Day 12 - The Third Chapter - Khalil is Back

We will add another chapter to our novels. For the novel chapters that follow, I was initially going to write about boys in group homes who find themselves moving in and out of the juvenile justice system, but I decided to bring a different level of sensitivity to the gun violence occurring in Chicago. I introduce you to Khalil and his letters. I write short chapters to build and keep the momentum.

I believe violence is a symptom of a much larger problem that needs to be unearthed and addressed. I challenge each of you to use your pen to unearth something and strive for a better humanity for all. I know I am asking a great deal of you, but someone has to do the work.

Senior Brother Author Tatum

Khalil’s Letters

By

Alfred W. Tatum

Chapter 1



I wanted to reach out and grab the bullet the moment I heard the bang. Too late. I heard the screams. I am now running scared trying to convince myself that a killer is not supposed to have feelings. We are supposed to hate, hate everything. Right now, I hate myself. I killed someone else’s son, someone’s brother, and someone’s nephew. I killed somebody who looks like me. I killed myself twice.



I don’t want your sympathy. I think I deserve to die for what I did. The only thing I can offer in return is my own life, the ultimate and only fair penalty for taking someone’s life. All of my fourteen years have come to this point - wasted. I am writing this because I want you to understand me. I would rather be riding a bike or learning a new language. I would like to see different parts of the world like Central America or China. For some reason, I think Chinese kids are cool. They write with those funny symbols and eat with chopsticks.



Please no pity.



Do not start feeling sorry for me.



Just read the letters and try to understand me.



Chapter 2






Letter # 1 from Khalil Upchurch the 3rd



Science



April 13. 2007



Dear Reader,



i am not from a group home and I am not a crack baby. i have two parents who love me. They always bought me new clothes and my favorite gym shoes, New Balance. Everyone else love Nikes, but i love New Balance. i always kept them clean. i had a pair on the day i pulled the trigger. As the car i was in drove away, i glanced back and saw his face slam into the concrete. He did not try to catch himself or turn away. His body simply titled forward and picked up speed as it dropped. My body jerked as if i felt the thump of the ground. Bam!



i saw his picture on the Internet the next day. He was laying slumped over in a pool of blood, and a lady was screaming in the background. The boy’s name was Justin. He was thirteen, a year younger than me. It is something about a young person being dead that is not right. A kid will be placed in a cold, hard coffin because of me. I can only imagine how dark it is when the lid is sealed shut so close to someone’s face. They will bury him in a cemetery with a lot of old people. I hope they put him somewhere in the middle, not alone near the edge of a dark road.





Not too long ago, i was in class looking at a periodic table of elements. i could tell you about all of the earth’s precious metals. AU is the symbol on the periodic table used for gold. It has an atomic number of 79. Most of my friends only know that water is called H2O, but they do not know that it is made up of two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen giving it an atomic number of 3.



i started learning about the periodic table at a university science camp held during the summer. The university is only fifteen minutes away from my house. i killed somebody over the atomic number 79, a funky gold chain. Gold and iron clashed. The symbol for iron is FE and it has a chemical property of 26. Iron has a silver color, the color of the barrel of the gun.



My granddad, Khalil Upchurch, Sr., was born in 1953. He was a follower of the Black Panther Party that started in Oakland. He wanted to join the Panthers when he was sixteen, but my great grandmother would not let him. She was afraid he would become angry like my great granddad who was mistreated after returning from the army. He wanted to buy a house in a segregated neighborhood on the far south side, but he was denied because he was Black. He eventually moved to the west side where I was born born in 1993.



My daddy, Khalil Jr, was twenty when I was born. He started and coached in the Jackie Robinson youth baseball league. I started playing for him when I was nine. Before every game, he told us, “We will win this game with our hearts, but we will win in life with our heads.” Then he would say, “Let’s go get ‘em, Malcolm or Let’s go get them Marcus, or Let’s go get them Huey, or Let’s go get them Jackie. He learned about these people by reading the books my granddad had around the house.



My dad always had a book in his back pocket. He graduated from college after earning a science scholarship. He met my mother while in college. She also earned a college degree in science. They loved science. They brought me a book about Percy Julian, a well-known black chemist, for my tenth birthday. He won Chicagoan of the year in 1950. He received more than 2 million dollars for his work in the 1960s. The money, not my parents, convinced me to become a scientist.



My dad put me in the science camp each summer. He always told me that the real revolution is in the test tube. He drilled in me that I needed to know about science because the world cannot get along without it. Dad told me that science is in the food we eat, the air we breathe, and in the medicine used to save lives. He would say, "Everything is made up of chemical properties, and that my future lies in one of those properties." The mural on my wall, my shower curtain, and the curtains in my room were all periodic tables. By ten, i knew all of the elements. I could spell them and pronounce them. Some of my favorite properties are:


Potassium (K) chemical property 19


Hydrogen (H) chemical property 1


Aluminum (AL) chemical property 13


Iodine (I) chemical property 53


Lovium (L)






The elements have symbols that spell my name. L is not a symbol found on the periodic table so I made one up – lovium. I think love should be on the periodic table so I called my new element lovium. i knew more about the periodic table than my seventh-grade science teacher.






i am writing this letter with a small i. It is not a mistake. My dad always told me that i have to earn the right to write with a big I. He told me that there is power when a person earns the right to name himself. i am afraid that i will never be able to name myself. Others will name me. Murderer. Convict. Delinquent. Thug. Monster. None of these feels like they fit me. I am still my mother’s ‘baby boy’. That’s what she calls me.






i used to be called the science boy by the other students in my class because i won the school’s science fair every year since fourth grade. Last year, I won with a project on the human brain. My granddad started calling me brains after that.


He always described the brain as a maze with so many dark places to be uncovered. He also would tell grandma that cooking was like a maze because he did not want to do it. i like his chili though. He puts the largest tomatoes in what he calls his homemade-super-duper chili.






i wonder when i will be able to eat his chili again. i wonder if anyone will ever call me a teacher’s pet again. Murderer, convict, delinquent, thug, and monster do not seem to fit me. But, the law of physics tells us that for every action there is a reaction. That’s the left side of my brain working again.






i am getting scared now. i’ve heard stories about what happens to boys when they get locked up. The mistreatment. Their light is dimmed forever with no hope of being lit again. My dad always talked about the light of youth when we watched the news and a story about a young boy doing something he should not have been doing was talked about. He would tell me that it is not normal for young boys to be locked up.






i have an older cousin who is praised for doing time. He seems to have a special place reserved for him in the holiday conversations. I do not like it. How can i be so stupid to fall so low so fast? i know i am rambling, but i am scared. i can hear my uncle now, “Well you did the crime, do the time. Nothing you can do about it now.”






i wonder what the funeral was like. i wonder what they dressed him in. His family probably did not dress him in a suit and a tie because he was too young. i wonder if he wore a gold chain. i wonder what other people said about him at the funeral. How did the pastor explain God taking a life so young? I’ve only been to one funeral in my life. I know the family sits in the first row as people pass by to view the body. i wonder if his mother was crying or screaming. How can you describe the life of a thirteen-year-old in one of those funeral programs? I can only think of one way – Gone too soon. I can imagine a poem that someone may have written for Justin. I am using his name like I know him, but I do not.


Gone too Soon






Justin was a bright star that no longer shines


He made us laugh with his smile to be remembered for all times


He was our young prince with dreams to explore


We will miss you Justin forever more.





Chapter 3



Letter # 2 from Khalil Upchurch the 3rd

Different

April 14. 2007



Dear Reader,



My mother and father always wanted me to be different from those other boys. Every time they told me that I needed to be different I felt like should be ashamed on my skin color. I really did not pay too much attention to what they were saying when I was younger. But, their words started to bother me when I started middle school. It seemed like they were trying to cut me off from myself. How was learning science being different from those other boys? How was reading about the brain or the periodic table different from those other boys? I started hating feeling that I was somehow different because I was extremely smart. It seemed like they wanted me to be ashamed of being who I am and what I look like. They would not even allow me to wear braids in my hair because they did not understand why I wanted to look like all the other boys in school. They wanted me to be my own man. Dad always said, “we don’t need more stereotypes."



My teacher even made a comment about my being different. He said, “Khalil, you are different from a lot of the other boys in here.” What did he mean by different? Did he mean that I was better because I earned better grades? Does God judge us by grades? He told me that I should be very careful with the company I keep. I felt a sense of pride when I first heard his comments. Then, I thought about how young people are trained early in life to treat people different because of grades. Why can’t an A student hang out with a D student? Why can’t a student who lives with both parents hang with a student whose parents are in jail? Parents and teachers were putting these differences in my mind. Be different, Khalil. Be different. Be different from what?



I wrote about being different last semester when Mr. Carusso, the language arts teacher, gave us a writing assignment. He told us to write a two-page essay about an important moment in our lives. We could write about an event or experience that we thought would stay with us forever. He told us to keep it clean though. His important moment was the night his mother died when he was in the seventh grade. He was forced to become ‘a man’ at an early age. There was no one to pick him up from band practice after school and no one for him to rush home to talk about the good or bad things that happened. His dad left his mother when she was pregnant.



Mr. Carusso told us he started hating the world and hating God. Then, he met Dr. Barnett, a language arts teacher, who was a real writer. She just didn’t talk about nouns and pronouns in school and gave kids assignments, she actually wrote. She had three novels and a book of poetry published. Mr. Carusso told us how she encouraged kids to use words like steps on a ladder. “Each word should make you taller,” she said. He began to write his way out of the hate he was having. He told us he did this all the way through college, eventually deciding to become a language arts teacher.



I did not have an important moment at the time of the assignment, but I do now. I am now one of those other boys that my father was trying to keep me away from. I am now one of those other boys that my teacher was talking about when he told me to be careful about the company I keep. I am one of those other boys because I decided to become one of them because everyone told me to be different. I pulled the trigger, but society is the real murderer.



Now I have an important moment essay:



My important moment was being born in a society that judges young people who are just trying to find out who they are. This society separates us by race - our black students, our white students, the Latinos and the Asians. This society separates us by gender – boy’s line, girl’s line. It places us in different classrooms. You go to the top class so you can become great. You go to dummy class so that other people can laugh and be cruel to you. I was born in a society that tried to make me feel different because I am smart. I just wanted to be me. I stopped it all with one shot. I know this is not much of an essay, but I am still writing my story. Damn you society. Damn you.
 
 
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