Live to See the Day, page 9
By the time the war on drugs went into full swing, drug use was in fact falling. But data was no match for the zeal of the political and media class to rev up the war and stoke the crack epidemic scare in a bid for votes and ratings.40 Days before the election and without holding a single committee hearing, Congress radically reshaped the criminal justice system with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. The law authorized $1.7 billion to wage the drug war, with most of the funding going to law enforcement and corrections, leaving little for treatment and prevention. It also enacted a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for drug offenses that involved five grams of crack cocaine, five hundred grams of powder cocaine, one hundred grams of heroin, and one hundred thousand grams of marijuana. The 100:1 crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity inevitably meant that the brunt of punishment came down hardest on African Americans and Latinos, who were more likely to be crack offenders than whites, who were more likely to use powder cocaine.41 When Nixon announced his war on drugs in 1971, the combined state and federal prison population was just shy of two hundred thousand. By 1989, with the changes in criminal justice policies, that figure had grown more than threefold.42
* * *
BEFORE RAYNI MOVED in with George, before she gave birth to Ryan and Avry, she was with Ildefonso. She first saw him one spring day in the nineties when she drove her friend Leah to see her boyfriend in Kensington. As Rayni waited in the car, she saw a gorgeous man race by on a motorcycle. His skin radiated with “a drug dealer tan,” she said. Tattoos of hearts, a panther, Jesus, and other designs covered his body. She thought, I want him to be my baby daddy. When her friend returned, she told Rayni that the man’s name was Ildefonso, but everyone called him June.
Soon after, Rayni spotted him on the drug corner he oversaw. There was a glamour associated with dealing drugs. You had money. You had power. You were the shit. This time, she introduced herself and asked if he was single. Ildefonso said no. “That’s a shame.” She drooped. “When you’re single, let me know.” A few years would pass before that happened.
Ildefonso was a drug kingpin who ran a mini-empire in Kensington. His turf was part of a three-square-mile tract that the police and media called the Badlands. With some of the highest poverty, unemployment, dropout, crime, murder, and housing vacancy rates in the city, it was where 70 percent of the drugs in Philadelphia were sold. When crack landed on the streets of urban America, it engulfed impoverished, ex-industrial communities like Kensington as collateral damage, sending the homicide rates soaring. Some of this was due to the gang violence prompted by the struggle to maintain and defend turf. Most customers traveled in from the suburbs of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland to buy the dirt-cheap dope. The glut of deserted houses was prime real estate for the drug factions, which turned them into shooting galleries and crack houses.43
Ildefonso’s success put a target on his back, and several years earlier, at 3 a.m. one morning, Julia, his five-year-old daughter, was woken by a commotion in the house. She tiptoed out of her bedroom into the hallway when a man gripped her and pointed a gun at her face. Her mother, Gabriela, also came into the hallway and screamed, “That’s my daughter!”
“Tell her to shut up or I’ll shoot her,” the man commanded. Julia stood frozen. He let Gabriela approach to take her downstairs to the living room, where Ildefonso, five foot nine with brown eyes and a round, gentle face, was handcuffed and sitting on a mattress on the floor with his two-year-old son, Hector. Julia and Gabriela, who was also holding her infant daughter, Alexis, crouched behind the sofa in terror. Five men toting AK-47s towered over them.
Over the next hour, as his accomplices were ransacking the rooms upstairs, one of the men pricked the side of Ildefonso’s forehead with a box cutter each time he refused to reveal where he was stowing the stash of drugs and cash. Tiny beads of blood welled on his flesh. “Don’t kill me, don’t kill me,” he pleaded.
His attackers couldn’t find the narcotics or money (which had been stealthily stored inside the barstool cushions) and were running out of patience. Suddenly the police barged through the door. They were able to nab one of the men, but the others escaped through the back. The call had come from Ildefonso’s mother, who lived across the street. He had instructed her that if she ever saw his curtains closed, it meant something terrible was happening, and she should call the police.
Ildefonso, who was born in Salinas, on Puerto Rico’s southern coast, and Gabriela were childhood friends from the neighborhood. When their friendship turned romantic and Gabriela became pregnant, she dropped out of high school. Their first daughter, Julia, was a daddy’s girl. He called her baby, and she was the object of her father’s many hugs and kisses. Then Ildefonso joined the military and severed almost all contact with the family. When he came home, he was in the suffocating grip of crack addiction, unable to curb his anger or impatience. The drug crippled him, but you couldn’t tell unless you knew him; he was a functioning addict. He began operating on both sides of the narcotics economy, as a consumer and a supplier.
Before long, Ildefonso hooked Gabriela on crack, too. Julia would wake up in the night and see her parents getting high together downstairs. In the mornings, they were asleep, so she dressed for school on her own. School was her escape. Her teachers could see that she was dealing with havoc at home, and she was not alone. Virtually every household was touched by the wretched state of Kensington. But the state did not launch an urban Marshall Plan to invest in jobs, housing, education, and health care to eliminate poverty and other causes of crime. The state did not provide methadone maintenance treatment or supervised injection sites. Rather, it doubled down on handcuffs, armed police, prison cells, and austerity measures on the assumption that poor African Americans and Latinos were undeserving and predisposed to a malady of waywardness and criminality.44
At Julia’s home, domestic abuse followed addiction. Ildefonso took out his anger from the strife of the streets on Gabriela. He would thrash her with such intensity that her injuries left her nearly unrecognizable. Once Julia woke up to the sound of ghastly screeching. Ildefonso had thrown hot oil on Gabriela’s leg. Julia applied toothpaste to her burns, but it didn’t help, and the assault left permanent scars.
A little over a year after the home invasion, Gabriela called it quits. She was pregnant again, this time with their son Ricardo, and feared that Ildefonso would kill her if she stayed any longer. She promptly located a new apartment in Kensington and moved with all three children. They found temporary stability, but addiction and poverty were too formidable. Gabriela couldn’t take care of the children and had to give them up. Julia went to live with her aunt in New Jersey, and the two boys were placed in foster care. For Julia, the trauma of the hostage episode never dissipated. She could not forget the feeling that she could have died at any moment. She rarely crossed paths with her father, but when she did, she would not let him forget his failings. “You don’t do anything for me. You are never there for us.”
* * *
IN THE WAKE of the Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of the four police officers who beat Rodney King, President George H. W. Bush embarked on a whistle-stop tour of Philadelphia to drum up support for his urban agenda. It was May 1992, months ahead of the presidential contest, and he was vying for a second term. Bush began with a visit to a police mini-station, and in the late afternoon, he rolled up in his black Lincoln Town Car limousine to St. Boniface Catholic Church at Norris Square in Kensington, which had acquired the name Needle Park. The ever-present drug dealers, who worked in the heroin and crack trade, had been evacuated. He was greeted by a sea of protesters chanting, “We want jobs! We want jobs!”45
Now inside the church’s gymnasium, Bush sat at a table with Police Commissioner Willie L. Williams, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Michael M. Baylson, and more than a dozen community organizers and residents. He spoke briefly about the Weed and Seed program and listened to various testimonies.46 Operation Weed and Seed was a pilot program administered by the U.S. Department of Justice. Nineteen cities were each given a minuscule $1.1 million to weed “out gang leaders, drug dealers, and career criminals” and seed “communities with expanded employment, educational, and social services,” as Bush put it. In Philadelphia, the vast majority of the federal grant went into “weeding,” leaving chump change for “seeding.”47
At the forum, neighborhood activists requested more funding for the community. Similarly, Florence Richardson, a member of the local Weed and Seed Steering Committee and community activist in Hunting Park, a neighborhood north of Kensington, asked the president, “What I need to know from you is that since we’re talking about a multimillion-dollar business as far as drugs are concerned, exactly how are we supposed to fight this kind of problem, especially talking about agencies, community agencies, that deal with housing with limited funds?” Bush replied, “Well, I’m not sure that funds is the entire answer.” He later said that producing jobs in the private sector was critical.48
Other speakers hammered home the same plea for investment in education, jobs, housing, and youth recreational activities, to muted responses by Bush.49 Recognizing that many families depended on the drug trade for economic security, Wilfredo Rojas, founder of the Norris Square Civic Association, explained, “We wanted them to eradicate drugs from the top and provide jobs at the bottom for the masses.”
For his final stop of the day, Bush headlined a $1,000-a-plate Republican fundraiser five miles south at the Bellevue Hotel in Center City, where fat-cat donors devoured chicken with tarragon sauce and white wine. The gig raked in a cool half million dollars.50
6
• • •
My Baby Daddy
Like Ildefonso, Rayni had grown up in Philadelphia and had familial roots in Puerto Rico. As the story went, her parents, Emilio and Laura, met at the port of Corinto in Nicaragua, where Emilio was unloading supplies from a ship. “You see that woman down there?” Emilio exclaimed to his fellow merchant marines, pointing to a stunning woman in a well-fitting dress with fair skin, hazel eyes, and flowing blond hair. “That’s going to be the mother of my children.”
His colleagues razzed him, “Skinny dog dreaming of a steak.” Laura was nineteen, twenty-four years younger than Emilio, and had a son, Hugo. One of thirteen children, she lived in deep poverty, roaming the streets, peddling tortillas, eggs, lemons, and chicha, a sweet corn-based beverage she served in sandwich bags. When Emilio saw and wooed her, it was a sign that God had answered her prayers for a man who could take care of her and Hugo.
After the birth of a daughter, Maritza, and a short stint in Emilio’s hometown in Puerto Rico, the family flew to the U.S. mainland and settled in North Philadelphia. Rayni, the second daughter, was born in 1968. Laura opened a hair salon in a bustling business district on Fifth Street that became known as El Bloque de Oro, “the golden block,” with cafés and furniture, clothing, hardware, music, and barber shops.
Her salon quickly became one of the most popular in the area. The family lived in a flat on the second floor. Often when Rayni woke up, she would peek out of her window and see a line of Latina and older white women snaking out the door. Every summer, Laura closed the salon for a few months, and the family trekked to Nicaragua by car. At the border, customs would check their suitcases and swipe items, so Laura started bribing them with money and small gifts. To her family, she was Santa Claus. She brought them clothing, appliances, perfume, makeup, and jewelry. She was the only one to have made it out of poverty.
Early on, Rayni and her sisters were tasked with sweeping and cleaning the brushes and other tools at the salon. Her mother kept the girls secluded and issued a constant stream of injunctions: Don’t talk like that. Don’t sit like that. Don’t laugh like that. They were expected to meet her towering standards and her exacting nature. Laura was determined never to return to the shame and poverty of her youth. She had worked too hard. She made sure Rayni and her sisters understood that, too.
Rayni went to Catholic school for most of her childhood until her younger sister Brandy convinced her to transfer to a vocational school because it would be less strict and have boys. But she and Brandy attracted unwelcome attention for their flowing hair, immaculate makeup, and glowing porcelain skin. Students stuck gum to Rayni’s hair, and she was once punched in the back. It was the price of being a hairdresser’s daughter.
Once she graduated, Rayni went to Temple University with the goal of becoming a psychologist, but she was ill prepared for the rigors of college, finding it difficult to sit through lectures and take notes. Her classmates appeared to manage, but she was lost. She could have attended office hours to talk to her professors, but she didn’t know what office hours were. Although Rayni had grown up less than two miles from campus, Temple operated in such a different universe that it may as well have been a foreign land. There were white professional codes, rituals, and etiquettes that would have to be mastered for her to succeed in higher education, but Rayni was a first-generation college student without the necessary support.
During the second semester, Rayni’s mother suddenly declared that she would provide not another penny for her college education. Her grand career ambitions to become a psychologist went up in smoke. Her mother expected her to marry, breed, and run the salon. She hadn’t thought it was even necessary for Rayni to finish high school. So she dropped out. Nobody from Temple contacted her, and she had no inkling that she could apply for student loans.
What followed was a daze of boyfriends, clubbing, and miscellaneous jobs. At one point, Rayni lived in a series of hotels with a drug-dealer boyfriend who was on the run from the cops. She started bartending to spite her mother, helped run a salon that Brandy opened in North Philadelphia, and discovered the thrill of emancipation from Laura’s demands.
A few months after her first brush with Ildefonso, Rayni was driving to her mother’s salon and passed through his block. Ildefonso crept up to the window of her beige Honda Civic. “I’m single,” he announced.
“That’s nice,” she cooed.
“Do you want to go to Wildwood this weekend?” he asked. They ended up driving to Wildwood Beach on the Jersey Shore in his convertible along with a brown paper bag of beers. Rayni lusted for him—he was very handsome and generous with money—but she held back. He had recently left a relationship, and she didn’t want to get played. She knew nothing about his abusive past or the neglect of his children.
Ildefonso moved into her apartment within a few weeks of them dating. One evening, he came home after a grueling day on the corner and said he wasn’t sure they were going to work out. Rayni interpreted his doubt as a rebuke of her desire to take things slowly. So that night, they made love for the first time. He left the next morning and didn’t return. She was shattered to learn that he had resumed his relationship with his ex-girlfriend, Amanda. This is what happens when I trust a man, she thought.
She was at Brandy’s hair salon when she realized that she might be pregnant. She had been feeling a strange quivering sensation in her stomach. Then she missed her period, all but confirming her intuition. Rayni was excited about becoming a mother. Ildefonso heard that she was pregnant through the grapevine and wanted them to work things out. But she had promised herself that if she were ever in this position, she wouldn’t be with her baby daddy just for the sake of it. I’m twenty-five years old, she thought. I’m independent, and I don’t need nobody.
The two were talking on the phone when Ildefonso announced once again that he was single. But Rayni felt she couldn’t trust him. Who could? I’m not going to be with someone if I have to worry about what time he’s coming home or even whether he’s going to come home, she told herself. She wasn’t convinced that he wasn’t off sleeping with Amanda or some other woman, so she tried to pry out the truth.
“I’m not with nobody,” he insisted. After a few more denials, annoyed by her persistence, he finally admitted that he was seeing a new woman.
Rayni hung up. Her temper flaring, she left the salon and drove to his corner.
“What did you just say to me on the phone?” she bellowed, attracting the attention of his boys selling across the street. “You said you’re with somebody?” Ildefonso kept mum, peering off into the distance with his hands stowed in the pockets of his baseball jacket. She moved closer and slapped him on each cheek. His face snapped sideways.
He grabbed her. His dealers, primed for a fight, rushed over. “She’s pregnant,” someone called out. Rayni pushed him away and left. Over the following weeks, she tried to purge her mind of Ildefonso, but her desire got the better of her.
* * *
“DID YOU KNOW that June has been coming around?” Rayni’s friend Leah asked her. After their fallout, she and Ildefonso hadn’t spoken much apart from the time she hustled $400 out of him for new clothes. She had lied that she needed money for an abortion.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, yeah—in the middle of the night. He was drinking. He did it again last night.”
After the clubs let out in the wee hours of the morning, Ildefonso twice stopped by Leah’s house, where Rayni was now living. “Rayni! I love you!” he howled. “I want my family back!” Her room was in the back, so she couldn’t hear him.
Although he was now dating another friend, Elena, Rayni couldn’t shake off the attraction. They started chatting on the phone again and hanging out.
Just before Valentine’s Day when Rayni was six months pregnant, Ildefonso said he’d be tied up on the corner until late, but he promised to come over by 1 a.m. She stayed up, staring at the clock until dawn, telling herself he had reformed, and this time would be different. But he didn’t show. She had never felt more crushed, but it wasn’t entirely his fault. The law had finally caught up with him. Ildefonso had been arrested with five baggies of cocaine, 32.2 grams, and was charged with the offense of having “unlawfully manufactured, delivered, or possessed with intent to deliver a controlled substance.”
