins because we got in trouble together all the time. We did stupid shit—holding up grocery stores, stealing car radios—just about every petty crime that takes place on the street. Mostly my cousin and I went into cribs and took what we could within three minutes. That was my rule. Three minutes was all we had. That’s why they started calling me Speedy, and later, Spidey, like Spider-Man. Nason and I got good at it, too. We did most of this when we were thirteen, fourteen; we were those kids you didn�
�t want to run into out there in Brooklyn. And during those years, my grandmother was the one in charge of looking after us most afternoons until it was time for us to go home to our parents.

  During one of those afternoons we realized that my uncle was not nearly as pious and God-fearing as his brother Gesner. His tastes were much more earthly, judging by his porn collection. To my teenage eyes, watching people have sex on video was the craziest, most incredible thing I’d ever seen. These films were pretty innocent, now that I’ve gotten older and seen real hardcore porn, but back then, my eyes bugged right out of my head. Like new devotees of any religion, we began to study these sacred documents, behind closed doors, every afternoon, until my grandmother caught us. She whipped us to high heaven, and after that my uncle’s door had a lock on it. Only a woman as tough as my grandmother could have kept us in line, despite our numbers: on any one afternoon she might be looking after as many as fourteen kids—all of my father’s siblings’ kids, plus us, his kids. She ran a tight ship, keeping us off the streets while our parents were at work and keeping us quiet enough for her to be able to watch Lucha Libre. To do that she behaved like a drill sergeant, shouting at us to keep quiet, get in line, whatever had to be done. The oldest four of us, being headstrong teenagers who thought they were thugs, eventually decided that we’d had enough of taking orders.

  We held a kid group meeting and I decided that there was only one thing to do about Grandma holding us down: we had to get rid of her. My little sisters were there, and like I said before, they were like Tootie from The Facts of Life, just snitches all the way. My younger sister Rose was growing up to be just like my sister Melky in that regard.