The Coldest Winter Ever (49 page)

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The voice of Winter Santiaga is strong and decisive. Her boldness is the everyday style of millions of ghetto girls worldwide who wear attitude like battle armor. This is why she is the thirteen-year-old, undisputed protagonist of the novel
The Coldest Winter Ever.

A five-year-old ghetto girl is as grown as any twelve-year-old girl living anywhere else. Her experiences are multiplied and accelerated, as she lives out her life right beside, on top of, and below hundreds of men, women, and children, all project dwellers.

In the projects, space is tight. Too many times it is dangerous, sometimes dirty. A five-year-old ghetto girl may be in charge of an apartment that is mostly motherless. She may be responsible for the care of an infant child, to cook, to guard the door keys, to lie to the curious welfare workers, children’s service agents, probation officers, and other controlling onlookers. She “holds it down” while Mommy works for metro money, chicken, and 150-dollar sneakers.

She can stare you dead in your eye without blinking. Deceive you without smiling. Put you in your place when you cross well-drawn lines and boundaries. She knows when someone is looking at her funny, drinking too much, or about to do something shiesty. If you fight her, she’ll fight you back, even if you’re bigger. If she thinks you want to fight her, she’ll punch you in your face first, just to get the jump on you. If you help her, she’ll take what you’ve got but never trust you. She’ll use it but won’t depend on it happening twice.

Ghetto girls are hell-bent on survival. They don’t think they might be attacked. They’re sure they will. This ain’t poetry or music. She’s trying to grow up without people stealing all her stuff; her pocketbook or her pussy, her shoes or her sanity, her money or her man, her rights or her reputation. The victorious are the ghetto girls who are able to, through hook or crook, gain the most and lose the least.

This is why the fearless Winter Santiaga, an alluring teen in a ripe
body, is liked, lusted after, and loved in ghettos from Brooklyn to Jamaica, Johannesburg to Brixton, Brazil, and back. Winter pushes to remain the taker and not the tooken.

Imagine the mixture of fight and fortitude the ghetto breeds, with the arrogance of affluence, a human Molotov. The result—little Miss Winter Santiaga. Born in 1977, in Brooklyn, New York, Winter is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ricky Santiaga. Her younger sisters are named Porsche, Mercedes, and Lexus Santiaga. Their family gained wealth through her father’s carefully constructed illegal drug dealing empire.

The drug money and all of the expensive material possessions it can buy place Winter in the position of being an upper-middle-class girl, living in an underclass ghetto. Her father’s henchmen, a network of uncles, aunts, and cousins, all of whom earn from her father’s business, protect and insulate Winter from the hatred and jealousy that is unavoidable when one clique in the hood is eating and earning while the majority of people starve and scrape to get by.

Winter, in turn, decorates herself in jewels and authentic designer wear. The amount of beautiful things she has stands out, because it is not one or two items from time to time. It’s an unrelenting daily fashion onslaught of the best of everything from small to large, accessories included. Under normal standards, living where she lived, she would’ve been challenged and robbed, maybe even raped, definitely harassed. Instead, it was this “unreality” that framed her mentality. She had these things, she believed, because she was supposed to. She was a princess, the other girls were not. Her father was the king, the other men were not. Her mother was the queen, the other mothers were not. It was a ghetto hierarchy that moved from the top, King Santiaga, to the bottom, the defeated crackheads. Winter’s attitude was, “Hey … bow down to the family who puts food on the table for you and yours.”

Winter’s ghetto love was rooted in things remaining exactly how she experienced them as a member of the reigning family. The fact of the matter is, for sixteen years she never had the authentic ghetto experience. Or at least we can say, she never had the same feelings, fears, realities, and hard times that girls her age had living in the same exact building.

For example, Winter does not have to deal with poverty of any kind. The other girls do. She does not have to answer to or prepare for
welfare workers, probation officers, or intruders. The other girls do. She doesn’t fear the police like many poor people who have been unfairly brutalized or murdered for being black while standing, running, driving, or putting their hands in their pockets. “They work for Poppa …,” she says of the police. She does not have to deal with unwanted sexual advances by boys or men. The other girls do. Just a glance at Winter by a peeping locksmith leaves the worker trying to hold his face together after having it slashed open by Santiaga’s knife as punishment. Not to mention the fact that she has a biological and present father, unlike the overwhelming majority of her friends.

The fact of the matter is, there is no threatening authority in the life of Winter Santiaga prior to her father’s downfall. She does not even have to respond to teachers, guidance counselors, or school administrators. Winter says:

I wasn’t gonna report to school everyday like it was some type of job when they weren’t even paying me for it. School was like a hustle. Teachers wanted me to come ... so they could get paid to control me ... I just wasn’t having it.

Everyone is beneath Winter, beholden to her
and her family, or irrelevant and nonexistent. This permanently alters her ability to experience healthy friendships. When one person has money and her friends don’t, the bond that supposedly holds them together can be either flimsy or completely artificial. When the money holder speaks they all listen. When the one with the money is wrong, no one corrects her. Instead they fear being cut out of the benefits that hanging out with the money girl brings. Even a spunky friend like Natalie can be impacted by a simple reminder that she’s wearing one of Winter’s old dresses. And, in every situation where there is a good thing and an excellent thing, the friend without the money is expected to settle for a good thing while of course the friend with the money takes and deserves the excellent thing. When it’s time to fight, a brawl with some chicks, Winter does not have to fight. Just the sight of Winter’s face, a reminder that “Santiaga runs things,” causes would-be bullies to stop dead in their tracks and fall back.

Winter grew addicted to this arrangement. She fed off of the attention. After all, the entire neighborhood had watched her grow up, experiencing life as none of them had. The neighbors saw Winter and her family floss, ride expensive cars and limos, throw big parties, spend money, gather gifts, and parade privileges. Earline’s Beauty Salon was a stage for Winter and her mom to flex their power. All business stopped and was redirected toward them when they entered the already packed facility.

When the Santiaga family, under the leadership of the father, picks up and moves to a Long Island mansion, Winter does not see this as advancement as most people would. She prefers the projects to the palace. She prefers the cement to the grass. She prefers the commotion to the peace. She needed to be in the projects with hundreds of people beneath her. She needed her friends to need her and to depend on and sweat her stuff. She needed her captive audience, and jealous schoolmates. She needed to be surrounded by familiar but subordinate things. It was her position in the hierarchy that drove her personality. In the suburbs no one knew her position or cared who she was, or worshipped and feared her father. Out there, she met her worse fear. She just blended in.

The Daughter-Father Relationship

From birth Winter was handed some twisted traditions. Her father sent a limo to pick her mother and the infant up from the hospital. He gave her a 24-karat-gold diamond ring on the third day of her life. He obviously thought that this was special, as she was told this story as soon as she was able to understand. The moral of the story he told Winter was “It was important for me to know I deserved the best, no slum jewelry, cheap shoes, or knock-off designer stuff, only the real thing.” So what’s wrong with this picture?

Stories of early childhood clue children in on who their parents really are, what really happened, and who they will ultimately grow up to be. The story of the limo and the ring is not about how a loving father slept in the hospital room right beside the mother in anticipation of the birth of his first child. In fact, Santiaga was not even there, hence the limo. The story that Winter holds up as told by her father is not about the smile on his face or the fear on his face as he witnessed a baby coming through the birth canal. It’s not about something she saw her father do that stuck in her mind forever. It’s about material possessions being given to define and/or express a father’s connection to his daughter. The story reveals the depth of
the connection of the father and daughter, and the lack of depth at the same time.

Fathers set their daughters’ standard of manhood. Winter grew to see her father as a proud provider. One of his greatest values to her was his consistency in giving her stuff—diamond rings, necklaces and tennis bracelets, clothes, shoes, coats, pocketbooks, hairstyles, and of course cash. She consequently began to look at men as being worth what they could give her. A man who could not buy her, was less of a man. He deserved nothing more than to be used, sexually or otherwise, like Sterling.

Santiaga taught Winter that she deserved the best, but not because she worked for it, or accomplished anything in her life. She deserved it because he said so. She deserved it because she was royalty.

When a child is given things of great material worth, through no effort of her own, she loses the awareness of its value. No matter how much it cost, or what it took for the parent to acquire it, the child does not get the actual life experience of earning. The child has no scale on which to weigh or appreciate its value. Whether a child is rich or poor, by not requiring a child to prove herself worthy of gifts, valuables, and excess, the parent corrupts the child’s understanding of capital in capitalist America.

The child who is flooded with things, grows to expect them, needs them even. As time moves on, it will take more and more things to excite and delight the child, coming at a faster pace. Those items, although they increase in monetary cost, become less and less impressive to the child. However, they remain very impressive to the child’s friends who have never enjoyed even one hundreth of that lifestyle. The delight therefore then comes from the child showing off her stuff to her friends and getting a charge out of the envy and excitement the onlookers display. Winter Santiaga was so addicted in this way, she clearly stated that she would go to school only “If I had a new outfit to show off or some new jewels I knew I’d get sweated for… .”

In the process of giving Winter too much, Santiaga was also taking something away. All the years he spends “over providing and protecting” her from the real world, is time lost helping her to develop a skill of her own. Time is lost that she could’ve spent charting an independent course where she would have challenged herself to answer the question: What will I do when I grow up and am on my own? What is my personal plan and purpose on this Earth?

Another twisted tradition was the decision not to send Winter to school with regularity. In the novel, she never discusses any academic course or extra-curricular activities. Now, we all know that education can happen in many ways. It is not always necessary to attend the public school that is offered up to American youth. But, no private school, no home instruction, no family library or bookstore outings, no outside reading or information coming in, is a guarantee that your child will be naive and ignorant.

For many decades, many blacks in America have been confusing looking good with doing well. Mothers have taken two jobs to “make their children look right, and keep up,” when, in fact, no matter how well dressed, manicured, and heeled your child is, if she does not have any knowledge, any skill, if she has not mastered anything, she is not doing well. Winter Santiaga looked great. Winter Santiaga could read, write, and count. Yet, Winter Santiaga was ignorant.

In the ghetto if you are born into the painful reality of having a criminal parent, an addict parent, an alcoholic parent, or an uneducated parent, the other adults in your extended family—the grandmother or grandfather, the aunts and uncles and cousins—become your opportunity to see beyond the limitations of your parents’ choices and circumstances. Any one of them may provide the alternative model or blueprint for you to pattern yourself after. Winter Santiaga’s extended family, the ones who lived close to her, were all involved in, or hostage to, or beneficiaries of criminal activity. Criminal activity was her norm.

When Winter is in a tight spot, after the takedown of her father, she cannot, or does not, think constructively about how to make money, employ herself, or reignite her education. Even though her skills as a cosmetologist, manicurist, beautician, decorator, and designer were impeccable and apparent to the reader, they were not considered viable options to Winter. They were, she figured, just something she would use to raise money to invest in and get herself set up in the drug world. The drug world, because of her father’s and family’s example, seemed the obvious choice. It was almost as if the legitimate options she had available, she considered beneath her and temporary. The illegal options she considered a step up and in.

Ricky Santiaga did talk to his daughter. His words were lessons in street survival. For example, he taught her how to be the daughter of a drug kingpin. He taught her to keep the family business quiet. He
taught her how to profile and stunt, to look the part. He taught her not to go out with men who were not sharp and aggressive, not to go out with men who can’t give her, again, what she deserves. He gave her little stories about how he set up his drug business and why.