Free Midnight by Sister Souljah Page A

can’t get no money
. In two years’ time I counted twenty male teens dead. Twelve had actually lost their lives. The remaining eight were hauled off in police cars, heads pushed down by the palm of some questionable cop’s hand, cuffed and carted away for a long, long time. And this was only in my building. I didn’t count the dead from the other side of my block.
    It was crazy how they left the yellow tape on the walkway, tracing out the body of DeQuan’s dead little brother DeLeon, the asthmatic one. He got popped on the block at age fifteen. Somebody spray painted the outline of his corpse and drew a mural on the ground in his name that read: ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE.
    I looked down at it one day as I walked by and figured his brothers blamed him for not being gangster enough to stay alive.
    Another time, two teens had lost their lives throwing a party around our way in the tiny rec center. They was tryna make some money. One was an emcee. The other was his deejay. Now they just dead. They brought my building body count to twenty-two in two years. In four years the countexploded to forty-six. Getting money was usually the reason, or somebody jealous that somebody was getting money, or somebody stealing money. Or the cops shutting people down ’cause they don’t want nobody around here making money or just ’cause they felt like it.
    We made quiet money, Umma and me.
    It was strange to us how an American salary was so much more than a Sudanese salary, yet American workers remained poor. It was strange remembering how Umma’s employees back home earned so much less money but had so much more. Swiftly we realized that a salary here meant next to nothing. We needed to have a business of our own.
    Together we decided to build the business most familiar to Umma, modeled on the one she built and operated back home, but on a much smaller, start-up level. I had faith it would work. I knew that there are very few people who can do what Umma does the way she does it. Once people found out about her products, there would be a demand, I thought.
    Every day after work, Umma would be telling me her ideas for improving her workplace, including introducing new methods and products. She pointed out that the factory had more advanced machinery and a larger operating budget than she ever had back home, but they worked with a simple and lower-quality fabric and cranked out garments with limited, unexciting patterns and designs.
    On the flip side, Umma was an expert in textiles and designs, and could make everything beautiful. She knew all that a person could know about fabrics—cotton, linens, silk, wool, seersucker, jute, leather, suede; their grain, grade, and quality. She also knew about coloring, blends, and dyes. She was so nice with her fingers that she could stitch elegant patterns and pictures on brocades and do embroidery of intricate original designs on cloth, clothing, and upholstery. When she was bored she crocheted and knitted beautiful blankets,sweaters, scarves, gloves, hats, and clothing. All of our beds at home were draped in her work. She told me she began sewing and stitching at age five. She loved creating designs and clothing but said that her greatest accomplishment was a Sudanese carpet she made from an elaborate design she saw in her mind. It was the only carpet she had ever designed and woven in her lifetime.
    I recommended that instead of her trying to get me to translate her suggestions to management in an effort to move up in their company, she should keep her ideas to herself and we should start our own hustle on American soil.
    At first Umma was skeptical. To earn her factory pennies, she already worked long, hard hours, sometimes randomly being required to do double shifts. She knew the possibility existed of making money in a private business. Yet after she received the huge hospital bills for the birth of Naja, which she had to pay on her own, she really valued the limited health insurance we were now