Letters From Carolyn: Two Sons, One Love

By Bridget Murphy
"I often ask myself where did I go wrong with my children, but I can't seem to find an answer." — Carolyn Cohen in a 2002 letter to her son Pedro
Carolyn Cohen cried when each of her sons left home.
Is there a mother who doesn't?
But it was the way each went away, eight years apart, that made one heartache so unlike the other.
Her sons knew it, too. Because after they were gone, Carolyn wrote them letter after letter.
That was always how she let her feelings out, pen in hand on the family patio on Friday nights.
Page by page, she filled pads of paper with words that sometimes made the Cohen boys cringe or cry.
Things she needed to tell them, but just couldn't say.
Because as any mother might, Carolyn wondered how it turned out like it did.
How did a woman who worked as a City of Jacksonville clerk for 32 years and her Army veteran husband raise two sons who took opposite paths?
How could they grow up in the same red brick house with the driveway hoop, play in the same park, graduate from the same high school, and finish so far apart?
Even if society never asked the question, people passed judgment.
Outsiders looked at Carolyn's boys and saw only a college graduate and a convict.
But she never could see her firstborn Pedro and her baby boy Cedric with anything but the same eyes. Carolyn couldn't love one more than the other.
Even after the choice that changed the lives of all the Cohens.
Because after Cedric chose to do wrong, the rest of the family had to come together to help make things right.
Because by then, there were even more Cohens counting on him.
"Always know this. I am your mother, I brought you in this world and I can feel my children's pain."
Carolyn Cohen in a 2005 letter to her son Pedro
The story started in a matchbox of a house on Jacksonville's Northside someone eventually painted hot pink, a shade that made it shout like a postcard from paradise. And it was heaven for a husband who worked as a dishwasher and taxi driver and a wife who nannied and kept house for a doctor's family.
In the early 1960s, Gus and Irene Williams fled the projects with their daughter Carolyn and their three sons to claim their own bit of suburban bliss on Belafonte Drive. The family of six finally had a private stoop to plant a lounge chair, a yard for Carolyn and her brothers to tumble around in.
But things were changing by the time of Carolyn's sweet 16. Gus and Irene's little tomboy was growing up. She started spending time with an older boy named Irvin Cohen. Everybody called him Crip.
Carolyn's father tried to chase him off a few times. But by the end of senior year at Raines High School, Carolyn had a secret that made her hope he would stick around. Two weeks before graduation, the dean of girls confronted her. Carolyn told the truth. Yes, the 18-year-old said, she would be a mother soon.
School officials wouldn't let her wear a cap and gown with other Raines graduates. But the baby kicking in her belly would one day.
"I think I gave birth to two smart children, but one just decided to make the wrong choices."
Carolyn Cohen in a 2002 letter to her son Pedro
Crip had some thinking to do. The oldest of eight children, his parents split when he was about 11.
He helped his mama put food on the table by running numbers, and playing pool and darts. He dropped in and out of school before he met Carolyn at Raines. When Crip heard she was pregnant, he had only two ideas about how to care for the child inside her.
All of his friends were drug dealers. But Crip decided on something different.
"Mr. Gus, I'm going to do the right thing," he told Carolyn's father. "I'm going to join the Army."
Crip proposed in a phone call from basic training, marrying Carolyn on a weekend leave. Later that summer of 1969, Irvin Cohen Jr. arrived while his father was away on duty. Carolyn's father nicknamed the infant Pedro, after a friend at the downtown chili parlor where he worked.
By the time Crip made it home, the name had stuck. So did his promise to stand by Carolyn. After his Army service, Crip went to work for General Motors in the early 1970s.
Another son arrived in 1977 and they named him Cedric. They raised both boys in a home they'd bought in 1972 on Simms Drive in the city's Washington Estates section. Living there were many African-American working-class folks and some professionals.
Across a bridge from an area of subsidized housing, Estates families enjoyed private lawns and driveways.
As years passed, Crip rose through the ranks at General Motors. He went from cleaning tobacco spit off the floor to building train engines. Carolyn was putting in long hours in the city's Parks Department. But her brother Henry Brown helped keep her boys busy. He ran a recreation program at an East 20th Street park where they could play ball from sunrise to sunset.
In 1987, the family celebrated Pedro's graduation from Raines. He wore jersey number 10 as quarterback of the football team, and finished as number 11 in his academic class. He started capitalizing the 'D' in his nickname after friends predicted he'd be famous one day.
"He just made that choice that he wanted to be something," Carolyn says. "He wanted to go to school."
Eight years later, Cedric also wore a Raines graduation cap and gown. He played football too, even had the same junior varsity coach as his brother. While Cedric was smaller than PeDro, the coach saw him as more of a natural athlete.
"PeDro was a quarterback, which meant he was more of a finesse player," says Doug White, now Raines' athletic director. "... He was not as physical a football player as Cedric."
Cedric could make a vicious hit. It was a gift White says could have taken him to college, and much further on the field than his brother. But while PeDro became a class leader, Cedric would run with a rougher crowd.
"I think he kind of got caught up in that thing where he wanted to be a tough guy," White says.
Looking back, Carolyn says her family's story is one she's seen repeated among sons of other Washington Estates families.
"Same thing," she says. "One went the right way. One didn't."
The Cohens say something shifted in the neighborhood in the eight years between when PeDro and Cedric came of age.
PeDro's role models were older guys who went to college, pledged Kappa Alpha Psi, and lived on pennies while aiming for a place in corporate America. But by the time Cedric was a teenager, fast money was rolling in the streets.
Crack was becoming king. And as the white rock reigned, it addicted some people and infected others. Greed was every child's enemy, even those with two parents under the roof.
In the end, both Cohen boys would battle the neighborhood's drug lure. And it would be years before anyone knew whether the rock would win.
"You are a good person PeDro. You are a lot like me. A person always caring for others. Don't give up. Always be strong and you will be OK."
Carolyn Cohen in a 2005 letter to her firstborn
"Will y'all take all the toilet paper out the window of the car?"
It was the summer of 1987, and wedged inside Crip's Chevy Blazer was the biggest pack of bathroom tissue Carolyn could find.
Must be like 90 rolls there, PeDro thought, as minutes ticked down to his Simms Drive departure.
Carolyn hesitated after PeDro's friend insisted they ditch the roll monster.
What did she know about packing for college? PeDro would be first in the family to go.
He'd been watching cartoons when Crip brought up his future a year before.
"Hey man, what you gonna do when you graduate?"
"I'm going to college."
"Oh yeah? Cool. Who's gonna pay for it? Nobody ain't got no money to pay for college."
So it's all on me, the National Honor Society member fumed. He didn't know Crip and Carolyn worked as hard as they did just to make ends meet.
So PeDro did what he knew. He threw touchdowns. And he did it in front of a Morehouse College scout he met at a friend's Paxon High School game.
PeDro had to sit on the bench as a junior. But as a senior and starting quarterback, he aimed to work harder than anyone else on the field.
It landed him a Morehouse recruiting trip. That led to a college application friends helped him fill out, and the half-scholarship, half-loan deal that finally had him staring at his father's Blazer squeezed full of toilet paper.
Then came a father-son talk before the two left for Atlanta.
"I need you to be strong for your mom ... She's out there crying and stuff, man. I need you to be tough. Hey man, I'm talking to you. Turn around. Oh hell! You crying too?"
"No, I'm straight. I'm straight. I'm straight."
"All right man, well get it together. I need you to work this out for your mom."
Soon after that, son number one was out the door.
Crip couldn't believe it when he saw his son's Morehouse living quarters. Beggars on the corner and a two-bathroom house for 22 guys is college?
But PeDro told him Morehouse was where Martin Luther King Jr. studied.
That a diploma from the same place would mean something.
Crip drove back to Jacksonville and never worried about his firstborn again.
He knew the 18-year-old had the drive to make it.
"I know God will make a way for you. Sometimes things happen for a reason that we may never understand but He's always there for us."
- Carolyn Cohen in a 2005 letter to her son PeDro
A torn rotator cuff at the end of PeDro's fall semester sidelined his Morehouse dream. The freshman was getting good grades but was about to lose his football scholarship. He didn't know how to look for more loans.
So when PeDro came home for the summer, he stayed. He enrolled at the University of North Florida. But even while working, the sophomore struggled to pay his tuition. Fitting in was another problem. PeDro was hip-hop from his hair to his threads to his tunes. He looked around the campus in his own city and felt lost. Where were the other black people?
From the Morehouse dean's list, PeDro's grades fell to two Fs, two Ds, and a C. His wallet was empty. His car was dying. And the boy from Washington Estates could think of only one other way to make it. People would pay him for the white rock. PeDro called a kingpin he knew from growing up.
"Put me on, man."
"Put you on? Are you crazy?"
"No, I'm serious."
"Put you on for what?"
"I ain't doing this college thing."
"Man, no, what you want to be put on for?"
"Man, I need some money."
"Money for what?"
"Man, I need my car fixed. I need this, I need that. I need."
"All right. Let's go do all of that."
"OK."
"And I'm still not putting you on. Man, I need you to graduate from college ... You know, you pretty smart. Go to school, man. Don't be out here with this."
The drug dealer fixed PeDro's car and put cash in his pocket. He bought his school books and gave him a Bible. He saw something in PeDro that told him he was a kid on track to rise above what was low and dirty in the neighborhood.
PeDro knew he couldn't get that kind of work if a kingpin turned him down.
So he stayed in school, finding a professor who helped keep him on track.
He worked at jobs before school, in between classes, and overnight.
And PeDro finished college in 1994, a year before his baby brother would graduate from Raines.
Carolyn was a proud mama, with barely a hint about the heartache that was coming.
Because where someone from the streets had told PeDro no, Cedric only heard yes.


Read more at Jacksonville.com: http://jacksonville.com/news/2011-07-22/story/letters-carolyn-two-sons-one-love#ixzz1eX8rYyPR