Facing the Music

Originally published October 8, 2000.

When Nathan Mackey saw the police lights behind him on Cameron Road the night of June 27, 1999, he knew his number was up. His head swirled with thoughts of leading police on a chase or jumping out of the car and taking off on foot. The former Elgin High School football and track star was sure he could outrun the officers.

"I knew that if I just pulled over, I was going to prison,'' he says. But he didn't flee; he froze. Something inside told the self-proclaimed "country thug,'' who has released four gangsta rap CDs as "Lil' Black," that this was how it was meant to be.

The police officer at his window notified Mackey that he wasn't wearing a seat belt. When a background check turned up outstanding traffic warrants, Mackey was taken into custody. As he sat handcuffed in the back of the police cruiser, watching the officers search his car, the police found what Mackey knew they would find -- 3 kilograms of cocaine, with a street value of more than $50,000. "Suddenly, they kicked the back door of the cop car shut,'' Mackey recalls.

Mackey was well-known to Elgin officers as a major drug supplier. "But he was pretty smart, using two or three guys to work for him, so we never caught him," Police Chief Steve Huckabay says. The slamming of the car door was the sound of his time running out.

"Every morning, I wake and pinch myself, hoping it's all just been a bad dream,'' says Mackey, a 27-year-old husband and father of two. But it's no dream; on Feb. 17, he pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

"There are two sides to the street. On the one side is all the money, cars, jewelry, women. On the other side is when 'them folks' get in your life,'' he says.

"Them folks'' is slang for the criminal justice system, which will have Mackey in one of its federal penitentiaries for a length of time to be determined at a sentencing hearing Wednesday Oct. 11. The mandatory minimum for the charge under federal sentencing guidelines is five years, but because this is Mackey's first conviction he could get less time under the "safety valve'' provision.

While waiting for a $10,000 bond to be approved, Mackey sat in the Bastrop federal holding facility for 12 days, taking inventory of a life that once carried such promise.

"When you're on the street, man, you don't see things clearly,'' he says. "I used to tell neighborhood kids in Elgin to bring me their report cards and I'd give them $10 for every A, $5 for a B, thinking that I was encouraging them to stay in school. Instead, I was taking them from their parents."

"Me getting caught is the only way, besides getting killed, that I would've stopped,'' he admits. Still, he sometimes wishes it was a bullet, rather than a set of handcuffs that had ended his reign as a drug supplier. "It's over like that (snaps his fingers) when you get shot, but I've gotta face my troubles every day."

And every day he looks back at his small-town upbringing and wonders how he came to be the modern-day gangster he rapped about in his songs.

'You know my pops

always told me

a flashy man was broke/

But I was blind at the time

and took it as a joke'

From 'My O.G.'s' on Lil' Black's CD, 'Around the World In a Day'

"Watch out for the grasshoppers,'' Mackey says, leading a visitor through his childhood home two miles outside the Elgin city limits. Indeed, the little critters are floppin' and poppin' all over the front porch. "It's me, Mama!'' Mackey announces, then the door creaks open and Emma Mackey goes back to the bedroom to put on some "company'' clothes.

Before he was old enough to drive, Nathan used to go to Thomas Park, where all the local kids hung out.

"Nathan was always gettin' bit,'' his mother says, wearing a brown dress and gold necklace. "I remember once we had some baby pigs that Nathan wanted to pick up, and I warned him not to go near them because the mother hog would do anything to protect her babies. Well, he went ahead and tried to pick one up, and the mother bit him clean to the bone.''

The scariest injury of all was on the football field. Four games into his senior year, Nathan was piled on by five or six Giddings High players who his mother says were out to get the flashy tailback who wore No. 1 and strutted as if he deserved it. As Nathan lay there motionless, his mother ran from the stands to the sidelines. They had a deal that if he was hurt, he'd wiggle his feet to let her know he was OK. But there was no movement this time. Just as Emma started out on the field, something she promised her son she'd never do, she saw his feet move side to side. He wasn't paralyzed, but his football-playing days and his chance of getting a college scholarship were over.