Street Life in America-Part I

By Cariel Britt

Writers Digest Second Draft Professional Writers Review

"A very good idea and dramatic story and very well executed."

-- Joe Stollenwerk

* * *

Professional Press Publishers

"Remarkable story most readers find it interesting its remarkable story and quite gripping, almost riveting and its descriptions of urban life."

-- Amy Coelbert

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 22, 2005
• ISBN: 9781465329936

Book preview

STREET LIFE IN AMERICA

Part I

Cariel Britt

Copyright © 2005 by Cariel Britt.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

26510

Contents

Introduction

The Life of Britt

Dedicated

to my late beloved brother

Jessie Britt

26510-BRIT-layout.pdf

Introduction

I was born in Franklin, Virginia., in a wood frame country house back in the deep country woods on May 18, 1955. There was no doctor, but there was a midwife who signed my birth certificate. I was named Cariel Britt, to my mother’s disappointment—she wanted it to be a Carl Britt. I was the second-oldest male child. After my mother had given birth to four siblings, my father left the family from what I was told. He had a fight with my grandfather, his father, who was wealthy and a successful moonshine manufacturer who had bought a lot of land; he had the whole town in his back pocket. So my father and he fought over the business, and my father, who was his most trusted prodigal son, ran the business when my grandfather was in jail or too drunk chasing women.

My father left my mother and four children and one newborn for the big New York City where he had an aunt named Edith who lived in Harlem. About a year and a half had passed before my mother got a letter from my father for her to come to New York to reunite with him along with myself and four siblings.

I remember my first train ride getting off the station at Thirty-fourth Street Amtrak with my mother and my five siblings in the cold winter morning. The year was 1960. I don’t remember how or when we made connections with my father, but I remember all five of my siblings and Mother and Father cuddling up in I guess two beds joined together at the Anderson Hotel and the Fleetwood Hotel in Manhattan in New York City. Finally, my mother with the help of social services (welfare) was able to find an apartment in Brooklyn, New York.

It was in a community of historical events, which I found out many years later, that the area was called Brownsville and East New York, Brooklyn. There was the famous Murder Inc., Bugsy Segal Dutch Schultz gang. I lived around the corner from where these historical gangsters ran their operations. We moved on Grafton Street between Pitkin and Sutter avenues. It was unbeknownst to me that my parents were members of a chapter of a gang called the Frenchman. They were a wing or splinter gang of the largest adult gang in America called the Chaplains who was led by the then Tom Skinner who today is Reverend Skinner. In order for my father and my uncles who migrated from the South to enter the New York block, they had to join this adult gang.

So I and my siblings witnessed the gang wars and execution of a rival gang member, a Hispanic adult gang member called the Dragons. One incident I recall seeing my father and uncles running from Sutter Avenue to Grafton where we lived and the Frenchmen led by the leader Gypsy and gang members being chased into our three-story apartment building, throwing bottles, wailing long knives, and shooting homemade guns at the rival Dragon gang members. Finally, I witnessed the execution from my window of a member of the Dragons. He was caught somewhere on the block and dragged and beaten in a circle with a spare tire then stabbed twenty-four times by the Frenchmen.

These adult gang members had youth gang spin-offs and also unbeknownst to me, they too lived on the block and played in the circle where I and my siblings belonged. On one occasion, my sister and I were in the backyard playing like we used to back home in Virginia in the country (trees, dirt, and grass) and we didn’t know we were being stalked by these youth gang members. So we got ready to leave and the members approached us, five of them. Their leader Chuckie said they wanted to rape my sister Alice, and they started to walk toward us. I looked them straight in their eyes and said, You’ll have to kill me… And for whatever reason they smiled and let us walk back upstairs to the front of the building.

After two more siblings were born two years later, we moved out of the neighborhood to a nicer, more affluent neighborhood called Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was and still is today a multi-ethnic colored community.

So my family and I settled there for the next ten years, from 1962 to 1972, after which we moved to Berkley Place, between Sixth and Seventh avenues, where my youngest and last sibling was born—the last Jessie Fitzgerald Britt named after John Fitzgerald Kennedy—on November 3, 1963. We lived there for one year and moved around the corner. The neighborhood was nice and quiet. Our neighbors were white, Hispanic, and immigrants from the Caribbean, as well as black Americans from the South and inner ghetto cities.

We moved to an eight-family tenement on Seventh Avenue the year 1965. I was a quiet nine-year-old, shy, and a loner. I worked little domestic jobs after school or on weekends helping people with their groceries at the supermarkets, then at the neighborhood shoe repair store where they needed a shoeshine boy.

I was eleven by then and because I came from a family with eight children, money was very tight and I had to work by the sweat of my brow. The honest way hard hustle. There was an element in the neighborhood because of the affluent border that was around perimeters (very wealthy exclusive people). The young guys my age and older would go up there and watch these people coming to and from work and mug or rob (snatch their pocketbooks) them. A lot of these thugs I knew; I even went to school