EXTRACT FROM TATTOOS ON MY SOUL
Persuasion and force of personality were my weapons of choice, words my bullets. And highly effective they were too. Mediating, cajoling, haranguing, persuading and threatening, I was the mouth, the Muhammad Ali, of Cicero. I rarely came up for air once on a roll. With my verbal armory fully deployed, a man might feel as though he were in front of a firing squad! Capitulation was common.
But things were heating up on the streets. The dynamics were changing. By the early eighties, the volume of narcotics flowing into the ghetto had transformed the face of black organized crime. Hundreds of millions of dollars were in play weekly. The price of merchandise continued to plummet and the market grew exponentially. Gang-bangers were more heavily armed, more aggressive then ever and the ante was as high as it had ever been. Competition was deadly. Literally.
No longer a case of scrapping, slapping and maybe stabbing a way through the turf wars with fists, boots and knives, the gangs now relied on guns as their enforcers. Retribution could be grisly and permanent, but no matter how lethal, never served to dampen the violence. One death would escalate to two or three or a dozen, as family, friend and opportunist retaliated, and conflict spread like wildfires in a drought-dry forest.
Nobody ever said: “well damn! He just killed Jimmy. ***this bullshit, lets stop the violence now!”
No, it was far more likely that before nightfall, Jimmy would be avenged in blood, and another young black man added to the body count.
I knew the set was only going to get hotter and no one could possibly win. Homicide had no part in my world. Only a fool goes with violence as a strategy, it takes a stronger man to use words. The only possible winners of a shoot out were the undertakers and lawyers. As one mother buries her son another is preparing herself emotionally for a couple of decades of prison visits. She at least, will see her boy again, and not have to settle for kissing his picture on a tombstone.
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