Death Around Da Corner by Demetrius Buckley
Demetrius Buckley’s “Death Around Da Corner” is one of two pieces selected as an editors’ choice for the 2024 Memoir Excerpt and Essay Contest. This year our editors were drawn to work that powerfully addresses social injustice and the search for meaning in troubled times.
In his haunting essay, “Death Around Da Corner,” Demetrius Buckley transports his audience to the east side of Detroit in the late 1990s; his canvas is painted with young characters who, like him, experience violence and death as a matter of ordinary life. He writes, “We were in a revolt of death and insects, how they both kept their names buzzing around the world and plaguing our neighborhood through the dark streets.” The essay is shaped by the dialogue between this group of friends; their particular vernacular and thought processes are crafted by the confluence of geography, race, identity, and pop culture. Buckley includes so many nuanced and complicated layers to the dialogue, but particularly, the casual nature and specific vernacular deepen the resonance. The reader is painfully aware that these characters are children. Children who have witnessed a great deal of life’s harsh realities, but still very young.
In his craft essay “Vernacular Currency,” Roberto Carlos Garcia writes, “I strive to capture not just the way people talk in general, but specifically how my people talk.” Demetrius Buckley is a reliable narrator because he reproduces dialogue as he heard it, and often chooses not to step back to consider the speech’s implications. He is the survivor of a world and a culture that claimed so many victims, but his essay preserves their existence. As Garcia notes, quoting the poet Willie Perdomo, “The more specific the language, the more liberated the speaker.” —CRAFT
Pac got shot up in ’96, this time on a famous strip in Las Vegas. In three days he’d rise again like Jesus, a Lazarus in the Bible, outside of his hometown claiming victory over Hades. He’d be back in a wheelchair throwing up middle fingers and screaming fuck the world as he did the first time he got shot up. Tupac Shakur, a college student, was our myth we’d tell our kids in the future, our Zeus in the Olympus we called the east side of Detroit.
Outside, on my grandma’s porch, the low hum of mosquitoes swarming us, a radio station was cranked high on 97.7 three houses over, an hour past streetlight curfew, announcing the famous rapper was admitted to a hospital.
“Nobody supposed to survive six gunshots. Nobody!” Fab said.
I was standing next to him, dropping in length. Terrell, my best friend, sat on Grandma’s porch too, holding his head deep in his hands. We were in a revolt of death and insects, how they both kept their names buzzing around the world and plaguing our neighborhood through the dark streets.
“I know somebody who got shot twelve times and he still alive,” Terrell said. I waved his comment off and he took to his feet with a bounce. “I’m serious!”
“Yeah right,” I said. “He ain’t real then—can’t be.”
“That’s what happens when doing bad stuff like that,” Fab claimed. “Joining gangs and stuff. You’d be rolling around here in a wheelchair or walking around like Retarded Ricky.”
Ricky had been some older kid we knew around the way but we never knew the real story about him getting shot in the head. He’d appeared one day with a sunken chunk at the top of his dome, where his brain and skull used to be.
We droned all night about murders and the untimely deaths going on in our neighborhood as we swatted at mosquitoes. It had been toiling our thinking—the concept of no one ever returning. If death was a person, where would “it” be if it came for us?
Fab didn’t like that I’d joined some clique starting up on Anglin Street, so he took every possible shot at me about death waiting on some corner. It wasn’t like we weren’t cool. I was just looking for a different kind of clickin’, a “My Ambitionz” of a fighter in a neighborhood that buzzed with subtle demises—keeping me inside Grandma’s house, and Fab’s warnings, I knew would’ve worsened that ambition to prepare me for what had to come next.
When I got caught smoking weed on some corner, I found myself spending more time on the west side, at my grandfather’s house. No one asked me why I had done it, wanted to do it, or if I had a reason for it. I would have told them that the world was a place I couldn’t be in alone, that the people who stood on those corners knew something I didn’t know, and passing a blunt had connected us in a world that had enlarged before my eyes. I kept to myself a lot—until Starisha called.
Starisha, she was it. She was the thirteen-year-old girl with the biggest bangs in my middle school, the girl in the basement when I was getting beat in or beat down or beat on to claim a street’s name. Welcome to the crew. Before summer was over, I’d fought over thirty boys, some in groups, some one-on-ones, and had a bounce to my step. Death was around every corner like that Tupac song, cuz a skinny niggah dies, said 2Pac.
Starisha smoked long cigarettes, got thick all around, messed with boys three times her age, and believed she could heal others if they dreamt of her.
Her hair pulled tight into a ponytail, gel-edged sideburns, a tracksuit sometimes, and black high-top Filas, she walked by me and I commented on her beauty with that same bounce.
She’d return in a whisper, “I still love you, Demetrius.” And I fluttered inside like a beating wing against my torso.
She was a place undiscovered; I wasn’t allowed to go to it because her brother was Big D, one of the OGs in the neighborhood. I’d get beat up for doing stuff like that. After summer, Starisha was sent away to a relative’s house and the people missing started to reveal their departure.
Some other kids found a dead body in an abandoned house, naked with one bullet hole in the head. Dirt clogged under the nails, soil dragged down by the knees.
A few days later somebody killed a guy named Kenny at Pershing High School. Terrell and I, at my grandma’s house, read it in the newspaper, next to the obituaries and crossword puzzles and Marmaduke off into bullshit.
Terrell spread the newspaper out on the kitchen floor. In a lower left corner, a picture of Kenny kneeling in his football uniform; under the frame it said that he was shot four times in his back, in his Jeep, reaching for a gun he didn’t have. All black letters. I felt the tip of my fingers go numb. Terrell looked confused as much as I did when thinking of people never coming back. Where were they going again?
“I don’t want to go to a funeral,” I said.
“Why?”
“Cuz I ain’t never been to one before.”
We sat back on the squared floor, back against the cabinet with the newspaper open, trying to keep Kenny alive as long as possible. People I knew were vanishing off into a place unvisited, somewhere no one could come back from. I couldn’t understand death and why it had to always be messing around some corner.
People disappear in a blink and never come back; life could be either more or no more. Like being Sonic the Hedgehog before he dies, or when Sonic restarts, or when he gets the rings knocked out of him: he blinks, imitates a beating hummingbird’s wing until solidified, with the blue color in his mane full and tough.
The next day I went around the corner to talk to Big D about Kenny. Maybe he’d explain where they all went, how they vanished off to somewhere no one wants to go.
Big D wasn’t there but it rained that day—all day—and I could smell the musk down in the dirt, in the fall equinox cooling from the drizzles before the soaking of it all; before the puddles formed on sidewalks and on some slanted edge of a shattered street.
Starisha stood in the door wearing pink shorts and what looked like a RIP shirt of Kenny plastered across it, tied in a side-knot.
“You standing in the rain, peanut head.”
I stared at her, hoped she didn’t start blinking like a video game character.
Inside the house I hung my wet shirt over one of the dining room chairs. Wood smelled strange in the rain, like food in that house got cooked all the time. Like feet in that house were bare-only walking most of the time. Starisha was thirteen now. Dark circles looped under her eyes and I could see healed welt marks across her legs and between her thighs.
“Where you been?” I said, trying not to shiver.
She sat next to me with a smile that forced me to share one back.
“You’re cold.”
“A little bit.”
“How yo’ grandma?”
“Fine, but…where you been?”
She didn’t respond immediately. I heard the patter of raindrops on the windows, wet tires turning on wet roads, and the occasional furnace gurgling off and on below us.
“Over there,” she finally said, a whole minute later. She pointed where the dining room connected to the kitchen. “I pulled my dead baby out of me over there. Momma made me stay with an aunt.”
“Baby?”
“Yeah, stupid. I can have babies. Imma make a bunch of ’em.” Her bangs were pulled back with her ponytail and I could see her forehead wrinkle along with her excitement of making a life.
A dark stain spotted where the kitchen began, a darker stain where the dining room ended. She was the women in my family I never could understand. She grown. She could do what she wanted with me, and I couldn’t look her in the eye if she did. I was ashamed that I once thought of her in a way a boy thinks of any other girl he’d like, but now she was a woman—a mother, an aunt, a teacher, a creator.
My teeth chattered against the small gust escaping the world and into the house. I couldn’t stop shaking, but she kissed me on my cheek and I warmed; it was then I noticed we were completely alone together. Anybody could walk in on us, see us here, touching each other, close.
She stood and my eyes followed the welts turning inward on her thighs, but I didn’t mean to look or I did but only because she said the baby came from her, there, where the pink shorts wrinkled. And maybe because I wanted her in a way that didn’t exist yet, to be the baby she had lost and the boyfriend she had needed.
She lit a cigarette and the smoke trailed wherever she went. Kenny’s body ruffled against her chest and I got the idea of him not being alone, because her baby was up there too, along with 2Pac.
She passed me the cigarette and I puffed on it, imitating; her a momma and she needed to smoke cuz the world had been burdening her old feet. I put out the cigarette on the inside of a grape jelly lid and before I knew it her arms were around my body, then my arms around hers. She bent her head down between my shoulders, her body jerking in small humps. I felt warm strips of tears race down my bare chest and onto my belly, the cigarette fizzing back to life on the jelly lid.
“D, go get my baby,” she started. “Go get my baby, please.”
I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how we had the right to want what had disappeared into nothingness. I didn’t know what to do.
“Don’t cry…please…” I said, against the rain and her tears, my body wrapping around hers. Death turned us into tiny swarms of threats that had to be squashed around every corner.
A month later, Starisha was murdered by her twenty-nine-year-old boyfriend, her body in that abandoned building, shot in the head. Under her nails: another’s skin.
DEMETRIUS BUCKLEY is the winner of the 2021 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Cave Canem Chapbook Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, PEN America, Scalawag, Tahoma Literary Review, The Offing, Southern Review, and elsewhere. His writing has been honored by the Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award and Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and he has performed his work at the Brooklyn Museum. He is a part of a writing program for incarcerated folks called the Empowerment Avenue. He is currently hopeful.
Featured image by Mathew MacQuarrie, courtesy of Unsplash.
