draft/ essay one

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My mother was murdered. That is all I have been thinking for 13 years after my father made it official. You watch television shows and read newspaper articles about people being murdered, but it never hits home for people who haven’t directly experienced the pain, anger, guilt, confusion, and unspeakable sorrow that is attached to such a tragedy. You watch the news and almost become detached from the reality and finality of death. You become detached from the idea that when an anchorperson delivers news about death and murder that these are real people with real families.
When that anchor person says, “in other news”, we as viewers are taught to move on just as quickly. We fail to comprehend that we are all part of the same human family and that these aren’t just people who are murdered every day, but mothers, brothers, sons, aunts, uncles, daughters, and fathers. My mother was murdered and my father turned to drugs to cope. He was the prime suspect in my mother’s murder as most spouses are in a murder investigation in which the victim is married. I guess it is just assumed that some sort of domestic dispute lead to that persons murder if they have a husband or wife.
My father explained to me that he and my mother had been arguing a lot and had gotten into some physical altercations after she admitted that she had cheated on him with another man. He told me that they had just settled their differences the same day she was murdered. My father said that my mother told him that she loved him before she walked my uncle’s girlfriend to the bus stop; that was the last time any of us saw her alive. Her and her friend were stabbed over 70 times and left to die on the rooftop of an abandoned building. Penny Eudora Fant died wearing a locket that had our pictures inside. It was never made clear to me exactly what my mother was involved in or who she was involved with that would have wanted to inflict that kind of harm to her or what she could have possibly done to warrant such aggression. I’ve gotten stories from my uncles that my mother had been involved in drug dealing. One of my uncles who is not alive now told me that one time when he worked for a limousine company that he went to visit my mother and when he came into the house she had shoeboxes of money in the closet.
My mother stole to provide for our family. We were very poor and sometimes she had to do what she had to do for us to have what we needed. My father told me that she went to jail in 1986 for robbery or shoplifting and was not the same person when she returned, he believes that someone on the inside lured her into the drug game and then made threats against her life, and the lives of her family members which would include me, my father and the rest of my family. My father told me that a few months before she was murdered she tried to overdose on medication. She kept screaming at him, “ I can’t let anything happen to the family, I don’t want anything to happen to you or Elliott”. The woman she was with whose name was “Betty” was my uncle’s girlfriend. It was determined that she had nothing to do with the murderers or with that situation, she just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I died with my mother and her friend that night. My ability to trust, my ability to love entirely, my happiness and contentment and my faith in people were all shattered in a way that I cannot fully describe, in short, by the time I was 12 years old I was no longer a child, but a prisoner of circumstance that had suffered through more hardship than people 4 times my age. After years of eating from this plate of life the worst thing began to happen to me; I became used to it. My earliest memories were ones of ignorance, knowing halfway what I should have known entirely. Having the feeling that I was always on the outside looking in as it pertained to circumstances that were to have a profound impact on my childhood existence, my adolescence and my development as a man. I still struggle with how I feel to this very day about the Hillside police reopening my mother’s case, because I don’t know how I would react if they found my mother’s killers, I don’t know if I’d kill the people who killed my mother. My family; my maternal grandmother in particular, just wanted me to be happy. She seldom spoke about my mother and on the occasion that she does she only chooses to talk about the things that my mother would do around Christmas time and the good memories that she had from my mother’s adolescence. My maternal grandmother would omit things that happened around the period of her death even as I became older and more ready to understand what was going on.
I was upset at her for not trying to help me understand more about my mother. I was upset with my father for having become addicted to drugs, but as with my grandmother and the rest of my family how could I have known what it was to be in their position. What did I know about being accused of my wife’s murder or being the mother, sister, aunt, uncle or grandmother to a 21 year old woman who’s murder was one of the worst murder mysteries in the history of Hillside, N.J. I remember moving around a lot as a kid, moving from ghetto to ghetto with the rest of my family trying to find a place to call home. Every time I would become settled and find new friends to get into trouble with, it was time to move again. I moved from Hillside, to Plainfield, to Newark, to Irvington, and back to Newark in a period of five years. I remember it being 1993 and my family moving to Chelsea avenue in Newark, N.J.
My first real recollection about drug selling and drug use was set in motion by my grandmother’s boyfriend who had a team of drug peddlers selling crack cocaine, heroin and angel dust off of our porch steps while my grandmother was off at work. He and my uncle used drugs in the house. Cops raided our house for drugs on a few occasions and when my grandmother found out what he was involved in and that other dealers in the neighborhood was threatening his life, she bought him a plane ticket to Oregon and ended their relationship. My mother doesn’t have a tombstone on her grave until this very day because he messed up the money that my grandmother wanted to use to purchase it with. I wondered at nine years old what those little bottles with the colorful tops were that I kept finding peppered in with the leaves in our backyard and crushed into broken glass along the street pavement. In the years to come I would find that the demons that hid in these little bottles and in those tiny slips of aluminum foil would take countless members of my community and several members of my family away in ambulances, or police cars via drug distribution or drug use from the 1980’s on through the 90’s.
When my paternal grandmother found out what was going on at the house she insisted that I come to live with her. My maternal grandmother agreed because she worked really late nights and there was no one that she felt comfortable with supervising me from the time school ended until the time she got home at 12:00am, so towards the end of my 2nd grade year I moved to East Orange, N.J. with my paternal grandmother. The neighborhoods weren’t all that different in terms of what went on outside; the robberies, gang violence, drug selling and drug use were commonplace in all of the surrounding neighborhoods from Orange, N.J. all the way through Newark. What was different was what went on in the house.
It was only me and my grandmother living together in East Orange, as opposed to the 10 people who lived with me when I lived with my other grandmother. With my paternal grandmother I was always properly looked after, I ate everyday, showered everyday, and did my homework. My paternal grandmother didn’t always give me everything that I wanted materially, but she gave me everything that I really needed. She gave me discipline, and security. I remember her turning on the radio to the jazz station CD 101.9 and having me help her clean the entire house on Saturday mornings before she went to the grocery store; things that I hated doing back then, but that I am appreciative for right now.
I still was consumed by anger as a youth, and that feeling only heightened in my dealings with other youth from the neighborhood. I was teased and made fun of for being one of the few children whose parents made them adhere to the uniform policy in sixth grade. It didn’t help my cause to have a double barrel Euro Sport book bag that was just as big as me. When I would walk home from school, kids from our rival neighborhood would follow me home and kick my book bag and taunt me as they followed me home from school most days. I remember them surrounding me on Church Hill where my friends and I played football. As I looked at one member of the group another member punched me in the face and then they jumped me.
When I got home I went under my grandmother’s bed and grabbed her handgun and vowed to myself that I was never again going to be a victim. I put the gun back where I found it, but I had every intention at 12 years old of shooting the next person that thought they were going to bully me. To avoid being put in that position again, I took a longer way home from school, not because I feared these kids, but out of fear of my own anger. I had no self esteem when I was young. I remember walking home with a friend and running into a couple of girls. My friend asked one of them to talk to me and she said, “ I’m not talking to him, he’s ugly, look at all those bumps on his face.”, I couldn’t remember a time in my childhood when I was more hurt and embarrassed. I always heard what that girl said to me in my mind. It echoed loudly at night, almost like the girl was in the room with me. I sometimes wondered if she would’ve been as mean to me if she knew my story, then I thought that I wouldn’t have wanted her pity at the expense of her honesty.

After seventh grade, my grandmother decided to have me enrolled in a program called, “ A Better Chance”. It was a program designed to take those who qualified academically out of the inner city public schools and place them in “more accelerated” college prep schools. I took several stances against the viewpoint that my grandmother’s shared about sending me off to finish middle school and high school in Hoboken, N.J., a place that I had never heard of in my entire life. I didn’t understand why my grandmother wouldn’t even allow me to finish 8th grade at the school that I was attending and I was against it, especially after me and my grandmothers visited the school, but oddly enough it turned out to be one of the most important experiences of my life to date.
I grew up in predominantly black neighborhoods throughout my life and if I or anyone in our neighborhood saw white people either they were cops or they were people who we saw in passing who we thought were just lost. I wasn’t exposed to white people or even Hispanic people a lot when I was young, not because me or my family had any animosity toward those or other groups, but because that was just the habitat of where I grew up. Going to the Hudson school in Hoboken taught me how to adapt to new scenery, new ideas, and new cultures and people, those experiences opened the door to a whole new world of perspective. I caught the train on my own for the first time in 1998 on my first day at this new school. On my second day while traveling home, I met what I thought was the prettiest girl I had seen up to that point in my life.
When she smiled it was like the sun was shining indoors. I remember how high I felt after she said yes when I asked her to be my girlfriend a few months later and how low I felt when she dumped me two weeks after that. High school was a blurred vision stock piled with the good, the bad, and the ugly of adolescence. I realized by the time I had graduated that this distant love that took my heart while in high school took my common sense as well, but I didn’t feel too bad because that is a commonality in all love stories.
My senior prom was perfect and a far cry away from my junior prom where I was crowned prom prince, but could not fully enjoy the moment because of how my friendship had crumbled with the girl I loved. After she graduated in 2002, I realized that I didn’t really take the time to get to know her the way I should’ve, and that if I didn’t truly know her then my love for her was actually for a representative. I found someone that I took the time to get to know over the years as a friend and she accompanied me to the senior prom. I was recognized as the prom king, I had the nice limo, and a pretty girl on my arm and for the first time in my life I felt like life wasn’t all that bad. The night culminated perfectly, but it was then that I realized that she was the one that I should’ve been chasing all along and that with graduation one week away and her going to Temple I lost four years in which I should’ve been trying to establish more of a bond with her.
Just before graduation, I wrote a poem/memoir illustrating my life experiences up to the point that I wrote the poem. Some people were moved to tears when I read it in class and some were just astonished because they didn’t have any idea about what I had been through in my life. The poem is called “regrets”. I keep it in my wallet until this day to remind me of the first time that I addressed my personal sorrow through a poem. I had been writing poetry since the early part of my adolescence, but never about my own personal grief. Writing always proved to be the best therapy when I was upset, sad, or indifferent. On graduation day I wore a shirt with my mother’s wedding picture on it to remind me just how far I had come and to remind me that there was so much more that I had to do.
A few months before graduation I moved out of my paternal grandmother’s apartment in East Orange and moved back in with my maternal grandmother in Elizabeth. This happened after an argument that I had with my paternal grandmother about making me fill out college applications and then saying that she could not help me pay to attend once I was accepted to an out of state college. I felt that she shouldn’t have had me waste my time applying to colleges if she knew there was no way she could help me pay to go to those colleges. She took me to take a placement exam for Union County College, I was accepted and I attended UCC for one year before I decided to go to the U.S. Navy.
My decision to go into the military was a decision that I made out of frustration over my job and school situation. I was accepted to a four year school, but I couldn’t afford to go and I didn’t have a good paying job so I thought to myself that it would be beneficial for me to go. I could make some money , see the world and come home as a veteran of the armed forces. Things didn’t work out in the military and I returned home after a few short months to find that there were no jobs that were willing to hire me. My friend had to get me a job working as a janitor in a grocery store.
After performing militaristic duties I was now mopping up aisles, cleaning up spills, and being paid very little to do so. I decided that I had to get back into a four year school. I applied to Kean University in April of 2005 and began as a freshman in September of 2005. Today I am senior at Kean University and preparing for graduation in May of 2010. I have repaired my relationship with my father. One night during my freshman year he came to my grandmother’s house and sat down with me. We stayed up until morning. He talked to me about my mother, his drug addiction and the experiences he had as a member of that world. He came clean about everything. He told me that he and mom used to get into fist fights and that they had a really bad fight when he found out that she cheated on him. It was the first real conversation that we ever had and it went along way in repairing things between us. I hated my father for a long time because I was embarrassed by his addiction. My father is like Superman to me and it hurt me a lot to find out that he had those kind of shortcomings. It hurt me when he would tell me that we were going to go play basketball or catch and he would never show up.
It has taken my father almost twenty years, but he finally has the look of someone who has put their life back together again, at least on the surface. I’m sure a lot more work has to be done to fully heal himself internally. It has taken me a long time to repair myself emotionally. I am still fighting with rage and anger. At 24 years old, I am still on a journey where I am not sure of the destination. All I know is that what was once a fight for survival is now a fight to succeed, I am prepared for the next round.