Slipping Into Darkness by Maxine Thompson Read Free Book Online Page A

live like this. Petty, low-level crime. Gangbanging. The world of get-money chicks. Sheesh.
    My mother was a Crip–a gangbanger–until she went to prison. Now she was still a respected OG. No, I had to break the cycle.
    For years I carried survivor’s guilt, but now I felt like an ambassador. I was like a spy who could slip in and out of corporate America, then go back to the underworld. Although we had a black president, for too many of my people things had not changed. The recession, unemployment, things for many had not gotten better; they’d just had gotten worse. The Black middle class’s grip on its lifestyle was tenuous, to say the least. People seemed to be slipping into darkness.
    I couldn’t even say if it was a good thing or bad, but some men refused to be out of work. Men like my brother. They created work for themselves and others–even if it was on the wrong side of the law.
    Thinking of it, I noticed something. Now that I was in South L.A., a sense of danger quivered in the air. I smelled it and I could taste it. I could feel the tension between the gangs and the police cars, which prowled the streets all night. Yet, at the same time, I personally felt an alliance to my people. I felt like I was entering a colonized state. A police state. With the fading middle class, some of the denizen had slipped into a permanent underclass status, but these are my people and I have to help and defend them where I can. Besides, I could get into cracks the police couldn’t get in.
    Why? Because I spoke the language of the hood. I knew it because I grew up the first nine years of my life in nearby Jordan Downs Projects.
    Ebonics was a language, and like any first language, you had to grow up hearing it to understand all its subtleties and nuances. There was a rhythm and a poetry to the language of the street. It changed and grew every day in an ongoing effort to continue to dupe the law. And it always amazed me how the language lost its punch when I hear it bastardized by mainstream America. Even newscasters tried to speak in hip hop these days.
    My car was old and I didn’t have a navigation system, so I relied on my memory of the Watts streets’ layout. I felt a sense of unease in the people who were out this time of night as I drove up the street. Unless you were in the 5 percent oligarchy, you were like the rest of us, who were living in a time of uncertainty. People who once held six-figure salaries no longer had them. Unemployment benefits had been extended beyond twenty-four months–a benefit that was previously unheard of–and still there were not enough jobs. Middle-class America had taken up in arms and was Occupying Wall Street all over the country. The whole world had changed overnight for us Americans. In a crazy way I understood how the man I’d read about in the paper felt, who, after having been Harvard educated, and a former Wall Street investor, was now robbing banks. He probably felt like the bottom had fallen out and he had nothing to lose. The world, including mortgages, was upside down and people were losing homes to foreclosures like houses under water during a tsunami.
    Regardless of what was going on, everyone was in search of that elusive American Dream. People were desperate, and desperate men would do what they had to do to eat. I had to assume this had been Mayhem’s stance all along–even before the economy crashed.
    I guessed I’d already been through my own peripeteia–the point when everything the heroine thought she knew about life was wrong. The point when my American Dream and my ideal job were snatched out from under me like a double whammy rug, leaving me to fall on my big posterior. Yes, I’d lost my hard-won job as a police officer, and had gone through the shame and degradation of being a drunk who hit bottom. But with my loved ones’ help, I’d worked hard to build my life back. And this time around, it was