Everybody's Brother Read Online Free PDF Page B

and biscuits.
    I used to love watching Mom preach, which she didpart time. But when she really got into the Spirit, it sometimes scared the mess out of me and Shedonna. We used to go to tent revivals, and Shedonna and I would huddle together when our mother got in the line for a special prayer. We were afraid she would catch the Holy Ghost and pass out. And then what would we do? She caught the Holy Ghost a lot at that Baptist Church. It scared me to see her flailing around like that, but it also gave me an opportunity for some mischief. Shedonna remembers at least two times when I’d fake the Holy Ghost and fall on the floor. My mother would not be amused.
    A few years later we switched to a full gospel church called the Fellowship of Faith. They used to speak in tongues, which also scared the mess out of us. The first time we saw them gargling and jabbering and carrying on, Shedonna looked at me and said, “I mean, are these people crazy? What is this, voodoo?!” Whatever it was, we wanted no part of it, and we’d sneak out when we knew that part of the service was coming up. We’d sit in the car for a while then get back in place before church was over and Mom found us.
    There were a lot of good things about church too. Most of it musical. Every Friday night we had to go to what’s called “family enrichment” and then go to church very early every Sunday morning. To make it more fun, I started singing in the choir and doing Bible raps for the congregation. We learned all the books of the Bible from something called “Bible Break,” which I quickly memorized. “Lo’s gospel raps became a phenomenon at ourchurch,” Shedonna remembers. “So Lo could save souls even when his was in danger.”
    It turns out that Shedonna understood me pretty well—maybe better than I understood myself at the time. She knew that while I was singing like an angel at church, bad things were starting to happen out on the street. The devil was sitting on my shoulder, and there was a battle going on inside me for my very soul.

Born into these crooked ways
    I never even ask to come so now
    I’m living in the days
    I struggle and fight to stay alive
    Hoping that one day I’d earn the chance to die
    Pallbearer to this one, pallbearer to that one
    Can’t seem to get a grip ’cause, my palms is sweatin’…
    —
Goodie Mob, “I Didn’t Ask to Come”

SCHOOL DAYS
    Here I am apparently doing some higher learning while a student at Riverside Academy, a place that had a big impact on my life in a short time.

P eople called me “Chickenhead.” Then they ran the other way.
    Today, the world knows me as that sweet, soulful black guy on some hit TV show. But I haven’t come this far in my life to have to bullshit anybody. I come to speak the truth—my truth. I may look as if I’ve always been a pussycat, like Purrfect, that pretty white creature you may have seen me stroking so lovingly and gently on
The Voice
. Please trust me, I haven’t always been that way. Not even close. However you want to spell the word, I am rather far from perfect—and somewhere deep in the Atlanta police files, I no doubt have the juvenile record to prove it.
    So here is a little taste of reality for you. Just like all the most interesting heroes in your finer comic books, the truth is that right from the beginning, I’ve always had a little villain deep inside me too. I’m kind of like Two-Face in reverse. Which is interesting, because I’m a Gemini, and two faces come naturally to me. Then and now, I try to embrace all sides of my own character, especially now that I seem to be living such a happy ending. They say that before you can get high, you’ve got to get low, and as a kid growing up in Atlanta, I got pretty low—and as you’ll see, eventually I got pretty damn high too.
    So let us then get real. Back in the day, before I became the lovable, ready-for-prime-time character who I am today, I was a damned effective little criminal—with the