Look for Me in the Whirlwind by Dhoruba Bin Wahad

Author:Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

JAMAL: According to standards laid down by Noonie and by other people’s parents, we were supposed to go to school and get a good education so we could get a good job. Yet the subjects were so boring and the teachers seemed to be more wooden than the desk you had to sit behind. All this began to turn you off. In junior high I began playing regular hooky, and I spent quite a bit of time crashed on some Gypsy Rose from the liquor store. I was still popping that racist, Five-Percenter ideology in school, and the teachers were saying that I was a problem and I would never make it anywhere. More out of spite than anything else, I took the test* for one of the best high schools in New York, and I passed—which stunned my teachers. But then I dropped out of the summer program I was supposed to go to, and blew it.

That was the year that one might call the beginning of the big drift. It was a time of gang fights, of running the streets, of finding out what the street life was about, of drinking wine, smoking reefer, and just checking out cold life. In the fall I made an attempt to give up on that and to attend Evander Childs High School. But Evander Childs was pretty bad. It was a drugstore: drugs were sold in every corridor and every corner of the school. Nobody related to classes, it was simply a matter of making contact and getting high and going to whatever hooky party was going on.

The veil over certain facts in my life had been slashed off by then—I had found out that I am of Puerto Rican and possibly black descent, and the reason certain people in the block looked on me with a certain amount of taboo is that I was born out of wedlock. I also found out at that time all the facts of the different arrests of my foster brothers and sister, and I had come to the end of my idealistic rope. I didn’t see anything that I could do except follow other examples, just say, “Later for everybody else. I just got to get out here on the street and see what I can do for myself and try to put together a little bit of bread and possibly get my claim to fame by becoming a pimp, hustler, or a Murphy man, whatever type of game I can get off into.” I’d begun sniffing heroin around the age of thirteen, and it wasn’t too long before I went to skin-popping, then to shooting it. The high never really intrigued me, it wasn’t that beautiful, but it gave me an effect that my problems were cooled out. I had a little chippy—chippy is slang that means you have a light habit, not to the point that you’re strung out. But I knew I never wanted to attain a reputation as a dope fiend.

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