First came Vietnam, then drug addiction. Somehow, God helped me survive.
I was born in Alabama in 1948, during the time of Jim Crow. My grandfather had been a slave there, and my father a sharecropper.
I grew up during the time of the Great Migration, when millions of Blacks left the American South to settle in the Northern, Midwestern, and Western states. My dad’s cousin found freedom from sharecropping in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio.
My father followed soon thereafter, saving enough money to eventually bring our entire seven-member family as well. I don’t remember much about that 1951 journey, but my parents told me about the lean and hard times we faced while living in a one-room apartment.
I don’t know when it began, but my father fell prey to alcoholism. I remember coming home from school and finding him passed out on the front porch of the four-room apartment we eventually inhabited. My mother drank during parties, but her real problem was rage.
When I was a kindergartner, I carried a prized drawing home to show my mom, and as I rushed in the door, I saw her kissing a man who wasn’t my father. In shock and confusion, I ran to my room. When my father arrived, I told him what I saw, and he went verbally ballistic on my mom. Dad left the house and abandoned me to my mother’s previously unseen rage.
As she beat me bloody with an extension cord, she yelled, “Don’t you ever tell on me again!” Afterward, she threw me into a closet, and as I cried, she warned me, “Shut up. If you don’t, I’ll beat you again.”
Fighting to survive
So began many beatings throughout my adolescence. My older brothers bullied me too. I realized my survival depended on my ability to fight.
Oddly, through it all, I loved my mom and knew she loved me. …
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