A Father First: How My Life Became Bigger Than Basketball Read Online Free PDF

period. Nothing specific, just plain and simple mother love, like glimmers of light you spot at a distance on the surface of the water, the further you get from the memories.
    Because, unfortunately, all of this was short-lived.
    A new man came into my mother’s life. Young as I was, I understood that he brought the drugs into our place, once it became apparent that the first-level apartment was a prime location for dealers to do their drops, and soon enough as just a place to sell from. What I didn’t understand was how it was he got to come into our house and control our mother, beating her, like she would say, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then attempt to control us. My mom was on dope again before long, all for reasons I couldn’t fathom until much later. She didn’t think that I knew or that I’d ever seen her shoot up. It would have been too shameful for her to accept that I was ever in the room when she was tapping for a vein to hit and putting the needle in.
    Right before I turned five was the first time the police raided the apartment.
    Whenever my mother’s boyfriend or anyone shady was around, Tragil would get us into our bedroom at the back of the apartment and lock the door. No one who ever came around laid a hand on us. But she had always prepared me for the pounding on the front door by the police. Our escape route was to run out the back door and up the outside staircase, two flights to Grandma’s back porch. Tragil would push me out first and then follow. Once again she was willing to sacrifice getting caught as long as she got me out of there first.
    This time, thankfully, we both hit the stairs running at full speed. The police had been staking out the place but hadn’t come around to the back. At the top of the steps, we desperately knocked on our grandma’s back door, calling out for her in loud whispers, “Grandma, it’s me Dwyane!” “Grandma, it’s Tragil, can we come in?”
    No answer.
    Scared to death that she wasn’t there, we were so relieved and lucky to find Uncle Roger at home. We flew inside and then raced to the front window on the other side of the apartment and looked down to see our nightmare: Mom in handcuffs being dragged to the patrol car. They’d found nothing in terms of drugs but they took her anyway only to hold her overnight and release her in the morning.
    And now, a few months later, our grandma was out on the front porch on a rainy spring night, praying and crying because of what drugs had done to her daughters and sons and nephews and nieces and grandchildren. So that’s what caused a switch to flip in my mind—seeing how much pain and stress the madness had brought to her—and I knew for certain right then that this woman, this rock of the family, my grandmother, would not have one more child to cry about when it came to me. And my decision to be different was not one of judgment of right and wrong on anyone else, only that I didn’t want to be the cause of Grandma’s worries and hurt. The thought was unbearable that she could one day be hurting at night for something I’d done or something I was doing.
    And that was that.
    Of course, I had other memories of this period in time out there on the porch where Grandma usually kept her chair just under the overhang. In warmer weather, we’d stay outside farther down on the stoop, sitting there for hours, late into the night. And Grandma would watch the goings-on in the neighborhood, keeping an eye out not just for her own kids and grandkids but for everyone. Nowhere in the world was safer to me than my spot sitting behind my grandma. No matter how many times she’d say, “Go on in, chile, time you go to sleep,” I’d say, “I don’t wanna go to bed, I’m not tired!” and then proceed to curl up right behind her and fall asleep there.
    At sixty-five years old, Willie Mae Morris, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, mother of nine, including my mom, was more to me than a mothering/grandmother