I Beat the Odds Read Online Free PDF Page B

like it. It might be hours or it might be days. It was pretty bad getting locked out of our own home, but it was probably better than seeing her and her friends all strung out.
    We moved around to a number of different places when I was younger. My mother couldn’t seem to hold on to any place, even in the ghetto. We lived for a while in a housing project in North Memphis called Hyde Park. Parts of it have been redone, but it was and still is one of the most dangerous parts of the city. We got shuffled around to lots of different units because my mother couldn’t stay current on the rent or bills or just keep the place from getting condemned. We went without power a lot. We were homeless and living under a bridge for a couple of weeks. That was pretty awful.
    When I was four or five, we lived with my grandmother Aeline, my mother’s 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