I Beat the Odds (9 page)

I don’t remember if we knew anything about the court’s decisions for us at that time or not. Even if someone had sat us down and tried to explain it all to us, I think it would have gone right over our heads. When you’re a kid, it seems like forever to think even six months down the road. Five years would be impossible. As far as we could tell, the longer we stayed in the foster system, the longer we were being kept away from the rest of our brothers and sisters, and we just wanted our family back.

So when I got home and no one came after me for a couple of days, I figured they might finally have decided to leave us alone—and I guess I was right. Since we weren’t in any immediate physical danger, maybe the authorities just decided that it was worth another shot for us to try to live at home again. Or maybe they were tired of chasing me and figured that if I wanted to be at home so badly, they might as well let me. I didn’t look like too much of a kid anymore, either. By then I was coming in around five feet seven, which is pretty crazy when you’re barely eleven years old.

For all the great dreams I’d had about what it would be like when I finally got home, though, I was pretty disappointed. I’d always imagined that things would be just like they were before we got split up, with all of us kids together again, plus the new ones that seemed to just keep coming. But a lot had changed during those few years. Marcus was an adult now. Andre and Deljuan were about to be. Rico was still in the system, and John, Denise, and Tara were living with other families. So for now, home meant my mother, me, and a new baby or two. As their situations changed, my older brothers drifted in and out, but I was facing the hard realization that things would never be the same—that we’d never all live together again.

My grandmother had moved up to Minnesota. I have no idea if I have any family up there or if there was a specific reason why she chose that particular state. But as far as I was concerned, the farther she was from us, the better. I didn’t want the DCS getting any kind of ideas about moving us back in with her. She died just a year or two after I returned home for good.

I had changed, too. I had started to put the pieces together of what was required to get a life and a job outside of the ghetto someday. As much as I had hated being in state custody, I did have someone getting me up each morning and making me go to school. It’s amazing what regular attendance can do for you. Even if I had pretty much given up on trying to learn much, as I was changing schools so often, I still began to understand better what responsibility was all about and why it was important to show up where you are expected each day.

There was one big change that I was especially excited about, though. When I was close to turning eleven, we moved from Hyde Park to a house in Hurt Village that had three bedrooms, and as far as I could tell, it was a mansion. We had never lived in a place that big, and even if the every-man-for-himself rules still applied at dinnertime or in terms of grabbing a place on a mattress, I thought we were living large.

That year was actually a good one. I was back home with my mother, which I had wanted so badly, and I was put in Ms. Verlene Logan’s fourth-grade class at Gordon Elementary. I had missed so much school at that point, and even at eleven years old I was much bigger than the other kids, but she never made me feel as if there was anything negative about that.

She had taught for many years and was wonderful at it. She made all of us feel special in her class and she went above and beyond in caring for her students. She could always make the rough, rowdy kids calm down with a few gentle words. She always told us that we were all intelligent and could accomplish great things in life if we didn’t give up and take the easy road. She tried hard to let every student know he or she was important to her and seemed especially proud of me when I made the honor roll. I found out later that if there was ever a child who didn’t have clothes or shoes that fit, Ms. Logan would quietly go out and buy them what they needed.

But I didn’t know that then. I just knew that she was the teacher who was determined to make all of us in that inner-city school believe in ourselves. “Can’t never could and ain’t never would” she used to remind us, in order to help us believe in our abilities and the importance of working hard. She used to encourage me to keep up with sports because whenever we would play T-ball or kickball at recess, I used to tag everyone out—including her. “One day, you’ll make big money because you are too fast!” she used to say, laughing, whenever I’d chase her down at first base. I loved that she saw value in my athletic talent instead of acting like it wasn’t an important skill.

In fact, I saw her just recently at an annual charity event in Batesville, Mississippi. A friend of hers knew that I would be there and gave Ms. Logan a call. She came, but I don’t think she thought I’d have any clue who she was. The second I saw her, though, I shouted, “Ms. Logan!” and gave her a huge hug. It was such a wonderful surprise. I reminded her that she and I shared the same birthday, and she thought it was so funny that I would remember something like that after all these years. But I don’t think it was crazy at all. Each one of us has memories of a favorite teacher or coach from when we were little, and even if we didn’t know how to tell them at the time how much their encouragement meant to us, we carry that memory in our hearts. I had carried that memory of Ms. Logan with me for years because she made me believe that I had a talent worth developing and the ability to see it through.

But the good times didn’t last, and even the thrill of the new house wore off, too, when it was clear that nothing had really changed except our address. My mother disappeared a few times; we ended up moving again, too, staying one place for a little bit before getting kicked out of it for one reason or another. Pretty soon I was back to camping on people’s floors or sofas, or even sleeping in doorways and under bridges when the front door was locked. Memphis winters usually aren’t too bad, but the summers are brutal.

My mother fell back into the same routine of getting clean and then relapsing, and the same routine of neighborhood trouble started up again, too. There was a grocery store right next to Hurt Village called Chisholm Trail Grocery. It was a pretty big store where everyone did their shopping—and stealing.

I should take a second here to apologize to the owners of the store, which is out of business now, and probably because of all of the stuff I shoplifted from them. It started out as just a dumb thrill. All the neighborhood kids stole candy there, and I did, too. Not to be making excuses for what we did, but I don’t think that it actually occurred to us that it was bad. After all, most of our parents weren’t very active in teaching us right from wrong. And it seemed like more of a game than anything else. If you made it out of the store with your candy, you won. If you got caught, you lost. I lost four times.

But as I started getting a little older and the growth spurts started, stealing from Chisholm Trail Grocery wasn’t a game anymore. It was actually a matter of survival for me. My mother didn’t keep food in the house and what I was able to bum from people in the neighborhood wasn’t nearly enough to fill me up. I needed food—real food that could keep up with my body. So I moved from stealing candy to stealing meals. I’d smuggle out pork chops, steak, whatever I thought I could get back home to cook without getting caught. I always tried to steal meat if I could because that was something we definitely didn’t get at home.

Most of the time, though, I got food through the same old routine of begging and bumming. I’d hang out with a friend and just wait for their mom to offer me something to eat. There were certain moms who I could always count on to feed me. We all kind of knew the deal: There were the nice moms who you knew couldn’t stand to see a kid not eat; there were moms who would give you something only if you asked; and there were the moms who clearly didn’t want you around at all. All the kids in the neighborhood knew who was who. When she was off drugs, my mother was one of the nice ones who the other kids knew would give them something if they came by our house. Everyone loved her when she was clean because she was just such a loving woman. But as soon as she went back on drugs, it was a different story.

Things get a little fuzzy for me for a while as far as trying to remember exactly when and why we moved to certain places. I remember that this was when we ended up staying in a shelter for a few months while my mother tried to straighten herself out yet again. Then for a while we were in a housing project called Alabama Plaza, which was a bunch of old brick apartment buildings and a couple of townhouses that were all kind of smashed together. There, the main activity was to sit outside in lawn chairs and just wait for something to happen. Whether it was a fight or an arrest or a car chase, something was always going down, and you wanted to have a front-row seat for whatever it might be.

After it became clear that I couldn’t bum or steal enough food to stay full, I decided to try selling newspapers again, like I had done when I was living with Velma. She used to take the kids in her care down to get bundles of papers on weekends and then have us stand on street corners selling them in order to make a little money. I had been a pretty good little salesman working for her, so I decided to give it another try. Each Sunday morning, I’d go down to the
Commercial Appeal
and get a couple bundles of newspapers, then sell them roadside at various intersections. Typically, I could make about seventy to eighty dollars, but on a good day I could pull in even more. That was enough to buy dinner for a week and sometimes even new clothes if I’d managed to outgrow what I had.

I loved the feeling of being able to do something for myself. Every week I was out with my newspapers and just about every week I sold them all. Then I could face the rest of the week knowing that I wouldn’t be hungry. It became my Sunday morning routine to get up early and be out on the corner around six o’clock. Eventually, I even got promoted to one of the best corners in the area because the newspaper knew they could trust me to show up and work hard. Other people would get bored and wander away before they had finished selling their stack, but I was determined to stick it out. I made a game out of it, telling myself that if I left before the last paper was sold, I’d lose.

One day, when I was fourteen, a scary-looking neighborhood guy came up to me and said, “I know you know what this is.” He was right. I did. I could see that he had a gun in his pocket—it was a mugging.

“Where’s the money?” he asked. He was acting totally normal so that the cars passing by had no clue what was going on. It just looked like a man talking to a kid on a corner, but he definitely meant business.

“It’s in my coat over there,” I told him. It had been a warm morning and I’d taken my coat off as I walked up and down the street. I figured if I could get just a few steps ahead of him, I could take off running, but he must have known what I was thinking.

“If you run away, I’ll blow your back out.” The way he said it, I could tell he meant it. So I walked over to my coat slowly and pulled out the money. I was just finishing up, so I had a lot—there was about a hundred dollars in my coat because it was such a nice day and a lot of people were out. I carefully took it out and handed it over to him. He took the money and ran away.

I was pretty depressed, but at least I knew I had about twenty or thirty dollars in my jeans pocket, and he’d been too dumb to ask if I had anything else. It was going to be a hungry week.

 

 

THE DCS EVENTUALLY FIGURED OUT where I was (or maybe just finally noticed that I was no longer in their custody) and they started up with their visits again, though this time they didn’t try to take me away because my mother didn’t give them a chance to. From my running away adventures in foster care, she had learned the rules of the system and ramped up her refusal to let the caseworkers in the house. The caseworkers obviously knew exactly where I was, which was right on the other side of the door, or maybe just hiding in the bedroom; but the law said they couldn’t come in without a court order, and so long as they showed up empty-handed, my mother made sure they left empty-handed, too.

Eventually, even those visits died down. I’m not sure what prompted the authorities to lay off, but I think it might have been some kind of arrangement to keep me in school. I have to say that it worked out pretty well, because eventually I ended up having one very good year academically.

In seventh grade, I was placed in the Ida B. Wells School. It was specifically designed for kids who were behind their grade level due to bad situations at home. I really thrived there that year. The teachers took a different kind of interest in the students’ achievement and I felt like I was being stretched academically for the first time in my life. The school itself was located in the basement of Manassas High School, the local high school. We had our own sports teams, and we played against some of the Manassas squads. Even though it was a separate school from Manassas, it was in the neighborhood with the kids who lived all around me. So I was uprooted again, but our program didn’t stick out as different.

That year at Ida B. Wells was one that opened my eyes to the fact that school could be a place for real learning to happen if you were taught by committed, caring people. Watching the teachers and knowing that some of them had come out of situations not unlike mine made me see the reality of making something out of your life. I discovered that’s really what it comes down to: You’ve got to want to be something. The problem was that it seemed like there was no one else around me who wanted to be something. There was no one else who I went home to at night who was working hard with dreams of a regular job and the responsibilities of a nice, middle-class life.

After that year of school with good teachers and role models, I was desperate for someone who could mentor me outside of school and teach me how to convert that dream into action, but I couldn’t seem to find anyone. I didn’t have a person who could sit down and talk me through things like planning for the future and making choices that would benefit me in the long term. So I just started to rely on my own common sense and my own ideas of what I wanted for my life. I would stop and ask myself: Is this a smart decision? What are the consequences of hanging out with these guys? What kind of trouble could I get into if I did this or went there? Do I want the thrill as much as I want to get out of this neighborhood someday?