Curtis Haynes’ New York
I‘M GROWIN’ PLANTS ALL THE TIME,” says Curtis Haynes, pouring half a glass of water over a geranium. The floor and window ledge of his bedroom are covered with leafy pots. “Plants are everything. They give us oxygen and food. They also a home for insects.” He brushes an aphid off a leaf. “Insects gonna inherit the earth.”
He continues the tour of his room — recently painted electric blue by his mother — by pulling a picture off a shelf full of basketball trophies. Judging by his fleeting eyes and reticent tone of voice, he doesn’t know what to make of me — a pale, white, 26-year-old, bearded magazine editor with thick glasses from a myopic childhood of too much TV watching and book reading in Madison, Wisconsin. Nor do I know what to make of him — a handsome, ebony-skinned, 16-year-old, short-haired high-school student with sharp vision from a childhood spent on the basketball courts of Harlem. “This my brother, Footie,” he says, holding a blurred photograph of a teenager bearing a strong resemblance to Curtis. “Remember, remember, remember. . .” is inscribed around the margins. “We named him that because he had such big feet,” he says. Curtis’ Pro Ked basketball shoes equal my own 11 1/2 Adidas — and I am 6’2″ while he is just 5’10”. “He died in a fight two years ago. Puerto Rican friend got in an argument at a party and the other dude pulled a gun. My brother jumped between them. I never go to parties no more.”
I’d first gotten to know Curtis over two years ago when I was doing a story on Adam Clayton Powell Junior High (JHS 43) on the corner of Amsterdam and 129th in Harlem. An ugly little building surrounded by towering, lookalike housing projects, the school often seemed a madhouse of students prone to rioting and teachers who had chosen one of two roads: to sainthood or hackdom. I spent a semester talking with ninth graders, one-to-one in empty classrooms, about their ambitions, which boiled down to achieving security and entering the middle class. They placed an extraordinary amount of faith in romantic love — no doubt fostered by dogshit song lyrics — as a savior from all the rottenness in their lives, though the highest emotion they could summon about specific members of the opposite sex seemed to be intense ambivalence. The flip side of this fascination was their endless self-hatred, manifest in their constant and brutal fighting, destructive drug consumption, lousy diets and general refusal to learn the intellectual skills that could pull them into the middle class. Although I found most everyone likable and bright, once I learned their language, I could see in their futures only a demoralizing reflection of the statistics that show New York City public schools graduating class after class of illiterates. Curtis Haynes was an exception. He could translate his perceptions of ghetto life into words I could understand, and he had managed to bring some of the motivation he brought to basketball into the classroom as well. Voted “Most Popular” in the school yearbook, he got respect and knew everybody in the neighborhood. When the opportunity arose to return to Harlem for another story, I sought him out. He barely remembered me, but looked on the story as a challenge to get a message to the world.
“I do some writin’ too,” he says. “I the only one I know who write for fun.” He hands me an essay entitled A Thought. “People around my way are not to much into what’s happening,” it reads. “Like they just stay stagnated in one building. They don’t go no where. . . . Like they just drink and fight and mess with stink disrespectful girls. Have kids with no financial backup. Messing around with cops. I hope they just realize that the way they’re acting really is how the white man really wants them to act.”
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