“No,” the judge repeated. “And, quite honestly, I don’t know that it got any better after that time, maybe a little worse, based upon what’s occurred and the fact that she’s kicked around and moved around.”
What the judge was saying, in essence, was: We all agree that you were poor and scared when you did this violent, hurtful thing, and if you had been allowed to go on working five days a week at Old Country Buffet, refilling soup pots and mopping up frozen yogurt spills, none of us would be here right now. You might have been able to save enough to move to an apartment that was de-leaded and clean in a neighborhood without drug dealers and with safe schools. With time, you may have been able to get Bo-Bo the medical treatment he needs for his seizures, and maybe you could have even started taking night classes to become a nurse, like you always wanted. And, who knows, maybe you could have actually become a nurse, a real nurse with a uniform and everything. Then you could really give your kids a childhood that would look nothing like the one Shortcake gave you. If you did that, you would walk around this cold city with your head held high, and maybe you would eventually come to feel that you were worth something and deserving of a man who could support you other than by lending you his pistol for a stickup or at least one who didn’t break down your door and beat you in front of your children. Maybe you would meet someone with a steady job and get married in a small church with Kendal standing proudly up front by the groom and Tembi as the poofy-dressed flower girl and Bo-Bo as the grinning, toddling ring bearer, just like you always dreamed it, and from that day on your groom would introduce you as “my wife.” But that’s not what happened. What happened was that your hours were cut, and your electricity was about to be shut off, and you and your children were about to be thrown out of your home, and you snatched someone’s purse as your friend pointed a gun at her face. And if it was poverty that caused this crime, who’s to say you won’t do it again? Because you were poor then and you are poor now. We all see the underlying cause, we see it every day in this court, but the justice system is no charity, no jobs program, no Housing Authority. If we cannot pull the weed up from the roots, then at least we can cut it low at the stem.
The judge sighed, and a silent moment passed. The court stenographer steadied her hands above the keys and waited. Kendal, asleep on Shortcake’s lap, breathed noiselessly. The judge ruled: “This is not…a probationary case. I am going to impose eighty-one months in the state prison system. It’s going to break down to fifteen months of initial confinement and sixty-six months of extended supervision.”
The bailiff approached Vanetta and told her to stand to be handcuffed.
“Oh, God,” Shortcake let out. She shook Kendal awake and took him to the glass. “Wave goodbye, son.”
Hands behind her back, Vanetta turned around, tears streaming down her cheeks. Kendal stared back stone-faced, strong, just like his momma had taught him.
—
After getting into several conflicts with congregants, bishops, and eventually her minister, Crystal left Mt. Calvary and joined Restoration International Ministries, an inner-city church in a bland two-story office building on Forty-First and Burleigh.
One Sunday, Crystal sat in the third pew from the front and began clapping with the music. She wore a black shirt and green pants, unbuttoned and unzipped halfway to fit. The pastor, a black woman with hair falling in arching waves down to her shoulders, wore a white robe with gold accents. She paced with a queen’s authority, stopping as the spirit led her. “God says He is the truth and the light,” she said. The young man at the piano fluttered his hands, and the even younger fellow behind the drums began teasing a cymbal. “The truth! And the—light! You hearing me?”
“Amen,” Crystal said. After being kicked out of her apartment with Vanetta, Crystal was admitted to a homeless shelter. Then through a weary, looping rhythm—make a friend, use a friend, lose a friend—Crystal found, for short bursts, dry and warm places to sleep. When those bridges burned, she dropped back into street homelessness, returning to St. Joseph’s or the Amtrak station. Sometimes she would walk the streets all night and sleep on the bus once morning broke. But through it all, she almost never missed church.
“Sha la la la YABA SHO TA tama ma ma,” the pastor prayed into a microphone. The language of tongues was spoken in a cadence the shape of a heartbeat: a small entrance, followed by a spike, then a quivering trailing off. “Are you in the press? Are you squeezing yourself up into the crowd to see Jesus? Whoa!” She stumbled back as if bumped by an invisible force.
“All right, pastor!” Crystal hollered. Crystal had always believed that SSI was a more secure income source than a paycheck. You couldn’t get fired from SSI; your hours couldn’t get cut. “SSI always come,” she said. Until one day it didn’t. She had been approved for SSI as a minor, but her adult reevaluation found her ineligible. Now Crystal’s only source of income came from food stamps.4 She tried donating plasma but her veins were too small. She asked her spiritual, foster, and even biological mothers for money, but what they could give her didn’t go very far. She didn’t ask anything from her church because “it always led to conflict.” Because she didn’t know what else to do, Crystal went “on the stroll” and began selling sex. She had never been a morning person but soon learned that it was the best time to turn tricks, catching men on their way to work.
“Is Momma okay?” the pastor asked. She was looking at an older woman being held up by two people.
“No.”
“Then we gonna stop everything and pray for her.” The pastor knelt down in front of the woman. A dozen or so churchgoers surrounded her, some standing on chairs, some with their hands on the old woman’s head. “Reach out your hands this way and pray!” the pastor commanded, and her congregation obeyed, even the children. “Oh, Jesus!” the pastor yelled into the microphone. “Oh, by the blood, oh you death spirit, you stroke spirit, come out!”
Crystal was bouncing and moving her hands from shoulders to hips, chanting, “By your stripes, Lord, by your stripes.”
“By the blood,” prayed the pastor. “The blood! ShabbabmaSHOTtala! I bind you. Come back, Momma. Come back!”
The music simmered low, waiting. The clutch of people surrounding the older woman parted, revealing her limp and blood-drained face. She looked to be asleep or dead. Then the huddle closed in again. After a few minutes, the people encircling the woman grew louder and stepped outward to show the pastor kissing the woman about her face and hands. People began clapping as the woman rose to her feet.
“Praise God!” the pastor said. She let out a triumphant scream into the microphone and collapsed to her knees, praying. The piano and drums kicked up, and the church exploded. People began running up and down the aisle, shouting and singing. Someone found a tambourine and started pounding it. The drummer crashed the cymbals, and the pianist lingered on the high notes. A woman yelled and sprinted in place, sweat streaming down her face. “We ain’t trying to have no funeral up in here!” the pastor boasted.
And there was Crystal, hands raised, fingers spread, beaming and dancing. “God got me,” she cried. “God got me!”
23.
THE SERENITY CLUB
Scott had been eight days sober when he went to the Serenity Club, a smoke-filled, wood-paneled AA bar that served stale coffee and root-beer floats. “They’re addictive,” one regular with a rap sheet said about the floats. “But I don’t do robberies for them.” When it was time for the speakers, a light-skinned Puerto Rican woman in a black bandanna and vinyl jacket took the podium. This was Anna Aldea, an acid-dropping, coke-snorting, cowhide-tough biker lady turned high priestess of AA. A few months shy of her ten-year chip, Anna had helped dozens of addicts through the program. During her speech, she pointed to her newest project.