The Sixth Man Page 2

  That peace, however, came at a price. You had better keep your behavior buttoned up and not cross Poletha. She was always loving, she could be sweet when she needed to be, but if you ended up on her bad side, you would regret it.

  I remember a day when I learned that lesson the hard way. My grandmother’s house functioned as a neighborhood foster home, and she took in kids whose parents couldn’t care for them for some reason or another. So along with me, my brother, and my cousins, there were always three or four kids staying with her. I never knew exactly what their stories were—maybe they had parents who were locked up or on drugs. But whatever their stories were before, my grandmother would take them in, receive a small stipend from the county, and make them, for as long as they lasted, part of our family. We ate together and played together all day long.

  One afternoon when I was about eight years old, I was outside shooting basketballs in the rickety old hoop she had next to her house. All of us were outside, with some of the kids playing in the field next to us and others running around in the garden. But a lot of times I preferred to be alone. Just me and a basketball and the hoop. My grandmother had been tending to chores all morning—cleaning, hanging up laundry outside—stopping occasionally to yell at one of us to quit acting up or stop menacing the other kids with a stick, but mostly leaving us to our own devices. I guess one of the foster kids had peed in the bed the night before, so she had pulled one of her old mattresses out to let it air-dry. She placed it down next to the house and went on about her business.

  Obviously, a mattress outside is just too interesting for most kids to completely ignore, so one by one they started drifting over to it and jumping on it. Next they were doing flips and Superman dives, and pretty soon they were making a game of it, seeing who could push who off the mattress. They were yelling at me, “Come on, Andre! Come play with us!” It did look like fun, and as one of the youngest, I always felt cool whenever I was included in what everyone else was doing. But then I thought about it. She hadn’t said so specifically, but I had a pretty strong feeling that my grandmother would not be pleased if she saw what was going down. As tempting as it was, I made a decision to stick to my basketball.

  But when you’re a kid, things like this are hard to resist. Everybody looked like they were having so much fun bouncing around and giggling that, after a while, curiosity got the better of me. Slowly but surely, I drifted over there to start jumping on the mattress too. It seemed like I had been over there for less than, I swear to God, three whole seconds before my grandmother appeared from nowhere, like a damn ghost. She was right up on me. All the kids had scattered and I was left. Caught red-handed. I tried to explain, the way kids do, that it wasn’t my fault—I was just shooting hoops and minding my own business. They were the ones who started it! But she wasn’t buying it. She just looked at me and said, “You were shooting that ball in that hoop, over there? But when I found you, you were over here, where there ain’t no hoop?” I didn’t have an answer. Every cousin, kid, friend, whoever who was out there that afternoon, caught a whooping from my grandmother, including me. That was one of my first life lessons and maybe the most important one: if I just keep my head down and focus on basketball, I’m generally better off.

  Poletha Webster came from Arkansas. First, she moved to Kansas City with my mother’s father. He was a man I met only once. I was so young at the time that I don’t even remember saying anything to him, just seeing this tall, dark-skinned man and being told that he was my mother’s father. I believe Poletha lived in Kansas City for a good while. In fact, my great aunt Jean lived in Kansas City, Missouri, until she passed away in 2017. When my mother was in high school, they moved to Springfield. Poletha had divorced her first husband, my mother’s father, and moved to Springfield, with my mother in tow, to be with her second husband. I never met him either. By the time I was born, Poletha was on her own. I think she preferred it that way.

  I was at Evergreen Terrace for only a short part of my childhood. Soon she moved to a two-story house on Carpenter Street in a working-class section of Springfield. That house became the center of my childhood. My mother, brother, and I lived in the attic from the time I was in early elementary school until my mother got married when I was in middle school.

  My childhood was solid, safe, and fun, and in some ways even beautiful. I was a mama’s boy. I never wanted to be away from her. That was my first true identity. Everybody used to tease me about it, but if my mom was gone for one night, I couldn’t last. I would be in a puddle of tears the entire time.

  The closest person in age to me was my brother, Frank. He’s just eighteen months older. You would think two boys growing up together that closely would be best friends, but that’s not exactly how it was. Frank and I were always so fundamentally different that we formed separate lives starting from a very early age. To be entirely honest, it’s only recently that we started to really like each other.

  We had such a big and involved extended family that Frank and I didn’t need to be that close. It was kind of like in the movie Soul Food, and Grandma was the center of it all. My one aunt was always over at the house, and she had three kids. My other aunt was always over as well, and she had two kids, plus various foster kids and neighborhood kids would be drifting in and out. So when you added it all up, that was like ten or eleven kids running around the house at all times. And my cousins were not like regular cousins: they were more like brothers and sisters. It seemed like I spent every day with them. I had two cousins I especially rocked with because we were even closer in age than my brother and I were.

  Frank also had a difficult personality. He was much more defiant, much more troubled than I was. Everything I learned about keeping my head down and flying under the radar was completely absent for him in his early years. He was ready to challenge anyone and anything at any time. He didn’t like to lose, and he didn’t like to follow rules. And nothing seemed to bother him. Punishments, whoopings—he just didn’t care. He would always say, “So what? It just hurts for a little and then it’s done.” He was always directed to do whatever he wanted, however he wanted, whenever he wanted. He was a kid driven entirely by his own will. Sometimes I admired that. Sometimes it was a pain in the ass.

  Frank was the kind of guy who saw things his way and that’s the way it was. He had a hard time seeing things from another person’s perspective. For one thing, he used to cheat. At everything. Blatantly. It didn’t matter what the game was, he would just boldly cheat and then deny it. I remember playing one-on-one basketball with him at the playground when we were kids. Every time I had the ball, he’d hack me up, slap my arm, damn near tackle me. He called it “playing physical,” but really it was unadulterated fouling. And when I tried to call him out, he would flat-out deny it. “What, man? I barely touched you.” This drove me crazy. I knew he fouled me. He knew he fouled me. But he would make me doubt myself. I had to play extremely physically just to get a shot off. At times what we did probably looked from the outside closer to football than basketball. The other thing he did consistently was change the score in the middle of a game. Every time I took the lead or tied it up, here goes Frank: “Nah, bruh. I’m still ahead. It’s eight to seven right now.”

  There wasn’t really anything I could do about it. Sometimes I felt like throwing the ball as hard as I could, storming off the court, and punching a hole in a wall. But I knew he’d just call me a baby for that. So it made me want to beat him as badly as I could. The angrier I got, the more focused I became. What started out as a game between two brothers would suddenly feel to me like a life-or-death struggle for my whole existence. I tried to pride myself on being calm and even-keeled when I was growing up. I wasn’t trying to be one of those out-of-control types. I saw what out-of-control anger did to people and I wanted no part of it. But playing basketball with Frank made me angry in a way that nothing else did. I knew I had to keep it in check because he was my big brother. So I swallowed it and lea
rned how to use it to play. It was like a performance-enhancing drug. One hit of it and suddenly I could run faster, jump higher, and get to the hoop quicker. I just wanted to prove to him that there was nothing he could do to stop me. Over time I would come to regard the entire world like that. But I learned it first from my brother.

  Maybe the biggest difference between Frank and me wasn’t how we were made but what we did with it. We were both combative, energetic, and incredibly competitive. But for some reason, I could always find a way to channel these things. I was an active kid, both mentally and physically. Sometimes it seemed like everything was happening in my head faster than it was in everyone else’s head, and I often felt restless and jumpy. But I learned pretty early that if you could just focus on getting something done, especially if your goal was to do it better than other people could, you could stay out of trouble. So that’s what I tried to do.

  School came particularly easy to me. I’ve always loved sports and I’ve always loved reading, and I suspect that both of these things came from my mother. Reading was simply a nonnegotiable in my house. If you weren’t reading, you weren’t achieving. But I could find ways to turn even reading into a competitive act. In elementary school there was a summer reading program where you got a sticker for each book you read, and if you got a certain number of stickers, at the end of the summer you got a pizza party. Once I found out about that, it was all the way on. Just knowing that other kids were somewhere else trying to get stickers motivated me to push myself. I couldn’t stand the idea of someone thinking they were better than I was at reading. I spent that whole summer engulfed in books, flying through them at lightning speed. You better believe that, come fall, I was the first kid in attendance at that pizza function.

  The other thing we read at home was the newspaper. This also came from my mom. She insisted on it. She made sure we were keeping ourselves educated. If we ever had the nerve to try to complain that we were bored (which we rarely did), she’d toss the newspaper in our direction before we could finish the sentence. In this way, I learned to be interested in world affairs, business, culture, and media. I learned how stories were told and how media and journalism work, and I was always fascinated about the idea of someone ending up in the paper. Most kids wanted to be on TV, but when I was little I thought the most famous you could possibly be was to have your picture in Springfield’s State Journal-Register.

  I thought that reading the newspaper as a kid was perfectly normal until I was about twelve years old and visiting a faraway older cousin. My brother and I were sitting around the living room of our cousin’s house, sharing sections of the paper, when my cousin’s boyfriend walked in the room, stopped and stared at us, and then laughed. “What the hell are you guys doing?”

  “Umm . . . reading the paper?”

  “You do that?”

  “You don’t?”

  That was the first time it occurred to me that Frank and I were being raised in a way that was different from a lot of the people around us. It’s almost like we had to be a part of two worlds. Among kids on the playground and on the court, we had to be cool, athletic, and, if not aggressive, at least not ready to back down if confronted. But at home we were well educated, well mannered, well taken care of, and critical thinkers. When I got out of Springfield, I would find that there were a lot of players in college and the NBA who learned to balance these two ways of being, but in Springfield I felt pretty alone.

  Reading aside, what we did most as kids involved running. One of the best things about Springfield was that you could find an open field just about anywhere. And we found them everywhere. We would just make up games. Play hide-and-seek, stickball, tag. My cousins and I and the other neighborhood kids had this long block radius that was ours. And there was a field two doors down from my grandmother’s house. We’d play baseball out there, making the bases out of sticks and boards and bricks that we found. We got neighborhood football games going during football season. There were so many of us kids that there was always activity going on. On summer evenings we would exhaust ourselves, playing until the very last light was in the sky and the crickets and cicadas could be heard singing in the trees and fields. And in the fall and winter we’d bundle up and run through the snow, chasing each other, playing touch football on the frozen dirt, pausing only to warm our hands with our breath between plays. Life was fairly simple, and it was fairly good then. We had family, friends, food to eat, books to read, and plenty of space to run and play.

  My mother was the center of my world. I never wanted to leave her side. In the Midwest we’d have thunderstorms in the spring and on humid late-summer afternoons. The sky would suddenly get heavy and thick, the heat would start to weigh down on you, and just when you were getting tired from a day of running around in the field, the clouds would open up and rain would come down in sheets, the sky on fire with sudden lightning, the earth rumbling with thunder. This terrified me. When I was in preschool, it was the most frightening thing I could think of. And being with my mom was the only safe place. I’d run to her, hoping she would protect me. If the thunderstorm happened at night, I would try to get in bed with her. I didn’t care if my brother or anyone else made fun of me—that was the safest place I knew. I’ve been in a lot of places in my life, and I’ve seen a lot of things, felt a lot of things. But I still remember being a little kid and being absolutely terrified by thunder until my mother let me know it was going to be OK.

  My mother, Linda Shanklin, was hardworking, loving, and fierce. We never doubted that she cared for us, but we also knew that it was not wise to cross her. For one thing, she was six feet tall. I loved her a lot, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t scared of her. She had played basketball in high school and still had an athletic build and reflexes quick enough to snatch you up if you had the nerve to try something slick. For another thing, she knew that raising two black boys in a town like Springfield meant that they had to know exactly how to behave at all times. If she didn’t get us in line and keep us in line, it could literally be the difference between life and death. The black section of Springfield was not an economically strong place. Unemployment was high, jobs were scarce, and people struggled. And when crack came, it just obliterated a lot of whatever safety and organization there was in the black community. On top of that, you had to worry about white police officers who were known for acting as judge, jury, and sometimes executioner in the streets. We rarely saw police officers as sources of protection or safety. At best, they were the last resort when you had absolutely no other choice. But for most of us, they felt more like another criminal element that you had to be careful of.

  My mother knew that the options for black boys to end up imprisoned, hospitalized, or in a casket were many, and that the ways out were few. She knew really of only one way, and it was education and discipline. And she taught me these lessons with her own two hands.

  One day in kindergarten, we were doing this cool little project where we all got red helium balloons. The idea was that we would write notes on them and let them go, and wherever they landed, someone would find our notes and write to our school. Pretty neat. So there we were, a troop of kindergartners, all marching out to the schoolyard with our red balloons all bouncing in the air on the end of long strings. We were supposed to wait for our teacher’s word to let them go, but being the kid I was, I just couldn’t do that. The temptation was too great. As soon as we got outside, I just let go of my balloon and watched it fly away into the sky. At first it was interesting, but pretty soon after, it hit me what I had done. I didn’t have a balloon and everyone else did!

  So I did what any little snot-nosed kid would have done. I walked over to a classmate and started telling him to let his balloon go too. Of course he didn’t want to, so I just snatched it out of his little hand and sent it flying up to the heavens.

  He didn’t take that well. He started screaming and crying, which got the attention of our teacher and got me in trouble
. When we got back to the classroom, she wrote my name on the board. A smarter kid would have just taken the loss and kept his mouth shut. But I was defensive. I’ve always hated being wrong, even when I know I am, so I challenged her. “So what?” I said. “I didn’t even do anything,” which was obviously a lie.

  This was way out of line, so she put a check mark next to my name for disrespect, which meant the situation was getting heated. Three checks meant you had to go to the principal’s office. But in that moment I wasn’t thinking the whole thing through. I was just mad that I’d let my balloon go, mad that I’d made this other kid cry, and mad that I’d gotten in trouble. And I wasn’t going to back down. I’ve never liked the idea of people having power over me. Even if it’s earned.

  “So what?” I told her defiantly after the second check. “I don’t care!”

  Now the class was quiet. This was decidedly not the way you talk to a teacher in kindergarten, but I was unbothered. Nobody was going to push me around. Everyone is so used to doing whatever the grown-ups tell them, but it was dawning on me that they had no real power. I mean, so I go to the principal’s office. Then what? He’s just going to lecture me and tell me not to do what I’m doing. I literally don’t care. I can keep saying no, and they can keep getting mad, but I’m still winning. This felt like a foolproof plan.

  And it was. Right up until the moment Linda Shanklin walked into the principal’s office while I was sitting there. They had called her to report on my misdeed, and she showed up as cool as a cucumber, calm and businesslike. She had to come in from work and was in her professional attire, which usually meant I was going to escape any kind of serious punishment. See, my mother had two modes. Weekend mode, when she didn’t have makeup on, was when you had to be careful. She would get you as soon as you got out of line. She’d flash on you, pop you across the back of the head or whatever she needed to do to let you know she was in charge. You knew not to raise her attention then. But if she was in work clothes and makeup, you could always get away with just a little bit extra because that meant she had to deal with white people and the general public and there was pressure on her to be professional. My brother and I figured this out early, and we tried to use it to our advantage whenever we could.