In fact, anywhere you look, in any neighborhood or any school in America, there are kids who need help and hope. If you’re an adult who wants to help a kid in foster care or a tough situation, the first step can be showing them that there is a different way of living from what they’ve always known. By helping a student focus on the future and sincerely believe that working toward their goals will pay off, you will be helping them take that first step in being something different and breaking away from the circumstances that have such a strong pull.
If you’re one of those at-risk students and you want out, you have to work for it. Success isn’t just handed to you; it’s something you have to earn. No one can do it alone, so you have to keep an eye out for friends of good character and mentors who will give you guidance. But the way out starts with you and your determination to become something better than your circumstances. Just because your life begins in a bad place doesn’t mean it has to end there.
The odds are stacked against you, but you can’t let that be an excuse. You have too much promise to let the odds beat you. It can be done. I beat the odds, and so can you.
CHAPTER TWO
Life at Home
M
y first memory—the furthest back I can reach to recall a time in my life—is of walking down the side of the highway with my brothers when I was about two years old. We were looking for shelter because the house was locked up again. I don’t remember any details beyond that. I don’t know how far we had to walk, where we ended up, or if we ever ended up finding a place to sleep that night. I just remember walking and I remember cars speeding by.
I’ve asked Marcus about it (he’s my oldest brother and would have been about ten years old at the time), but he told me it happened pretty often that we’d get locked out, and he would load up the five of us boys and move us all somewhere safe. So really, it could have been any one of those times.
In some ways, I guess that was kind of a symbol for what most of my childhood was like: I was trying to get somewhere better than where I was, while the rest of the world rushed by not noticing me trudging along in their direction but without any real guidance.
That was how it was from as far back as I can remember: my brothers and I, fending for ourselves. Marcus was the oldest, then Andre, Deljuan, Rico, Carlos, and me. There was another baby at the time, my brother John, but my mother kept him with her wherever she went. Most of the time. But once my sister baby Denise came along, John would wander around with us, too, and my mother would carry her instead.
Being the oldest, Marcus acted in a lot of ways like both a brother and a dad to us, looking out for everyone and trying to take care of us the best he could. He did his best to make sure we all had food, brushed our teeth, showed up at school—but there’s only so much a ten-year-old can do. All of us siblings loved one another a lot, but I don’t think I fully realized just how much fell on Marcus’s shoulders until I was much older. No matter how hard he tried, a kid can never be a replacement for a parent. Marcus didn’t ever try to discipline us, but I know if he had, we never would have listened. I think we could all feel the absence of a strong male figure in our lives, even though we never talked about it. That’s a hard place to be: growing up as a bunch of boys without anyone around to show you how to be a man.
I never really knew my real father, even though I met him a few times, mostly between his prison terms. My mother’s brother, Gerald, had been his cellmate during one sentence, and when he was released, the man who would become my father stopped by the house to say hello to Gerald. That was how he ended up meeting my mother. They would have two children together, me and my sister Denise.
As I was growing up, he was never around. Once he gave me a few dollars when he stopped by to visit my mother, and I thought that was pretty special. He seemed tall to me then, but looking back now I realize that was just because everything seems bigger when you’re a kid, since you’re so much closer to the ground. In reality, he wasn’t very tall at all. Physically, I seem to have taken after my mother instead of him. She is tall and pretty wide, too.
But other than a couple of short visits when I was little, that was just about all the contact I ever had with my father. None of my brothers or sisters really knew their fathers, though, so as far as I could tell I was maybe one of the luckier ones since I had at least gotten to meet mine. It may not seem like much, but it was enough to shake me up years later in high school when I learned he’d been killed. He had never been a part of my life, but he had still been something I could call my own.
I called him my father; I never called him dad. It takes more than a handful of visits and a few bucks to make a dad.
ALL TOLD, THERE ARE NINE BOYS and three girls, but we never all seemed to be in the same house at the same time. Rico, especially, I remember was almost never home. He was always out on the streets, hanging with his friends and sleeping at whatever house he ended up at that night, but almost never ours.
The girls kept to themselves. For one thing, they were a lot younger than us and my mother was usually toting one or more of them around because they were just babies when I was in elementary school. Denise, the oldest girl, is named after our mother and she is my full sister. The rest of the kids had a variety of different dads, though we all shared the same last name. It didn’t matter what the father was named or what the birth certificate said because my mother decided that she wanted to go back to her family name, and from that day on, we all went by the last name Oher.
I didn’t pay much attention to the fact that we were all pretty much only half-siblings, because we all looked out for one another. Once we got a little older, when we’d scrounge for food or places to sleep because my mother had left and locked us out, we would usually work in pairs or small groups. Even when we were fending for ourselves we tried to stick together.
No one in my family—not my mother or my brothers or my sisters or my grandmother—no one ever said the words “I love you.” I never once remember hearing that as a child. But even though the words were never there, I could feel the bond that connected us all together, and I knew it was strong.
It wasn’t that our mother didn’t love us, or that she was physically abusive. It was just that sometimes she seemed to forget that she had children and that we needed her care, so she’d go off for a while and we kids would be left to take care of ourselves and one another. Since we didn’t know any other way of life, we just adjusted to it the best way we could and always tried to back up one another. And we weren’t the only kids in the neighborhood who lived like that. It probably shouldn’t make me feel better that there were other families with the same kind of messed-up routine as ours, but back then I think it made me feel less alone and a little more normal.
My mother is from Memphis originally. I don’t know much about her life, but I imagine she was like most of the people who lived around us: She was born in the ghetto, and that’s where she stayed. I don’t know what her schooling was like, where she went, or how many grades she completed. Those weren’t the kinds of things she talked about. I do know that she was, and still is, one of the nicest ladies you would ever want to meet—when she’s clean.
There would be stretches when she’d get off drugs, straighten herself out, and get a job. It was great to be home then because she would always have a smile on her face and just make you feel happy. Since she is a big lady, it’s impossible to miss her in a crowd; and with her huge grin and strong hugs, she makes you proud to know her. If one of us kids brought over a friend who needed some food or a place to stay, she’d welcome them in, even though we didn’t even have room for all of us, let alone for an extra body or two. But she made room. That was just how she was. She was big-hearted and loved to have her family around her.
But she seemed to love the crack pipe even more. Crack and cocaine were her drugs of choice and she never seemed to be able to get very far away from them. Every time she would pull herself together, fight back against the addiction, get a job, and try to make a nice life for us, it would only be temporary. Before long she’d be back on drugs and back to disappearing for days at a time.
To her credit, I will say that she never did drugs in front of us kids. She always made sure that she was somewhere else when she got high. She would leave to meet her friends, lock the front door, and just not come back until she felt like it. It might be hours or it might be days. It was pretty bad getting locked out of our own home, but it was probably better than seeing her and her friends all strung out.
We moved around to a number of different places when I was younger. My mother couldn’t seem to hold on to any place, even in the ghetto. We lived for a while in a housing project in North Memphis called Hyde Park. Parts of it have been redone, but it was and still is one of the most dangerous parts of the city. We got shuffled around to lots of different units because my mother couldn’t stay current on the rent or bills or just keep the place from getting condemned. We went without power a lot. We were homeless and living under a bridge for a couple of weeks. That was pretty awful.
When I was four or five, we lived with my grandmother Aeline, my mother’s mother, but we didn’t stay there long. She was the meanest and dirtiest woman you’d ever want to meet. Her house was just depressing and everything seemed to be covered with dirt or garbage. It probably wouldn’t have seemed so bad if we’d at least felt like she wanted us there, but it was pretty clear that she didn’t. I don’t even know why she let us move in. She screamed and hollered at us all the time, yelling hateful things at my mother and at all of us kids ... with one exception. My grandmother really loved Marcus. Maybe it was because he was the oldest and listened better—I don’t know. All I remember is that she couldn’t seem to stand the rest of us, but as far as Marcus was concerned, she couldn’t do enough for him. The rest of us weren’t jealous, though. We were actually a little relieved. If she was gushing over Marcus, she couldn’t yell at us. We were all afraid of her, so the less time we had to deal with her, the better.
IT FELT LIKE EVERY TIME WE MOVED, we kids ended up at a different school. I can remember going to five different elementary schools by the time I was in second grade, and I’m probably forgetting a couple. And it seemed like no matter where we went, there were guys who could show us how to get into trouble.
Trouble was the biggest source of entertainment for the kids in my neighborhood. I think it was the favorite of some of the grown-ups, too. Almost everything we did for fun seemed to involve some kind of rule-breaking, whether it was jumping the fence of a closed court to play basketball or missing school to hang out. Of course, when I was that little I couldn’t really get into a whole lot of serious trouble. But my brothers could. Rico was definitely the best at finding ways to have run-ins with the cops, but everyone seemed to have a way to find things to do that definitely were not the best decisions.
I remember being not quite seven years old and watching my older brothers Deljuan and Rico break into cars for joyrides. It never hit me at the time that what they were doing was wrong because they never stole the cars to sell them or to keep them; it was just something to do. You would steal a nice car, drive it around for a few hours for fun, and then leave it somewhere on the side of the road for the cops to find and return to the owner. They didn’t see it as a crime but as a challenge. The point wasn’t to actually take the car from anyone for good, but just to see if you could outsmart whoever drove it or designed the security. And, as far as I knew, it was totally normal for a kid my age to be hanging out, watching people smash windows or pop locks. My brothers and their friends let me come along on the rides sometimes, and so I thought it was totally normal to run from the cops, too. It was cool. The big kids included me, and what little kid doesn’t want that?
The boys in the neighborhood weren’t the only ones who didn’t want to play by the rules, though. My mother was pretty good at finding trouble, too. Like I said, she couldn’t seem to remember to pay our bills, so sometimes we didn’t have power or water wherever we were living. She didn’t always pay rent, either, so we got evicted a lot, too. But it never seemed like it was that big of a deal, and she definitely never seemed embarrassed by it. For us, it was just a way of life.
It seemed there was always a reason we had to move somewhere else, always a new school where I had to try to figure out where they were in their studies. Nothing ever seemed to change, no matter where we went. It was just a big circle for my brothers and me. All in all, it was a pretty miserable way of living, feeling like you could never really relax anywhere just knowing it was home or even just feeling safe and cared for. But at least we were miserable together.
When I was six, we ended up in a tiny duplex a little farther south in the city. From the outside, it seemed like a step up from the projects or my grandmother’s dirty place. There were a couple of trees around, which made it feel nicer, and it had a little yard. It was on a pretty quiet street with only about four or five other little houses. Most important, it wasn’t public housing. It wasn’t in Hyde Park or any of the other projects in that area. It was a real house that we could call home in a real little neighborhood that wasn’t government-run. I thought it was beautiful.
Once you got inside, though, it was pretty clear that we weren’t exactly living the dream. The front door opened into a small living room where we had a bunk bed pushed against a wall. There was one little bathroom, a small kitchen, and a tiny bedroom. Nine of us were living in a house that was less than five hundred square feet.
I learned later that in most houses, people have their special places around the kitchen table, and when the family sits down to eat together, the food on your plate belongs to you; the food on somebody else’s plate belongs to them. That wasn’t the case with us. We didn’t have a kitchen table. When my mother bought groceries, she would make normal dinners, just like any other family, but there weren’t any rules on how we ate. We would all just jump on whatever food was around, and if you weren’t quick enough, you lost out. The same was true with those bunk beds in the living room. They belonged to whoever happened to be the first ones to fall asleep there that night. We looked out for one another when we were out on the street, but at home it was every man for himself.