When the podcast aired that October, I noticed Marc had recorded an introduction. He said that talking to me, “learning about what it means to grow up poor and black in America,” blew his mind.
I appreciate Marc so much for having me on as a guest. It helped me get a deal to write this book. But I don’t know if I want to be the poster child for growing up in the hood. Not everybody has it as bad as I did. Plenty of poor black girls don’t get knocked up by married-man predators, and not every kid has a mama who looks the other way. There are lots of poor folks who work hard and take care of their babies. There are teenage moms who make it out of the hood without ever selling drugs or dropping out of school. I just had the extra bad luck to be born into a family that had been beat down for so long, all that was left to our name was a bunch of hustlers and addicts. I had no one to show me the way.
I could easily have turned out different, ending up like my sister, or Butterfly, or all the other girls who I saw get lost to the streets. Instead, I feel like I was specially blessed. How else can I explain the angels who seemed to come out of nowhere when I needed them most?
Granddaddy and Curtis were the first angels who showed me love. But I was lucky, I had a whole crew. Miss Troup, my angel in badass leather boots, taught me to dream, Duck told me to act right, and Lamont opened my eyes to quality. Miss Munroe and Miss Campbell gave me good guidance and Hubert Hood watched over my kids. And through it all my children, my angel babies, made sure I never, ever, ever gave up.
Of all the angels I had looking out for me, Michael is the boss. He met me when I was struggling and scheming. But he saw the good in me and believed I could do better. He wrapped his arms around me and didn’t let me go.
People ask me all the time how I turned my life around. I used to think it was too complicated to answer without telling my whole life story. But now that I’ve laid it all out in black and white, I realize the answer is really pretty simple: I wanted to turn my life around, and what got me there was love.
Epilogue
December 26, 2013
The place I was looking for was in a part of Decatur, Georgia, I’d never been to before, in the kind of neighborhood I hadn’t driven through in more than a decade. There were houses with busted-out windows and run-down buildings with beat-up sofas and empty soda cans littering their weed-filled yards.
“We in the hood now,” I said to Nikia, who was riding with me, as we scanned the street.
We were looking for an address I’d put in my car’s GPS, searching for Sweetie’s second daughter, Diamond, who I hadn’t seen in years. Her older sister, LaDontay, had contacted me saying Diamond needed help, and asking could I go check on her. LaDontay didn’t call their mama; she called me.
“I don’t know about this,” I said to Nikia.
“Everybody deserves a chance,” he said.
We found Diamond in an upstairs apartment that smelled like dog piss, dirty feet, and weed. Dressed in faded pink sweatpants and with nappy hair, she was standing in the middle of the living room looking dazed. Peeking out from behind her legs was her six-year-old son, Jamal, dressed in a thin windbreaker and winter boots several sizes too large. His younger sisters, aged two and four, clung to Jamal’s bony frame. Cradled in Diamond’s arms, wrapped in a hospital blanket, was her two-week-old baby girl.
Diamond told me she had been waiting on her child’s father to come get her. “But he got locked up,” she said. Now the people she was staying with—her boyfriend’s cousin’s family—wanted her out.
A woman shuffled into the living room and pulled me aside: “Real talk, that nigga she waiting on ain’t never gettin’ out. She needs to get up outta here and go.”
I hadn’t seen Diamond since before Michael and I moved to Indiana, before her son was born. I didn’t know what hardships she’d faced or what choices she’d made or which road she’d traveled down that led her to this particular corner of hell. All I knew is she’d hit rock bottom, and now the bottom was falling out.
I reached out my hand for her little boy and told Diamond to gather up her things. As we carried her one suitcase and a trash bag of possessions to the car, I started rehearsing in my head how I was gonna tell Michael that I was bringing home five more mouths to feed.
Diamond came to live with us in Indiana. I took her to a dentist, who pulled out sixteen of her teeth because they were rotting in her head. And I arranged for her to get some glasses because she could barely see. I helped her get day care for her girls and enroll Jamal in school. One night before bed, I heard him explain to his little sisters in a serious tone, “At Auntie Pat’s we get to eat every single day.”
Diamond got herself a job working the night shift at a bakery, cleaning the giant machines where they make the bread. Then, two years after I’d picked her up in that shit hole of an apartment out in Decatur, she’d saved up enough money to move herself and her kids into their very own place. I was so proud. I told her every day, “Girl, you work hard you can turn your life around!” Michael and I even cosigned so she could get herself a car.
A few months later, she crashed it.
Then she fell behind in her day-care bill and stopped paying her rent. She didn’t tell me any of this. Instead, she just disappeared.
I don’t know exactly where she is now. I saw a picture of her on Facebook a few weeks ago. She was in the backseat of a car, her head rolled to the side, her eyes barely open, wearing a bright blond wig and the glasses I’d gotten her. I guess whatever demon she’s fighting won this battle. But I’m not giving up on Diamond. I raised that girl for ten years. I know she can find her way back.
In the meantime, her kids are living with me and Michael in the suburbs. Michaela and Junebug watch over them after school and Michael reads to them every night.
“I love you, babies,” I said this morning while getting them dressed for school. “And I want you to know something important. No matter what kind of hard times you face, remember you can do anything and be anything you want in life.”
I pulled them to me and held them close, my mind thinking back to all the angels who’d kept me safe, given me hope, and helped me find my way. “Remember,” I whispered, “All you have to do is dream.”
How This Book Came to Be
I first heard Ms. Pat when she was a guest on Ari Shaffir’s Skeptic Tank podcast in June 2014. I remember walking my dog and listening to Pat’s nonstop laughter as she described becoming a mother, selling crack, and getting shot in the head, all before her seventeenth birthday.