I was first in a gang when I lived in East Harlem. I joined the gang so I could go out with a guy. They weren’t allowed to date outside girls. It had to be girls who were in that particular gang. I was 12 or 13. They became my brothers and sisters. Most of us came from broken homes, or parents that had two jobs or alcohol and drug problems. But there were some of us who had everything a kid could have. So there wasn’t one particular reason.
From Spanish Harlem, we moved to the South Bronx. The Hunts Point area is the poorest place you can be. It doesn’t get any worse than that. That was when the Bronx was burning. When I stepped off the train, I saw all these abandoned buildings, and every night there were the sirens of the fire trucks, and people being displaced, crying, no place to go. You lived in one building, and the buildings to your left and right were abandoned, because they were gutted out by fires. It looked like an epidemic had destroyed the place. And the drugs? Forget about it—everywhere you went, every corner, the drugs were there. You could find it in the grocery store if you wanted it bad enough. People were sniffing glue, so the bodegas began to sell glue because it was so popular. Prostitution was everywhere too. The apartments were filled with rats and roaches, we had no heat or hot water half the time, pipes were falling down, ceilings were leaking. This was our life. Who was I supposed to hang out with? It wasn’t like the guy on the corner was a doctor, the one across the street was a lawyer. It was where I was going to end up, whether I wanted to or not.
When I was in Spanish Harlem, the guys in gangs wore silk jackets with their name on the front and the club name on the back. When I moved to the Bronx, I saw guys with long hair, cut sleeves, kneepads, and motorcycle boots. They didn’t look like they bathed. I was like, “What the hell is this?” Then, slowly but surely, I started to gravitate towards them. Once again, I wanted to go out with someone who was in that gang. My mentality wasn’t, “I have to join that gang.” It was, “I like the guy, the guy likes me.” Before you knew it, I married the president of the gang. I was with him for 24 years, so I was a real part of it. But here’s the thing: I was never a member of that gang. I never wore colors. But I lived in the streets with them. I lived in abandoned buildings with them. I left my mother’s house when I was 14. I’m 50 now, and I haven’t been back. My children’s father—we had five children together—he and I slept in abandoned cars and buildings, what we called clubhouses. After a while, I realized that they—not just them, other clubs too—were being paid by the landlords to burn the buildings for the insurance. So it was an epidemic, but an economic type of epidemic.
I remember my first encounter with a drive-by. I was maybe 16. We were sitting on the corner of Longwood, drinking beer, and this particular club came by and started shooting. The bullets were just whizzing by my ear. So I ran down the block, and there’s a restaurant there, still exists to this day, and I went into the restaurant because I knew the owner. I told him to open the garbage can, one of those big silver ones, and I went in there, and I told him to put everything on top of me and put the lid on. I stayed in there for what seemed like three hours, but it was probably 15 minutes.
I personally didn’t believe in jumping people. I never jumped anybody. But there were girls where I had to kick their ass. Sometimes after I got done kicking her ass, one of my girlfriends would come and, you know, kick her ass some more. It could be that she had sex with one of the girls’ guys, it could be that she was just wanting to have sex with one of the girls’ guys, or she could have just been from another club.
I also had to fight some of the guys in the club. They didn’t like me too much. I think that had a lot to do with the fact that I wasn’t a member. I never wore “Property of.” In the gang, the girls used to have to wear “Property of” on their jackets. I never believed in that, so I never did it. So I think a lot of it had to do with that. They thought I had control over their leader.
I carried guns for them if we had to go to a rumble or something because at the time the police wouldn’t check the girls. In fact, sometimes the girls would rumble with other clubs without the guys knowing. I remember a particular time when a group of us girls had a rumble with a gang called the Seven Immortals. We rumbled with their guys, and that started a war between the clubs.
We were coming down Freeman Street to the club, and they started calling us out. They said, “You’re not supposed to be on our block. You have to flip your colors.” They started getting nasty. And a lot of these girls from these clubs, let me tell you, a lot of them could have been better fighters than Ali’s daughter. I mean, these girls could fight. They had a lotta heart. And they wouldn’t flip colors. That means turn your jacket around or take it off. So the guys said, “If you don’t do it, we’re gonna strip you.” And that’s where the war began.
Stripping you means taking your jacket by force. And of course, you don’t let nobody take your colors. In fact, you don’t turn around for anybody either. If somebody says, “Oh, let me see your colors, turn around,” it’s not something you do. If you want to see somebody’s colors, you walk around the back and look at them. Colors are more respected than your whole family. It’s something you die for, like a flag. Today, that’s what the gangs call it—the Bloods, the Crips, all of them, they call it flagging: “I die for my flag.”
It was about territory. This is my hood. You don’t fly your colors in my hood unless you’re in one of my brother clubs. If you had war with somebody, then you could walk around their block wearing your colors, trying to be funny. You’d be saying, “I don’t give a shit who you are,” calling the club out.
Back then, I’d get up in the morning, 7:30 or so, go stand on the corner by the train station, and ask for quarters. I’d be there for a few hours. I could make up to $20. With that money I’d buy wine and cigarettes. Then I’d go into this one restaurant, talk to the guy I knew there, find out if there was any food from breakfast left—99 percent of the time there was—and he’d pack it up and give it to me. The guys in the restaurants were cool with us, and in return, we took care of them. We made sure nobody messed with them. But it wasn’t like they asked us to. It was the fact that they were so cool with us. We were like, “Nah, don’t fuck with them.”
So I’d go back to the club, feed myself, feed my man and whoever else was there. We’d drink wine—we’re talking now maybe one o’clock in the afternoon. We’d eat, drink wine, hang out, bullshit, discuss what we were going to do that day, whether we were going to go visit another club or if there was going to be some kind of party. That was a typical day.
You have every type of person in every club. It’s like a family, or the police department, or the priesthood. You have your murderers, your rapists, your thieves. You have it all. Who the hell knows what’s in your brain? If you’re in my club, I take you at face value.
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