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REAL
LIVES
Terence
As Terence Jackson grew up he watched his generation totter towards disaster...
They weren't like the earlier generations, who had dabbled in crime without
any great intent or success. The younger people were angrier, less respectful,
willing to take more risks and to organise themselves. They had grown
up without the solid certainties of life in Jamaica, rejected by the society
around them, feeling insulted and disrespected. Now they advertised their
hostility. They had had enough of being picked on in the street, so they
clustered together in street gangs...
Some of the street gangs became big businesses. They called themselves
"posses", run like a corporation.
Ever since he had been a child in Spanish Town, Terence had dreamed of
becoming a lawyer. He, clung like a baby at the breast to this vision,
but he could longer see how it was going to happen.
By the time he was sixteen, he had had enough of school.
He had escaped it in the only way he could, by going out to look for work.
He had found it first in a series of no-hope jobs, like his cousins. Terence
wasn't stupid. he knew that his ancestors had been compelled to do the
worst jobs and now, he knew, he was still doing the same thing. He was
in the bottom stream again, earning the least, looking forward to the
worst. He went in and out of the army, in and out of the Job Centre. But,
for some reason, he refused to follow his generation into crime...
Terence would always remember the riots. His whole life was hiding from
crime and craziness going on around him. Maybe he was just scared of getting
into trouble. Maybe it was because he still clung to the self-respect
that his cousins were losing. But he was stuck. He could dream all he
liked about becoming a lawyer. The reality was that he was living in a
ghetto, where he was far more likely to become a pimp...
He found the strength to take one step further away from
crime, to repair the damage that had been done to him by school. He signed
up to go to college to learn law.
Now he could see a future for himself. If he could become
a lawyer, he could live a decent life himself but, more than that, he
would have skills to bring home to his own community, just like an earlier
generation had hoped to take their skills home to Jamaica. This was the
time of Rastafarianism, and Terence could see how this faith was bringing
a new unity to his divided community. Instead of distrusting each other,
people were beginning to greet each other in the street, realising that
they had something which gave them a direction, which did not depend on
white people. Terence felt this was a turning point, not only for him
but for the whole community. He began to feel hope. Maybe, after twenty
years of being lost in this country, they were about to find themselves...
Pretty soon, crack started to spread through the ghetto like infection.
Terence saw it happening. By now, he was further and further down his
path out of this place. He had passed his exams, 0-levels and A-levels,
and he had found himself his first job, as a legal clerk in a criminal-law
firm in the city centre. He was a proud man. His dream was coming true.
He walked down the street with a spring in his step, believing that he
was beating the ghetto, dreaming of how one day he would use his power
and his skill to help this place. But all around him he could see the
community was stumbling into disaster, led by the scent of crack cocaine.
It was not so much that it filled people’s brains with pleasure for
a minute or two - though that was important - but the really big point
was that it became the most saleable commodity in the neighbourhood. An
entire economy grew up around it. This economy was a source of income
on a scale that income support and dead-end jobs on factory floors could
never match. Maybe even more important to a community like this, it was
a source of status and power...
All this happened to Terence at the same time as the black
posses started to fall apart. The police were beginning to get on top
of them.
The black community in the city had become frantic with crack. Terence
had already seen his father's generation turning inward. He had seen his
own generation drift into hostility and crime. Now, crack cocaine injected
a new chaos and a new ferocity into his community.
Somebody torched his car one night when it was parked outside a club,
and all the Jacksons reckoned it must have been the Birmingham crew trying
to hassle them...
Terence tried to shrug his worries off and concentrate on his work at
the law firm, but there was more trouble. His friend got busted with a
kilo of coke in London. The police tried to make out that Terence had
introduced him to a woman who had acted as the courier. Terence put his
faith in the system and told the police the truth: that he had sat in
his car outside this woman's house while Eric went in to talk to her.
When the case came to trial, the judge said Terence need not give evidence,
but he had barely talked his way out of that situation when trouble grabbed
for him again. And this time it caught him...
He was arrested and accused of a conspiracy to cause actual bodily harm.
He was sure this was just the police trying to get at the notorious Jacksons,
but all he could do was to put his faith in the system again and hope
for the best.
When his case came to the magistrates' court, it was thrown out. Terence
was just about to believe that the system had done its job again when
the police asked for a bill of indictment to send Terence and his two
sisters straight for trial. Terence was trapped. Worse than that, his
law firm said that they couldn't tolerate this any longer. Terence would
have to go. He lost his precious job. He lost everything he had worked
for.
He was unemployed and penniless. He couldn't even pay his phone bill.
He had put his faith in the system, and now he had nothing...
Sure, there were some black people who were making it - but not many.
Out of his whole class at school, there were maybe two or three who had
got decent jobs and managed to make a life for themselves. But mostly,
when Terence looked around him he saw young black men who were pimps and
dealers and users; he saw young black women trying to settle down and
finding no young black men who were capable of living stable lives; he
saw black youths who thought nothing of serving a "life" sentence
because they'd still be only thirty when they came out and, more important,
they would have respect; he saw the Yardies and the rude boys with money
and power, he saw the dealers and the gangsters; and he saw no hope at
all. Terence had tried and he had failed. In the ghetto, it was better
to be bad.
Nick
Davies
Dark Heart - The Shocking Truth About Hidden Britain
London: Vintage, 1998, pp. 209-234
Extracted with permission
Copyright Nick Davies, 1998
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