Black Leaf: Through the Eyes of a Hustler’s Daughter: The Secrets I Held Within

By Noirceur Magnificent

BASED ON A TRUE STORY As I sat on the side of my mother hospital bed holding her hand, with a tight grip, I told her I loved her. “squeeze my hand if you hear me “I said’. At that moment I felt a soft gentle squeeze. I got up walked away and broke down. I was just a 14- year-old kid trying to be strong for my mother, When my father got the news, He didn’t think twice about spending the $500 he saved over the years from working in the jail house kitchen to see the woman he’d loved all his life . He walked down the long hospital hallway with handcuffs on his wrists and shackles on his feet, when he entered her room and saw her lying there, he became that 12-year-old boy all over again. As he sat there crying uncontrollably, she opens her eyes in disbelief smiled and said everything is going to be ok.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781483492445

Book preview

him.

CHAPTER 1

Guerrier never made it back home. It was a cold November night in Black Leaf, four days before Thanksgiving 2011, As Guerrier tried to stay warm in the old rundown house uptown. I returned with my mother that evening to care for him, as we did every day, after entering his home we started making our way upstairs, when we got to his room, we found him in his bed, naked and cold.

I yelled, Guerrier! Guerrier!

It’s freezing in here. Something is wrong, my mother said.

I called out to my son Dure, who was in the next room. How long had he been in here sleeping?

A few hours, Dure said.

What? Look at him, I said. He has spit-up all over him.

Call the nurse, my mother instructed me as she sat there holding Guerrier’s hand.

I quickly dialed the nurse’s number. Hello, this is Guerrier’s daughter Noirceur. Something is wrong with my dad. Can you please come over?

I’ll send the paramedics to see what’s wrong, the nurse replied.

Okay, please hurry.

Fifteen minutes later there was a loud knock at the door. Dure called out, It’s the paramedics.

Okay, send them up, I said.

One of the paramedics asked me, What’s the problem, ma’am?

My dad is acting incoherent, I said. He was fine when my mother and I left him last night. I don’t know what’s wrong with him.

The paramedic said to Guerrier, Sir, do you understand what I’m saying?

Guerrier just looked straight ahead but said nothing. The paramedic suggested that Guerrier should go with them to get checked out.

Guerrier, you have to go with them so they can help you, okay? I said.

He looked at me, as tears started to fall down his face.

Don’t cry, I said. It’s going to be okay, and we’ll be right here when you come home. I promise.

We’re going to try to lift you up, sir, said one of the two young female paramedics. Are you ready, sir?

He let out a yell. No! No-o-o-o!

My mother, Déesse, said in her calm voice, Guerrier, you have to go with them. Please let them help you.

The paramedic took him by his arms and tried to lift him.

"No! I’m not going!" he yelled as he pulled away from the paramedics.

The paramedics looked at us and one said, There’s nothing else we can do.

What you mean? I said, feeling angry and frustrated.

We can’t take him; he’s refusing to go, the paramedic said.

My father is scared. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s out of his mind. Yawl can’t just leave him like this. He will die in here.

Sorry, but we can’t risk getting hurt, the paramedic said, then they both started wrapping up their belongings.

I said, Yawl need to call someone else over here because he will not die in here!

The paramedic replied, Like I said, there’s nothing we can do.

I yelled at them. And I told you he will not die in this house! Move out of my way. We’ll get him down those fifteen flights of stairs. I turned to Dure and said, I’ll sit at the top of the stairs, and you take the bottom. We’re going to put Guerrier in the middle of us and then scoot ourselves down these steps.

Okay, Dure said.

I told my father in a stern voice that he must come with us. He tried to refuse to go down the steps, I told my son no stopping we must get him out of this house just take your time. With every bump in the steps, Guerrier screamed and hollered. We both told him, You can’t give up. We got you, as he struggled to get away. After twenty minutes, when we’d finally gotten him to the last two steps, he refused to move any farther.

Dure said, Mom, let me lift him over my shoulder.

You can’t lift him, I said. He weighs two hundred and something pounds, and he’s six foot two.

Mom, I got him, he said to me, and that’s when he picked his grandfather up and lifted him over his shoulder like it was nothing. All we could hear was Dure saying, Granddaddy, I got you.

The paramedics strapped Guerrier on a gurney and lifted him into the ambulance. Just before the doors closed, he looked at me, and although he said nothing, it was like he wanted to say, I know I’ll never see you again. I’ll always be in your heart, so always remember all the stories I told you. Never forget.

And as I looked into his eyes before they shut the door, my thoughts took me back to the beginning ….

Snakewood, North Carolina, 1952

Mama Magnificent stepped out of the 1920 worn-down country home on a cold winter’s day, holding her youngest son, Fantôme, as she called out to Guerrier, saying, Go fetch your sister and brother from the field.

Okay, he said as he played with the water pump. Three-year-old Guerrier ran toward the field, calling out to his big brother Sûr and his sister Premier né, Time for supper!

And as they walked back home, big brother Sûr yelled, The last one home is a rotten egg!

Guerrier ran full speed and was the first one home. All three were out of breath. They proceeded to wash their hands in a wash pan that Mama Magnificent had prepared. Then they gathered around the table. Their father, Perle, came home, tired and worn out from working all day at the steel mill, but no matter what, he always made it a priority to eat supper with his family.

After they finished supper, Mama Magnificent said to the kids, Be good for your dad. As she got ready for her side job at the bar. She gave her kids a kiss goodbye, and when she kissed Perle, she couldn’t have realized it would be many years later before she’d hear him call her Diamant again.

As Grandma Diamant was waiting tables at the crowded bar, thirty minutes into her shift, a crowd of white men entered the bar. They were loud and rowdy, and as she proceeded over to their table, they made racist remarks toward her. One man stood up as she was walking away. He grabbed her from behind and started to fondle her. As she tried to get away, the white man got angry and started to choke her. That’s when Diamant pointed a gun at him, point blank, and shot him. BANG!

CHAPTER 2

Five Years Later, 1957

Perle Magnificent moved Guerrier and his sister and brothers from Snakewood to Black Leaf so his other family members and friends could help with raising them. He also hoped there would be better opportunities for him to raise the kids alone if he made their home in Black Leaf. My great-grandmother was willing to help him raise the kids until her daughter returned home.

My great-grandmother was a beautiful Native American woman and somewhat of a mystery woman. They said she never got sick a day in her life, and she lived to the ripe old age of one hundred. As a young child, I often saw my great-grandmother sitting in her rocking chair, with her long, silky, wavy hair swinging- back- and- forth as she rocked.

Perle hoped that Diamant would be released from prison in a few months when she went in front of the parole board. The Magnificent were a large family, and the majority of them lived in Black Leaf. While Diamant served her time for killing a man, Perle tried his best to raise the kids on his own. He found a job as a brick mason, but no matter how much he tried to keep his kids off the streets, unfortunately young Guerrier and his oldest brother Sûr were fertile ground. They quickly learned the ins and outs of the streets.

As a young kid, Guerrier caught his first charge at the age of nine for stealing a watch from a store downtown. The court system sent young Guerrier to Hard Time Detention Center for six months.

While in the detention center, Guerrier was beaten by two correctional officers, which caused him to get fifty stitches in his nose. His father was outraged when he got the news, and he tried to get justice for his son, but with no education and no one to help him, it was impossible for him to do so. After the incident, it was hard for young Guerrier to trust anyone, so he started to act out by constantly getting in fights with the other kids and giving the staff a hard time.

Perle was at his wit’s end with worrying about Guerrier and trying to keep track of Sûr on the outside, who was a few years older than Guerrier. Sûr was on the path to becoming one of the best safecrackers in the Black Leaf area. As time passed, Perle knew he must stay focused on the two children who were still at home—his oldest child, Premier né, and his youngest boy, Fantôme, who was five years old at the time.

A few months passed, and Diamant was two weeks away from being released from prison after doing six years. While in prison, she was an honorable inmate. It was said that she never got into trouble and did what she was told to do. To a lot of the inmates, she became a mother figure. She protected them and encouraged the ladies by telling them that they still had a chance on the outside. Guerrier would be released from the detention center a week before his mother’s release date. Everyone hoped that Diamant would come home with a different mind-set; she was a no-nonsense woman with a short fuse.

People said she had a bad attitude because she was never acknowledged by her father, who was a white man, and his father was a slave owner. It was said that the reason she always carried a gun was because of her fear of the white man and the power they had in the 1940s.

In 1958 Diamant was released from prison and joined her family at the home in Black Leaf. She tried to pick up the pieces of the last six years that she’d missed with them. Guerrier was back home as well, and the kids were happy that everyone was under one roof, like their days in Snakewood.

One year after their mother’s return, it seemed to be hard for Diamant and Perle to get control of Guerrier and Sûr. While in the sixth grade, Guerrier dropped out of school and started to hang around the known drug dealers in the neighborhood.

Diamant and Perle knew how hard it would be for him with no education, so they did everything they could to make him go back to school, but Guerrier had a mind of his own, and their attempts failed. Guerrier was on a path to destruction on the mean streets of Black Leaf. The hustling mentality was instilled in him from the beginning. He had a family bloodline of murderers, hustlers, pimps, and con artists—a family that would do anything for money and respect. As the years passed, his mother and father had five more kids to add to the Magnificent bloodline. The family now included Guerrier’s sisters—Premier né, Sparkle, Love, and Cherish—and his brothers— Sûr, Fantôme, Argent, and Stix.

It was now the early 1960s. Kids went to house parties and spent time around each other as a tight-knit community—that was all they had back then. Blacks couldn’t travel to certain parts of the city. The city was segregated, as it was before Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights march. One hot summer day, when Guerrier and his brother Fantôme were walking to the store, they came across ten-year-old Déesse and her nine-year-old cousin Sugar, who lived not too far from the Magnificent brothers. Guerrier said it was love at first sight when he met the shy and soft-spoken Déesse.

As time passed, Déesse and Sugar would see Guerrier and Fantôme at neighborhood block parties, the Howard Theater which is one of the most talked about historic black theater in Black Leaf. If they had the ten soda tops, they had to collect to enter the radio station, they would see the brothers there every Saturday afternoon, as well at other outings around the city. Guerrier always had Fantôme with him; he said he had to protect him because he got picked on at school because of his light complexion and his blue eyes. Guerrier said kids would call him white boy, so even though Cut-Nose was no longer in school, he made sure he walked his brother back and forth to school, and he dared anyone to say something when he was around.

The girls would always sneak out their house to meet up with the Magnificent boys, as many girls did at that time to meet up with the little boys in the neighborhood. Déesse lived with her stepmother, Dame, and her father. Her stepmother was a very strict and out-spoken woman but also a loving person. Still, she was very different from Déesse’s father, Duke, who was a quiet man and someone who had a kind heart. Both only wanted the best for, Déesse. Her father had raised her on his own until she was five years old, and then he met his current wife. Déesse’s biological mother had died a few weeks after giving birth to her from a brain aneurysm that ruptured. Déesse’s cousin Sugar was like her sister, but she had it hard at her house, living with her mother and three brothers. Her mother was addicted to alcohol, and men would be in an out of their