Midnight by Sister Souljah Page A

of the places were dangerous and fucked up. America, or at least the state of New York, was divided into separate areas. A lot of people were tribal and territorial. Some fools seemed to believe that if you weren’t from a certain area, you couldn’t enter or walk through that area. Some people thought their buildings were off limits. Some people believed that kids were easy targets,like the two guys who hid in the corners down in the subway then came at me from two sides, surprising me then jamming me in the turnstile. They didn’t get nothing. I dropped down and rolled out.
    In just the borough of Brooklyn you could get hemmed up by Black American youth or angry mobs of young whites and sometimes even their parents! You could get chased out by territorial and suspicious Jews, who sometimes had their own private patrols and community rules. Even some of the real religious ones considered their neighborhoods exclusive. I handled all of that and the other boroughs as well.
    I had to keep the product nice, neat, and in the same condition that Umma packaged it in. I purchased a high-end North Face backpack from Paragon, a sporting goods and mountain gear boutique in Manhattan. I also brought garment bags in bulk from the Garment District to use when the orders were large. I made sure I expressed our appreciation to each customer and even provided handwritten receipts.
    I kept my twenty-two on me to defend our profits. Umma sewed deep pockets into my jeans and khakis, jackets, and coats. She did it because I asked her to. I asked her to so I could carefully conceal my joint plus my knives.
    She knew I had weapons. Where we are from, a man is supposed to be armed to defend his family.
    She never tried to be an obstacle to my manhood. Even when I showed up with wounds, cuts, or bruises, she just cleaned them up and asked no questions, the same way she related to my father.
    Umma opened her first bank account with my translation assistance. We placed half of her cash in the bank. We hid one fourth of the cash in a secret location just in case. I kept one fourth of the cash in my room for business operatingcosts, like extra supplies and transportation fees or the phone bill and such.
    My tips were a separate matter. I started storing them in tin cans that used to hold tea leaves. After filling eight of them, I had to upgrade to huge coin jars, which I filled and placed in the back of my clothing closet—pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, all in their own jars. I marked each jar as it filled up, to keep the count. Small tips were adding up. Inside of each of my volumes of
The Amazing Adventures of Akbar
, I kept my clean double digit paper dollars neatly arranged and pressed.
    As time pushed on, Umma upgraded our business in several ways. We developed a much bigger client list of paying customers who had nothing to do with the factory where she worked. Through word of mouth, or should I say the precision of her skills in making women dress and feel better, she received a big order from one woman who wanted Umma to design everything she wore. The woman had deep pockets and never haggled about our mushrooming prices. She attracted a few wealthy friends of hers to our business but never allowed us to meet them. She made their orders run through her.
    With more money to invest back into the business, I improved our packaging to make the products more appealing. Umma introduced colorful tissue papers for wrapping each item, some solids, some fluorescent, some paisley, all interesting and different. She added a line of “scented clothing,” using a tradition from back home in the Sudan where women draped their cloths in a closed-in room where homemade incense was burning, making everything they wore smell delicious and leaving an alluring trail wherever they went.
    Slowly and carefully, Umma began making her secret homemade perfume potions and placing them in small crystal bottles for sale to exclusive customers and as a gift