War of Words

Sometimes Marcus Leach boils over with spastic energy, shaking his fists in the air and slapping his bony elbows. He warns anyone who crosses his path with an odd threat: "I'm gonna unload a six-piece of Church's Fried Chicken and a biscuit" -- emphasizing the biscuit with a groin-high kick. When he starts acting like this, the girls in his school usually laugh. "Marcus," they say, "you ain't no thug!"

When he's bored and his wallet is empty, Marcus likes to conjure elaborate capers -- like robbing banks and escaping to Mexico through the city's sewer system. He jokingly claims to have a gun stashed in his bedroom closet. For a while this year, he walked around with a giant knife stuffed in his pocket.

From the outside, Marcus' world seems as bleak and violent as the Nas and Dead Prez songs he downloads onto cheap TDK compact discs. He lives on a street with no sidewalks in a cramped duplex near the VA Medical Center on Linwood. Trash blows across the gutters as he walks past abandoned houses on his way home from school.

Last year, he heard a gunshot as he climbed the steps to his house. He looked over his shoulder to see one of his neighbors splayed out on the ground bleeding, while another ran down the street. From the news the next day, he learned that one brother had murdered another over a $30 gold tooth. This year, one of the most popular kids in his school -- a girl who sat next to him every morning in African-American history class -- lost her life in the crossfire of a gunfight at a teen hangout on Troost. "At least one person dies every year in my school," he says.

Marcus hears a lot of talk about how school is the best means of escape. But like many of the kids he's grown up with, he'd rather be anywhere but in a classroom.

If he feels so much as a pinch in his stomach, he'll cut school. If a class isn't necessary for graduation, he'll drop it. If he thinks a homework assignment is stupid, he'll blow it off. He likes to brag that, were it not for a few happy accidents, he'd be just another dropout.

His report card proves it: Over four years, he's amassed a 2.3 grade point average at Central High School -- a school Missouri officials have deemed "academically deficient."

Yet he's one of the most sought-after seniors in the Kansas City School District.

He's weighing scholarship offers from the universities of Kentucky, Louisville; North Texas; Northern Iowa; and Missouri-Kansas City. Other schools -- Northwestern, Wake Forest, Iowa, Kansas, Southwest Missouri State, West Georgia, Emporia State, Pittsburg, Marist College and Mizzou -- have also expressed interest.

No, he's not a sensational athlete.

He's just a seventeen-year-old who has figured out how to beat the system -- one system, anyway. Now he's spoiling for a bigger fight.

Evaline Lumpkin struggles for words to describe her eighth child. "He's just Marcus," she says. "He's so different from all the kids that I've had."

He always seemed to be second-guessing the world around him. When she'd tell him to do something, he'd crumple his brow and demand to know why. Sometimes she had to swat his behind because his curiosity would inspire him to take apart brand-new radios or TVs. "He could never just settle for what was on the outside of anything," she says. "He would question everything."

She knew she had to keep her eye on a kid like that. But she was single; she didn't have enough money to be a stay-at-home mom, and her budget couldn't handle day care. Her first child had arrived shortly after she graduated from high school. From then on, she'd had to work whatever jobs she could land with her high school education. Marcus' father, a white man who worked as a painter at the Kansas City housing project where the family lived, could offer little help. Shortly after Marcus was born, the man was diagnosed with brain cancer and had to quit working. So Lumpkin turned her apartment into a nursery, taking in neighbor kids for money to subsidize time spent with her own.

Lumpkin wasn't one to set her children down for long lectures about right and wrong. But she radiates what Marcus likes to call "Southern values." Starting when she was five years old, she worked twelve hours a day in cotton fields with her parents and siblings in the Mississippi Delta. When she was ten, the Freedom Riders rolled to town on one of their voter-registration drives. They handed her mother a petition, and a photographer for Jet magazine snapped her picture when she signed it. After the photo appeared in print, the plantation's owner evicted her entire clan from their fieldside shacks. But Lumpkin's family remained close even after they split apart on their migration northward, first to Poplar Bluff, then St. Louis and, eventually, Kansas City. While Marcus was growing up, Lumpkin would load him and his siblings into the minivan and cart them to reunions in Mississippi. By then, she had a stable partner -- Marcus' stepfather, Glen Mitchem. "Glen didn't have the label of my official father, but he was the provider," Marcus says. "And that's what was most important."