A RAP FOR BRANDON : Memories of a Mother and Her Manchild in the Forsaken Land

tis the season filled with sorrow

pretty manchild no tomorrow

called yourself a rapster a thugsta

another misunderstood youngsta

Brandon Niles was sweet 17 when he kicked.

The first time I saw him, he was a 4-year-old with his mom, Sylvia, my baby brother’s ex-girlfriend. For a decade, they shared our family holiday celebrations. Then we lost touch. Until six weeks ago.

“He was scared, Wanda,” Sylvia told me then. “He was so scared.”

She says that when Brandon gave over to peer pressures, his attitude changed: “ ‘In order for me to be with them I have to act like them--but that doesn’t mean I’m one of them.’ ” His homies re-christened him Eyeball. He was always lookin’, enormous sad orbs scoping for possibilities--a way out. He took to rhyme in his spare time. He hid his product in a shoe box, wrote rap songs about his struggle to cope, hoping someday to break large and in charge.

Sylvia had tried her best to save him. Three years earlier, after Brandon had been robbed of a brand-new leather jacket at Uzi-point, she got her employers to transfer her to another state. Things didn’t work out. Within a year, she and Brandon returned to South-Central. His guilt by association went like this:

“Brandon knew these guys who robbed some people. He tried to stop them, he even told them it wasn’t right, but they wouldn’t listen,” Sylvia says. “He felt so bad he even gave the victims $10 of his own money, all he had.”

When the police car arrived, everybody ran but Brandon. He was innocent, so why run?

The cops didn’t see it that way. Brandon caught the case. Witnesses and victims alike testified, Sylvia says, that “Brandon was not one of the robbers. The judge refused to weigh their testimony.” It angered and confused Brandon that the man who decided his future read a newspaper throughout his trial. Brandon was placed under house arrest until his sentencing, which was deliberately set to fall after his 18th birthday.

“They had him trapped like a dog,” Sylvia says. “I told Brandon they were tryin’ to strip him of his manhood. That’s why they wouldn’t listen. He became terrified of the police. Whenever he saw them, when we were out driving, he would ask me, ‘Please, Mama, can we get off this street?’ ” Brandon was caught between the law and the lawless.

“The court sent him to two Crip schools knowing he was a Blood,” Sylvia says. “Wanda, I swear I did not know. I’d wake him up, send him to school and couldn’t understand why he didn’t have any enthusiasm.

“He was branded a Blood because of the turf he grew up in,” she says. “Brandon couldn’t ride a bus, couldn’t get out at a certain corner, would say, ‘Mama, I can’t go into that store,’ and I would say, ‘Boy, why can’t you go into that store? It’s a free country!’ ”

Desperate, Sylvia went back to her employers for help. This time the choice was no choice.

Brandon was shot and killed in a pay phone booth at Jefferson between Wadsworth and Griffith while he talked to his girlfriend, Rosa. No arrests were made.

your potent youth was wasted

before it was even tasted

of your love her arms were robbed

the future she once had in you

is spent in sobs

Sylvia takes modest comfort in recalling the times she overheard Brandon laughing and loud-talking with his friends, fellow Thugstas, the name of their rap group. They were hyped about gettin’ over with their songs, dreaming of the big money, the big time and someday buying their mothers the big house. She hadn’t known they were serious.

Then she found the box.

Sylvia, who hopes to get her son’s music published, meets with the mothers of other children who have died violently. Their support group is called Drive-By Agony. It’s not enough, but it’s a start.

“I found a song, written a few days before Brandon died,” her voice trembles. “It tells of his death. He saw himself die, and he was callin’ to his homies, but they couldn’t hear him.

“And he was rising toward the light.”