A Young Mother's Fear Times Picayune 02-02-1998 "Life After Death" 2 Of 6 Part Series ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ She sees him growing up to be an undisputed "mack daddy." The swarm of women drawn to him by his slow, infectious grin, his flashing eyes and his designer clothes will earn him that title. As will the sports car, spoiled out with every expensive extra that money can buy. It all will add to the mystique of New Orleans' premiere drug dealer, as ruthless in guarding his territory as he will be quick to settle a score. And then it will be over. An enemy's bullet will take him out, then elevate him into the mythical realm of gangsta-dom. For now, that scenario is just a dark fantasy. The only turf that 2-year-old Paul Honore Jr. wants to protect is his mother's lap. The apocalyptic vision of his future is hers. Rena Vereen is 20, unmarried and attempting to raise her son in a city known for its lurid drug trade and its frequent murders of young black men by other young black men. She fears sometimes that she won't be able to save him. She is tormented by her sense of helplessness. "I try to blank it out of my mind," Vereen says. "But I'm afraid he's going to be the type to kill somebody quick, fast and in a hurry. "Everybody tells me that. They say that's how he looks. I've never had anybody tell me he's going to be good." As quickly as the notion visits her, she wants to dismiss it as irrational. She wants to think he's just a baby who happens to be aggressive and a tad spoiled. "He wants what he wants" is the way she puts it. He'll outgrow his tantrums, become a respectable person - smart in school, popular with his friends and a good athlete, her litany goes. But she has trouble convincing herself. The fears she has for his future were born on a surreal night when mother and son experienced the unforgiving fury of a narcotics-driven nightmare. Vereen can't help but view life darkly. She has already seen the abyss. *** Real-life horror *** It was shortly before 3 a.m. on April 19,1996. Baby Paul, who normally slept in a crib near his father, lay in bed between his parents. A loud noise woke them. It was the door, kicked in and crashing against the wall. "I saw a big gun coming in the room and then two more big guns," Vereen says. Paul Honore Sr. pleaded with the three gunmen not to hurt Vereen and his son. "He had sat up in the bed," she says, "and he just kept saying 'Be cool, bro, be cool. Just don't hurt my wife and son.' "I was scared to look at their faces. I thought it would be like on TV, where they don't shoot women and children." But it wasn't. For minutes, Vereen lay trembling, trying to shield the baby. One of the intruders held a gun on them; the others ransacked the house. Then she heard a single crack. Honore was shot in the upper chest. He didn't make a sound. He slumped down in the bed. Vereen screamed. Next the guns were turned on her, pumping her thin body with at least nine bullets. "After I felt the first bullet, I played dead," she says. "I thought they wouldn't shoot anymore. But they kept shooting." Finally the gunmen left, empty-handed. Honore was dead and Vereen was dying. In the middle of the bed, their baby sat silently, drenched in their blood but unharmed. "I called 911 and I said, 'We're dead. We're dead,' " Vereen recalls, caught up in the memory, her voice rushed and whispery. Word on the street, Vereen laterlearned, was that Honore was supposedlyholding a stash of stolen drugs or money for a friend. It was a rumor that robbed Baby Paul of a father, robbed Vereen of a healthy body and robbed the family of any dreams for a normal life. *** Scars, seen and unseen *** On a recent fall evening, Vereen is in the kitchen preparing a dinner of boiled turkey necks. Paul, who has been taking a nap, runs in barefoot and clings to her leg. She pulls him onto her lap as she flips through a toy catalog. Paul's birthday is coming up and she is looking for gifts. She'd like to throw a party at Chuck E Cheese's, too, if she can come up with the money. Before the shooting, Vereen worked at Rally's. Now she lives on Social Security, combining the check she gets for her disability with the money her son gets because his father is dead. The scars are clearly visible on Vereen's lean body: the gash on her right shoulder where it was pierced by a bullet, the dark patchon her thigh from a grafting operation, the pronounced limp on bad days. Her loose clothing covers more: the colostomy bag and the exit wound in her lower back that looks like a tiny crater. Paul's wounds are just as extensive, Vereen fears, though not visible. She is plagued by the possibility that he, too, suffers from the emotional trauma that still haunts her. "He used to be asleep, but he would be crying and screaming like he was awake," she says, "like he was having nightmares. "People tell me he was too young, but how do they know?" With Vereen's anxiety over Paul mounting, she felt compelled a few months ago to seek answers. "I used to see on TV where people would say that when they were small, they saw all this violence and then they grew up to be violent," Vereen says. "So I went to get Paul evaluated. I was hoping they could tell me if it had an effect on him. But they said he was too young." Though Vereen didn't find the answers she was looking for, she at least found help of another kind. A social service agency discovered that Paul's verbal development was lagging and began sending a speech therapist to the house twice a week to work on his speakingskills as well as his playtime manners. It provides some comfort for Vereen, but still she sees his aggressive behavior and quick temper, and she worries. "He acts like a baby bully," she says, rocking him in her arms. "He bullies my little niece and nephew and both of them are bigger than he is. "He's ready to fight children everywhere he goes. I have never in my life seen a child like that. He is ter-ri-ble." On this quiet fall evening, however, Paul is more baby than bully. With one pudgy hand clinging to Vereen's slender neck and the other grasping a toddler cup filled with Kool-Aid, he settles down to enjoy the soothing cadence of his mother's rhythmic movements. "What's wrong, sweet thang?" she asks as he whines softly. "You still sleepy?" Vereen hopes that as Paul gets older, he'll grow out of his aggressive behavior. If he doesn't, she wonders if she'll be able to control him. "I work with him and stuff," she says. "You know, reading to him, talking to him, taking him to the park and McDonald's. Stuff parents should do." But still he can be combative. "I had this one boy tell me that he was just born bad," Vereen says. "I hope not." *** Keeping 2 moms jumping *** Most of Paul's days are spent in perpetual motion, playing alone in the three- bedroom double where he lives with his mother, his grandmother and his uncle. The neighborhood is green and tree-lined, but the Vereens' front yard is mostly dirt and the back yard is home to a neighbor's dog. So Paul spends most of his time indoors. Paul is hard at play, but dressed impeccably, as always, in Reeboks, a Polo shirt and jeans that have been starched and ironed at the cleaners. "When Paul was here, me and him used to do the same thing," Vereen says. "We bought him quality stuff. He doesn't have a daddy now, so I have to buy him extra, extra, extra stuff." Once again, he has turned his mother's spacious bedroom - the entire house, actually - into his playground. By midday a trail of blocks, bikes, books and balls have been pulled from his tiny closet and lie scattered across the bedroom floor. He has been up since 8 a.m., hasn't taken a nap and shows no signs of tiring. "Ball! Ball! Ball!" he sputters, issuing his usual one-word commands. He ventures to his mother's black wrought-iron canopy bed, where she is watching music videos and talking on the telephone. He climbs up and starts bouncing to the beat of a hip-hop song. "Paul, get down. This is not a trampoline," scolds his grandmother, Gloria Vereen. He grins and jumps higher. She walks toward him and his grin broadens. He has found a playmate, at least for the moment. Gloria picks him up under the arms and starts swinging him through the air. He loves it. She stops before the playful tussling turns rough, before Paul starts to bite or kick or punch, as he sometimes does. "We used to get down on the floor and go at it," she says. "But the therapist told us not to wrestle with him because he's already too aggressive." Although she's more than 20 years older than her daughter, Gloria is sometimes mistaken for her sister. She has helped raise Paul since he was born and often finds herself torn between acting like a parent and being a grandparent. Paul calls both women "Ma." It was after Honore was killed that Gloria moved the family to the Lakefront, hoping to escape the violence that plagued their Uptown neighborhood. If it were up to Gloria, they would leave New Orleans entirely and move to her native South Carolina. "This city is too violent," she says. "You never know what's going to happen. You can walk out your front door and somebody can shoot you for no reason." "Ma, Ma," Paul says, tugging at his grandmother's hands. "What do you want, Paul?" To play, of course, but his limited vocabulary allows him only to cajole. Paul tugs again, and when Gloria stands he lets out a squeal and starts to run. *** Proud papa, briefly *** If Paul's father could see him, family members say, he'd burst with pride over his miniature twin. "He was the same color when he was a baby," says Ellen Honore, Paul Jr.'s paternal grandmother, "and he turns his legs in when he walks like his dad used to do." A doting father, if only for a short while, Honore often was seen pushing a stroller around the neighborhood when he came home from work at the Palace Cafe, where he was a cook. "This is my son, this is my son," he'd tell everyone they ran into. "He was crazy about him," Vereen says. Honore had guessed his girlfriend was pregnant even before she did. Vereen was a senior at McDonogh No. 35 Senior High School and was planning to join the National Guard after graduating. It was during her physical that a nurse broke the news. "She told me I was pregnant," Vereen says. "I started crying." But Honore was elated. That night, he sat on his mother's porch, surrounded by all his friends, predicting it was going to be a boy. On Nov. 24, 1995, the day after Thanksgiving, their son was born. "Paul was in the room with me and he had seen the baby's head," Vereen says, laughing at the memory. "And he was, like, putting his hand over his mouth and shaking his head. He ran out ofthe room. He couldn't take it. "Afterwards, he was looking at the baby through the window, saying, 'Yeah, that's my little boy.' "He's crazy, man," she says softly, momentarily speaking of Honore in the present tense. When the baby was a week old, his father was arrested. "He went to jail for a whole week," Vereen says. "They said he had robbed this jewelry store. They went to his job and picked him up." Honore pleaded not guilty and got out on bail. He died before the matter was brought to trial. *** Life goes on *** Honore once had a vision about his future. "He told me, 'Ma, if I make it to 21, I'm good,' " Ellen Honore says. "He said so many people were jealous of him because he wasn't in that street life," she says. "He didn't hang out. Come 10 o'clock, he was inside. He and my oldest son, all they did was work." In fact, he did make it to 21, but not much more. Today, on the landing of her two-story apartment in the C.J. Peete public housing complex, where Honore was born and reared, his mother has a gallery of pictures of him, Vereen and the baby. It's there that Honore's daughter, 6-year-old Muffin, often takes her nephew, pointing out pictures of his dad. "She tells him, 'That's your dad, see your daddy,' " Honore says with a laugh, looking over at her sleeping grandson. "He was a good boy," she says quietly. "Never caused any problems. People still can't believe he was killed." From their upstairs window, Honore and her children have seen several shootings. Drug dealers, she says, have claimed some stoops as their own, and gunfire can erupt without warning. One of her sons, when he was 3, saw their teen-age neighbor get shot in the head and die. "All I do is say my prayers," Honore says. "I stay on my knees constantly. "After a certain hour, we don't go outside. By 5 o'clock we're inside. We lock the doors and stay inside." Paul is a frequent visitor at his grandmother's. He spends about a week there out of every month. He enjoys his visits, he has plenty of playmates, and the open space behind her apartment has become his romping ground. Vereen is concerned about her son's safety there, but she says she needs the break. "They wouldn't do a baby nothing," she explains, expressing her belief that no one would deliberately shoot at a young child. "Besides, I need to get out of the house and chill out with my friends. It keeps my mind off things." Meanwhile, on a breezy afternoon with a cloudy sky, Honore sits on her back stoop with another grandchild on her lap. In front of her is an expanse of trash-strewn grass bordered by a concrete sidewalk. Overhead a pair of faded white sneakers hangs from a utility wire. Nearby, Paul and his relatives play with abandon, chanting wildly in their high-pitched voices: "Ring around the rosy "A pocketful of posies "Ashes, ashes, all fall down."