Jumped In: What Gangs Taught Me About Violence, Drugs, Love, and Redemption by Jorja Leap

Author:Jorja Leap [Leap, Jorja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Criminology, Urban
ISBN: 9780807044575
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2012-03-06T06:45:46+00:00

Twelve. The Lost Boys

Where would we be if we kept chasing the wind

Around the streets love to stay high as a kite

After the cord snaps and send it flying

Up, up and away

Riding the freedom of gravitated euphoria

Itsgoodtoknowyou.

—Quentin Moore

“It’s rough out there,” Screech tells me, “I gotta protect myself.”

It is spring 2008. In the past six weeks two more gang members have been killed. Screech—who asks me to call him by his “real” name, Kevin Williams—has taken to traveling with a gun, strapped, everywhere he goes. He is also jumpy, erratic, and quick to anger. When I tell him to leave his gun at home, he stops talking to me. Three days pass without my seeing him. Instead, my cell phone rings at all hours with calls from his wife, Elena.

“I’m so worried about Kevin,” she tells me, her voice pitched high with anxiety. “I wake up in the middle of the night and he is standing at the window, staring out at the street. I tell him to come to bed, but he won’t come. Sometimes he leaves—I don’t know where he is going.”

All this is happening at the start of a major evaluation project. I have teamed up with two brilliant colleagues at UCLA, Todd Franke and Tina Christie, to design a longitudinal study of former gang members who come to Homeboy Industries for help. The three of us have just been awarded enough money from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation to fund the first two years of what will be a five-year study. Julio Marcial, who has the soul of a researcher, ultimately comes through with funding from the California Wellness Foundation to help with the remaining three years. It is a dream come true. But now the real work begins.

I meet Kevin Williams during the proposal-planning stage of the study, and he quickly involves me in all aspects of his life—gang activity, love, and danger. He is talkative and funny, with mocha-colored skin and gray-green eyes, the star of a gang-intervention class sponsored by the Los Angeles County Department of Human Relations. “Spreading Seeds” is a popular course with an unfortunate title: half its attendees have already fathered multiple babies. But oddly enough, its blend of new age mysticism and indigenous teachings appeals to homies, whether black or brown. Kevin attempts, carefully, to explain the class to me.

“I’m learnin’ that to move beyond the present, you gotta understand the past—and the oppression of people of color.” But when I ask Kevin about his personal history, the radical speak suddenly disappears.

“I guess I’m seein’ I always wanted a family,” he admits. “I never met my father. I know who he is. He was a Black Panther. Then he got locked up. I could find him but I don’t wanna. There’s nothin’ he could do for me right now. When I was comin’ up there was no older figures except who I met on the streets. They were gangbangin’ and stuff—I learned their trade, I could see they were makin’ money offa drugs, but I wasn’t sure this was what I was gonna do.

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