In remembrance of 'Little Tony'
This week's column.
Merchants of Hope, the new local initiative that aims to rescue young African American males from paths of aimlessness and bad choices, makes me think of Little Tony.
Tony was a neighborhood teenager whom my daddy had taken under his wing. My father gave Tony a variety of odd jobs around the house -- washing cars, cutting grass, polishing my mother's best silverware -- in exchange for a few bucks and a lasting friendship.
Tony and my dad, whom he called "Mr. Allen," grew very close over the years and Tony became, in very short order, like an adopted brother to me and my siblings. And a third son to my father.
It seemed only fitting his last name happened to be Johnson, just like ours.
Tony had friendly eyes and a broad, toothy smile. He wore his hair alternately in braids or a big, bodacious Afro that would blow like waves of wheat in a breeze.
He liked to draw and was especially taken with his drafting class at Dudley High School. He'd show me meticulous sketches of houses and churches. He wanted to be an architect one day.
You could say my daddy tried to impart some useful lessons with the spare change he dispensed to Tony -- fair pay for an afternoon's work, being where you said you'd be at the appointed time, and doing what you said you were going to do.
When Tony needed work, my dad got him a job at a local Winn-Dixie. When he needed shoes, my dad bought them.
I'd like to say there was a happy ending.
Tony wound up in prison for his part in an armed robbery of a Greensboro motel. That hurt my dad deeply, but he still didn't give up on Tony and Tony never gave up on him.
Mom says Tony denied involvement in the robbery to my father but he never did to me, or as far as I know, anyone else. The only thing he ever said to me about the crime is how dumb a decision he'd made. Mom wonders if Tony didn't want my dad to know the truth because it would be so disappointing to him.
While Tony served his time in a western North Carolina prison, he regularly wrote my father, in neat cursive letters on notebook paper. My dad had warned him to choose his friends more carefully, Tony said in an essay for a prison class about my dad. "He would say, 'You need to change the friends you hang around. You can get in more trouble in five minutes than it would take you 10 years to get out of.' "
My dad had predicted Tony's prison sentence to the month: seven to 10 years.
In return, Dad sent him money and words of encouragement. And never gave up on Tony.
Then Dad died on April 7, 1998. We were all numbed and shaken by the suddenness with which we lost him. None of us any more than Tony, who'd gotten the word while still behind bars.
He'd dreamt about Dad, Tony said in a letter to my mom, and he'd use the loss as a source of strength and inspiration to turn his life around. "I know he's watching,'' Tony wrote in that letter to Mom. "And when I make something of myself he's going to smile.''
For a while, Tony seemed true to his word. He was transferred from Caldwell Correctional Center to Guilford Correctional Center in McLeansville. I remember visiting him there on Sunday afternoons. At a picnic table under a big shade tree, he told me how he was resisting the temptation to fight a fellow inmate who taunted him with trash talk and physical play on the basketball court.
He was still honing his skills as a draftsman and looked forward to a career on the outside as an architect.
He kept his head and earned his freedom. He got a job and one day dropped by the newspaper to say hello. Once or twice he visited my mother's house on Sundays, when he knew the whole family likely would be gathered, for dinner. He seemed happy and still intent on keeping his promise to make a better life for himself.
Then Mom called me at work one day. Little Tony was dead. He'd shot himself on May 9 after his brother's death in a car accident. He couldn't bear the loss, his grandmother said at the funeral. He was only 29.
Mom said the other night that she wondered if Tony had suffered one more loss in a life full of pain and disappointment than he could take. My dad. His brother.
At his funeral at a church packed with fidgety young people who kept coming and going up and down the aisles, I'd learned that Tony was more popular than I'd known and had become involved in the church.
And I felt the hurt my dad must be feeling, seeing that his adoptive "son" had almost overcome the long odds of his too-short life to find himself and find happiness. Had we done enough? Had we said enough?
The moral of this story with the cold, cruel ending?
That Dad had tried to do what he could to reach out and save a young kid and ultimately had failed?
No. That he had done his best to make a difference and that he would try again if given the chance. Only harder.
Comments (2)
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Allen:
What a heart-breaking story; hopefully, Tony is finally at peace. While, you begin the column by describing "paths of aimlessness and bad choices," it sounds like the word "rip-tide" would have better described the internal forces pulling on Tony's life.
Posted on September 10, 2007 12:15 PM
I don't disagree, Dave. I'm not sure I'll ever really know what made him take his own life.
He had so much to live for.
Posted on September 10, 2007 4:08 PM