But later that night, I put Jonelle in his arms and he rocked her to sleep. He read the girls a bedtime story. He helped me rub ointment on their ringworm and grease their scalp.
A week after they arrived, Michael came home from work with a shopping bag from Kmart. Inside were four Little House on the Prairie–style dresses, covered in ruffles and bows. I didn’t tell him they were the most ugly-ass dresses I’d ever seen. Instead I just threw my arms around his neck and kissed his face. “I knew you’d come around,” I whispered.
“Seriously, Pat, we really need to talk about this.”
“They’re not going to be here long,” I promised.
Ten years later, the girls were still with us.
Chapter 23
Letting Go
Not long after Sweetie’s girls came to live with us, her caseworker gave us a Section Eight voucher to help with the rent. That changed everything. It meant we could move all the kids into a bigger place. Michael and I spent almost two weeks driving through Atlanta, Decatur, and Marietta looking for a house to fit six kids. One place out by the federal prison was so run down—with holes in the drywall and electrical tape holding together broken windowpanes—that Michael took one step inside and turned right back around. Another place was clean enough, but I noticed a couple of dope boys slinging rock on the corner and told Michael, “We ain’t bringing the kids into this mess.”
Every place we saw was worse than the last. Then we found it: a clean, four-bedroom house on a quiet block in Riverdale, a middle-class suburb about half an hour outside Atlanta. We signed the lease and moved right in. On our first night, Michael and I lay in bed listening to the crickets outside our window. “This is going to be nice for us,” he said. “It’s like we’re getting a brand-new start.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s good out here.”
Michael was quiet for a while. But just when I thought he’d fallen asleep, he said, “Now that we out here, maybe it’s time you started thinking about getting yourself a real job.”
“I got a job,” I reminded him. “I’m an entrepreneur.”
“No. I mean something legal.” That’s how I found out that when Michael said we were “getting a brand-new start” he meant a new start for me.
I thought we had an understanding. I understood that he went to work every day at the mattress factory and paid the rent. And he understood that I sold crack and bought us nice shit. I knew Michael wasn’t crazy about me being a drug dealer, so when I’d come home with a brand-new big-screen TV it was pretty much a don’t-ask-don’t-tell-type situation. He didn’t ask where the set came from and I didn’t tell him about my hustling. That was our arrangement. But now Michael wanted me to get off the streets and straighten up my life.
He started bugging me about it all the time. “Is this how you want to live?” he’d ask. Or “Just put in an application anywhere, get your foot in the door.” Sometimes he’d even try to scare me: “What if you get busted? None of these kids have my last name. If you get locked up, DFACS is gonna take all six of them. Is that what you want?” Michael wouldn’t let up, and I wouldn’t back down. Every time he complained about how I was making money, I’d storm out of the house and go shopping. Pretty soon we had all brand-new furniture.
As much as I hated Michael telling me what to do, I had to admit he had a point. Selling dope wasn’t a good fit for our new lifestyle. One minute I’d be taking Nikia to Little League practice, dressed in a button-down blouse and leather flats; the next I’d be rocking jeans and Jordans and running out to the hood. I was living a double life. But it was more than that. Living in Riverdale forced me to finally face the truth. I couldn’t keep telling myself that selling dope wasn’t hurting anybody.
All I had to do was look around. Our new neighborhood wasn’t filled with crackheads, hookers, and dealers. Riverdale was home to everyday folks who got up, went to work, came home, and played with their kids. It got me thinking about the time, before crack came to town, when Ashby Grove and Baldwin Place were filled with these same types of people. When I first started hustling, I used to tell myself that crack was just another high. But after six years serving addicts, it was obvious; crack ruined everything it touched.
Sweetie had her babies taken away behind that shit, and she wasn’t the only one whose life was ruined. Sometimes I’d lie in bed and think about all the folks I saw lose everything after they got hooked.
I thought about this one lady who used to come by Ashby Grove looking for her daughter. She showed me a picture of a round-faced girl about my age. “She was a history major at Spelman,” the mama said. “Have you seen her?” I glanced at the photo and told the lady, “No, ma’am.” But later it hit me: the girl in the picture was Butterfly.
Only somebody who’s never hustled before would think you can go from slinging crack to becoming a law-abiding citizen overnight. But that’s not how turning your life around works. It’s a process. It takes time. Especially if you’re going from making easy money to minimum wage. Michael wanted me to give up hustling and get a regular job, but quitting cold turkey would be a shock to my system. I had a better idea. I figured I should ease out of selling drugs and into something less risky. Lying on the sofa one afternoon watching The Young and the Restless while the kids were at school, it came to me in a flash: I could run a scheme like Brenda, my idol from Fulton County Jail. Instead of selling drugs in the hood, I could write phony checks at the mall. Except for Brenda, I’d never heard of anybody getting busted for check fraud. It was the perfect scheme, upscale and low risk.
I gave the rest of my dope to my niece Cece so she could make herself some spending money, and settled up my debt with my dealer Lamont. “I’m proud of you, girl,” he said when I told him I was quitting the game. “I always knew you were better than this.”
I was turning my life around, giving up slinging rock to start my classy new enterprise, writing bad checks. I thought for sure Michael would be happy about me taking my hustle in a new direction. But if anything, he was madder than before. “You can’t keep doing this,” he said one evening when I walked through the front door after a hard day of work scheming at the mall. I was carrying five overflowing shopping bags from Macy’s, Foot Locker, and Gymboree, all paid for with forged checks.
“But it’s school clothes for the kids!” I insisted.