Loyalty, Gang Affiliation, and Family Theme Analysis

I study Iesha real hard. She got bags under her eyes she didn’t have before. “Anybody helping you with him?”

“Help?” her momma says, like I cussed. “Who supposed to help her? Me?”

“C’mon now, Yolanda,” says Ma. “This is a lot for anyone to handle, let alone a seventeen-year-old.”

“T’uh! She wanna act grown, she can deal with this like she grown. By. Her. Self.”

Iesha blink real fast.

I’m feeling real bad for her all of a sudden. “If he is mine, you won’t be doing this alone no more, a’ight? I’ll come over and help as much as I can.”

“You good?”

Hell no. My life got thrown into a blender and I’m left with something I don’t recognize. On top of that, I’m suddenly somebody’s pops and I wish I had my pops.

Nah, man. I can’t freak out. I gotta handle mine, on some G shit. “I ain’t tripping.”

“You know it’s okay to be scared, right?”

“Scared of what? A li’l baby?”

“Of all the stuff that come with having a li’l baby,” Dre says. “First time I held Adreanna, I cried. She was so beautiful, and she was stuck with me for a father.”

I look at my son, and damn, I feel that.

“I decided I was gon’ be the kind of father she deserved,” he says. “I had to man up. That’s what you gotta do, Mav. Man up.”

“Fool, I’m a man already,” I say.

“I walked out on him last night, Dre.”

“Who? Your son?”

I nod. “He wouldn’t stop—I didn’t know how to make him stop crying man, and I was tired and—” I shake my head at myself. “I walked out of the house and left him crying.”

“Did you go back?”

I look up at him. “Of course I did.”

“That’s what matters,” Dre says. “Parenting is hard, cuz. You gon’ break sometimes. The most important thing is that you pull yourself together and go back, playboy.”

“Weak,” P-Nut says, behind a fake cough. The big homies smirk. I’m nothing but a joke to them.

I storm toward the church. I found Dre with bullets in his head. The least Shawn could do is let me handle the dude who killed him.

But nah. I’m just a li’l kid who can’t live up to his pops’s name.

I’m gon’ prove all them fools wrong one day. Believe that.

“Everybody in the set already think I’m soft, Shawn.”

“So?” he says. “Forget what them fools think. You gotta live for you and Dre now, you feel me? You can do everything he didn’t get a chance to do.”

I never thought of that.

“Raise your son. Be the best father you can be,” Shawn says. “That’s how you honor Dre. A’ight?”

The person who killed my cousin got killed.

It’s been a weird three weeks since it happened. ‘Cause Ant was shot at a school function it was all over the news. His parents cried on TV, and I realized he had parents. Like Dre. Some kids at school were really tore up over his death, and I realized he had friends. Like Dre. At the stadium, he got a memorial in the parking lot with flowers and balloons. Like Dre.

Everybody get mourned by somebody, I guess. Even murderers.

I’m feeling bold as hell, and things I’ve been scared to say suddenly not so scary. “You left us. Got Ma busting her ass to take care of me and put money on your books. I had to join a gang ‘cause of you. You can’t come at either of us.”

“What I did ain’t got shit to do with the fact you keep knocking girls up.”

“Yeah, a’ight, I made some bad decisions,” I admit. “I’m gon’ be there for my kids. Unlike you.”

He can’t say nothing, like I thought.

“I felt bad for leaving him and not being able to handle it.”

“That don’t mean you disappear, baby,” Ma says. I’m sorry that your momma didn’t support you like she should’ve and that you had to go through so much yourself. But you have responsibilities now. Seven needs you as much as he needs Maverick.”

“Not if I get in that bad space again, he don’t,” Iesha murmurs.

[…]

Ma rub her shoulder. ‘If it’s not, you’re not alone. It takes a village to raise a child. Seven has a big one. That means that you do too.”

“We need to start calling you Old Man Carter,” Rico says. “I take that back. My grandma get out more than you and she fresher than you.”

“Whatever,” I mumble.

The first bell ring for class. I follow Rico and Junie down the hall as they discuss the dance and their plans. It’s like they speaking a language I ain’t fluent in anymore. The words real familiar, but they done lost all meaning for me.

“No offense, Mr. Wyatt, but your nephew seem like a nerd. As for Carlos, his momma kept him and Lisa in the house. Of course they didn’t need protection. Anyway, I’m Li’l Don. Everybody expected me to join.”

“Because the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?” Mr. Wyatt asks. “However, it can roll away from the tree. It simply need a little push.”

“Word around the school is that you’ve had some life-changing developments this year,” he says.

I wait for the look. I swear, when grown folks know I got two kids, I see myself become trash in their eyes. It’s like they see my babies as trash, too, just ‘cause I made them so young. Hell nah.

“Do you love Pops?”

“I do,” she says. “I’ll always love Adonis, and I’ll always be there for him. I also have to love myself. All of that ‘ride or die’ stuff, it’s nice until you feel like you’re dying from not living. Adonis made choices that put his life at a standstill. He didn’t have to sell drugs; he chose to. I shouldn’t have to put my life on hold because of his decisions.”

Lisa stare at me real hard. “You’re selling drugs with King again, aren’t you?”

I sigh. “Man, look—”

“You know what? Don’t answer that,” she says. “Do whatever you want, Maverick. Me and my baby will be all right.”

“There you go, acting like I won’t be around.”

“Because you won’t!” Lisa says. “I make plans, knowing that. My baby needs one of us to think about the future.”

She don’t get it. She really don’t get it.

There’s a lot of things I never wanted to know ‘bout my pops. It come with the territory when your father is Big Don. I’d rather hear that he bought kids’ shoes and fed families at holidays. Not that he got people hooked on crack.

Sometimes one person’s hero is another person’s monster, or in my case, father. Yet it’s hard for me to judge him when I’m plotting to kill somebody else’s father. But see, taking Red out is the best way for Dre to get justice. It ain’t much different from a judge sentencing Red to death row.

I think.

“Daddy’s here. It’s okay.”

Them few words do me in. I say them to Seven all the time, but I ain’t heard them myself in years, and they everything I ever needed. “Dre should be here,” I blubber.”

“He should be.”

“He deserve better.”

“He did.”

“I wanna do this for him. I got to.”

Pops smile so sad it’s hard to call it that. “There were a lot of things I thought I had to do, too. Reality was, I only had to be there for you and your momma, and I failed at that.”

But when it comes to the streets, there’s rules.

Nobody will ever write them down, and you’ll never find them in a book. It’s stuff you need in order to survive the moment your momma let you out the house. Kinda like how you gotta breathe even when it’s hard to.

If there was a book, the most important section would be on family, and the first rule would be:

When somebody kills your family, you kill them.

“Why didn’t you do it?”

“I thought of my kids, my momma, and…and you. What it would do to y’all if I got caught or killed.” I close my eyes. Tears slip outta them. “I’m such a fucking coward.”

“No,” Lisa murmurs. “You sound like a man to me.”

I look at her. “How? That fool murdered Dre, Lisa. And what I do? I let him run away. What kinda justice is that?”

“It wouldn’t have been justice if you threw your life away to kill him.”

I almost laugh. “My life ain’t worth much. I just didn’t wanna put my babies through that. I know what it’s like to not have a father around.”

“Looks like you’re right. These canes need to be snipped.”

“Because they won’t help them grow, right?”

“Mmm-hmm. It’s kind like how we have to do with ourselves. Get rid of things that don’t do us any good. If it won’t help the rose grow, you’ve gotta let it go.”