The 57 Bus Page 4

  “You don’t want to be bothered, he’ll just keeping talking to you, keep playing, to the point where you’ll cuss him out and he’ll still be laughing,” Cherie says. “He likes attention. He likes to bother you. He likes to play hit you, play fight with you. Like, ‘Leave me alone! Oh my God!’”

  Around strangers he was quiet, alert, fading into the background until he was just a pair of hazel eyes watching everything go down. But if you were his friend, then you were family to him. He called you brother or sister, and he’d be loyal until the sun quit rising in the east.

  “He got on my nerves but I loved him to death,” Cherie recalls. “He was my friend. I don’t know what I would do without him.”

  OAKLAND HIGH SCHOOL

  O High wasn’t the best school in Oakland, but it wasn’t the worst one either, not by a long shot. It was right in the middle in almost every respect. Perched upslope from downtown, it was high enough on the hill that you could roll a quarter down Park Boulevard and have it land with a splash in Lake Merritt, but not high enough to float above all the regular Oakland drama. Few white families sent their kids there, but every other group did—Asians (44 percent), African Americans (33 percent), Latinos (18 percent). Oakland’s open enrollment process allowed families to apply to any school in the district, and Oakland High was a popular choice. Kids traveled from all over the city, north, east, and west, leaving behind their neighborhood skirmishes for a school they hoped might be a little safer, a little saner than the one closer to home. There was a security guard posted at the front gate to keep the craziness out, but there was plenty of craziness to be found inside. Some of it you had to look for, but some of it was hard to ignore—a girl trying to slit her wrists in the bathroom, a fight in the hallway, students shouting, running, sobbing, rumors about who got shot and who hooked up, who was looking for whom and what they’d say when they found them.

  You could steer clear of it though. Plenty did. There were AP classes and academies—public health, visual arts, environmental science. There was an African American Male Achievement Program to mentor black boys. There was an on-site Wellness Center with counseling, health, and academic support services. There was football, baseball, basketball, track, as long as you could keep your GPA above a 2.0.

  The finish line was marked with a cap and gown and a march across the stage. That year, two-thirds of O High’s students made it. You could get there, if nothing knocked you down. But life had a way of sticking its foot out, sending you sprawling. And then you were part of the other one-third, hanging in the hallways instead of going to class, or just drifting away altogether, away from school, away from that march across the stage, into a future that was as hazy as weed smoke.

  Of course, you rarely notice when you come to the fork in the road. It just feels like another day. A day when you didn’t go to school because you were sick or your baby sister was sick, or you didn’t study for that test so why bother taking it, or your clothes looked ratty and you were tired of hearing about it, or someone was looking for you and you needed to lay low for a few days, or any of a hundred other reasons that made not going to class seem like a better choice than going. Only once you stopped going it just seemed too hard to start again. Days rolled into weeks. Weeks into months. And then at some point you realized you’d entered the future. The one you never planned on. The one where everything was going to be that much harder.

  MISS KAPRICE

  It was three weeks after the start of the 2013–2014 school year and a friend of Richard’s was being sent home for fighting. She texted Richard to tell him and he went to meet her at the bus stop. It was still the middle of the day, but he didn’t care. He was a junior now, but back when he and Cherie were in ninth grade they ditched school all the time, wandering through the city with their friends, looking for fun, courting trouble. He wasn’t really in the habit of going to school all day, every day.

  But when Richard’s friend showed up at the bus stop, she wasn’t alone. She was being escorted by a petite woman with long black hair, dangly earrings, and a smile like a flash of sunlight. Her name was Kaprice Wilson, and she was O High’s attendance compliance officer. She didn’t know Richard, but she knew he was a student and it was the middle of the school day. Richard’s friend needed to get on that bus and go home, she said, but Richard needed to get to class.

  Richard followed her back to school, peppering her with questions. Who was she, and what did she do? She seemed different from your typical school official. She had a homegirl vibe.

  “I’m the truancy coordinator,” Kaprice said. “And what happens is, if you miss a lot of school, then you’re in an intervention program with me.”

  “So you try to help kids that’s been in trouble?” Richard asked.

  Kaprice nodded.

  “Well, that’s me,” he said. “Can I get in your program?”

  Kaprice stared at him. Nobody ever asked to join her program—students were assigned to it after they’d missed so much school they were in danger of flunking out, dropping out, or getting kicked off the roster. She wasn’t exactly trying to fill slots either. At a school with 1,875 kids, she had a caseload of some 800 chronically truant students, and if she was lucky she’d be able to work with 275 of them in the course of a year.

  “Yeah,” Richard said. “I want you to help me like you help them. Because I’ve been to a lot of schools and I’ve been in trouble, but I’m really not a bad kid.”

  Back in her office, Kaprice looked up Richard’s transcript. He was already a junior and her program was meant for freshmen and sophomores, who are easier to get back on track than juniors and seniors. But it was clear he needed help. His grades were poor, his attendance spotty. O High was his third high school in Oakland, plus he’d spent sophomore year living in a group home in Redding, California, three and a half hours away. He’d been placed there by the juvenile authorities after being arrested for fighting when he was a freshman.

  Next time they talked, Kaprice told Richard that if he worked with her, he’d have to learn a new set of rules. “Once you cross over into this lane, you know what you’ll be able to get away with?” she asked him.

  He shook his head, puzzled. “What?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because I’m going to make you understand the family motto: Never let your obstacles become more important than your goal. Right now, your goal is to graduate, and if you don’t comply with the family motto, then just know I have a collection of belts in the back of my filing cabinet and they’re not for sagging pants.”

  Richard laughed. “I understand,” he said, and grinned.

  THE PRINCESS OF EAST OAKLAND

  Kaprice Wilson came of age in East Oakland in the 1980s, when crack cocaine was just hitting the streets. For users, crack meant poverty—whole lives stripped down like a stolen car, the parts sold off to pay for their next hit. But for dope dealers, crack meant power and respect, fat wads of paper money, gold chains and gaudy jewelry, fancy cars.

  “Everything was in the moment,” Kaprice says. “No one thought about how it would affect our children.”

  When she was fourteen she saw a boy on a bike playing chicken with a car at the corner of Eighty-Second Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard. The boy rode up close to the car, trying to freak out the driver. The driver swerved and tried to hit him. The boy on the bike dodged away and crashed into the curb, jumping over the bike and landing on his feet, grinning.

  “Damn, did y’all see that?” he asked. “He almost hit me.”

  His name was Lil’ Jerry and he was thirteen. Kaprice fell for him on the spot. The regard was mutual. Soon they were talking on the phone every night. When Kaprice went to his house for the first time, his sisters told her Lil’ Jerry wouldn’t stop talking about her. That’s how she knew she was his girlfriend.

  Lil’ Jerry had been “claiming” East Oakland’s 69vill gang since he was five or six years old. He’d started out earning petty cash by ironing and rubber-banding wrinkled mo
ney from dice games, and then moved up in the organization. But even after he grew up to be six feet two, he was still known as Lil’ Jerry. By age fifteen he was carrying around backpacks full of money. Too young to have a driver’s license, he was already wealthy enough to own four or five cars. He liked to go to Las Vegas to watch the fights wearing fur boxers and a long mink coat.

  69vill was led by Felix Mitchell, who controlled much of the West Coast heroin market. He was arrested on federal charges in 1983 and sentenced to life in prison two years later. Fourteen months after that, he was stabbed to death by a fellow inmate at Leavenworth penitentiary. His funeral made the national news, the casket conducted through the streets of Oakland on a horse-drawn carriage followed by a procession of four Rolls-Royces, ten white limousines, and an assortment of Cadillacs and Lincolns. Thousands of Oaklanders lined the streets to watch the eight-mile parade. Kaprice’s mother wouldn’t let her go. She didn’t know that it was too late to worry about Mitchell’s bad example.

  Violence skyrocketed after Mitchell’s death as other gangsters battled for a piece of his turf as well as the increasingly lucrative crack trade. Year by year, the number of murders climbed steadily—from 114 in 1987 to 165 in 1992. The corpses weren’t evenly distributed throughout the city, though. They were clustered on the east and west sides of town. East Oakland in particular was awash in crack, blood, and bullets.

  Kaprice was living too fast a life to stay at home, so she moved in with her stepsister’s family. One of the girls’ chores was to clean the guns. When boys came over, Kaprice and her stepsister would be sitting at a table with brush, rod, and cloth, expertly taking the guns apart, spinning the barrels, polishing the grips. A visitor would have to be pretty slow not to get the message: these girls were not to be played with.

  Lil’ Jerry called her Kaprice Classic, after the car. (He owned one of those too.) She got a bit part in a Jim Belushi movie called The Principal and Lil’ Jerry called her a movie star. She knew everybody, and everybody knew of her—Lil’ Jerry Cooper’s beautiful, smart-alecky girlfriend. “By the time I got to be eighteen or nineteen, I thought I was like the Princess of East Oakland,” she says. “Because 69vill was the gang that had all the hype. It was the most feared.”

  Kaprice’s brother went off to college in Atlanta, but Kaprice had no interest. She’d tried junior college, but couldn’t be bothered to do more than cash the financial aid check. When her brother handed her an application packet for Clark Atlanta University, she threw it away. No way was she giving up her East Oakland status just to go to school.

  Then an acceptance letter arrived in the mail. Her brother had filled out the application for her and mailed it in.

  “You’re going,” Lil’ Jerry said when she told him.

  But Kaprice had another plan. She wanted to get pregnant. She knew she and Jerry would have beautiful children together.

  “How are you going to support a baby?” Lil’ Jerry asked.

  Kaprice shrugged. “I’ll go on welfare.” That’s what all the girls she knew did.

  “You sound so stupid right now,” Lil’ Jerry said. “You know what’s going to happen? They’re going to kill me. And I do not want to have a baby out here without a dad. I don’t want that for you and I don’t want that for my child. There will be enough of those kids out there. You can take those ones in. Just know that those ones will be your and my children together, and when they get crazy and out of control, help them. Because they’re going to need help.”

  Lil’ Jerry refused to sleep with her after that. “He froze me,” Kaprice says. “He was like, ‘You’re not messing with nobody else either. Try somebody else, I’ll kill them and I’ll kill you first.’”

  So she went to college. She majored in education. Ran track and got an athletic scholarship. Won an award for student teacher of the year from the dean of the school of education. Once when she came home during break, she learned that Lil’ Jerry had been shot three times. She heard it from a friend—he hadn’t told her, didn’t want her to know. But when she held his hand, she could feel a bullet lodged beneath the skin.

  It was clear the thug life was wearing him down—the violence, the danger, the vigilance. “We just need to stop the madness,” he would say. “Just stop the madness.” He drank too much, smoked too much weed. He began dressing like he was a blue-collar worker—jackets from UPS and Home Depot, a back brace like he had a job in a warehouse. He was twenty-four years old—in their world, that made him practically an old man.

  One day he got into a conversation with an elderly woman who lived on Eighty-Ninth Avenue, a couple of blocks from his house. She wouldn’t go outside because of all the drug dealing in the neighborhood, but she told him she wished she could have flowers in her front yard. He bought her some and planted them himself. Put a little gate around them so they wouldn’t get trampled by the customers going to the house next door to buy drugs. Paid attention every time he passed her house on the way to the store. Which is why he had to say something when he saw one of those drug customers take a shortcut across the garden.

  “Man, did you see the fence was there?” he asked. “Why would you walk across the flowers? Just walk around. She growing some flowers.”

  “I don’t give a fuck about them flowers,” the guy said. He didn’t know who Lil’ Jerry was. Just some guy in a puffy jacket.

  “Why you got to be like that? Just respect her flowers.”

  Now it was a challenge. “Fuck them flowers,” the guy said. “I’ma come back and shoot this shit up.”

  And he did. Or someone did. Within hours, Lil’ Jerry was gunned down on the sidewalk. Kaprice had left just a few minutes before. She’d been talking with Lil’ Jerry about what she was going to make for dinner. He said it sounded good. She’d promised to save him some.

  Afterward, two things stuck in her mind. One was how neat the shooting had been. It wasn’t one of the ones where blood went everywhere. There wasn’t even a stain on the sidewalk.

  The other was how nobody on the block saw who did it. It wasn’t like they were pretending they hadn’t seen, the way people did when they didn’t want to get involved. It was more like that bit from the Men in Black movies, where bystanders have their memories erased.

  It seemed to Kaprice like Lil’ Jerry must have wanted it that way. “I don’t want anybody to retaliate,” she imagined him saying. “I just want to leave. I’m ready.”

  The killing, like so many in East Oakland, was never solved.

  “That experience—it really grew me up and taught me a lot about life,” she said, twenty years after Lil’ Jerry’s murder. “Just appreciating the moment. And doing the most you can do, you know, to help somebody else.”

  Within a year she had her first job as an elementary school teacher in East Oakland. The troublesome kids kept getting sent her way—the ones who had been kicked out of other classrooms. She knew these kids, or she knew kids like them, and she knew how to work with them. They were her children, just like Lil’ Jerry had said.

  THE BEST MOTHER EVER

  At Oakland High School, Kaprice served as a surrogate mom to the kids who needed one the most—the ones who had trouble just getting to school every day. Some of them, like Cherie, even called her Mom, bringing her their grades, photographs, and artwork to hang on her walls and writing her apologies when they ran into trouble. Her tiny office was papered with their missives:

  From son Oscar, I ♥ you mom, read one.

  I’m sorry mom, she made me hecka mad, said another—written by a girl who had just gotten suspended for fighting.

  Kaprice taught her kids to look out for one another, even when their inclination was to squabble. If a student wanted to be one of her children, they had to accept that they were gaining siblings as well as a mother.

  “We’re family,” she told them. “This is your sister. This is your brother. You have no say in the matter.” On her walls she’d posted the family slogan: Never let your obstacles become more imp
ortant than your goal.

  The goals: go to class, get your grades up, graduate, stay out of jail, survive.

  Her office was a safe zone for Richard. It was the size of a walk-in closet, tucked off a hallway near the main office, but it had a couch where kids could sit and talk, take a breath, regroup, relax. He’d drop in during passing periods just to touch base.

  “He never wanted to get out of her office,” Cherie remembers. “I mean, he really loved her.” Cherie was already one of Kaprice’s children—Kaprice had helped her get off probation the year before, and she had never caught another case. Before long, Richard asked if he could call Kaprice Mom too, but she wouldn’t let him. He already had a mom he was close to—she wasn’t going to try to take that spot.

  “I’ll be your auntie,” she told him.

  HOPES AND PRAYERS

  Richard’s mother, Jasmine, was already four and a half months pregnant when her grandmother took her to the doctor to get checked. She was fourteen years old and had been dating a boy two years older. He was the one who figured out she was pregnant—she hadn’t known enough to make sense of the changes happening to her body. It was too late for an abortion, but Jasmine figured she was prepared to raise a child. She loved babysitting her niece and nephew. How hard could it be?

  “I thought it was about dressing them up and buying them clothes,” she recalled.

  Richard was born the summer before Jasmine turned fifteen. She split up with his father eleven months later. Richard still saw him frequently over the years, or as frequently as he could given that his father was sometimes in prison for drug offenses. When Richard was five, Jasmine got involved with a new man, Derick. Richard was resentful, still holding out hope that his parents would get back together. “You’re not my dad,” he told Derick.