Prince of the City Read Free

you, so what the fuck you doin’ ’round here?” the junkie asked, closing in on him. His partner joined him, cutting Michael off from walking away.
    â€œI’m visiting my girl. What business is it of yours?” Michael asked.
    â€œHold up, nigga. I know the fuck you ain’t gettin’ slick outta the mouth, and on top of that, your pretty ass down here fuckin’ one of our bitches. Matter fact, empty your pockets, nigga,” the younger guy said, holding his knife in a striking position.
    â€œAnd don’t try nuttin’ stupid,” the junkie said. “I’ll drive this joint in your ass so deep, you’ll be dead before you realize you’ve been hit. Now do what the fuck he said. Hurry up and empty those pockets, nigga.”
    At that very moment, Michael touched the pocket where he had placed the ring and then began to size up the situation. Naw, this shit can’t happen like this, he thought. This ring belongs to my future wife. I just can’t give it up like that.
    Before he could think of a way to get out of the mess, he felt the knife slash his face. It didn’t hurt much, but the wound felt warm. As the junkie took another swing, Michael ducked and delivered a vicious blow to his nut sack.
    â€œAHHHH, FUCK!” the junkie yelled, dropping to his knees.
    The other guy attacked Michael from behind and stabbed him in the rib cage. This weakened Michael, but still, he fought back with vengeance. His adrenaline pumped vigorously, allowing him to brawl like a lion in the heat of an attack by hyenas—never backing down and fighting until the bloody end. He turned toward his attacker and delivered a crushing left hook to his chin, followed by a hard right to the jawbone. Having dazed the attacker, Michael grabbed his attacker’s wrist, twisted it, and turned it upward. Instantly, he heard a crack.
    â€œAHHHH!” the younger guy screamed in pain.
    Michael knew he had broken his attacker’s wrist. When the knife fell to the ground, Michael retrieved it and held up the weapon in anger, now becoming the aggressor. Nothing could hold him back as he plunged the knife deep into the younger guy’s lung, causing him to collapse. He stabbed him at least five more times before turning his attention back to the junkie, who quickly fled the scene.
    Michael looked at the man that he had just killed. He didn’t feel sorry for him, since this man had attacked him first, but Michael did start to feel lightheaded and dizzy. He reached at his side and felt a thick wetness surrounding his wound. Realizing he had lost a lot of blood, Michael quickly fell unconscious.
    By the time Michael woke up from his two-week coma, a bandage covered his face with nineteen butterfly stitches underneath. Also, his right lung had been punctured badly, which required him to undergo a blood transfusion.
    As soon as he regained consciousness, police detectives charged him with second-degree murder. Although Michael was only seventeen, he was still charged as an adult because of the nature of the crime. He wanted to go to trial and argue self-defense, but the prosecutor had an eyewitness who said he only saw Michael stabbing the guy. There was no way he could win. During this same time, he also found out that Connie was pregnant. If he had gone to trial and lost, he would have definitely gotten twenty years to life. So instead, he took his lawyer’s advice and copped seven to twenty-one years.
    While Michael was serving time in Lorton Prison, one of the deadliest prisons in the nation, Connie visited him every visiting day, all the way up until her ninth month.
    On the fourth day of July in 1979, Connie went into labor at D.C. General Hospital, where she endured nine painful hours of labor and produced a little boy into this world. The baby boy’s dark caramel complexion was a mixture of both his mother and father’s skin tones, but he inheriteda head full of dark,