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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
A Black Gang-Banger Tells Us About the People Who Believe They Deserve Reparations
A Black Gang-Banger Tells Us About the People Who Believe They Deserve Reparations
These are the people that white liberals swoon over. “The poor dears, they feel so bad about themselves that they just have to rape girls.”
It was the first day of summer vacation. I was fourteen years old and had just completed the eighth grade, marking the end of my junior high school days. I was sitting at home, watching TV, when the telephone rang. “Hello,” I said.
“Yo, Nate, this is Lep!”
“Yo, Lep, what’s up?”
“We got one. She phat as a motherfucka! Got nice titties, too! We at Turkey Buzzard’s crib. You better come on over and get in on it!”
“See you in a heartbeat.”
When I got to Turkey Buzzard’s place a few blocks away, Bimbo, Frog Dickie, Shane, Lep, Cooder, almost the whole crew, about twelve guys in all, were already there, grinning and joking like they had stolen something.
Actually, they had stolen something: They were holding a girl captive in one of the back bedrooms.
Turkey Buzzard’s parents were away at work. I learned that the girl was Vanessa, a black beauty whose family had recently moved into our neighborhood, less than two blocks from where I lived. She seemed like a nice girl. When I first noticed her walking to and from school, I had wanted to check her out. Now it was too late. She was about to have a train run on her [be gang-raped]. No way she could be somebody’s straight-up girl after going through a train.
Vanessa was thirteen years old and very naive. She thought she had gone to Turkey Buzzard’s crib just to talk with somebody she had a crush on. A bunch of the fellas hid in closets and under beds. When she stepped inside and sat down, they sprang from their hiding places and blocked the door so that she couldn’t leave.
When I got there, two or three dudes were in the back room, trying to persuade her to give it up. The others were pacing about in the living room, joking and arguing about the lineup, about who would go first.
That train [gang-rape] on Vanessa was definitely a turning point for most of us. We weren’t aware of what it symbolized at the time, but that train marked our real coming together as a gang. It certified us as a group of hanging partners who would do anything and everything together. It sealed our bond in the same way some other guys consummated their alliances by rumbling together in gang wars against downtown boys. In doing so, we served notice mostly to ourselves that we were a group of up-and-coming young cats with a distinct identity in a specific portion of Cavalier Manor that we intended to stake out as our own.
After that first train, we perfected the art of luring babes into those kinds of traps. We ran a train at my house when my parents were away. We ran many at Bimbo’s crib because both his parents worked. And we set up one at Lep’s place and even let his little brother get in on it. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. He probably didn’t even have a sex drive yet. He was just imitating what he saw us do, in the same way we copied older hoods we admired. Different groups of guys set up their own trains. Although everybody knew it could lead to trouble with the law, I think few guys thought of it as rape. It was viewed as a social thing among hanging partners, like passing a joint. The dude who set up the train got pats on the back. He was considered a real player whose rap game was strong.
I think most girls gave in when trains were sprung on them because they went into shock. They were so utterly unprepared for anything that wild that it freaked them out. By the time they realized that they’d been set up, they were stripped naked, lying on a bed or in the backseat of a car, with a crowd of crazed looking dudes hovering overhead.
I always wondered what went on inside girls’ heads when that was happening to them. Afterward, most girls were too ashamed and freaked out to tell. They knew that if they snitched to the cops, the thing would become public news and their name would be mud. But every now and then, some chick squealed, and somebody caught a charge. Then guys got their buddies to go to court and testify that the girl was a footloose ‘ho’ whom they each had boned.
Most girls seemed to lose something vital inside after they’d been trained. Their self-esteem dropped and they didn’t care about themselves anymore. That happened to a girl named Shirley, who was once trained by Scobe and so many other guys that she was hospitalized. After that, I guess she figured nobody wanted her as a straight-up girl. So Shirley let guys run trains on her all the time.
Taken from Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America by Nathan McCall (b. 1955), Professor of Afro-American Studies, Emory University.