Read part one of “And Then You Shoot Your Cousin”: A Generation of Lies, Cocaine, and Tequila
As a teen, getting to college on a football scholarship as a quarterback dominated my existence and afforded me little time for lapses in judgment that could result in big trouble, let alone jail time or death. I was on a mission to play at either Clemson or South Carolina State after long dreaming of suiting up for either school.
Friends I grew up with playing football and basketball began to fall victim to drug selling, drug use, car theft, and home invasion. Back then, I never took the time to dedicate sympathy for their situations: I couldn’t understand why one would want to play with the probability of going to jail. I also didn’t have time to even think about getting involved in things that might put me in the same position. For me, it was as simple as “moving on to the next play,” a mantra I’d learned from football and basketball. Whether I was upset for making a bad throw on the field or a bad pass on the court—I was too locked in to the process of receiving praise from athletics. Moving on from one setback meant another opportunity to show my grit and determination.
Law enforcement wouldn’t determine anything about my fate, but it changed the course of life for my cousin, Kwasi.
In 1996, when Kwasi was 16, he was in juvenile detention for selling drugs. “I never got caught selling crack,” he explains. “My momma put the police on me after she found $15,000 in my room. When I came home, she had the money laid out on the counter while the police were in the living room.”
Almost 30 years ago, I knew nothing of how those events played out. All I knew was that my cousin had been sent to “juvie.” In the Summer of 2023, he and I spoke over the phone, as he described the incident that day. “After the police ‘cuffed me, our aunt came running from top of the hill—cussing my momma out, for calling the cops on me” he says. Kwasi remembers our aunt yelling at his mom, “Bitch, why would you call the cops on your own son, we could have split that money!”
Dysfunctional, to say the least, yet I was far from stunned by the actions of our “Aunt K”. She was the second youngest of all my mother’s siblings and was no stranger to criminal behavior. She had been incarcerated before, followed in the footsteps of “Bee Momma” as a madam, and she was a frequent drug user. I asked Kwasi a weighty question—if he’d ever sold crack to our aunt. “Shit, she was my number one customer,” he exclaimed while nervously laughing, as though he knew how bizarre the story was. Though the news was fresh to my ears—I wasn’t surprised.
Even during the days of selling drugs, my family managed to be family. The same aunt who battled addiction also provided a safe space for Kwasi and others. “Her house was our safe haven—we didn’t have to stand on the block running from the police all night,” he says. There was a community that sought refuge at my aunt’s house. “She let everybody come through there, so they’d feel safe,” Kwasi adds. “Crackheads would come there to smoke.”
Hearing my family’s experiences gave me somber insight into their new-to-me identity. I’d seen a lot as a kid but never understood the ethical ramifications of what I was witnessed to seeing, until my son was born. Memories of family members and marijuana use, aunts going off to prison, and the brazen placement of firearms in the open, each added to my embarrassment and questioning of the ethics in parenting, back then. The family I knew and loved were in charge of my own wellbeing while allowing a risk-filled environment all around us as kids.
It’s harrowing to understand how drugs took hold of my favorite cousin and a few aunts. Even my mom was a part of it at one point, leaving me outraged. “I remember we got pulled over one time on our way to Charleston, and my mom put two bricks under my car seat and told me to sit on them. She said if the police ask you to move—start crying,” Kwasi remembers.
As he mentioned previously, his gravitation towards drugs and crime had little to do with his absent father. “The deeper I got into the streets, the more I realized—we come from a family of God damn gangsters, and all of them are women,” Kwasi told me. It’s hard not to think of how the actions of our mothers and aunts didn’t contribute to his own choices.
I’m one of a few cousins in my family who doesn’t have a criminal record. While I was keg-standing and finishing graduate school, Kwasi was selling drugs and returning fire from his mom’s house, during an attempted robbery, killing a distant cousin in the process—in self-defense.
But I can’t be angry. Our parents were just one generation removed from sharecropping and a few away from slavery. Drug dealing and substance abuse was a means of a twisted sense of survival.
The trauma that my family experienced, lived with, and at times became a part of, has formed who I am as a father. Kwasi and I shared bonds as kids that linger today, but the stories that shaped our childhood are also real memories that remain from those early years, meaning that never for a moment do I assume my own son is too young to remember. Kwasi was probably my son’s age now when his mom asked him to wait with drugs for her.
Kwasi’s last stint of incarceration ended over a decade ago. His focus now is on being a husband and father to his three children. He even adopted the son of another cousin of ours, who passed away in his late twenties. Like myself and our great-grandfather, Buster, Kwasi’s life after crime led him to the spirits industry: He’s part-owner of a new tequila on the market, La Conecta Tequila.
Our family’s blood runs through our veins,. communicating the stories of our ancestors. Kwasi and I were once kids searching for a moral compass that could guide our way. We took different directions, learned different things, but ended up in the same place. I’m sure Buster would be proud.
