Night after night, week after week, voices tore the thick summer air and crashed through bedroom windows all along the block.
And then, together, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.”
Days, North Clifton is an easygoing street. Big, old trees line much of the block. Neighbors nod hello from their porches. They water their patch lawns and struggle to pick up the garbage left by Belmont Avenue barhoppers.
Yet the boys were winning control of the street. No one could stop them. They laughed off the police, several assault and battery reports, and their girlfriends’ mother. A man who took his complaints directly to the boys got a fist in his back and a brick sailed at his head.
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Chris and his buddies insisted the whole conflict was racially motivated. They are a gang of school friends, not a street gang. If 15 white boys were hanging out, the kids said, no one would mind. No one would be scared.
But Rona’s family is not the only black family on the block. The others resented the kids as much as the white families. They couldn’t sleep either. The noise tormented them just the same.
“What exactly do you want me to do?” asked the girls’ mom, Loretta, who is studying to be a medical assistant. “They’re not mine. I can’t be responsible for them. Don’t you lay it all on me. There’s nothing I can do.”
