Bill’s House
By Chelsea Raker
This is one of two winning essays for the Janice Nora Lackey Award for Academic Excellence.
To be eligible for the Lackey Award, an essay must have been written for an NPEP course. NPEP received more than 20 essay submissions for consideration. Each essay was read by two members of an anonymous panel of three NPEP faculty members, who provided notes and a preliminary assessment. Essays that received two positive votes were then read by the third committee member. All of the essays were discussed and evaluated against the criteria identified in the award announcement: clarity of writing, creativity, argumentative strength, and level of development.
The trap was my haven, my hell, and my first classroom.
“The trap” is just another way to say, crack house, stash spot, or dope house. In my culture, it’s a noun and a verb. It’s a place as well as a lifestyle. To me, it is an acronym that stands for: take risks and prosper. This motto became my own.
Where I’m from, people risk it all for the almighty dollar. To me, the trap is exactly how it sounds, a trap. Once you’re in that life, getting out proves to be difficult, or nearly impossible. Typically, the only way out is in a box — either the one in the ground or the one upstate. In other words, you die or you go to jail.
I was born into this life. I’m a trap baby, or product of my environment. My father was a drug dealer and my mom struggled with addiction. My parents split up and my mom couldn’t take care of me, so I stayed at the trap spot on Chatham Street with my dad. His friend Bill owned the place. Bill was a Vietnam vet with a drug and alcohol problem. I would come to live at his house many times growing up, with and without my father. The first time I lived there I was in pre-kindergarten.
As a young child, I would go to Bill’s house after school to find him sitting on the couch. Often, he had circled my name in the newspaper. They would print a list of high honor roll students.
My name would never fail to be on that list. But while I would go to school and learn one thing, learning to think with a street mentality was another thing entirely. I often felt like two different people and had a really hard time not letting what happened to me outside of school affect me while I was there. After school, I had a whole different set of lessons to learn. I learned something new every day.
Eventually, my dad started doing more drugs than he was selling and had worn out his welcome with old man Bill. No matter how many times I moved away, somehow, I always ended up back at the trap spot at the bottom of that dead street. The dead-end sign on the street reminded me that I was on a road, mentally, and physically, that led nowhere.
The house itself was big and covered in spray paint. Like many other things in the neighborhood, it had been tagged by the Bloods. The Bloods were a predominant gang on the south and east side of Savannah. By spray painting the house, they made it known that the house was Blood territory. The front door of the house led straight to the living room, which was largely dominated by the couch. It is the couch that I remember the most. It was gigantic, and probably older than I am now.
Like everything else in Bill’s house, it had been tinted yellow by the thick cloud of smoke that was ever-present in the air. That dingy couch was surprisingly comfortable. Many times it harbored me in my time of need.
During the day, old man Bill sat on the couch smoking paper joints and chasing his vodka with beer. I would watch him and his many friends smoke his weed and drink his booze. Bill was a Type 2 diabetic, and his hands shook badly. He soon taught my nimble fingers to roll his weed for him — one of my many lessons. When the sun was up the drug dealers and gang members, who considered the trap their place of business, mostly kept the kitchen, the garage, or the front porch. These are the men I looked up to because unlike my father, Bill, or his friends, these men were not content with their life. They wanted more. They wanted better. They would get what they wanted by any means necessary.
Most nights, when Bill retired to his bedroom, Peezy ran the house. Peezy was a general, or high-ranking member of Blood, that called the shots in the neighborhood. Everyone that came and went knew that Bill claimed me as his granddaughter. I wasn’t but the notion saved me some trouble — sometimes. Peezy was a man who always seemed to be in a hurry. He was usually angry, but had a rare smile that captivated the room. Much like many of the thugs that came around, Peezy liked me, but he didn’t call me “sis” like the other guys did. Peezy did not look at me with brotherly love. What he felt for me was much more primal. When he smiled at me, I felt as if I was prey, being hunted, and that his smile was only intended to lure me in.
When I was barely 13, I had graduated from sleeping on the floor of the laundry room to having a spot on the couch in the living room. At that time in my life, my father was M.I.A. My mother was in Lee Arrendale State Prison, in Alto, Georgia.
I was state property. I ran away from foster care and Bill took me in, again. I had a couch-mate named C.J. He was 18 and had just gotten out of the county jail. My bond with C.J. would be a pivotal one in my young life.
I remember one night in particular when C.J. had been coming in late and sleeping on the other end of the couch for about a week, I had a really bad feeling. No longer able to pretend to sleep, I sat up on the dirty, L-shaped sectional, and prepared to run. I remember feeling relieved that I had learned to sleep with my shoes on.
Honestly, it wasn’t C.J. giving me the bad feeling. Secretly, I felt safer with him around. He had never bothered me and Bill told me that he was “all right,” so I wasn’t as concerned with his close proximity as I was with the tension rolling off of the men who had passed through the living room on the way to conduct their nightly business in the kitchen. My main cause of concern was that Peezy would be looking for a stress reliever when his dealings were done. More than once he had sought me out as a distraction after having a “bad night.” It made me sick to think that I would, again, be the object of his desire. Especially now that C.J. was there, inevitably leaving a witness, or worse, to my demise. I couldn’t stomach the thought of that, so I was going to disappear. Disappearing was something I was good at since more often than not, I was technically a missing person. I usually stayed off the streets at night, taking refuge on Bill's couch if I could because a kid outside after dark drew unnecessary attention.
I felt stuck. Like I was bound to a way of life that I hated. I had chosen the streets, or rather, I felt that the streets had chosen me. While it was a dangerous way to live, I preferred it to the system. I blamed my parents for exposing me and then abandoning me in the trenches.
There are serious risks that come with sleeping in a trap house. Being hit by a bullet that was intended for someone else was only one possible scenario. Knowing what Peezy would do to me, it was somehow not the worst one I could think of at the time.
Looking back on the night, I remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach only getting worse. Then C.J. changed everything. “Hey Ma, you good over there?” he asked from the other end of the couch. He actually looked concerned. I remember realizing that before that moment, I had only ever heard him speak in hushed tones. I was always pretending to sleep, but just then, his voice wrapped around me like a blanket. He slid closer to me and I flinched. “Yo, relax Ma, look at me,” he cajoled, his tone gentle yet commanding. The louder the men in the next room got, the closer I was to running.
I realize now how afraid I probably looked at that moment. I’m still embarrassed by how jumpy and disheveled I was. “Look, the old man only let me kick it if I make sure nun’ happens to you. We good over here,” he assured me pulling a .357 revolver from his waistband. He set it on his lap and rested his hand on the firearm as if the contact put him perfectly at ease. What struck me the most was that he said, “we,” like I wasn’t alone. My face must have portrayed the uncertainty I felt at that moment because he looked at me and with a heavy sigh said, “OK, trap baby here.”
This time he pulled a 9 mm pistol from the back of his pants. Gripping it by the barrel, he held it out for me to take. To this day, I do not remember reaching for the gun but all of a sudden it was in my hand, the weight of the cold black steel was overwhelmingly empowering, but I felt like the weight of the world had been suddenly lifted from my shoulders. I recall briefly wondering why I wasn’t afraid of the gun, why my hands had quit shaking, and why I could no longer hear my heartbeat. I almost thanked him, but didn’t, already feeling ashamed for showing weakness. Instead, I checked the chamber, it was loaded. I remember him telling me that I, “should never be in a war zone without a weapon.” From then on, I kept one on me.
On the couch, at that moment, I felt as if I didn’t have to conform or live in fear of any man. I could hold my head high. That gun became an extension of my body. It was just as much a part of me as my fingers or my toes. I slept with it under my face like it was a pillow. I lived by it.
I thought that eventually, I’d die from it. That couch proved to be a place of transition for me. Looking back on that night I should’ve ran.
Thirteen years later, I replay that night in my head and think about how the men in that house, and the moments on that couch, taught me to be a little weapon. It turned me into something I did not want to be. Raised by the streets, I hustled and survived. I was held captive by a way of life. I look around now and face the reality that I am now held captive because of the way I went in life.
Despite all of the odds, I’ve grown up in these forsaken places. No longer on that dead-end road, I put these memories behind me. I have learned many lessons, most of them the hard way, and now I can just be.
