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the wide mouth of the James River, where it empties into the Chesapeake Bay, is Norfolk and Virginia Beach, bridges and hotels and All-U-Can-Eat seafood buffets and T-shirt outlets and boat shows. To the east is Chesapeake Bay and then the rural, insect-infested Eastern Shore, that thin strip of land with its crab pots and peanut fields, farm equipment, fruit stands, and beautiful old homes. Beyond that, the dark Atlantic.
They are rebuilding Hampton nowadays, making it into a place for young professionals, with nice restaurants and beachfront properties going up where once only slums were (the slums have moved a few blocks and been condensed and are now more heavily patrolled by city police); nightclubs thrive; the parks are full of couples and families every weekend.
In 1983, however, when a young boy I will call S was murdered in our old neighborhood, Hampton was a place from which people wanted to move. It had been in steady economic and aesthetic decline since the early sixties. The buildings of downtown went unrented; they had cracked mortar and broken windows and some had begun to lean with their shadows toward the empty, trash-filled streets. The lower-middle-class suburban neighborhoods were racially mixed and volatile. The schools were among the worst in the state.
Here, just a few miles from where my father had attended high school and quit and attended again, just a few miles from our old house, my brother and his friends had a fort in the thick forest between the Briar Queen public pool and our old neighborhood. The fort sat deep in the guts of these woods, the same woods where I used to play after school when I was six and seven.
On the edge of the woods, half a mile from my brotherâs fort, there was a black man, a Vietnam vet, living on top of the junior high school, a man smelling of urine and feces and garbage, dressed in rags, a hat made of newspaper. His face was covered in fat, light brown scars like slugs. The neighborhood legend was that he had been a POW. He made toy birds out of leaves and pinecones. He spoke a kind of Southern urban gibberish, shouting from the roof to the kids below about the merits of calisthenics, the nutritional value of army rations.
From 1977 to 1983 my brother went regularly with friends to loiter around the junior high. They got drunk on bag-wrapped quarts of beer and stoned on ditch-weed joints, laughed, threw dirt clods, aiming for faces, for mouths and eyes. Sometimes they slugged it out with rival basketball teams, friend or foe, didnât matter who, just something to do. They either walked there from their fort or drove a guy named Clydeâs VW bug, all of them packed in like clowns in a clown car, pot smoke billowing out of windows, bass beats bouncing off houses and into the sky.
They had to jump a high fence to come and go at the school after hours. Graffiti covered the buildingâs bland concrete wallsâgang insignia (B-Section Boys), or terse commands (Suck Me). They shot hoops on the outside courtsâsteel nets stuck to bent rimsâand acted as obnoxious as bullies do anywhere.
For fun, for something to do, they called the old man on the roof a coon, a jigaboo, a spook, a spear-chucker. They said, nigga pleeze, said, yo, wipe that fuckin slug off yo face, nigga.
From the roof, the old man, covered in dirt from being recently hit with a dirt clod, told them again, this time with tears in his eyes, to do calisthenics or perish in physical disrepair.
It was here, on June 10, 1983, just a few hundred yards from Michael and his friendsâ fort, just down the road from the junior high and the homeless black veteran on the school roof, that S was murdered. I believe I would have all but forgotten the murder by now, wouldnât have to imagine and reimagine it, if it hadnât later become central to the story of my brother.
I picture a boring late afternoon in our old rundown neighborhood in our old rundown city, picture the small
They are rebuilding Hampton nowadays, making it into a place for young professionals, with nice restaurants and beachfront properties going up where once only slums were (the slums have moved a few blocks and been condensed and are now more heavily patrolled by city police); nightclubs thrive; the parks are full of couples and families every weekend.
In 1983, however, when a young boy I will call S was murdered in our old neighborhood, Hampton was a place from which people wanted to move. It had been in steady economic and aesthetic decline since the early sixties. The buildings of downtown went unrented; they had cracked mortar and broken windows and some had begun to lean with their shadows toward the empty, trash-filled streets. The lower-middle-class suburban neighborhoods were racially mixed and volatile. The schools were among the worst in the state.
Here, just a few miles from where my father had attended high school and quit and attended again, just a few miles from our old house, my brother and his friends had a fort in the thick forest between the Briar Queen public pool and our old neighborhood. The fort sat deep in the guts of these woods, the same woods where I used to play after school when I was six and seven.
On the edge of the woods, half a mile from my brotherâs fort, there was a black man, a Vietnam vet, living on top of the junior high school, a man smelling of urine and feces and garbage, dressed in rags, a hat made of newspaper. His face was covered in fat, light brown scars like slugs. The neighborhood legend was that he had been a POW. He made toy birds out of leaves and pinecones. He spoke a kind of Southern urban gibberish, shouting from the roof to the kids below about the merits of calisthenics, the nutritional value of army rations.
From 1977 to 1983 my brother went regularly with friends to loiter around the junior high. They got drunk on bag-wrapped quarts of beer and stoned on ditch-weed joints, laughed, threw dirt clods, aiming for faces, for mouths and eyes. Sometimes they slugged it out with rival basketball teams, friend or foe, didnât matter who, just something to do. They either walked there from their fort or drove a guy named Clydeâs VW bug, all of them packed in like clowns in a clown car, pot smoke billowing out of windows, bass beats bouncing off houses and into the sky.
They had to jump a high fence to come and go at the school after hours. Graffiti covered the buildingâs bland concrete wallsâgang insignia (B-Section Boys), or terse commands (Suck Me). They shot hoops on the outside courtsâsteel nets stuck to bent rimsâand acted as obnoxious as bullies do anywhere.
For fun, for something to do, they called the old man on the roof a coon, a jigaboo, a spook, a spear-chucker. They said, nigga pleeze, said, yo, wipe that fuckin slug off yo face, nigga.
From the roof, the old man, covered in dirt from being recently hit with a dirt clod, told them again, this time with tears in his eyes, to do calisthenics or perish in physical disrepair.
It was here, on June 10, 1983, just a few hundred yards from Michael and his friendsâ fort, just down the road from the junior high and the homeless black veteran on the school roof, that S was murdered. I believe I would have all but forgotten the murder by now, wouldnât have to imagine and reimagine it, if it hadnât later become central to the story of my brother.
I picture a boring late afternoon in our old rundown neighborhood in our old rundown city, picture the small
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