The Book of Luke Read online

  Stanley was the real genius of all of us. In college, he was one of the top aerospace engineering students in the state. He became a fighter pilot and later a test pilot for the navy. Stanley’s real dream was to become an astronaut, and he blamed me when he got passed over for the program. “NASA don’t want no 2 Live Crew brother in space,” he said.

  Growing up with five boys in the house, I had to learn to fight. I’d get teased. I’d get beat. We had other cousins who lived down the street, and they were boys, too. We all had to be tough, but compared to me, all my brothers were angels. You could say I was the problem child. I always had a temper. Once I lost it, I was out of control.

  When I was four years old, Brannard played a trick on me. He traded me a toy of his for some candy I had. Once he finished the candy, he took the toy back. I told him to give me the toy, and he told me to kiss his ass. I went into the kitchen, took a cast-iron skillet from the cupboard, and walked up behind him and brought it down on his head. The neighbors used to say I had a demon in me, but Mamma told them I was just full of energy.

  At the time, Liberty City was a poor, working-class neighborhood, but it was still a neighborhood, a safe and stable community. Me and my brothers and my friends, we’d play games in the yard, go back and forth hanging out at each other’s houses, shoot fireworks at apartment buildings, and shit like that. Charles Hadley Park was the public park at the heart of the neighborhood, and we’d go there to swim, throw the football, just run around and do kid stuff.

  When I was five I went with the rest of my neighborhood friends to Orchard Villa Elementary. Five years earlier, it had been an all-white school. Now it was all black. Our whole world was black. Before Miami was founded, the beach was just the beach. Nobody owned it. Anyone could go there, swim, fish, whatever. But then they wanted to turn the town into a resort, and starting in 1900 blacks weren’t allowed on a single beach anywhere in Miami. To try and fix that, a black businessman named Dana Dorsey bought a huge chunk of Fisher Island, where Jeb Bush and Oprah and all these celebrities have houses today. Dorsey was going to try and build a private black resort, but he was forced out and lost the land. It was only in 1945 that the city designated Virginia Key beach as the colored beach. I remember my father would take us out to Virginia Key and me and my brothers would race to see who could swim the fastest. But I didn’t know the history of black-owned business in Overtown or what that wall was doing running down Twelfth Avenue. I didn’t know that when Charles Hadley Park was built in 1947, thirty-five black homeowners had been evicted to build what was supposed to be an all-white park. Then, as those white families retreated, the park turned black and the facilities were left to fall apart. I didn’t know that during the New Deal, when our grandparents were living in slums, the city was sitting on $5 million to build affordable housing for blacks, but the appropriation wasn’t being spent because there weren’t any neighborhoods that wanted blacks to move in.

  Like all black kids, it was only as I got older that I started to learn and understand more about race, about what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white. A lot of my education about race and the civil rights movement came from my uncle Ricky, God bless his soul. Between him and my dad, I learned all about the history of black Miami, all the racist games and things that happened. Uncle Ricky was very active in the civil rights movement. He was a painting contractor, one of the first black contractors in Miami to own his own business. I would spend my weekends at his house and my summers working for him, painting houses. He would talk to me about life, the things he went through, the things that I would go through. He would talk about politics, tell me stories about Malcolm X and the Black Panthers and H. Rap Brown.

  At Uncle Ricky’s house, he’d never let me watch cartoons. He’d make me sit down and watch the news. He’d say, “Turn the fucking cartoons off. Read the news. Watch the news. And when the news come on, pay attention to what you’re going to see: you’re going to see some black people doing some stupid shit, like robbing or killing. Then it’ll be the weather, then sports, then some national shit about who we’re going to war with. Then, at the end, the last thing they’ll show you are some white people shopping at the mall or skipping through tulips or something. Like, ‘Hey, look how great it is to be white!’ They’re not going to show you black people picking daisies in the field and talking about how great it is to be black. You’re never going to see that.”

  I’d be sitting there thinking, Whoa! And he was right. I’d pick up a newspaper, and all I’d see was “Blacks are bad! Bad! Bad!” These were the images that the media was putting out there. Uncle Ricky would say, “Look at that. The black man in the orange jumpsuit on the news? To them, that’s who you are.”

  He said I had to pay attention to what was going on around me. I had to learn about the world, because at some point they were going to come and put chains back on black men. He’d tell me that all the time. He’d say, “They gonna come for you with the chains. But they ain’t gonna be the regular chains no more. They’re gonna be the invisible chains, the ones you can’t see. You’re gonna be locked up and you’re not gonna know you’re locked up because you’re gonna be locked up in the mind.”

  I was blessed to come from a good family, to be raised by people who prepared me for how tough my life was going to be. From my uncle Ricky, I got knowledge and the consciousness to think critically about the world. From my mother, I learned to be compassionate and dedicated to my community, to always put out a plate for a hungry neighbor to share a hot meal. From my father, I learned to work hard and be responsible and proud of who I am.

  But pride can make you stubborn, and I was definitely that. I was young and cocky and I always held my head up high, and America has never been an easy place for a black man who doesn’t know how to apologize.

  MIAMI BEACH

  Football was my thing growing up. If you’re a young guy in Miami, you almost have to play. It’s a rite of passage. You have to play if you want people to think you’re any kind of real man. I was a football junkie, and it was all I wanted to do. It was how I was gonna make it big. Miami is a football town. It treats football the way the Russians and the Chinese treat gymnastics. It’s serious. South Florida produces more NCAA Division I recruits per capita than any other part of the country. Our high school games look like college games. A few years ago, a regular-season game between Northwestern and Jackson brought forty-six thousand people to the Orange Bowl. For a high school game. That’s how serious football is down here.

  I was a Miami University fan above all else, and followed them religiously. My brother took me to all the games. Back then, the team was so bad, they would give tickets away. Anyone could go to Burger King and get free tickets with the hamburgers. We would go to the game, sit up there, nobody in the stands, and we’d watch the team get slaughtered. They got tore up every year, but they were still my favorite team.

  I was a Dallas Cowboys fan. I used to dream about growing up to be Bob Lilly, who played defensive tackle for the Cowboys. I liked the fact that Tom Landry drafted Bob Hayes from Florida A&M to play for the Cowboys. Landry was like Bear Bryant. He’d recruit black players and he’d give them a fair shot on the field. He was the first pro coach who was out getting these guys from historically black colleges. I liked Landry for that. The Dolphins, I would watch the games and they would have Mercury Morris, the black guy, run the ball all the way down to the goal line. Then they would bring in Jim Kiick, the white guy, and he’d run it in for the touchdown and get all the glory and praise. Everybody around here would talk about how fucked up that was. So I was a Cowboys fan and didn’t like the Dolphins.

  I wanted to play organized football, even from elementary school, but we didn’t have that in Liberty City. Youth football started for real in Miami in the early 1970s. They had several Pop Warner little-league teams coming up, most of them sponsored by the Optimist Club or some other youth charity. All the teams were based out of different city parks, and the parks, like
all the public facilities, were segregated. The parks in the white neighborhoods, they all had teams. But the parks in Overtown and Liberty City—Gwen Cherry Park and Charles Hadley Park—they didn’t have facilities, didn’t have money for programs. The best we got in black neighborhoods was kids playing pickup games, sandlot ball. There was no Optimist Club, no Pop Warner, none of that. Not for the blacks. But the coaches at the white parks, they wanted to win. They saw all these talented kids living in these black neighborhoods with no programs. We were an untapped resource. Maybe they didn’t want us living over where they lived and joining their country clubs, but they wanted us to play ball. So they started recruiting us—recruiting kids out of elementary school to play football, that’s Miami right there.

  At Orchard Villa Elementary, in the fifth grade they gave us this Presidential Fitness Test. We were being recruited based on the results of this test. We had to run fast, jump high, do all kinds of wild stuff. I did that, and I was real good at it. Me and my friends, we were very athletic. The coaches from the youth football programs across the city, they were scouting all the top athletic kids out of Liberty City to go and play ball to make their programs better.

  All this was happening in the middle of the fight over school desegregation. My two oldest brothers, they’d gone to Northwestern, which was down the street from us, back when it was still segregated. Then the whole school-busing thing started. My third-older brother Stanley, the rocket scientist, he was in one of the first waves of black kids to go to school on Miami Beach. Then Brannard, and then me. I got bused over for the start of sixth grade at the same time I got recruited by the youth football team. They had it all set up that way. It was worked out so that the kids getting bused for the desegregation program were also the kids who were the most promising athletes. They’d bus kids from Liberty City and Overtown to Miami Beach schools to make sure we were available for football.

  I could have gone to school right down the street, but they wanted me on that bus. They pulled that thing up right on my street and made sure I got on it. Not that they had to pressure me much. I wanted to go. My parents supported it, too. Some kids didn’t like the idea of leaving Liberty City, but I wanted to do it. I knew it was my shot. The Liberty City schools, they had athletic programs, but they weren’t really good because they had no feeder system, no youth league to teach kids the fundamentals. When I played for Beach High, we used to beat the shit out of em. It was a joke. We beat em like they stole something. So when I was offered a chance to go to school on the Beach, I took it—I took it and I ran as fast as I could.

  For the first thirty years of Miami’s history, there was no black high school at all. Public education for blacks didn’t go past the eighth grade, because they didn’t want us to be educated. Not too many kids are taught in American history what actually went on, about where they came from, what they own, or what they should be proud of. They might hear a few things about Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks, but that’s about it. Black kids in Miami never learn the history of black Miami, because if they knew their own history they’d want their piece of Plymouth Rock.

  Back in the day, Bahamian families had to send their kids back to the Bahamas to live with relatives if they wanted them to go to high school. In 1927, they opened Booker T. Washington High. That was ours. That school was the heart of Overtown. It gave us our own place, our own institution, something that we controlled, that gave black Miami a sense of pride, of empowerment. But in many ways it was an illusion. It wasn’t real power. Because once Brown v. Board came along and they started trying to desegregate the city schools, we didn’t have any control over how it played out.

  The desegregation actually started at my elementary school, Orchard Villa, in Liberty City, which back then was all white. In the 1950s, after Brown v. Board, more black families like ours were moving into the area, and black parents sued to get their kids into Orchard Villa. The city fought it as long as they could, but eventually they lost and finally they announced that the school would integrate in the fall of 1960. By the time classes started, there were only a dozen white kids left. By Christmas it was all black. Pretty soon they were putting us on buses to go off chasing integration at some other white schools. The wealthy white neighborhoods, they were protected. They had the political clout to make sure their kids didn’t have to go anywhere. It was only the average, working- and middle-class whites who had to deal with us coming in. And the black community—once desegregation started, we didn’t have the clout to protect what was important to us.

  In 1967 they shut down Booker T. Washington High and turned it into a middle school. All its kids were being separated and bused across town. It had a devastating impact on the community. Right there it set off a lot of the hate and the mistrust. I didn’t understand it at the time, but my parents would talk about it and later I saw it as an adult. It started when they plowed Interstate 95 through the heart of black Miami, but then when they closed Booker T., that was the last straw. It was like, “What are y’all trying to do? Y’all fuckin the ’Town. Y’all just stuck a fuckin expressway through the middle of our neighborhood, and then you close up the number-one black high school?”

  There were a lot of people from Overtown who felt like they were displaced. Their pride was destroyed. It became really, really heated among blacks in Miami. Many angry black people were moving into the white areas of Liberty City, and they were mad because they didn’t want to be there. Just talking to my mom and dad, they’d say that’s when the hate and the venom really got worse, going both ways between blacks and whites. We initially felt all right as long as we had our little area: at least we had pride in having our own thing. Then they started taking shit away from us, and we didn’t feel like we were getting much in return. After everything they promised us with the civil rights movement, they were closing down our institutions but they weren’t really opening the door to their side of opportunity. All-white private schools were springing up everywhere. By 1969, we’d lost Booker T. Washington High, but 42 of the 217 public schools in Dade County were still all black. Whites were fighting us in court. White parents on Miami Beach sued to stop their kids from being bused out into black neighborhoods, but they didn’t fight us being bused over there.

  Miami Beach was nothing like what you see today, the boutique hotels and million-dollar condos and beautiful women on every corner. The glory days of Frank Sinatra and Count Basie playing the big hotels, those days were long gone. The big acts had gone to Las Vegas. In the late eighties Miami Vice happened and the gays came and they created a little industry. The place took off. Then Disney World opened, and that was the new thing for families going on vacation.

  If you watch Scarface, the scene in the beginning where the guy gets cut up with a chainsaw, that’s what the Beach looked like when I was going to school. Miami Beach was dead. Those old hotels on Ocean Drive were all falling apart, paint chipping, a bunch of old Jews sitting out on the porch in aluminum folding chairs. A lot of those hotels had gone bankrupt. They’d been carved up into efficiency units and SROs for these old folks on fixed incomes—a lot of retired Jews, immigrants, and refugees. They would just hang out on the sidewalk, didn’t have any air conditioning, nothing but a hot plate to cook on. Half the buildings down here were zoned for demolition. The art deco preservation, none of that had started. The whole place was run-down.

  Before I was bused to Miami Beach, I had no experience with white people. None. I don’t know if I’d ever even talked to a white person before I went over there. The doctor, maybe. That was it. But I was never worried, because my brothers were already over there. Stanley, being in the first group to integrate the school, it felt like he started changing, started acting more like he was white. We would pick at him. My old man had a problem with it. They would argue about that. A lot. I guess that was a phase he went through, being the first to go over there. Not me. I saw that and I never got caught up in it. I didn’t change at all. I was still the tough guy. I was the bad guy
. I was a really, really bad guy.

  Busing all these kids from different backgrounds into the same school was like starting a turf war. It was some territorial shit. It was wild. It was rough. My first day at school, it was literally an all-out brawl. Miami Beach police in the hallways. It was the Cubans and the blacks and everybody fighting each other. I was right there in the middle of it, and I had to fight. It wasn’t so much the white kids, because it wasn’t straight white folks over there. The white kids on Miami Beach, they were mostly Jewish. They were cool. They weren’t really as confrontational. We’d hang out. It was mostly blacks and Cubans doing the fighting. There were Cuban guys coming to school with chains like it was fucking prison.

  Race and desegregation and all that played out differently in Miami than anywhere else because of the Cuban thing. I got to the Beach right as that was happening. A lot of my classmates were named Gonzales and Almodovar. Fidel Castro took over in Cuba in ’59, and hundreds of thousands of Cubans started flooding into Miami. The government just waved them on in. The tension between the blacks and the Cubans at the school, it settled down after a couple years, but in the beginning it was bad. I was more likely to be friends with a Jewish kid than a Cuban.

  School was fine, but it wasn’t at all what I was focused on at the time. I was on the field. We played Pop Warner in Flamingo Park, which was like a second home to me. Every day after school I was at practice. Practice, practice, practice. Running drills in the heat, sweating my ass off. I’d be out there all afternoon and sometimes into the evening before catching the bus back to Liberty City. They had metro buses dropping us off. It wasn’t school buses. It was the city bus. Didn’t have no air conditioning. I’d never get home earlier than eleven o’clock at night. I didn’t really get to see my friends.