Daniel B. Summerhill’s essay, ““Tell Me When to Go” Had Just Dropped and I Was from Oakland” is the Rumpus Prize for Nonfiction First Place winner, chosen by judge Megan Stielstra, who writes, “I oversee a regional list at a university press and spend the majority of my time thinking about what it means to write a place. Scenic craft, sure; but moreso, the complexity of how our places made us, how they’re inside of us. We’re all from somewhere, for better or worse, and we’re shaped by these places and their people. “‘Tell Me When to Go’ Had Just Dropped and I Was from Oakland” nailed this complexity perfectly, asking the reader to see so much deeper than their own assumptions, and isn’t that what we need right now in this beautiful mess of a world? I loved it.”
‘Tell Me When to Go’ Had Just Dropped and I Was from Oakland
And I had dreadlocks in California’s high desert. And Victorville is a kind of town you wouldn’t know unless you ended up there somehow. And “somehow” is a curse to most people who I came to know there. Although it was incorporated in 1962, the legacy of theft goes much further back as Victorville was a major supply station during the mid-19th century when travelers would cross through present day Victorville headed towards San Bernardino. Eventually Route 66 was created and a large section of it runs through Victorville or the indigenous land of the Serrano and Vanyume peoples. It still always felt like a place no one was from, at least nobody but the natives. As in, every boy in my new high school was from some sub-section or neighborhood in Los Angeles. Namely Compton or Long Beach, which also had to be disaggregated because it was deadly to be from a block in the wrong direction, which meant Victorville was a field of landmines.
The name Victorville originated from the railroad manager Jacob Nash Victor. Perhaps this is insignificant information aside from providing another example of the legacy of naming things after white men who, on their way to nowhere, saw profit in someone else’s land and decided to stay a while.
By the time we moved there in 2007, Victorville was one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. Droves of people who could no longer afford to live in Los Angeles or places along the coast were flocking to the high desert. This would have been fine if the city had planned for such a population boom, but it didn’t. Half of the roads were still made of dirt. Half the streetlights still hung from strings and there was only one high school, Victor Valley High School, which was older than the city’s incorporation. It was the only place to be educated as an adolescent without traveling to nearby cities like Adelanto. Confronted by this boom and the overcrowding of Victor Valley High, the city decided to turn the newly built prison into a high school to catch the scores of kids moving to Victorville. Did you know all of this Ma? I remember telling you that my first day of school felt like sitting in a cell for eight hours.
At Silverado, there were gates everywhere and most of the classrooms had no windows. The corridors between the different sections were only buzzed open during the passing period, like prison. Each grade level was relegated to their gated section of the quad except me because I had dreadlocks, or at least that’s what it felt like. The truth is: I was a football player and I had dreacocks. They called me “Hyphy.” At parties, I played the part. I showcased dance moves only known by kids up north in the Bay Area. The “Oakland drop” most often, leading into a silky bounce. The finale was always me shaking my dreads to the thick baseline before disappearing into the crowd of buzzed teenagers, which was always ready to receive me if I danced well enough.
Being the boy with dreadlocks from Oakland who could dance well only kept me a float for so long. It only allowed me to escape the landmines of Southern California gang culture. I realized there was a world outside of Silverado High School who didn’t care how well I could dance or shake my head back and forth. They were interested in how well I could showcase a certain prescription of masculinity. They were interested in where I was from. Where my grandma and nem lived. Which part of LA I migrated from.
I’m sure there were other people with dreadlocks in Victorville, but I also very much looked like an “Oakland nigga,” Ma. I wore an oversized white t-shirt, blue jeans and Nikes and my locks messily lined my forehead. I looked like an Oakland nigga. Ma, you know what I mean.
Once, while walking to the gas station down the street from where we lived to get some Hot Cheetos, the same blue Nissan Sentra passed by twice. I had learned to pay attention to things like this from living back in Ghost Town, cars passing by more than once. Peering inside, I counted more heads than I knew seats in a Nissan Sentra to have. The second time they passed, they stopped just ahead of the direction I was headed.
Being from Oakland, one thing you understand early is that Oakland is in fact a country and that country is not necessarily in California. It might be, but that depends on who you ask. For most of us, Oakland was all we ever needed and for some of the homies, it is all they ever knew. Some of the best of us had never even been across the bridge to San Francisco. So when I yelled “East Oakland” to the question of where I was from, I wielded it as well as anyone would wield their subset or hood, like a shield made from pride.
A few blocks from Silverado High there was a field that I’d have to walk through to make it back home on days when you didn’t pick me up from school. This is the field where I would later fight the crip, but before the field was a boxing ring, it was where I smoked weed for the first time. Because I was a football player, the team allotted me immediate community when there would have otherwise been none in this new place of landmines. One night hanging out late after smoking weed, I remember J Allen, hanging out the window of his white Mustang slurring, “we’re going to find White Castle.” In inebriated moments like that, I felt warm and connected to something more endearing than my own shield of pride. The same way Ghost Town wrapped its arms around me, the football team did the same.
In particular, I rolled with a group of players that were known as Piru Bloods or at least affiliates, which in some ways made no difference back then. It didn’t matter that I had not been jumped in or initiated. Because I hung with Piru’s, that meant I was a Piru to anyone who was not.
Growing up in Oakland, I thought gangs were orchestrated through drug territory. Through turf or the areas people like Bones claimed for him and his. By the time I was half way through football preseason summer camp in Victorville, I understood gangs as a different thing. They seemed to seep their way into everything. Not just through color but through walk, behavior and even by adding or omitting letters so as to not kill off one’s own affiliation. The first time I saw the word “bool,” it was spray painted on the side of a lunch table near the sophomore quad. Since the only time a Piru or Blood used the letter “C” was when it was followed by a “K,” which stood for kill as in “Crip Killa,” I had to get up to speed quickly. I had to learn when to deploy a “B” instead of a “C” or when to omit the K in abbreviations such as Burger King or Brooklyn. It was a lexicon born out of Black ingenuity and Black angst. I soon learned how to codify my tongue in a way that allowed me to talk to my Piru teammates like I was one of them. Like I was from a particular group of blocks in LA. I suppose this is another word for interloping. A gang is all about who to include and who to not, no matter if the metric is drug territory or proximity to a particular park.
There is a neighborhood in the westside of Compton called Tragniew Park. It is named after a park that sits next to the Compton Regional Airport, which is also a part of the territory of the Tragniew Compton Crips. They share edges of their fief with other gangs, namely the Neighborhood Pirus. “Neighborhood Piru” is an umbrella for a few different sets, including the set my football teammate Danny Farber was known to be from: Original Block 151 Neighborhood Piru’s or more colloquially known as the “151’s.”
Most reduce what they know of LA gang culture to “blue” or “red,” which I suppose has something to do with it—the same way language symbolizes “us”or “them” or “me” or “you.” In America especially, the adversarial nature of the culture is the way we build and are built, through a particular deathly lexicon that signifies who’s good and who’s not. I know all of this now, but then, I understood much less about the slope of us vs them. I wanted to survive. The same way leaders of the Tragniew Crips and Neighborhood Pirus wanted to survive when they met in Watts in 1992 to sign a truce. Ma, you who walked LA streets as a teen are familiar with this, though through other lexicons—seeing a brother and then not perhaps. Hearing bullets ring out without warning. Sometimes another word for this type of disappearance is “murder” and survival breeds a particular kind of mercy I suppose.
Mercy be a God with a heavy heart and a short temper. Mercy be the fury silting through a clenched fist and falling on the face of the fallen—salting the job.
When I think of a park signifying something other than a child’s joy, I first think of Sobrante Park back in East Oakland. I don’t ever remember seeing the play structure at the entrance to Sobrante without a fifteen-foot green fence around it. It is a neighborhood bordered by train tracks, the San Leandro creek and a faulty city plan. One way in. One way out. As a boy, I remember driving past 105th Ave and Edes towards Alcalanes and seeing the yellow slide peeking through the plastic slats wondering if anyone had ever slid down it headfirst. Ma, have you? Or has the park been locked up your whole life too? I don’t mean to get sidetracked, but I imagine joy as a form of survival too.
Since James Baldwin said theory is suspect, I know the neighborhood was designed that way. A tight plot of land with poverty gripping the neck of its residents even tighter. The same way America held off on recognizing street gangs as an issue until blood was spilt outside of the hood in 1988 in Westwood Village, Oakland officials knew enclosing us that way was a type of genocide. There is even a legend that the government left a train full of guns wide open on the railroad tracks that ran behind 105th Avenue. As if someone said, here, kill yourselves.
I know some boys who have died. So the boys I know are survivors—
Tragniew Park is where world famous tennis champions Venus and Serena Williams trained with their dad before moving to Florida in ‘91. Tragniew Park is also where Arlon Watson, the person who would murder Danny Farber years later, is from.
Danny was said to be at least an affiliate or aspiring Neighborhood Piru or more specifically a “151.”
What I remember of Danny is cornrows and a peculiar scowl. A look of skepticism always. We both played running back on offense and cornerback on defense. At this point in my football career, I was better as a defender. I learned how to hit to avoid being hit when I was a boy in the Sacramento heat. Plus I couldn’t see because I hadn’t discovered my nearsightedness or astigmatism, so defense was a little easier. I played cornerback mostly, which meant I only needed to see the ball enough to know when it was time for my hit.
Danny was skilled on both sides of the ball. Though we were only sophomores, it was clear Danny would be a starter on next year’s varsity team. It seemed he too learned how to hit before being hit.
On one occasion after summer practice, a transfer student from Gardenia who was also talented and a foot taller, challenged Danny to ones. I’m still not sure either of them said a word to signal this fight but somehow both knew where to go and what was going to happen once they got there.
Because Silverado was built as a prison, there was no shortage of yards. This one was an empty yard near the practice fields with nothing but the cracked desert floor. The transfer kid and Danny marched in pride first, silently. The transfer kid was shirtless and ripped. Danny was wearing a white t-shirt before discarding it for skin and abs too. Some teammates, mostly the Pirus, filed in after Danny and the transfer kid and formed a loose circle around them. They began exchanging swings, every third landing audibly—the distinct sound of bone to damp flesh.
Each of them swung before the other could, ducked before the other person could swing. Hitting before they could be hit. Some hits to the chest, others to the temple or jaw. Both of them seemed unfazed by the blows. This went on until it didn’t and I swear neither of them said a word the whole time. Suddenly, they stopped abruptly and dapped each other up before grabbing their pads and heading to the locker room. No one even talked about the fight afterwards like they did back in the Bay, but somehow everyone knew it needed to happen. Like a tension that had to be relieved.
Danny’s smile was gentle in a way I wanted to understand. It was a smile that was wide and big and vulnerable, unlike the rest of his posture. He always wore a clean pair of Bape sneakers and an oversized cherry-red hoodie. There are some spirits that inhabit bodies so well little effort is needed, Danny had that kind of spirit. His body floated through the hallways like a demi-god.
The longer I hung out with the Polys, Pirus and Bloods, the more often I wore my red hoodie too. You told me to be careful everytime I put it on heading out the door for school.
Remember when I mentioned fighting the crip in the field? It was because of my red hoodie and my exaggerated plosive repetition of the word blood while walking with a group of girls after lunch. Yes. I was showing off. I was a boy from Oakland with dreadlocks just after My Ghetto Report Card had dropped after all. At Silverado there was a gang called B.U.G. and I am still unsure of what B.U.G stood for but I do know we used to make puns at practice about the possibilities. “Bitchass Ugly Gang.” “Bums Usually Gang.” That day walking to class, I guess I said “blood” one too many times and the B.U.G felt some kind of way because he charged me and told me to meet him on the other side of the portables. I knew better. I knew the portables were where the B.U.Gs hung out and I wasn’t interested in getting jumped. We shouted threats back and forth towards one another instead. Eventually, a school security guard grabbed him and took him to the office because he had a documented history of “getting into trouble,” and me being new to the school, did not.
After the altercation, I went to geometry class with Mr. Sulit who used to play just the audio of old Disney Movies. He had a peculiar fascination with the era of animated movies that used to come in the clamshell cases, like the library of them you used to store the cabinet for your grandkids to watch after I had grown out of them. Something child-like about Mr. Sulit inclined us to drop the “Mr” that was attached to other teachers’ names and just refer to him as “Sulit.” “Where you headed,” teammates would say after lunch. “Sulits’ childish ass,” I would respond. Unlike other more strict teachers, Mr. Sulit would let us finish our lunch in class as long as we showed up early enough to finish it towards the beginning of class. I never did. Hiding my Baked Hot Cheetos in my bulging pocket as I walked in a few minutes after the tardy bell had rung, he would make known my entrance by calling me Clausy Moto. “Clausy Moto, why are you tardy?” he’d say each time. As routine as this was, I never prepared a response, just b-lined towards my desk to begin the “warm up” work that we began each class with. I wasn’t the only person in the class that Mr. Sulit had unpleasant nicknames for, he had names for almost everyone, but only the boys were named after the unfavorable Disney characters. The girls were named after Jasmine from Aladdin or Pocahontas or Jane from Tarzan. I had the most insulting nicknames and I think it’s because I used to be popular and get attention from the girls Sulit seemed to have a proclivity towards. While we worked each day in class, he would play a cycle of films, which now makes some sense because Mr. Sulit was later arrested for child molestaton after having a relationship with a student. On the day after the B.U.G run in, I remember “Hakuna Matata,” playing on the Sony’ speakers above my head as I scribbled wrong answers on my math test, Hot Cheeto dust sifting across the paper.
The next day, another B.U.G member, in bold fashion, cut through football team-Blood-Piru territory on the quad b-lining towards me. “The homie was expelled,” he said through his teeth. He was referring to the same homie I had exchanged words with the day prior. I would later learn this was because he had been in a lot of fights throughout his years, even before I arrived at Silverado, but on this day none of that mattered. I was the reason the homie was gone and I had to “pay for that,” he said. In cliche fashion, he told me to meet him after school to which I rescinded “nah” because I had football practice and I was more afraid of Coach Jones than I was of any B.U.G member. J-Allen cut in and suggested that I just skip 7th period weight-lifting, which carried less of a consequence than skipping the regular football practice that took place after school and because I didn’t want to seem afraid in the eyes of my peers, I agreed.
In the movies and stories, when they use the after-school fight trope and show the anxiety weighing on the face of the person waiting to fight and they are fixated on the classroom clock and the clock is moving at a slower pace than usual, it is not an exaggeration. Time moved extra slow between 5th and 7th period, seemingly backwards at times.
By the time the bell rang, I had already walked out the door and changed into my practice shorts, heading for a field near campus. You already know of my battle wounds, the knot on my forehead circled by my red hoodie, so I will tell you about his face which I remember vividly as my hands struck it. The growing concentration of blood left on his pale face after each impact. His lip sliced open as it was smashed between my fist and his braces. I remember hitting him before he could hit me. Ducking as he swung. Swinging before he could duck. I remember the anger and fright in his eyes. I remember the orchestrated rage I returned to each time I launched a new fist. I remember hearing the sirens crescendo closer before we all scattered to the cars that circled the make-shift ring. We hopped back in J-Allen’s Mustang and in an instant I was sober for a few seconds, even feeling the discomfort of adrenaline leaving the scrapes on my face to fend for themselves. My teammates gloated and hyped up my victory before someone called one of them and said “they are not done” and that we should just switch spots and fight a second round. By the time we got to the next field, my adrenaline had gone completely bankrupt and I wasn’t even sure I still wanted to fight, but I did anyway. This time I convinced myself that since I was a football player, I could take him down the same way I did during tackles on the football field, which I was successful at, thrusting my shoulder into his stomach and driving his back into the desert floor.
In a fight, more so than hitting before getting hit, anticipation of your opponent’s next move is pinnacle. I don’t think I thought past the tackle or thought about the fact that he was at least a few inches taller and maybe forty pounds heavier than me.
When we were on the ground in the dirt between the weeds and the sneakers of spectators, he managed to wrestle his way on top and pin me before delivering several knees to my head. He did this until my teammates separated us. Until there was a knot on my forehead and his blood on my white T-shirt.
I remember Danny’s look of affirmation when I made it back in time for practice. I remember him patting me on the front of the helmet after each drill, right where the knot was. It throbbed but swelled with pride. I remember a different kind of comradery. I remember this was the first time I felt I had skin in the game or battle wounds to show for my affiliation with my Piru teammates.
I would never get to compete against Danny for the starting spot as running back or cornerback on the varsity team. The following summer, I moved back to Oakland and he moved back to Compton where he would later be murdered two weeks before he was set to graduate high school. He died in a Louisiana Fried Chicken after being shot by Tragniew Crip Arlon Watson.
Much of the court litigation in the trial of his murder was debate on whether or not Danny responded “what” or “this Neighborhood Piru” when Watson asked him “where he was from”—whether or not he deserved the hand he was dealt because he was from 151—or was an affiliate—or was born and raised on a Block that happened to be the land of the living—land of those who have survived if nothing else—even at the cost of others—or maybe in spite of someone else—which I imagine defines “survive.” However, lexicon changes, like we do, it molds to our needs. Like the way I dropped the C in lieu of a B in any word that began with one or the way I called my teammates “Uce” or “Blood” or the way they repeated, “it’s good” as they pulled me from the arms of the B.U.G. in that field that day.
I am not sure it mattered then or it matters now if you are an affiliate or a part of the gang. You may die in either case. You can become the boy remembered by his wide smile and courage. You can be survived by some boys who know some boys who have died.
