Tennessee Connection

My mother is the backbone of our family. She got married at fourteen—my father was twenty-one—and had her first child at fifteen. We had a little grocery store/diner that my dad's family owned. My dad, Donald Wright, was an only child. His mother gave him away to one of her sisters to raise. He didn't know who his father was, and still doesn't to this day.

He joined the army after dropping out of high school at age seventeen, when he was in ninth grade. (He got held back two or three times.) He served in Korea, was based in Japan for some time, came back to the United States, and went into the air force reserves. When he met my mom, she was twelve and he was nineteen. He would come home on leave and see my mom, because her mother lived only two houses down from the store that his family owned.

When my father got out of the military, he took over running the store, but it wasn't that successful in the beginning. My mother started working, got married, and got pregnant. She dropped out of school in the eighth or ninth grade and had to work at the store to help pay the bills.

I had a sister, Tawana, who passed away from SIDS (sudden infant death syndrome) at three months old. She was the fourth oldest of my siblings. Before her were Milton, Dexter, and Tobytha. My mom was only eighteen when she lost Tawana. She was twenty-one when I came along, the sixth of nine children. My grandmother was her midwife. My other older sibling is Deborah; my younger siblings are Rebecca, Myron, Joseph, and Cheryl.

I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, April 8, 1961. Income was always hard to come by, and my dad worked all kinds of odd jobs to support his growing family. I was born just three months after the inauguration of President Kennedy, and change was in the air. It was a time of hope and anticipation. It was a time of westward expansion, of California dreaming. The Dodgers were already in town, and the Lakers had recently arrived from Minneapolis.

I was less than three months old when my dad decided to pack our things and move the family to LA, without telling anyone. Personally, I think we left Tennessee in the dead of night because he was fleeing from his problems. He was a drinker and a gambler who had debts.

I also remember not being able to walk properly until age three. I wore corrective shoes and leg braces, like Forrest Gump. I remember constantly having to go to Children's Hospital to have adjustments made to the shoes and braces. Because of this, my parents never thought I'd be able to play sports.

Though my dad has always been with us, he hasn't always been the primary breadwinner. My mom has always worked to keep the family afloat. She went to work every day, catching the bus a lot, and paid the bills. She paid for the things I needed to participate in sports. There were times we had to go on welfare and food stamps, but we always had a roof over our heads and food on the table.

My dad was strict. We suffered through a lot of family dysfunction because my parents fought a great deal when we were young. My dad smoked and drank, and now none of my siblings do that. We saw what it did to him, and we didn't want to be like that. We wanted to be like our mom, who went to church and tried to give us a weekly allowance. My dad did want us to be successful, professional people.

We stayed in a hotel when we arrived in California, all eight of us. Mom found a job as a school cafeteria cook, and later worked as a domestic and an in-home nurse. My dad found all kinds of odd jobs, mostly door-to-door sales. He delivered phone books. Later he sold suits, clothes, dresses, jewelry, perfumes, and framed prints of President Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He also went to school to study carpentry and brick laying, but had trouble finding jobs because blacks weren't allowed in those unions at the time. These are some of the earliest images that remain in my mind about my childhood.

My dad was always a physical presence in the household. He was always very strict, and when we were growing up, my siblings and I didn't feel he was as close or as loving as most people thought. As far back as I can remember, I watched my mom go to work, all day, every day. Back then we didn't have a car, so she'd walk to the bus stop and ride to Santa Monica for her job at the school cafeteria. (That job was similar to the one she had in Tennessee when she was fourteen.)

I started working with my dad when I was four years old. He wouldn't take me with him and hold my hand. He would leave me with a bundle of stuff, and then tell me he'd meet me at a certain time at a certain intersection. That went for my siblings as well. We were all affected by that. We all hated the word sales. People tried to cheat me, thinking I didn't know how to count. People would try to steal stuff from me too. They would try things on in another room and not bring everything back. What was a boy who was four, five, or six years old supposed to do? It was mostly men who took advantage of me. Sometimes we'd work from eight or nine in the morning until eleven at night. A lot of times our car broke down, and we'd have to work on it or sleep in it. When we started school, we'd have to come straight home afterward, because we'd have stuff to do. I was attacked by dogs, some of which were sicced on me by their masters. There were the winos and drunken people who'd cuss at me, chase me, and attack me. For a four-year-old, that was a tough thing to go through.

As our finances improved, we moved from the hotel room to a one-bed, one-bath house near the station for the Newton Division LAPD. It took some time to find it because few landlords were renting affordable housing to large families. But this one woman made an exception with our family. Her name was Corine Thomas, but my siblings and I simply referred to her as Miss Corine. She stands out in my childhood memories because she really got to know our family. Miss Corine spent a lot of time with me as a toddler, when my older siblings were off at school. She told me I was special, and she taught me to share. We lived there until I was three, then we moved to another back house on Jefferson Boulevard. Miss Corine was still our landlord as well as our friend and babysitter to Myron, Becca, and me. She made me feel like her own child.

Unfortunately, our stay in the Jefferson home was short-lived. We were displaced by a fire, which destroyed everything we owned except our lives, the clothes on our backs, and, of course, our resolve.

After the fire, we moved to the Ramona Gardens housing project in East LA. This was the neighborhood where I began kindergarten. It was also the one where I got into my first fight. Not just myself, but my brothers as well. It was the first neighborhood we lived in where we looked different from most of our neighbors. I remember wanting to join a gang, since that's what I saw around me. That's what I was exposed to. I was too young to hang out with my...