Better, Not Bitter Read online

  LaGuardia was such a different world, but I fit in perfectly. It was a liberating place. Many of the students would go on to become famous actors and comedians. Omar Epps, Marlon Wayans, and Carl Anthony Payne from The Cosby Show all went there, and I got a chance to see so much talent in one place. My previous school had been so different. There were regular classes, bland state-issued curricula and texts, and maybe a few after-school activities. But LaGuardia felt like the world to me. I was one of the visual arts students and we were always creating. You’d walk down the hall and see choreographers working on a movement. And that was it: Everyone was always creating, and I soaked all of that in.

  We were all artistic dreamers making plans to live out our creative futures as singers, dancers, painters, actors. Again, it was New York. What better place to do exactly that? I was going to be a rapper, so I decided to take the first step toward making things happen. At that time, ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers) was up the block from my school. They had rap applications back then. You could fill out one to become a songwriter.

  “I’m going to do it!”

  I went up to the floor where ASCAP was located. I picked up my rap application and stared at the lines and information. Then I got cold feet. I never filled it out, never turned it in.

  I think everyone has that moment when we hesitate right before attempting something that feels significant. Sometimes it’s fear of the unknown. Other times it’s doubt. In hindsight, doubt might be why I hesitated and didn’t return the application. If we could learn not to doubt ourselves and just execute, we would be so much more on top of what we are trying to achieve. But everybody has their moment, and that was mine. The worst part about it is that you can never get that moment back.

  Even now, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I did. Would the trajectory of my life have been different? Would I have been the next LL or Nas? Who knows? Nevertheless, I still wrote and practiced my lyrics. I still wanted to be a rapper.

  Hip hop culture wasn’t just about the music, though. It was a lifestyle. It was the dope beats, but it was also the fly clothes, shoes, and accessories. There was a way rappers moved that conveyed confidence bordering on arrogance. They lived on that fine line; it was how they drew us into their world wholesale. Hip hop was just as much LL’s Kangol as it was his words. When he spit, “Terrorizing my neighbors with the heavy bass / I keep the suckers in fear by the look on my face,” we wanted a taste of that fury. Two generations later they would call it swag. We called it fresh. Hip hop was MC Lyte’s flow, but it was also the asymmetric haircut that all the girls rocked. It was the black leather outfits Kool Moe Dee wore. It was the African medallions worn by all the so-called “gods” in the game.

  During my time at LaGuardia High School. In 2010, I ran into my old friend Serena (in the hat) at a protest during our fight with the City of New York for a settlement. She came up to me and we embraced, reunited after all these years.

  I loved it all.

  As an earnest dreamer who also happened to be a Black boy growing up in Harlem, I was aware of all the dangers that lurked in the city. For a while there, none of those dangers affected me. I flowed in and out of all the boroughs, dressed in my Triple F.A.T. Goose, my kufi or crown, and my medallions without a second thought. I took shortcuts through tunnels and never had a problem.

  That is, until one day I encountered the Decepticons. They were New York’s most notorious gang. This group of young men traveled fifty-deep and were the most feared crew in the whole city. If they came to your school, everyone was in trouble. One day, they set their sights on LaGuardia High School of Music and Art. Truth be told, they didn’t really mess with the Black folks. They targeted white students who had money and nice things. They were coming to get it all.

  On the day they came to my school, I had just gotten out and headed to the 1 train at Sixty-Sixth Street and went through the tunnel that put me below Lincoln Center. I walked underneath the street to get to the turnstile area. I could’ve walked upstairs and gone around instead, which was a longer and safer path, but I didn’t feel like there was anything for me to fear.

  That day, as I was taking the short route in the middle of the tunnel, the Decepticons turned the corner. I always carried my pocketknife with me. Because I was tall, people thought I was older than I was, and they would haze me. I stayed ready for whatever. My mind went to my knife when I saw them coming but I didn’t make any sudden moves.

  I was beyond afraid. I wasn’t sure if I was shaking on the outside, or if they could smell the fear on me, but I certainly was trembling on the inside. I finally put my hand on my knife and said to myself, If they take me, I’m taking them. I wasn’t a chump, and I wasn’t going to get beat up. Two hundred–plus feet below Lincoln Center, a place where affluence and wealth reigned, lay this jungle made of iron and steel. I knew this wasn’t a moment for me to have a bunch of words. This was a moment for me to stand my ground with one look. I couldn’t allow them to smell my fear. But still, I was scared. I was wearing what we called “the culture” from head to toe. I had a crown on my head. I had black African medallions. I think I also had on my Rasta belt. All of these adornments were ripe for the taking.

  They surrounded me. It felt like they were ravenous wolves, and I was raw meat. All I could see in my mind’s eye was my body mangled after they were done with me. Then one of them muttered in Patois, “Nah, him all right…”

  They all left.

  I don’t remember if I ever walked that tunnel again. But I’d gotten their respect. They’d essentially said, “Oh, he’s cool.”

  Nothing else. Four words and they let me be.

  This was not how it would usually go. In a very real way, I could have lost my life that day. I could have been stabbed and left to die. In a poem I wrote called “New York-ish,” I captured this feeling: “New York will have you on some, eat a cat like a lion, spit the bones out, and beat they soul with it.” As a Black boy growing up in a place made a jungle by those who colonized its human resources, this confrontation was familiar. And because I recognized it, I survived it.

  Still, for the longest time, I wondered why they didn’t do anything to me. Maybe they let me go because I could understand what they were saying to each other. Even as a kid, I’d always been able to pick up accents and dialects easily. The Decepticons were mostly immigrants, speaking Patois. I understood them perfectly. I could understand the nuances of dropped consonants and elongated vowels. I think this is a gift that I’ve yet to unpack fully—except that God was preparing me to be able to understand a diversity of people, to be able to converse and connect with them at the heart level.

  I later learned that they probably left me alone because they didn’t think that I was African American. They likely thought I was an African in America, an immigrant. It was such a strange and common phenomenon in New York. Black Americans were often believed to be unworthy of rising to greatness, even by some of our own brothers and sisters from the Diaspora.

  They spared my life on that day because they were immigrants who saw themselves as victims here in the United States. When they looked at me, they didn’t see raw meat. They saw themselves. They said, “Oh, he’s not from here. He’s okay. He may be West Indian or this or that.” It’s funny how because of the Decepticons I started claiming my father’s Bajan lineage more. I somehow believed that it was another layer of protection I could wear to keep me safe. But it would take a couple more years for me to realize that, to white folks, Black is Black.

  I believe strongly in the spiritual connection of all things. All these moments when I could have died, where I could have been destroyed, taught me that I am supposed to be here, right now, doing everything I’m doing, speaking truth as I’ve experienced it to the masses. Everything I’ve witnessed and lived through was necessary in order for me to impart information and direction and guidance. That’s what early hip hop did. There was always a message in the music and music in th
e message. There was always someone telling stories, however embellished, of their journey through life. It was alchemy. Even though I never became a rapper, I still get to do that every day. There’s only one person I wish I’d gotten a chance to tell my story to: my father.

  My parents got married by the Imam of the large, ornate mosque on Seventy-Second Street on the West Side. My father left our home when I was about four years old.

  With the exception of the time he sent me the book on the 99 names of Allah while I was on trial, he never reached out to me. Because of that stark absence, I have only a few memories of him with our family.

  Early in my parents’ marriage, when I was a toddler, we moved from New York City to Savannah, Georgia. I remember one balmy night, we were all sitting in the house when my father put his fingers to his lips and said, “Shh!” As kids who looked up to this grand figure, we dutifully obeyed.

  Dad then grabbed his shotgun, aimed it in the direction of something we could not see, and then BOOM! The whole house shook.

  We were stunned by the sound but not afraid. He was our father. If he did it, then it needed to happen, we thought.

  It was a mouse.

  For a long time, we walked around that hole in the floor of our home.

  I don’t know why he shot the mouse. Dad didn’t explain things. It was simply a given that something was in our home that wasn’t allowed and it needed to die. It seemed as if this was just his way of dealing with things. My mother once said, “Your father was the type of man that if you crossed him, he’d spit in your eye and then cut it out.” But, maybe because I was a small child and he was my dad, I never saw him that way.

  I’m grateful for these flashes of memory, though: I see myself in storefront windows holding his hand. I see my mother’s face, frustrated at him. I know they must have been going through something hard, though I’ve never had the courage to ask her about it.

  On the rooftop with my parents.

  My last memory of him is also fleeting. We were in Georgia. It was me, my mother, and my siblings. We were all sitting in one of those old U-Haul trucks with the big front seat. I believe my mother was driving.

  She was leaving him. We were going back to New York. Dad was staying down south.

  We never saw him after that.

  About ten years ago, Aisha got in touch with him, first writing him a letter and then a phone call. He was living in Charleston, South Carolina, by then. He’d had other relationships and other children. When she first told me she’d found him, my heart beat wildly in my chest. I kept saying to myself, Man, one day I’m going to go see him. There was a real wanting there. A desire to know this part of me. People used to say we looked almost identical. The elders who knew him would say he “spit me out.”

  But I never got the chance. He passed away in 2015.

  The things I do know about my father are the remnants of stories told by family, mostly my aunt, who was the person on that side who kept track of everything and everybody; she, too, recently passed away. My father had five or six brothers. He was an actor who appeared briefly in the film Daughters of the Dust. He was also a photographer. In fact, he met my mother because she was a model and he was a photographer hired for fashion shows.

  In 2019, at a convention I was attending in Georgia, a vendor said to me, “I know your father.” This guy was about my age.

  “Oh wow.”

  Then he said, “Yeah, your father, he used to work on the ships. He built ships.”

  That really struck me. My father built ships? Just one more thing I didn’t know.

  I must admit that not knowing made me feel the loss of not having a relationship with my father even more. Hearing a stranger share this tidbit of information was like, “Damn, my dad has this whole life that we know nothing about and we will never know nothing about.” I have siblings I don’t know and that just makes that gap, that absence, feel deeper.

  My father apparently lived many lives. In Islam, he was considered to be a sage in the community. In Islamic terminology, he was the Sheikh. My father was very rigid in his understanding and practice of Islam, too. My mother told me, “Your father was a brilliant photographer [but after becoming a Muslim] he ripped all of his photos up and destroyed them.” In Islam, you’re taught that making pictures is considered haram (forbidden). I don’t know if it’s haram in the same sense as eating pork or murdering someone, but the reason is because they’re told that God is the only Creator and on the day of judgment, God will challenge you to give that picture life. It’s the same idea that shows up in the Bible about not making graven images.

  I no longer carry much anger toward my father and his decision to be absent. It’s more of a void. My siblings certainly hold him accountable for the way things went. Aisha would lament that we have an older brother we don’t know. That we have younger siblings, either two or three, whom we don’t know. There’s certainly some regret that I didn’t get a chance to connect with him before he died. Mostly, though, it’s a deep, abiding longing.

  There are days I feel lost when I think about him. There’s a tension there. On the one hand, I can spiritually reconcile that my father did all that he had in his capacity to do, and yet on the other, I wonder why he didn’t stretch himself a bit more.

  What helps me feel just a little less lost is knowing that there’s a Creator, that the reality I’m experiencing is temporary. There’s a verse in the Qur’an that says, “We awakened them that they might question one another. Said a speaker from among them, ‘How long have you remained [here]?’ They said, ‘We have remained a day or part of a day’” (18:19). “And indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of those which you count” (22:47). So there is a comfort I have in believing that if my father is accepted into paradise, I’ll see him again. And when I want to feel his energy in my presence, I hold his copy of the Qur’an. I kneel on his prayer rug. These were all given to me by my aunt after he passed.

  That said, there’s never been any part of me that thinks, If my dad was here, I wouldn’t have gone through what I did, or that things would have happened differently. Even at fifteen and sixteen years old, I was already self-aware enough to know that God is the only One in control.

  The flip side of that yearning is that I made a commitment to never cause my children to feel the way I felt. Through divorce and a blended family, I made a pact that my children would always know me. Whether a relationship works or not, that I would always be in their lives. And I’ve done that. Despite my ex-wife and I no longer being together, I can pull up and see our children anytime. I get immense joy in participating in their lives. And they know how much I love them.

  David Nocenti was my Big Brother when I was part of the Big Brothers Big Sisters League of New York in the late ’80s. Whenever I think about what it means to have a father figure or an older brother in my life, I think about my uncle Frank and David. David was definitely a big brother in every sense of the name that matters. We hung out together a lot. He took me to the movies and even swimming at his parents’ house in New Jersey. David was also the male role model my mother looked to in guiding me as a teenager, and he was a critical advocate for me when I was arrested. That night when my mother arrived at the precinct, David was already there. She’d called him and told him what she knew, and he’d immediately found out where I was and came to see how he could help.

  Me at David Nocenti’s parents’ pool in New Jersey. My uncle Frank was the one who taught me how to swim.

  “Hey, I’m here to inquire about my little brother, Yusef Salaam.”

  “Are you here in your official capacity?”

  They knew him.

  Linda Fairstein, the head of the sex crimes division; Elizabeth Lederer, the prosecutor; and everyone else involved knew who David was.

  This young white man asking about this Black kid from Harlem wasn’t a small thing. David was the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Before everything went down, I didn’t kn
ow how powerful that position was or what it meant. I just knew that there was this guy, who happened to be white, who cared. David was a young man examining his privilege before that was a thing. He was doing the work to give back and lift up. I’d been exposed to the other side of life in many other ways. Uncle Frank and Aunt Denise had moved from our building to a large house in Middletown. I wasn’t a charity case when it came to the exposure that David gave me. But the brotherly love we shared was certainly beautiful. He was such an integral part of my life before and after the case.

  Before, we hung out together almost every weekend. We ate pizza together. He was the first person that I ever saw dabbing the oil off his slice. Who does that? I was from the hood. We ate all the pizza with the cheese falling off and burning the roof of your mouth. But here he was, mindful of his health, I suppose, dabbing the oil. And guess what I do to this day?

  I dab the oil from my pizza.

  In hindsight, I understand that it was never about the pizza or the oil. There’s a more impactful reason why that particular memory sticks in my mind. There was a fatherly quality to our time together. And a son mimics his dad. Maybe I picked up some of that.

  After, he was the one who reinforced to my mother, “You have to fight for your son.” He went as far as to show her how to do it. He was responsible for telling her what she needed to know about in regard to the nuances of the law, and he gave her the information she would need to make the documentation. David, at the precinct, was able to make note of how much time had passed, who was doing what, and any other details my mother might have needed. For instance, he would say, “Hey, I’m here to see Yusef at nine o’clock.” And they’d say, “Okay, we’ll find a place for you to sit down and talk to him.” But, of course, an hour or two would go by. He knew that there was something odd about that, so he was writing down who was who, so my mother would know whom to address and whom not to address.