Since Nine and the SSH [Send Your Ass to Sinai Hospital] crew got done in by the Somali Famili over in Liberty Heights doing that bad deal, the Park Heights Crew had come on up, now dominating the corner:

At age 14, Snickarius Webb had a badass golden hoody trimmed in black and two razors stole from his skank-ass sisters. He didn’t want to have nothing to do with no chump-ass drug dealing. Snickarius wanted reparations, plain and simple, recovered from any who had benefited from his sorry plight—which meant the whole world, so far as he saw it.

Jamalabad Johnson had his grandmamma’s rusty-ass .38 snub-nose she stole from a cop she used to date way back in the ancient-ass day. He had no bullets for it and it would not fire no way, but it would be good for a pistol-whipping and what’s a pistol-whipping without a pistol and what is more of a pistol than a revolver? He was in love with the idea of the revolver as the cowboy gun of the Old West, when black gunfighters ruled the white ranges and crackers hid in the mountains and fought Indians rather than fight the black gunfighters that won the West—and somehow had it all taken from them by whoever shut them back up in these crowded-ass places. At 13, Jamalabad looked up to his half-brother Snickarius in all things, and Snickarius said that Samjai was okay, so Jamalabad went along.

Samjai was so light-skinned he was damned near white, so made up for this color deficiency with a stronger sense of racial identification. If it had not been for the fact that all—whites and blacks included—agreed that black blood was so much stronger than white, that there was no such thing as a mixed-race person and that one drop of black made you all black, then Samjai might have been a conflicted person. But there was not a doubt among the hate-filled human family that black blood pumped more meaningfully through the bodily veins than cracker juice. He hated everything white, was beginning to identify as a Muslim based on his made-up name alone, and found it especially hurtful to both his Black and Muslim sides that the white race even had their own secret society, Jews, who lived just two miles or so out the way and needed to pay—for what remained unclear. But the fact that the people who ran the whole world from secret rooms lived two miles from where he suffered all the poverties of soul and body—in a world of their diabolical design—was too painfully ironic for him to process in any nonradical way.

The snow pattered wetly.

The splatting of distant tires sprayed sidewalks and curbs with slush.

The squeaking slap of their sneakered feet played tentatively on the snow-melting asphalt of the street.

Before the Liquor Mart sat Broke-Ass Rasheed, his Black Panther beret still in place, but his Nation of Islam vowl to abstain from drinking the Whiteman’s devil juice a tarnished memory, as he mourned the death of Nine and his crew at the hands of the Somali Famili, drinking a forty, tears streaking his wizened cheeks, snot streaking his grizzled beard. The three militant youth sought guidance to lend purpose to their impulse to strike out at the society that had stricken them numb in the cradle of neglect which had been their fatherless lives. In the tattered, besmirched and sorrowful figure of Broke-Ass Rasheed they saw a touchstone, some pool of memory that might glorify their unknown fathers and set their sons on the road to conquest—the path of positive redemption, placing them on the sacred verge of "stepping the fuck up," the dream of feral youth the world over among the like ruins of all dying civilizations.

He looked up, seeing them standing there in the slushy gutter, like three would-be wise men before a mechanical manger occupied by an agent of despair and nodded his ascent to their silent entreaty. As a city bus narrowly missed running them over in that drear hour before dusk, they stepped up onto the sidewalk and gathered into a three-point crescent around him to hear the first words of wisdom ever directed toward them by a man, “You dumbass hoppers need to mind the power of a bus to run your asses over. If you shoppin’ a lawsuit for yo mamma, you want to be hit by a two-door sedan, or better yet be on a bus that get hit. No never mind, this is your corner now, so it stands-to-reason you occupy this shit righteously instead of trifling in the gutter.”

To be continued in The Seven Shades of Rasheed.