The Dying Ground Read online

  During the 1920s and 1930s, around the time of the Harlem Renaissance, more than a quarter of a million African-Americans settled in Harlem, creating what was described at the time as “a cosmopolitan Negro capital which exert[ed] an influence over Negroes everywhere.”

  Nowhere was this more evident than on West 138th and 139th Streets between Adam Clayton Powell and Frederick Douglass Boulevards, two blocks that came to be known as Strivers Row. These blocks attracted many of Harlem’s African-American doctors, lawyers, and entertainers, among them Eubie Blake, Noble Sissle, and W. C. Handy, who were themselves striving to achieve America’s middle-class dream.

  With its mission of publishing quality African-American literature, Strivers Row emulates those “strivers,” capturing that same spirit of hope, creativity, and promise.

  Praise for THE DYING GROUND

  “Friend or foe, everybody’s family in this heartfelt hometown mystery, even the guy at the other end of the gun.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Tramble’s writing is multidimensional, muscular and poetic, capturing the voices of African-Americans of many ages and backgrounds without slipping into pretense or parody.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “The Dying Ground teems with the tinny bravado of young men too eager to prove themselves. [An] impressive debut [with] a pungent, streetwise sensibility that gives her novel its racing pulse.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[Tramble’s] characterization of Maceo is often astonishing, the most dazzling facet of a consistently noteworthy debut. The author’s sure sense of structure, keen knowledge of male behavior and exquisite sense of pacing all contribute to this novel’s overall excellence. I read it fast, and I was sorry when the last page appeared.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Many mysteries featuring African American characters and set in the world of the black underclass fail to rise above the level of cheap stereotypes. But Nichelle D. Tramble establishes a new benchmark for such stories with The Dying Ground. … Tramble combines a note-perfect ear for the music of street slang with a cold acceptance of the violence that is, sadly, so much a part of some people’s everyday lives.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A pulse-pounding urban thriller that keeps the mystery intact, refusing to show its hand until the final pages. Tramble proves herself an unpretentious poet whose sense of the inner city, its argot and its inhabitants is almost romantic—and certainly vivid. The story is … infused with immense passion and new, true grit by this remarkable young novelist.”

  —Philadelphia Weekly

  “Mysteries are the urban fiction; nothing else so catches up the furies and fantasies of our cities. In The Dying Ground, Nichelle Tramble turns out Oakland’s ragged, depleted pockets—and hands us gold. I welcome a strong new writer.”

  —JAMES SALLIS, author of Eye of the Cricket

  “Beautifully written with an incredible eye for decaying urban streets, Nichelle Tramble’s The Dying Ground is one of the most accurate portrayals of violence, death and redemption in mystery fiction. This book is smart, mean and funny as hell. Don’t be the last to discover a great new writer.”

  —ACE ATKINS, author of Leavin’ Trunk Blues and Crossroad Blues

  To Daddy and Blaik,

  angels I knew for a while,

  and

  Judy Faye Tramble,

  my angel here on earth

  It was the easiest never to leave home. Ghettos were created to hold their inhabitants inside, but their boundaries were a defense perimeter as well, a secured border within which people felt as if they belonged.

  —Sylvester Monroe

  Brothers

  When you will survive if you fight quickly and perish if you do not, this is called the dying ground.

  —Sun-Tzu

  The Art of War

  Every time I had a nightmare as a child, my attempts to retell the dream in the midnight hours were always met with the same hushed words: “Wait till morning. If you tell your nightmares before sunup, they might come true.”

  These words of my grandmother’s were always whispered to soothe me, but instead they haunted me for years. It scared me to think I could give birth to the images of death I met in the middle of the night.

  I was born in death when my father decided to celebrate my arrival with a lethal drug treat for my mother. A suicidal combination of cocaine and heroin. He survived and she didn’t, and I’ve continued to relive her death ever since. In most of my dreams I follow her, not as the infant I was when she died but as a grown man. She doesn’t recognize me when we meet, and that is what frightens me the most.

  I’ve been visited by death every four years since my first days on this earth. I’ve grown so accustomed to mourning that funerals are rituals to me much like Christmas and Easter.

  On my fourth birthday my father followed my mother to the grave. He was a man my family hated even beyond and through his rehabilitation, so I never had the chance to meet him while he was living. Since then we’ve become acquainted in the middle of the night. His visits are always followed by another death, and I’ve grown to hate the sight of him.

  I dreamt about him just yesterday and I’ve been holding my breath for what’s to come. For the first time in years I tried to tell my grandmother of this fear. All she said was, “Nothing good ever happens at the back of midnight, baby. Don’t give those thoughts a reason to live.”

  But they’re already on their way, and this time it’s murder.

  A murder two hours on the backside of midnight with a single bullet to the head.

  “Well, if it ain’t little bitty Maceo Albert Bouchaund Redfield! That name so tall the boy got to walk up under it and say excuse me every day of his natural-born life.”

  The crowded barbershop broke into laughter as Cutty greeted me with a variation of the same put-down he’d been using for over sixteen years. The fact is that at five feet five inches I barely reach the first letter of my six-foot-tall name.

  “How short are you exactly, Maceo?” This came from a balding contemporary of my Grandfather Albert.

  “I’m tall as I need to be,” I answered.

  I eased into the shop, taking note of the old and young faces waiting in the unusually relentless heat of October.

  “And how tall is ‘need to be’?” Cutty grinned my way.

  Cutty had been my barber since my seventh birthday, and habit kept me a customer despite the insulting words. The barbershop was one place in Oakland that provided shelter if needed and contributed order to an often chaotic life.

  More simply, it was home.

  Cutty was as invested in me as a blood relative. Alongside his prized Oakland A’s paraphernalia, snapshots of local celebrities, and barber’s license was a photographic history of my baseball career from Pee Wee League through high school. Up until the ninth grade, all my uniforms bore the red-and-white logo of Cutty’s salon, Crowning Glory. The pictures were his way of staking a claim before I hit the majors.

  “You didn’t answer my question. How tall is ‘need to be’?”

  A waiting customer piped up with his opinion. “I say he’s four ten and a half on a good day.”

  The ensuing laughter reminded me that people often see my height as a flaw. It has been a source of ridicule since I was a young boy, but to me my size is a day-to-day reminder—a reminder to keep life compact and close to the vest. The few times I’ve reached for the height of others I’ve been knocked back into place. So I’ve learned to live as a little man with a big name. And I’ve learned to smile at the jokes.

  “Five foot.” Another barber.

  And Cutty: “Shit, Maceo ain’t seen hide nor hair of five feet.”
He raised his natural comb to his mouth to think for a moment. “No, I take that back. Maceo was about seven feet tall when he was winning all those championships.” And just like that the jokes about my height switched to praise for my baseball career.

  I was used to that too.

  Cutty picked up a portable fan and held it in front of his face. “Damn, feels like Africa outside.”

  Oliver, Cutty’s partner, rolled his eyes. “What you know about Africa? You barely left Oakland in thirty years!”

  “Shit, I know plenty ’bout Africa. I find out all I need to know ’bout Africa every time I go to East Oakland.” It was an old joke that never failed to hit its mark.

  The bonus October heat had sent everyone out into the streets in pursuit of any company to be had, and the sense of camaraderie and fun among the patrons kept the mood light. Along the curb a few waiting customers sat perched on the hoods of their cars, smoking cigarettes or reading newspapers. A few of the youngstas, unschooled in Cutty’s bullet-ridden history, masked shady business deals behind the steady bump-bump of rap music.

  Crowning Glory, Cutty’s shop of thirty years, sat on the Oakland side of San Pablo Avenue, a dirty artery that ran from Oakland’s city center all the way through six cities. It was his fifth location since incorporation. Initially his shop had been on Alcatraz Avenue, the Oakland street so named for its clear-day view of the famed Alcatraz Island. It was there, when I was seven, that my granddaddy took me for my first haircut.

  When business picked up enough for Cutty to leave Alcatraz, his bad luck began in earnest. His new location on MacArthur and Broadway attracted all the hustlers and Superfly wannabes of the 1970s. Though Cutty hated to compromise his profession, he built his reputation on the mean, slick perms so favored by that generation. And as his reputation grew so did his clientele until finally, inevitably, a crosstown gangster rivalry was played out in his barber chairs.

  The first casualty of Crowning Glory was Scott Hathaway, a heroin dealer with control of North, East, and West Oakland. He was slaughtered by an up-and-coming drug dealer named Jordy Prescott.

  Legend has it that Hathaway’s look of surprise was driven off his face by a bullet through his right eye. A quick nosedive in business confirmed that most people believed Cutty helped set up the flamboyant Hathaway. Only a new location on Shattuck Avenue and a year’s worth of time brought people slowly but surely back into his shop.

  The next move was caused by a retaliation shooting that occurred three blocks away, but Cutty took no chances. Before moving into the dusty San Pablo storefront, he had the property baptized by a local preacher, he installed church pews instead of seats for the waiting customers, and there hadn’t been a murder since. But sometimes, through the ever-ready smile, I suspected that a cutthroat heart beat in the old man’s chest. That much bad luck in one place made anybody suspect.

  Memories were short, however; the boys dealing on the curb proved it. The eighties had brought a fast and furious new industry into Oakland, the crack trade, and there was evidence of it everywhere you looked.

  The circus atmosphere of the drug game seeped into every aspect of urban Black life. Nothing went untouched as newfound wealth allowed men, women, and children to dream of something different. To the older cats, Michael Corleone and the crew of The Godfather supplied the props to let them dream in an elegant manner and jump the class barriers of their birth. But the rules and regulations of The Godfather became old to the youngstas even before the credits rolled. They had no time for rituals and order, just time enough to shove a big-ass foot through a door and demand the respect only a loaded gun and lots of money could bring.

  Scarface was their manifesto.

  It was a mess, but more seductive than anything we’d ever seen.

  In 1989, the entire Bay Area, San Francisco included, fell under the 415 area code, and under that name a prison gang became a strong independent faction within the penitentiary system, eventually edging out the stronghold of the Black Guerrilla Family and keeping the Los Angeles Crips and Bloods from infiltrating the northern California crime force. The Bay Area was proud of its No Crips, No Bloods policy, but once in a while small pockets of transplanted criminals made their way into the fray, usually by way of family members, more often than not by way of good-looking women.

  All that added to the big-man-on-campus swagger of the young men gathered here and there in front of Cutty’s. Fellas who, a mere two years before, never rated second glances now had all the props of true hustlers, and they used every opportunity possible to flaunt them. I rode the wave as a person on the edge of the inner circle, aware all the time that the Wizard was just inside the curtain. Anyone who looked closely knew the center would not hold; the smoke and mirrors would disappear and reveal a body count to equal a homegrown war.

  The unseasonable warmth pumped the festivities to a fever pitch, and all I could do was watch. The heat had an entirely different effect on my spirits. While the others laughed and joked and made plans to hit Geoffrey’s, Politics, and the End Zone, I waited for what was to come.

  The 90-degree temperature just weeks before Halloween threw off my alignment. It felt unnatural to my blood and, coupled with the bad dreams, left me coiled like a snake for the first sign of bad news. It was coming, I just didn’t know how or when.

  In an attempt to keep cool inside and out, I grabbed a crisp white towel from a broken chair and wiped the sweat pooled on my neck and shoulders. The chair had been broken for as long as I could remember.

  Cutty was superstitious to a fault, hailing from the same folklorish state as my grandparents—Louisiana—and he took all minor omens and signs as the gospel. He refused to remove any of the furniture that had been there since he opened for business, and as a result his place looked more like a flea market than a barbershop.

  “Man, Cutty, when you gonna fix this chair?” the man next to me asked.

  “Soon as you mama come over here with her tool belt.”

  I winced for the victim. Everything and everybody, no matter how sacred, was fair game. Entering Cutty’s meant donning a thick skin and readying a sharp tongue of your own.

  Cutty pointed at me when he spotted the towel in my hand. “Boy, what’s wrong with you, wiping your greasy face with my clean towels? Grab you some tissue paper.”

  “I might lose my place in line,” I countered.

  “That ain’t got nothing to do with me,” he shot back.

  “Alright, alright.”

  “How’s the pitching arm?” Cutty continued. “You had some good stats year before last.”

  “I remember that.” A man about my age turned to give me a quick pound of his fist. The gesture was the surest sign of respect Oakland had to offer. “You’re the Watch Dog.”

  I nodded in affirmation, but I was reluctant to resurrect an old past through conversation. Watch Dog is the nickname I received while pitching for the St. Mary’s High School baseball team. My habits before each pitch earned me the title and a bit of local notoriety, but it’s been at least a year since I’ve even picked up a ball. An injury plus cowardice saved me the disappointments of being second string on my collegiate team. But since Oakland is such a small town I am constantly reminded of my much-copied pitching style.

  During sophomore year I developed the habit that would become my signature on the field. I would study my surroundings down to the last detail before releasing a pitch. While the ball rested in my hand I would take in the batters, the opposing players, my teammates, the fans, the coaches, the vendors, the announcer, and the scouts, and if there happened to be birds and dogs in the park I studied them too. I’d take it all in, then wait for that perfect moment when the air and the elements sang in unison.

  Strike!

  Every time.

  That long prep dismantled a lot of batters and secured me a place on four all-star teams. The waiting, the patience, the timing; those were the keys to my success on the field.

  In life I try and apply the s
ame rules. If given the chance I’ll chose silence every time, listening instead to what the talkers don’t say, what they avoid, what their hands, legs, and arms add to the conversation. The body is always closer to the truth than the mouth, and I’ve come to trust silence the way others avoid it. This practice, like smiling at jokes, has served me well and kept me out of trouble.

  “I was at Bishop O’Dowd when you were pitching for St. Mary’s. You took the championship from us. Three times.” He stuck his hand out. “Lamont Quailes.”

  “Maceo Redfield.”

  “I remember. I remember. You use to kick it with my cousin Billy. Y’all was hella tight back in the day. Matter fact, I was with Billy when I saw you last.”

  I took a closer look at him and smiled. “Monty! Man, was-sup? I didn’t know you played ball.”

  “I mostly rode the bench. Too many superstars for me to play, but they wasn’t tough enough to face you.” He pointed across the room to one of the Little League pictures. “Remember that? They couldn’t even touch you way back when.”

  The picture in question happened to be my favorite, one I kept on a wall at home. In it I’m in the front row of a winning team, game ball at my feet, my two best friends—Jonathan Ford and Billy Crane—on either side. The photo captured a peace that no longer existed among the three of us. The years managed to drive a wedge through our friendship, a gulf further widened by women, an unhealthy rivalry between Billy and Jonathan, and the complexities of time and age. For a couple of years, though, the lines of our friendship were simple and clear. Me, the natural mediator smiling easily in the center, four inches shorter but the definitive link between them both.

  Monty gave me another pound and a wider smile, then looked me up and down, noting my Negro League baseball jersey, vintage original from my grandfather’s closet.