Grace After Midnight_ A Memoir - Felicia Pearson [21]
“Wake up, girl,” says N, who’s standing over me.
“Man, this dream freaked me out,” I say.
“The way you shaking, looks like a nightmare.”
I look at my hands. They are shaking. I don’t understand why. A dream has never before made my hands shake.
I try to forget it.
And I do.
Can’t tell you how much time passed—maybe a few weeks, maybe a few months. But when the news came, I remembered every detail of that crazy dream.
“TUPAC SHAKUR SHOT
IN LAS VEGAS.”
That’s what the news said on September 7, 1996.
For those of us sitting around city jail, it was like the president was shot. Only worse. We couldn’t relate to the president. But all of us sure as hell could relate to Pac.
Now I understood my dream. It was so clear. And so goddamn scary.
He was shot in a drive-by and was laid up in some Vegas hospital. Pac was fighting for his life.
The crowd down at city jail wasn’t a praying group, but we had us some prayer meetings. We prayed that Pac’s life be spared.
We talked about when he was a young kid backup dancer for Digital Underground. We talked about his first record, 2Pacalypse Now, and his last record, All Eyez on Me, and his new joint as Makaveli, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. We talked about his genius.
We heard his lines in our head: “No matter what you think about, I’m still your child.”
“What you feed us as seeds grows and then blows up in your face—that’s thug life.”
We waited for his change to come. We wanted him to live so bad. We wanted more Pac joints, more Pac movies. We knew he’d blow up to be bigger than anyone in the history of the game.
We wanted him to stay alive.
And then on the sixth day after the shooting, he died. Respiratory failure. Cardiac arrest.
I didn’t wanna talk about it. Didn’t wanna think about it.
Still don’t.
Uncle came by.
“We gotta talk about your case,” he said.
“You were gonna make the case go away,” I said. “You said the witnesses didn’t really see nothing.”
“Well,” said Uncle, “almost all of them told us that.”
“What you mean, ‘almost’?” I asked.
“One witness can’t be turned around,” he said.
“Man or woman?”
“Woman,” said Uncle.
“What’s she saying?”
“That she saw you shoot her.”
“What does my lawyer say?”
“Your lawyer wants to talk to you.”
“Does the lawyer know what he’s doing?”
“He’s the best. He’ll get you the best deal.”
THE BEST DEAL
I was up in the gym. I was playing point guard, and I was making all the moves. I’d always been good at hoops, but on this particular afternoon I had a hot hand. Everything was falling.
Game over. I headed back to my cell. Note said my lawyer was there to see me. Cool.
Lawyer was smiling when I came in the room.
“No witnesses will testify against you,” he said.
“Word.”
“Of course the trial will go on. There’s no way we can stop that, but it’s pretty clear that their case is weak.”
“So you think I’ll walk?” I asked.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” the lawyer said. “But it’s looking better than it ever has. Now it all rests on the trial.”
I thought about the word “trial.”
There’s a trial down in the courtroom. Those kinds of trials happen all the time.
Then there’s what Mama likes to call the trials and tribulations of life. That kind of trial was already happening with me being locked up in city jail. City jail smelled bad, looked bad, was bad. City jail was a trial of my patience. I saw some niggas lose their cool in city jail and straight-up flip out. They couldn’t stop either crying or shaking or screaming shit no one could understand.
City jail was a trial.
The trial in the courthouse came up two years after I’d been sitting in city jail. I thought it’d go great.
It didn’t.
First day we got there I saw this woman walk in the courtroom with the prosecutors.
“Who’s she?” I asked.
“She’s the one who said she didn’t really see what happened,” he said.
“So what’s she doing with the prosecutors?”
My lawyer didn’t have an answer.
I did.
They’d done flipped her. She was getting ready to testify against me. I could see it in her eyes. I could feel it in her walk. Bitch was ready to