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By Root 242 0

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