I didn't do nothing all day Sunday but read that book again so I could write my report and get it to Ms. Harris so I could get in the class. I mean, it ain't no coincidence that he brought me the book and she wanted a report. That's a sign from the Most High as Mohammed put it that I gotta get it together, don't you think? I'm gonna write that report tomorrow, and I'm gonna do it all by myself. You remember how I used to always ask you to write my shit for me? Well, this time I'm gonna do it all by myself, with no help from anybody. I might ask Mohammed to look at it for spelling and puncutation, and that's it. I promise I'm not gonna disappoint anybody anymore.
Love,
Antonio
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July 27, 1990
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I'm sorry I took so long to write back to you, but I had to sort out some things I wanted to say to you. You
know what Antonio, sometimes I feel like you don't even be listening to me or caring about what I have to say. I know you try to cheer me up, but I think you need to realize you ain't gotta be locked up to be lonely. I have a lot of problems and a lot of things I think about and want to do myself. It's like lately I been feeling your letters is all about you and you ain't interested in me no more. And I think you trying a little too hard to impress this Ms. Harris so I'm wondering if you got feelings for her. I saw your mother the other day and she told me you sent her the paper you wrote and all the good comments Ms. Harris had wrote on it, and I got a little bit upset cause you ain't said nothing to me about it. What, you got sumthin to hide? You need not be worried about Ms. Harris. You need to be worrying about your mother. Antonio, the truth is she don't look too good. She done put on a lot of weight I can tell you that. You ain't seen her in a while, but the next time you see her you'll see what I'm talking about. Now Mrs. Lawrence always had them hips, but it's like her stomach got big and her arms swelled up and every time I come over there she just sitting on that couch with a bowl of dried-up food on the front table, smelling up the room. She just flip channels over and over again, from Oprah to
People's Court
to
Days of Our Lives
to whatever. I keep asking her when she gonna go back to her job and she keep saying she ain't ready. Tell you the truth I think she fired and don't want to accept it or admit it. I don't know where Tyler and Trevon be half the
time. It's the summer, so I guess they be out on the courts or riding bikes.
But anyway she took all Mr. Lawrence pictures down, and on Saturday me and her took the bus down to 125th to the Salvation Army to donate some of his clothes. I guess she finally accepting that he gone. Now, if you don't want her to take your pictures down and give your clothes away (starting with the kicks), you better start showing some concern for somebody other than yourself. Like about time I started thinking about myself for a change. I'm starting to turn out just like my mother, thinking about everybody else and not myself. Well, that's about to change. I'm going to France in less than a month and I asked for more hours so I could save up some money for my trip, so I'm not gonna have that much time to write. Go ahead and keep yourself busy with Ms. Harris while I handle my business.
Best wishes,
Natasha
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July 31, 1990
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First of all Natasha, no you do not know what it's like to be me. You do not know what I been through and what I go through every motherfucking day of my life. You don't have a clue what it's like to smell another man's shit or to be scared to look somebody in the face for fear you might get
clocked for nothing or to have to do the same thing over and over every day at the same time every day or to have somebody watch you take a piss or wash your nuts. You don't know how heavy a dead body is and how no matter now hard you try you can't get that wide eye look out of your head and that soggy water smell out of your nose and the gargling noises it make when it's trying to breathe out of your dreams at night. So when you know all of that get back to me and criticize me and accuse me of not giving a fuck. And don't worry about my mother. I got that. Let me take care of that. You don't think I talk to her, you don't think I know what's going on? I don't need you to tell me shit.
Antonio
PS. If I did like Ms. Harris (which I don't and I don't know where the fuck that came from) you ain't making it no better by going loco for nothing. She understanding me a little bit better than you are now so I hope you think about that while you enjoying your free life and trip to France. Suck my dick. I hope you was just on your period when you wrote that shit.
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August 1, 1990
Dear Antonio,
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Well, baby, you right. I guess I did fuck up. I was real mad when I read your letter and thought about giving
you your ring back. I even told Laneice, “Fuck that nigga.” But then I showed my mother and she explained to me that I might be a little bit insensitive. I don't know what you are going through and I don't know how it is for you. I was just a little bit upset and disappointed and worried that me and you wouldn't be able to be together. I'm just scared, Antonio. I'm really scared about us growing apart and not seeing each other. I don't know if I can handle it. I'm not saying I don't love you, I'm just saying that this is a lot for me too. I just need to know that you think about me the way I think about you. I need to know that you ain't gonna change and come out all hard and scarred up and painted from head to toe with nasty ass tattoos and shit. I see niggaz when they get out of lockup, some of my cousins or peeps from the block. And Antonio, they ain't the same. They meaner, more quiet, don't joke as much, smile real stiff, can stare you down til you feel like a pile of salt waiting to blow away with the breeze. And I guess I just don't want you to be that way. I'm scared you not gonna be the same man I knew before. I really want to see the paper you wrote. That's all. I just wanted you to share it with me too. So why don't you get it back from Ms. Harris and let me see it too, okay?
Love,
Natasha
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August 4, 1990
Natasha,
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Well, here it is. I hope you like it. It's probably not good as what you could do, but Ms. Harris liked it enough to get me in the GED class that's gonna start in the fall. And she ain't the only one trying to school me. Mohammed saw me reading
Catcher in the Rye
and asked me why I was reading shit that didn't have nothing to do with me. I told him I had read it in school and my teacher took the time to bring me my book and I was gonna read it and appreciate it just like the books he had. So he gave me one of his books from the milk crates he got all over our room. I heard of it before.
Autobiography of Malcolm X
. I told him I wasn't stupid and I knew about Malcolm X from learning about him in Black History Month and going on that damn walking tour with Mr. Cook where he showed us places where he lived, and from movies on TV. I thought him and Benito was gonna get into it when Benito said Don't be corruptin the youngun with your angry black man bullshit that ain't got you nowhere but in the pen. Mohammed told Benito to shut up and read the dictionary so he could learn English. Then he told me I got a new teacher in town, and it was about time I started reading something that was relevent before it was too late. He was telling me that Malcolm X was uneducated before he went in, but he came out a genius cause he read the dictionary back and forth a thousand times. Now, I ain't doing nothing like
that. I might do it once, but that's it. So between Ms. Harris and Mohammed I'm gonna come out here a professor and shit. Lawyer already told me I'm supposed to be a genius. It might be some truth to that shit. Mohammed found a Rubik's Cube in one of his crates. I ain't seen one of them things for years. It was all fucked up and he said he had been trying to get it back to normal for years. I did it in two days. My partners on the block started coming down here fucking that shit up all crazy, I mean turning that thing for two and three hours trying to get it to the point that I couldn't solve it again. Every time they fucked it up, I put it right back together again. Inmates and guards from other blocks heard about that shit and started coming down trying to catch me up. It's like a battle almost. Mohammed call it a “meeting of the minds.” You know he gotta say some intellectual shit, but yo this is fun. I get to see things all fucked up and coming back together again and plan five, six, seven steps ahead. I wish I could have done that on the outside, with my life.
Love,
Antonio
Holden and Me: What I think about the book
The Catcher in the Rye
By Michael Antonio Lawrence II
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The first time I read
The Catcher in the Rye
I got mad at my teacher, Mr. Cook, for giving us something that at first seems like it's about nothing. For one
thing, the main character is a boy named Holden Caulfield who seem like he have it all. He go to this fancy school named Pencey in upstate New York when the only time most cats I know go upstate is for this, the pen. At this school he got a dorm room and they eat stuff like steak for dinner every Saturday when most people I know only have steak on their birthday. Well he basically get kicked out of school and go back to New York where he fromâthe fancy part of Manhattan maybeâand instead of going home he choose to explore the city and hook up with old girlfriends and prostitutes and other people of that nature. It seem to me that all this white boy did was complain complain complainâabout his friends, the teachers, the food, his parents, girlsâor babes is what they used to say back then. The way he looked at everything was negative. He had a chance at something most kids would kill for. A chance to live away from home and go somewhere different and be on your own and get an allowance. But he chose to focus on the negative instead and by page fifty I was through with him. Also the fact that he was always lonely or depressed or crying and not knowing why, like he was a bottle of soda ready to explode with all this emotion but nobody had even shook the bottle. But something kept me reading this book. I think it was the fact that Holden was lonely, that deep down inside he felt like nobody was understanding who he was or that he wasn't making a real connection with
anybody. It's one part in the book when he says that New York is a terrible place when somebody laughs on the street late at night and when you hear that laugh you get so sad because it makes you feel so lonely and depressed. I remember thinking when I first read that how could somebody get lonely in a place like NYC where everywhere you look its people people everywhere? People behind you on line, people in front of you making you late, people hogging up the seats on the train, people bumping into you while they on the go and not even saying I'm sorry. I had to come here to figure out what he really meant by that. Because I find myself surrounded every day all day by grown men, angry men older than me with wrinkles and scars and yellow eyes to tell you where they been. And I don't want to get sucked up into that lonely, a part of that place that feels like a sewer filled with dreams flushed away. So I stopped hating Holden and starting feeling for him when I saw him floating around our city, with no place to really call home and no friends to help ease the ride. One thing that help him through is thinking about his sister Phoebe, cause even though she only nine, Holden knows that she understands him and got his back no matter what. That's how I feel about my moms and my girl, like if I was halfway across the world with no place to lay my head and rest that there is someone that would always welcome me home with open arms. Whenever I think about them, I get like Holden and start bawling
as he put it. I'm gonna be like Holden and say I don't know why that is. It just is.
August 10, 1990
Antonio,
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Antonio, I really love your essay. You wrote that all by yourself? I don't believe it. See, I knew you could do a lot better in school than you was doing. And baby, don't worry, you will never be like those other dudes in there with you cause I won't ever let you get that hopeless. You gonna be just like Holden when you get out, able to walk around and go anywhere you want and explore the whole city. Only the difference is you gonna have somebody waiting for you soon as you get out. That somebody is me! You never told me that you cry when you think about me. I cry when I think about you too because I miss you, but hopefully, that will all be over soon.
Antonio, you've asked me to keep a lot of secrets, so now I have to ask you to keep one. You can't tell nobody this, not Black, not even your mother, cause right now we don't know what we gonna do. But Laneice is pregnant. She had told me last week that she skipped her period, and Laneice got her period when she was only nine and she ain't never skipped it in almost 8 years so she said she knew something was up. So, we went to the store to get that EPT test, and we did it here while Roy
and my mother was at work. And it came out positive. You know, that little pink line had appeared. She started crying and breathing real hard and shaking real bad and I had to just tell her to get it together, that this wasn't the time for her to lose control.