Every Little Step: My Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

from the scene of the stabbing, across a courtyard. It was ridiculous that they carried him that far instead of leaving him there for the ambulance, but I guess they felt they had to do something. They couldn’t just let him die. When my brother and I kneeled over him, we could see that he was turning blue. Blood was everywhere. I started yelling for the ambulance. The high-pitched, terrifying cries of his mother filled the hallway as she watched her boy slip away. Jimmy died right there in our building, surrounded by family and friends. We watched the last breath leave hisbody, like he had made a decision that this would be his last day. The ambulance technicians arrived shortly after, but it was too late. Jimmy was gone.
    I was devastated, inconsolable. Thinking back on it, I was probably in shock. I had seen a couple of people get shot in OP by then, but that was the first time violence had struck somebody I knew, practically a member of my family. Most of us were still just little kids trying to have fun. We hadn’t made the transition to any type of killer mind-set, trying to end it for somebody. Hey, we were still watching fuckin’ cartoons. Yeah, most of us carried knives, cheap $10 blades that opened with a flick of the wrist, with “007” carved into the side, surely a reference to James Bond. But the knives were for our protection in a land of predators. We did not see them as tools for murder.
    After Jimmy died, I was in such a state of depression, I almost ceased functioning. I sat in the pouring rain on the curb outside our building for two days straight, barely moving, my tears mixing with the water flowing into the gutter. I stared down the block, thinking that Jimmy was going to turn the corner at any moment on his bike, headed toward me wearing a grin. I sobbed so long and hard that my chest hurt and my eyes could no longer summon tears. I didn’t even move to use the bathroom. I just held on to a pole on the street, clutching it like it had the power to bring Jimmy back. My mother sat down next to me to keep me company, to show that she understood and shared my grief; she neverforced me to come inside. When she wasn’t outside with me, she sat in the apartment window and watched me from above. To her credit, she let me mourn in my own twelve-year-old way.
    It seemed like Jimmy’s death led to a flood of young boys having their lives snuffed out—kids like Geno and Anthony, boys my age, way too young to be snatched away. There were too many fights, too much conflict, too much blood, with too many of us ignorantly deciding that our enemies were the kids on the other side of the projects, or in another project across town. The family of the kid who killed Jimmy had to leave Orchard Park after their apartment mysteriously caught on fire and was completely torched. I’m sure they were glad to go, fearful that the hostility we all felt for them would lead to one of them getting hurt or worse. The tension between blacks and Puerto Ricans in OP only intensified after Jimmy’s death.
    Jimmy’s getting killed was a catalyst for me. After I emerged from my deep funk, I vowed to myself that I had to get out of OP and out of Boston. It was the only way I could see myself surviving to my eighteenth birthday. And I knew exactly where to find my escape route—music.

CHAPTER 2
STARS ARE BORN: THE RISE OF NEW EDITION
    How did my friends and I form one of the most successful singing groups in R & B history? It still blows my mind how far we have come with this over these last thirty years. I mean, how many groups last in this brutal business even one decade, never mind three? We were just some nappy-headed little black boys from the projects. Making R & B history was the last thing on our minds.
    It all started with Michael Bivins, me and a dance troupe called Transitions. There were seven guys in the group, but the other guys were a lot older than me and Michael—we were only about nine at the time. Mike and I