Promise Boys

by Nick Brooks

The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.

I know a lotta dudes who weren’t killers until they killed. Young as fourteen, moe. You know, sometimes that shit just lurks in you until the right moment comes along.

I struggled all through elementary school. Not because I wasn’t smart. But nobody cared enough to teach me in a way I could learn. At the time, I didn’t even know there were different ways to learn.

stay up the rest of the night talking on the phone, falling asleep, listening to each other breathe. Anything to feel close.

Black men don’t get second chances,

As a Black man, you get no benefit of the doubt. You have to be on the right side of everything.

Still, even if he’s innocent, I think this’ll ruin him. I think it’ll traumatize him, and I think that’s the flaw of the system. Once it touches you, you tainted forever, guilty or not. Same thing happened to me.

A tweak here, a tweak there, and before you know it, I realized we were herding boys like cattle. They weren’t kids anymore, they were prisoners.

They’re children. Everyone seems to always forget that. No matter their size. No matter their skin color. No matter their attitude.

Hearing Coach say the team needs me is the best feeling in the world, especially because basketball’s the only thing I’m good at. I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody tell me they need me for anything.

when you put poor boys in a school, you can’t expect them to become something they’re not.

When you need money, when you need to survive, violence follows. The only difference between me and them boys at Promise is the uniform we wear. They have theirs and I have mine, but we all the same. Lions in a jungle, fighting to be king.

It used to bother me before, but now I’m used to people laughing at my dreams. Sharing your dreams with folks from the hood was always risky because most people don’t believe in the same possibilities I do.

I don’t think people know how terrifying it is to have a gun pointed at you. It’s even worse when it’s a cop because unlike a robbery or something, you know that the person in the uniform can do whatever they want and nobody will say anything. When that gun is pointed at you, it’s scarier because that gun isn’t bound by the same rules.

obvious doesn’t always mean visible. Sometimes what’s obvious takes a while to see—the

the truth isn’t always ready to be told.

Every day we send our children out into the world, they are inflicted with a thousand tiny cuts. And all the limpias in the world can’t clean it, because the wound is open.

Many people don’t realize that a lot of what it takes to be a lawyer is detective work. Asking the right questions to the right people at the right time.

girls are the ones who know everything. People act like it’s just because of gossip, which is bullshit. Everybody knows dudes are the biggest gossipers in the world so that’s not it.

Girls have to notice everything. Especially ones like me. It’s a survival mechanism. It’s how we keep our heads above water in a world that’s so incredibly dangerous for us. We notice everything, take stock of possible threats, and lock it all in our memory.

It’s a shame there’s no one here to protect us, only police us.

This is the part I hate, but also the part I love. When I walk into a room, and no one remembers my name. There’s a comfort in being nobody.

it doesn’t matter how low you fly—as long as you don’t hit the ground. Too high—too much of anything: smiling, frowning, sleeping, moving—and people start to notice.