And Ye Shall Know the Truth

By Shamese Bailey

Tammies life has always had a way of spiraling out of control. While she feels that everyone in her life has betrayed her she too lives with a secret that could destroy her family. She turns to the one person she thinks can help her. She soon finds herself on a merry-go-round of more lies, secrets and deceit. Tammie's decisions could forever change the course of her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503557772

Shamese Bailey

Shamese Bailey is a freelance writer and a poet who enjoys the challenges of creativity and attention to detail. Her professional career covers over 15 years of Military service and dedication to her country. She has earned a Bachelors in Business Adminstration and a Masters in Organizational Management. This is her first fiction book.

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Copyright © 2015 by Shamese Bailey.

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 is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 04/07/2015

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Contents

Chapter One White Picket Fence

Chapter Two Get On Down the Road

Chapter Three Sharon’s Curiosity

Chapter Four Back On Track

Chapter Five The Cookout

Chapter Six The Unknown

Chapter Seven Family Sticks Together

Chapter Eight Old Tactics Same Results

Chapter Nine Daddy’s Promise

Chapter Ten The Good Life

Chapter Eleven Granting Me Serenity

Chapter Twelve No News is Good News

Chapter Thirteen Ike and Tina

Chapter Fourteen Boys

Chapter Fifteen Advocate for Peace

Chapter Sixteen All about Ben

Chapter Seventeen Friend turned Foe

Chapter Eighteen Where’s the Justice

Chapter Nineteen Speak to me Heart

Chapter Twenty No Harm in Dancing

Chapter Twenty-One Show Off

Chapter Twenty-Two Count your Blessings

Chapter Twenty-Three Virtual Mishaps

Chapter Twenty-Four Saying Good-Bye

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to my three sons for loving me unconditionally and to my husband who, without knowing has helped to set me free.

CHAPTER ONE

White Picket Fence

Suddenly red and blue lights lit up the streets. Sirens screamed throughout the neighborhood. About thirty men, dressed in black wearing helmets and bulletproof vests to cover their heads and chests had their weapons in hand and aimed directly at the last house on Tamarind Ave. Lights flickered inside the house. Silhouettes raced across the windows. The sound of gun fire echoed from room to room as a woman yelled for her children to get down. The cries of little children sent chills through the hearts of the innocent bystander watching from behind the police barricade.

My name is Tamala Ja’nay Moore but my friends and family simply call me Tammie. I live in West Palm Beach, Florida with my mom, my oldest sister, Sharon, and my youngest sister, Roxie. We don’t have a steady father figure in our house but we feel protected with our pitbull Sheba. My mom has been in and out of a relationship with Roxie’s dad, Clarence. They are together when he’s not in jail. Each time he come out he would promise to stay out for good but of course he would end up right back in jail and therefore my mother would be single again. My mother always believed that he would someday get his self together so they could set a better example for us.

My sisters and I all have different dads who were hardly around so my mom raises us on her own refusing to force a man to accept responsibilities for what he had help to create. I’ve never seen Sharon’s dad. I’m not even sure if she remembers him since she haven’t seen him since she was my age. I knew exactly who my dad was. I couldn’t help but know him being that he occasionally come around to disrupt the life that my mother and Roxie’s dad were trying to build. He would always claim that he had to have her back. He would often tell my mother I still love you and I’m going to get you back, even if it’s the last thing I do.

I am six years old, my sister Sharon is nine but acts like she’s eighteen, and Roxie just turned one. Sharon and I are best friends. Considering that my mother makes Sharon take me everywhere she goes we are a lot closer to each other than we are with anyone else. We share the same friends in the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is peaceful in my eyes because it is home and everyone knew everyone. There are no white picket fences on my block but no one seems to notice. You don’t see people washing cars in the driveway, watering the lawn, or planting flowers in competition with their next-door neighbors. We share a duplex apartment building with the family downstairs and everyone else in the neighborhood did the same in their buildings. In my neighborhood it was understood that you played with the kids who lived on your block and you never left your block without severe consequences.

There were two reasons you never left your block. One was because you had to be within earshot of your mother’s call when it was time to be in the house and two you simply wasn’t welcomed on anyone else’s block if you didn’t live on that block. On my block the kids played in the streets, jumped rope, and held on to passing cars with skates on their feet just to see who could be swung the furthest when they let go. Other than the neighborhood kids playing on the block we would also see the neighborhood hustlers standing on the corner stopping several cars as they entered the block. Someone would always run up to the driver’s side, exchanged a few words, and then walk away. A different person would approach the passenger side, reach inside the window, then he too would walk away. His face usually stayed covered with a hood. Whenever strange cars entered our neighborhood the people on the block would yell One Time or Five O as they quickly cleared the streets. I watch this happen constantly, sometimes five and six times a day but for me this was a typical day in the neighborhood.

One of my first experiences with life being turned upside down was when Rodney decided that he would steal drugs from the neighborhood drug dealers. Rodney lived downstairs from us. He was a twelve year old wannabe drug dealer who always boasted about coming up in the world and making easy money. Making money was hard for Rodney because he usually got high off the drugs he was supposed to be selling. As Rodney started using more and more drugs his behavior became more and more erratic and his decisions soon became the neighborhood’s worst nightmare.

One day Rodney wanted to show off a cigar box filled with rolls of money, small bags of marijuana, thin white papers, and a pair of tweezers with three feathers attached to it. He brought the cigar box to the duplex basement where he poured one of the small bags of marijuana into a thin white paper and rolled it up into what looked like a twisted cigarette without the filter. The neighborhood kids were asking where he got the box from when got angry and started threatening everyone, telling them to stop asking him questions before he kicked their ass. Rodney convinced the neighborhood kids to gather in the duplex basement make a circle and proceeded to pass the marijuana cigarette until everyone had taken a puff. After the marijuana made its way back to Rodney, he said that if anyone told they would get in trouble too for smoking the marijuana with him. I witness the entire ritual but since I was so young Rodney didn’t make me take a puff. I just sat on the steps holding my nose as he passed the marijuana to his right to begin another round of puffing. I didn’t want to inhale the smoke because I thought I would become a drug addict if I did. As we walked out I turned to see him putt the cigar box into a small hole in the wall behind the hot water heater.

A few days later my mother seemed very nervous as well as the other adults in the neighborhood.

Kang and his brother Manny were scrounging the neighborhood making threats that they were going to kill whoever stole their shit. Kang and his brother Manny were the neighborhood drug dealers who sold drugs on the corner not far from where we played. Kang was the older of the two but Manny seemed to be the brains of the operation. Usually when they made threats no one paid them any attention because they weren’t known to be killers or even a major threat; just neighborhood hustlers.

My mom sent Sharon and I to the corner store for jungle juice and chips so we would have snacks to take to the babysitters’ house since she was due to be at work shortly. My mother had already dropped Roxie off to the babysitter and we had a few more hours of daylight before we were due to be at the babysitter’s house as well. When we returned from the store we noticed our door had been kicked off the hinges and was lying on the floor. My heart sank into my stomach as I dropped the brown paper bag containing our snacks for the evening. I thought my dad, Carl, has gone too far this time. He had been known to make a grand entrance whenever he came around but not like this. We hurried up the stairs only to see Kang holding a shotgun leading my mom and our neighbors Ms. Brenda, Ms. Donna, and Ms. Karen out the back door and down the stairs towards the duplex basement. My mom yelled for us to run but before we could move a muscle. Manny stepped behind us and blocked the exit. My image of Kang and Manny being small time hustles had immediately changed. They were killers and I could see it in their heartless eyes.

Once we got to the basement the women started pleading. It wasn’t me! I don’t have it! I don’t know who took it! Manny turned his chrome FNX 9mm pistol on us and told my mother he would shoot us in front of her if she didn’t tell them where his shit was. My mother pleaded like the rest of the women and begged for them to let her children go. As I sat in the corner on the cold wet basement floor it had all become clear. Rodney had stolen Kang and Manny’s stuff! Instantly, I wanted to yell, "Rodney stole your stuff!" But how could I be sure that was the same stuff that Kang and Manny were talking about? After all they hadn’t said anything about a cigar box and they hadn’t mentioned any drugs. But they did say several times, somebody better have our money. Even though I wanted to speak out fear silenced my voice.

Manny ordered Kang, tie these bitches up. He tied their hands behind their backs and then tied their feet together. He sat them on an old dirty black leather sofa that had been in the basement for years and then covered their faces with pillowcases as if the women didn’t know who they were. Together Sharon and I sat on the floor next to my mother’s feet holding hands too afraid to let go as Kang continued to make threats in order to get my mother to talk. Before we knew it, Manny started pouring water on their faces while they were still covered making it hard for them to breath. They continued to ask, Where is our shit? The women continued to cry, plead, and beg for Kang and Manny to let them go because they didn’t know where their money was. Manny went to my mom and hit her across the face with the butt of his pistol. Sharon tried to jump up to protect my mother but Kang slapped her back down to the floor. All I did was cry as I tried to help Sharon get up. My mother started screaming through the pillowcase as she tried to get out of her ropes. I could see that the pillowcase had started soaking up the blood that was spilling from her face.

I wanted to tell them about the box that Rodney had put in the wall but I had already taken notice that it was no longer there. I wanted to tell them that Rodney may have stolen their stuff but I was so afraid I still couldn’t speak. We must have been down there in that basement for a few hours. Kang was starting to get anxious as he tried to convince Manny that he was getting a bad feeling about the whole thing. He started saying that they should release them because he didn’t think they had their money. Kang knew he had to make a decision so he started threatening the women that if he released them he would kill all of them if they told anyone or called the police. Just as Kang was asking them if they understood, Roxie’s dad, Clarence, came busting through the doors startled by what he was seeing. Kang turned his shotgun towards Clarence as Clarence lunged towards him. Behind Roxie’s dad was his friend John who tackled Manny to the ground. Clarence, John, Kang, and Manny all fought and struggled for the guns while the women screamed and cried out for help. Sharon and I jumped up and removed the pillowcase from my mother’s head and untied her hand hoping to get her free before the struggle got worst.

As we finally got my mother free a gunshot went off! We stood frozen in the moment as silence became the loudest noise heard, echoing off the walls of the basement. When we gained the feeling back in our bodies we looked around to see John laying in a pool of blood and Kang and Manny running from the basement. We all screamed and started to panic. Clarence yelled for us to calm down and told my mother to go call the police. She was too afraid to leave the basement knowing that Kang and Manny could still be out there. Ms. Brenda, Ms. Donna, and Ms. Karen, in unison, screamed for my mother to untie them. She rushed to untie them while Clarence tried to keep John from bleeding to death.

Suddenly red and blue lights lit up the streets. Sirens screamed throughout the neighborhood. About thirty men, dressed in black wearing helmets and bulletproof vest to cover their heads and chests, had their weapons in hand and aimed directly at the last house on Tamarind Ave. Lights flickered inside the house. Silhouettes raced across the windows.

Kang and Manny had left the basement but were trapped in the duplex, surrounded by the police. One of the neighbors had witness Manny and Kang kick down the door and enter the duplex and had called the cops. From the basement we could hear the police say, Give yourself up, we have you surrounded. Then the sounds of gun fire echoed from the duplex apartment building. My mother yelled for us to down. We crouched down in a corner of the basement holding each other as my mother blanketed herself around us for protection. Kang and Manny exchanged gunfire with the police for what seemed like a lifetime. Then there was almost complete silence. We could hear footsteps descending