Dee Dee wasn’t capable of caring for her children, and she knew it, but she didn’t want anyone taking them away from her. The boys wanted to stay together; they felt safe together; together they at least had each other. They all knew that the police would be back for the boys, and so they left the shed. Dee Dee got her hands—she wouldn’t say how—on an old beat-up Monte Carlo. For weeks she and the seven boys slept in the car. “Bodies on top of each other,” is how Deljuan, who was now thirteen, recalled it. “We’d get up in the morning and go wash ourselves in the bathroom of a service station.”
Unwilling to leave the small area on the west side of Memphis where she’d been born and raised, Dee Dee found herself at a disadvantage. A few weeks after the police nabbed her daughters, they caught up to Carlos and Michael on a day they attended school. The police took them from school to the home of a woman they’d never met, named Velma Jones. “Velma was a big lady,” said Carlos, “about three hundred seventy-five pounds, and she got angry when you made her move.” The children found her terrifying—and their fear was only heightened when she showed them what she did to children who misbehaved: sat on them. That was Michael’s most vivid memory of the first few days, being sat on by Velma Jones. Carlos recalled being taken, with Michael, to the home of Velma’s equally gargantuan twin sister, Thelma, who made them mop out the raw sewage that had spilled into her basement from a burst pipe. It was the first of a long series of unpleasant chores the boys were expected to perform for the fat twins.
BUT THAT WAS JUST the beginning of their misery. The house teemed with other foster children, older and bigger than Michael and Carlos, who picked on them. (When asked how many foster children the State of Tennessee had deposited with her, Velma later said, “I really don’t know. I just got so much love and patience and energies. They just brought ’em to me.”) Velma had a single biological child whom, in Carlos’s view, she spoiled. She sent Carlos and Michael out to sell newspapers on Sundays, and when they returned she took away the money they’d made and gave it to her child. “Living with The Twins wudn’t no happy thing,” said Carlos. “They just treated us like we weren’t people. Every night Mike cried hisself to sleep.” The two boys slept in their first bunk bed, only Michael’s lower bunk couldn’t be called a bed, as it had no mattress. “I was sleeping on wood,” he said. Carlos remembers Michael saying, almost every night, ‘Carlos, I just want to go home.’”
Two nights into their stay Michael ran away, all by himself. (“I can fly.”) He was just seven years old, but still he ran right across Memphis and found his mother. Dee Dee told him that she had to take him right back to the foster home or they would all get in trouble, and Michael cried all the way back. A few weeks later he ran again—with the same result. Once his mother came to visit him. “That was a happy day,” he said. “Yes, that was my one happy day.” He and Carlos stayed with Velma Jones for nearly two years. Then, one afternoon, Velma sat them down and told them they were going to be sent to Knoxville. She might as well have said they were being sent to the moon. Neither had ever left a tiny little area in western Memphis. She told them to go back to their room, pack their few things, and prepare to leave. They went back to their room, ignored their few things, and jumped out the window.
This time it took the police two days to track them down. The Department of Children’s Services had noted by now that Michael was a runner, and they must have requested some sort of psychological evaluation. At any rate, instead of packing him straight back to foster care, they took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital. There he was deposited on what he took to be “the floor for bad kids.” They subjected him to tests that caused him to conclude later that they were seeing if he’d gone crazy. But it wasn’t half-bad; and the living conditions were a vast improvement on the foster home. “We had good food,” he said. “I had a bed with a mattress. They even had videos.”
Michael had just turned ten years old. After two weeks in the hospital, he ached to go home. “It got old,” he said. “You want to be free after a while.” Incredible as it might seem to anyone who knew only the bare facts of his case rather than his emotional predisposition, he missed his mother. It was as if Dee Dee had been put on earth to answer a question: how little can a mother care for her children and still retain their affection? His mother hadn’t cared for him, but still he loved her. “I guess you’re just supposed to love your mom,” he said later. “Just because she’s your mom.” That hard-to-shake feeling would explain why, much later, when he was asked for the first time about his mother and her problems with drugs, he would stare blankly and pretend the subject didn’t bother him. But when asked a second time, his brown eyes filled with tears.
The doors on both ends of the floor were locked. The hospital was old—it would soon be torn down—and Michael noticed that the big metal doors at one end of the hall rattled. “I remember it like it was yesterday, actually,” he said later. “We’d play up and down the floor. And at the end of the floor was an exit. One of those two-door exits that closed together with a lock between ’em. I got a sheet of paper and folded it together and stuck it down there. And it opened.” At his moment of discovery there were too many people wandering around for him to escape cleanly. He kept his secret, and his piece of paper, to himself the rest of the day. “That night when I went to bed I kissed the paper and put it under my little pillow,” he said. Between his room and the locked door a nurse’s station intervened. The nurse at the window could monitor the entire hall. Early the next morning, when the halls were clear, he crawled on his belly directly beneath the window of the nurse’s station. He reached the door without being seen, jimmied it open with his paper tool, and fled.
Now he found himself in a dark, concrete stairwell. Downward he plunged. “Door here, door there, and I was out,” he said. “Like a thief in the night.” (“We never did figure how he got out of there,” said Bobby Spivey, of the Memphis Department of Children’s Services.)
When he reached the street Michael still had no idea where he was. He wound up wandering for hours to cover what he later realized had been no more than half a mile between the hospital and a housing project called Dixie Homes. He arrived to find that his mother had moved again, from Dixie Homes into one of the most depressing public housing projects in Memphis: Hurt Village. Hurt Village had been built for white people back in the 1950s. The opening of its 450 units spread over 29 acres had been hailed by the mayor as “a great day in the history of Memphis.” By the late 1980s it was occupied only by blacks, who were fleeing the place as fast as they could. Hurt Village had become an inferno of gangs and drugs and crime. The city had decided to rip it down, but didn’t have the money to do the job. To spare themselves the expense of relocating the residents, the Memphis Public Housing Authority simply stopped maintaining their apartments. Without functioning air-conditioning, stoves, or refrigerators, the units became so unlivable that anyone who could leave, did. Once they’d left, the city came in and boarded up the abandoned apartment.
It was in Hurt Village that Michael found his mother. He checked in, then ran back to Dixie Homes and hid inside the place she’d vacated. Carlos soon materialized, and together they went on the lam. During the day they remained hidden; at night they came out and foraged. “Every day you were scared that the police might get you,” said Michael. “You see the police, you just duck and dive.” Two weeks later, feeling pretty sure they were in the clear, they left the vacant apartment at Dixie Homes and rejoined their mother at Hurt Village. The Hurt Village apartment had only two bedrooms, and Dee Dee had borne still more children. She kept one bedroom for herself; the seven children now in her charge shared a bed in the other. “Lots of feet, lots of hands, lots of heads—but we managed,” said Michael.
This place in which Michael would grow up over the next five years was, by 1996, a portrait of social dysfunction. Hurt Village still had roughly a thousand residents. There were no two-parent families: zero. Only a tiny handful of the residents held jobs. They had a mean education level between fourth and fifth grade. Seventy-five percent of the adult residents suffered from some form of mental illness. (Drug addiction counted as a mental illness.) Knowing that Hurt Village was soon to be torn down, and replaced with some other social experiment, a group of social scientists from the University of Memphis, funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, began to collect data on the place. “It was its own little community,” said Cynthia Sadler, an anthropologist who worked on the project. “They did not associate with people outside of Hurt Village, and people outside of Hurt Village did not associate with them.” The zip code for Hurt Village, 38105, was social poison outside of Hurt Village. Several residents told the researchers that they’d ceased looking for work because potential employers would see their zip code and reject them out of hand. “In all our travels,” said another researcher, TK Buchanan, “we never came across a single Cadillac welfare queen.”
By the time Michael arrived, Hurt Village was largely controlled by gangs. The Vice Lords were the biggest gang in Memphis, but the Gangster Disciples were the fastest growing and they ran Hurt Village. Delvin Lane ran the GDs, and he had an army of fifty-eight gang members in Hurt Village alone. In the early 1990s Delvin had been a dynamic quarterback for Booker T. Washington High School. He’d been set to go off to the University of Wyoming on a football scholarship. That opportunity vanished when he was sent off instead to jail, on an aggravated assault charge. He remained a natural leader, a quarterback, and, when he got out of jail, he used his talent to administer a huge and growing drug business. The GDs sold several different drugs but crack was most profitable, Delvin said, because it was the most portable and the most easily hidden. The first of the month, when the welfare checks rolled in, he made sure he had plenty of crack cocaine. Dee Dee would be waiting, cash in hand.
For Michael’s first three years in Hurt Village, Delvin was the closest thing to the man in charge. Delvin didn’t actually live in Hurt Village but he held meetings there, and when he and his army rolled in for these they were an impressive sight: a caravan of twenty to thirty fancy cars from which emerged these expensively dressed guys completely unarmed. Everyone knew they had no guns on them, in case the police showed up; everyone also knew that within yards they had stashed an arsenal of Uzis and 380s and sawed-off shotguns, in case the Vice Lords showed up. A twelve-man security squad armed with 17-shot 9mm pistols—two clips apiece—controlled key positions. Flanking Delvin were his two biggest bodyguards. One was called “Tombstone.” Tombstone was six four, 310 pounds, and the most frightening human being anyone had ever seen—until they caught sight of Delvin’s second bodyguard, Rico Harris. Rico was known as “Big Brim,” and he stood six seven and weighed 450 pounds. Big Brim’s official title was “Chief of Security,” and his job, literally, was to watch Delvin’s back. His blind side. “Big Brim was extremely valuable to me,” said Delvin. “Especially in a club environment. Big Brim could hit one person and knock five of them down. If I’m in a club and Brim is there, I got no worries. But if it’s a smaller guy there, I got to find other guys to help.”
For the first eighteen months after he’d fled St. Joseph’s, Michael stayed away from school, for fear of being taken by the authorities. For that year and a half he played what he thought of as a game of hide and seek with the Department of Children’s Services. In retrospect, it was never clear that the State of Tennessee knew the game was on. The amazing thing, thought Michael, was that no grown-up ever turned him in, or even questioned his status. Hundreds of adults saw him on the streets day and night—people from Hurt Village, people who knew his mother—and no one ever wondered what he was doing running around in the middle of a weekday. “No one ever said, ‘What are you doing out of school?’ he recalled. “No one made me do anything.” He guessed that if he hid out for long enough, the bad people at the Department of Children’s Services would give up looking and forget about him. And they did.
By the time he turned twelve years old Michael Oher was completely free of social obligations. He might as well have been alone on a raft floating down the Mississippi River—which flowed, unnoticed, less than a mile from Hurt Village. He stole a bike and rode it wherever he wanted to. He played games from morning until late at night. Every now and then the older guys started shooting their guns at each other—but that was just pure entertainment. “We’d sit on the hill and watch them shoot it out,” Michael recalled. “It was like being in the Wild West.” He didn’t feel himself unsafe; the older guys with the guns left him and the other little kids alone. He played basketball ten and twelve hours a day, and grew ever more certain that he was destined to be the next Michael Jordan. Hurt Village had long since come to epitomize the despair of inner-city life, but it didn’t occur for a minute to Michael to leave. “It was fun,” he said. “Everything was fun. Nobody stopped me from doing anything.”
He still had the old problems: where to find food and clothing. But now that he was older he was more capable of caring for himself. He got better at foraging for food, from neighbors and churches and the street. “I knew that on the first of the month you were supposed to have money to eat,” he said. “Everyone else got food and you got nothing.” He was growing so fast in every direction. Often he’d fall, and sometimes when he’d fall he’d hurt himself. Once he went over the front of his bike and opened a great gash on his elbow. He never went to the hospital; he didn’t even know what stitches were. Instead, he assumed that there was no injury, left untreated, that would not heal. The insight extended into his internal well-being. He must have calculated that emotional connections with other people were more trouble than they were worth, for, with one exception, he stopped making them. The exception came when his basketball got away from him and broke a neighbor’s flower pot. The lady was nice about it; it turned out she was new to Hurt Village and had a son named Craig. Craig Vail was a shy, quiet, small boy, who also loved to play basketball. He and Craig soon became inseparable; and Michael would later say that Craig was the one person in the whole world he fully trusted.