I Beat the Odds (5 page)

Whenever our clothes started to get dirty, one of us kids would fill up the bathtub—we never owned a washing machine that I can remember—and would scrub them by hand with a little soap before rinsing them and hanging them up to dry. You washed your own clothes and we all did our best to keep ourselves as clean as we could.

I don’t remember exactly how long we lived in that house, but I remember turning seven there, so I think it was at least six months, which was a long time in one place for my family. And as nice as it seemed at first to have some open areas to play, it turned out that our neighborhood wasn’t really the best place to be running around outdoors. Across the street was an empty field that was actually just a dumping ground for people who didn’t want to pay for garbage removal, and then a little farther beyond that you could see a big truck farm, where all kinds of eighteen-wheelers would park to collect their loads and then drive off to wherever they were headed. The air always smelled like diesel and you could hear the high-pitched sound of the brakes squeaking whenever they pulled up or drove away. Sometime after we moved away, that truck farm was bought and cleaned up by one of Memphis’s biggest businesses, Federal Express. It’s now a much nicer-looking facility. It’s funny to think about that now, since FedEx was one of the major financial backers of
The Blind Side
movie, and here, one of its trucking hubs is just a few hundred yards from one of the places I remember most clearly from my childhood.

It’s hard to imagine that that little house could have looked any rougher than it was when we lived there, but I visited it recently while writing this book and I was shocked by how small it felt, even with the walls kicked in—because now it’s just an abandoned crack house. I had to duck going through each doorway, and my head was just a few inches away from the ceiling, which is the only thing about the house that is still pretty much intact. The wall that divided our part of the duplex from the one next door is all gone and the sheetrock in each room has been smashed to pieces. All of the plumbing has been stripped out of the walls and there are empty bottles of Colt 45 thrown around the floor. The yard is full of old trash and broken glass that’s been grown over by kudzu. When we lived there, my brothers and I tried to at least keep our little patch of grass clean.

But two things were still exactly how I remembered them: the back door leading out of the bedroom and the tire shop on the corner. I’ll always remember them because they were major players on the day my world was turned upside down.

I
n the first or second grade, kids should be bonding over Matchbox cars and action figures and playing tag. That wasn’t the case for me and the way I connected with my family. Because we shared that strange bond of being neglected, I think my brothers and sisters and I were especially afraid of being split up. It was like we knew—even if we didn’t understand it—that the system had already failed us, and would fail us again, so we didn’t want to lose the one thing we had together.

As far as we knew, the foster care people were the bad guys. We had a sense of us-versus-them, and whenever we recognized one of them coming around to our house, we would all start getting scared.

There was one woman who we were especially afraid of: Bobbie Spivey. She was a no-nonsense social worker in Memphis who always seemed to be snooping around, talking to the neighbors, asking questions about our family and living situation, and trying to figure out what was going on.

There was another lady from Child Protective Services, named Bonnie, who was in charge of checking up on my family before Bobbie took over our case. I don’t remember much about Ms. Bonnie except that she was tall and would visit each week or so to see how things were at home. Before too long, though, I think she got promoted to another job, and that’s when Ms. Bobbie took over—and when things started to change.

No matter where our family moved, she tracked us down. She was like a bounty hunter. Sometimes she would come to the house three times a week on what they called “homemaker visits,” in order to check up on the situation in the house, to see if my mother was still clean and that there was food in the refrigerator and that we kids were going to school. On a few of her visits, it was clear that we’d been left alone for a day or two. We were terrified of those visits because we knew that sooner or later, she wasn’t going to be leaving by herself.

Of course now, when I look back on it, I realize that she genuinely cared about our well-being and our safety. She didn’t want us having to live in terrible conditions or missing out on an education. She had our best interests at heart and was fighting to give us a chance. But as kids, all we could see her as was the lady who was going take us away from one another. So in our minds she was just someone mean who didn’t want our family to live together.

I don’t know who first called the authorities about our family. It might have been a neighbor who knew we were getting left alone a lot. It might have been a friend’s mom who was tired of us coming over for food or a place to sleep. It might have even been one of my mother’s cousins who called. She had a couple of family members who were always worried about how we were living, though when I was a kid I just thought they were busybodies.

I wonder sometimes, though, if it actually was my mother who had called. I wonder if she had just realized she couldn’t take care of us—that we were too much for her and she felt overwhelmed and figured it would be better if we stayed with someone else, or if she just wasn’t in the mood to be responsible for us anymore. I know that she loved us and wanted to keep us with her, but sometimes it seemed like she just knew that she wasn’t up to the job of feeding and looking out for so many kids, so maybe she handed us off. If that’s the case, it may sound like a terrible thing for a mother to do to her children, but in some ways it could also be the kindest thing. I mean, if she couldn’t take care of us, at least she wanted to get us to someone who could, even if it meant we had to be apart.

We’ll probably never know who first reported us; Tennessee law protects whoever makes the call to report a family. I guess that’s in case it’s a teacher or a neighbor, they don’t have to worry that an angry family member will come after them to try to get revenge. But once a PCO (protective custody order) is issued, it doesn’t matter who made the phone call. It means that there is enough documented abuse, neglect, or endangerment that the authorities have legal permission to take the children away and put them in court-ordered care. We knew Ms. Spivey had that PCO, and we knew what it meant for us, even if we didn’t know who had first picked up the phone to call her.

And, honestly, it didn’t matter to us at the time. Our biggest concern was making sure that we stayed together as a family. Marcus used to pull together little family meetings where he would go over the game plan for when the authorities came to take us away—because we knew it was going to happen sooner or later. Each time Ms. Spivey would make a visit, we were afraid she would be coming right back with the authorities, so Marcus had come up with a way to keep away from them and he wanted to make sure that we all knew exactly what we were supposed to do. As soon as one of us spotted the cars, our job was to yell to alert everyone else, and then to run as fast as we could in every different direction, just trying to get as far away from the house or as well hidden as possible. There was no way they could catch us if we scattered because they would not know who to go after. We’d meet up again a few hours or a few days later when the coast was clear.

He didn’t want anyone to panic or be scared and forget what they were supposed to do when the time came. We knew we couldn’t just pretend not to be at home. We had to do something much more drastic. We viewed our plan as a way of fighting back against the mean people who wanted to break up our family. I guess in some ways, it was the first playbook I ever learned.

In early June of 1993, getting close to the end of my first-grade year, we were all sleeping in the tiny duplex where the family was living at the time. If I remember right, all us kids were there: Marcus, Andre, Deljuan, Rico, Carlos, me, John, Denise, and Tara. My mother had left two days before and there had been no sign of her since then, and as usual, she hadn’t left any food for us. She had, though, left the girls this time, even though little Denise was not quite three and baby Tara was only fourteen months old.

It was a school day, I think, but we were at home. I don’t remember who first spotted the cars pull up, but there was a big window in the front room and we all peeked out to see the big car and the people in suits who stepped out onto the curb. There was no mistaking who it was. No one else in the neighborhood wore suits during the week.

Thanks to Marcus’s family meetings, we all knew exactly what we were supposed to do. We ran to the back door and jumped down the steps even as they were knocking at the front door. Everyone ran a different way, hopping the fence and just getting as far from the house as they could while trying to stay out of sight. From the back door, I ran to my left toward an old body shop and tire store on the corner. It was a two-story building, and I don’t know how I got up there, but I have a very clear memory of lying flat on the floor to catch my breath, and how proud I was that even though I was one of the littlest brothers, I’d remembered my job and had been fast enough to get away. And then I realized what had happened. The plan to run had been between us boys. We’d never even figured in the girls because our mother had usually taken them with her because they were so little. We had left Denise and Tara in the house.

There were a couple of windows facing our yard, so I crawled over to one to look out of it. I think there might have been some old curtains up that I kind of hid behind so that no one could see me. Sure enough, they were carrying my sisters out of the house, down the steps, and loading them into the car. They had caught John, too. All three of them were crying. They were scared and confused about what had just happened—why their big brothers were suddenly gone and who these strange people were who were taking them away from home.

All of our planning hadn’t mattered. The grown-up world had won anyway. I could see Denise’s face clearly in the car window as they drove off and all of the pride I’d been feeling just a few seconds before was gone. As their big brother, I was supposed to protect them and I’d failed.

 

 

AFTER THE SOCIAL WORKERS STOPPED looking for us and left, we went back to the house one at a time. It was probably a couple of days before we were all sleeping there again. It was getting into summer break, so there was even less structure to our lives now that school was out.

I don’t remember when my mother finally returned, but not long after that we moved again. My memory is a little bit hazy here as to the exact timeline, but I’m pretty sure it was at this point that we lived at the Salvation Army shelter near the bus station for about a month before we moved to a little place in northeast Memphis. The shelter is closed now, but I have a very clear memory of staying there for several weeks. I think the people in the Salvation Army might have even been the ones who helped my mother find the new house and make arrangements to move us there. Whatever the case, we lived in that house for most of the time I was in second grade.

During that time, John, Denise, and Tara were put into the foster care system. Rico was put into state custody, so he was kept in a more heavily controlled environment than just a foster home. He was always the one out on the streets more than the rest of us, so if someone was going to get picked up by the cops, it would be him. But we figured that they were going to get all of us sooner or later, and we were right.

About a year after they got the little ones, the DCS people caught up with the rest of us at school. Carlos and I were at Coleman Elementary, an old brick and cement building that was two stories tall and probably felt old from the first day it was built. It was getting toward the end of the school year and everyone was excited for summer vacation to get started. One of the school secretaries came on over the loudspeaker in our classroom: “Would Michael Oher please collect his things and come to the front office?”

I was excited. The only time anyone was called to the front office like that was when their mom had come to take them out of school for the rest of the day. That seemed like a pretty good deal to me. I was hoping that was the case, anyway—that my mother was doing well, maybe even cleaned up from drugs, and she was picking us up from school as a surprise. Deep down, though, I think I knew what was really going on. We were about to get evicted from our current house and my mother, it turned out, had checked herself into a drug treatment and rehabilitation program. She wasn’t going to be home for a while, and there wasn’t going to be a home to go back to anyway, since we were getting kicked out. We couldn’t run and hide from the authorities forever. If they couldn’t get us at the house, they’d just find us somewhere else.

Sure enough, when I got to the office, Ms. Spivey and the DCS people were waiting, and they walked Carlos and me out to the big car that was waiting for us. Grown-ups always got their way. We just had to make do with whatever decisions were made for us.

A
fter more than twenty-two years of working for the department and several hundred children, Ms. Bobbie Spivey still remembers dealing with my brothers and sisters more clearly than just about any other in her career. “Certain families just stay with you,” she told me.

The questions she was able to answer for me were definitely proof of that statement. I was amazed by how much she remembered. But, of course, there were going to be a lot of things that she couldn’t recall, couldn’t share, or simply didn’t know. For that reason, I wanted to do some research into my past. I accessed all the court records I could about my early life and time in foster care. Unfortunately, a lot of the records were missing—most of them, it seems. Just in the past couple of years, a federal lawsuit forced Tennessee to clean up its Child Welfare System. After years of bad management, disorganization, and out-of-date policies, they were forced to pretty much completely revamp the entire department.