One of those twelve children was my grandfather James Dudley Sr., born April 5, 1920. James Sr. spent twelve years in the military as a cook and fought in the Second World War. After his time in the service he taught radio and television at Wenonah Technical School and later on worked as a postman.
James Sr. married Olivia Freeman on September 20, 1941. They had eleven children, the sixth of whom was my father, Ralph Everett Dudley, born August 23, 1955.
Throughout the course of his life my father went by a lot of aliases. Slim Daddy. Ralph Witherspoon. Ricardo Love. For the purposes of this story, a nickname he received as a young boy matters most: Gucci Mane. That’s right. He’s the OG.
See, James Sr. had always fancied himself a dresser. He loved him some nice clothes and expensive leather shoes. He’d spent time in Italy during his years in the service, which is where he fell in love with the Gucci brand.
Originally he’d given the nickname Gucci to one of his nephews, an older cousin of my father’s whom my father used to follow around all the time. Annoyed by his younger cousin always begging to hang and telling him “Come on, man,” he started calling my father the “Gucci Man.” As for how “man” became “Mane,” well, I’m pretty sure that’s just some country, Alabama twang. I’ve got an uncle on my momma’s side they call Big Mane.
My auntie Kaye told me that as a boy my father was sharp, soft-spoken, and sensitive. He was always at the top of his class. He suffered from a speech impediment and would have to spell out words he was trying to say so people could understand him. James Sr., a military man, didn’t always approve of his son’s mild-mannered temperament, and would yell at him for refusing to fight with the boys in the neighborhood.
But as a young man my father came into his own. With his speech impediment gone he became a slick talker, very much a people person. He wore Levi’s and played the guitar and listened to Jimi Hendrix, Peter Frampton, Mick Jagger—all the rock ’n’ roll stars of the sixties and seventies. His bedroom had guitars mounted on the walls and tapestries hanging from the ceiling. He drove a two-seater drop-top convertible, an MG Midget. He was supercool, ahead of his time for a young black man from Alabama.
After graduating from Jess Lanier High School in 1973, my father enlisted in the US Army, spending two years stationed in South Korea. When he returned to Alabama in 1976, he briefly attended college before getting a job making dynamite at the Hercules Powder plant in Bessemer. After that he worked at the Cargill chemical plant. My father took full advantage of the GI Bill and had quite a bit of technical schooling under his belt. The guy was smart as hell.
But I never knew my father as a working man. I never saw him hold a nine-to-five job my whole life. All of that happened before me. I understood my father as a hustler, an alley cat, someone who more than any other person I’ve met was shaped by the streets. But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on all that later.
My momma’s from Bessemer too. Vicky Jean Davis is the daughter of Walter Lee Davis. Walter and his siblings were raised not too far from Montgomery, Alabama, in Autauga County.
Walter was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, where he served aboard “Old Nameless,” the battleship officially known as the USS South Dakota. He was a cook on Old Nameless, but when the Battle of Santa Cruz went down in October 1942, he hopped on one of the antiaircraft machine guns and got it poppin’. He took down a few planes before he got chewed up by one of the Japanese strafers. He got shot up so bad it made it into the papers.
“He looked like one of his own kitchen colanders,” said the captain, Vice Admiral Tom Gatch. “But they couldn’t kill him.” It was a miracle he survived that battle.
When he came home Walter relocated to Bessemer, where he found employment at Zeigler’s, a meat packaging company not unlike Oscar Mayer. He was one of their first black supervisors.
He also met his wife, Bettie. Together they had seven children—Jean, Jacqueline, Ricky, Patricia, Walter Jr., Debra, and Vicky. Bettie had two sons—Henry and Ronnie—from two prior marriages.
My momma’s upbringing wasn’t easy. Around the time of her birth Walter and Bettie took up drinking. Soon enough, violence became an everyday occurrence in the Davis household. To this day my family tells the craziest stories about my grandmomma. Bettie Davis was a mean drunk like you wouldn’t believe. This little lady would get to fighting with somebody at dinner and reach across the dining room table and stab them with a fork. Hell, I heard she shot my granddaddy once.
When she passed away from a stroke at the young age of forty-four, my mother’s sisters had to take on the role of caretaker for their younger siblings. They kept a roof over everyone’s head and food on the table, but there was a lot to be desired. My aunties were only a few years older than my momma and they hadn’t had the best role models themselves.
But as resilient people do, my momma adapted to survive. Vicky Davis always was, and to this day remains, a very smart, hardworking, resourceful woman. And tough. She graduated from Jess Lanier High School in 1975 and went on to get an associate’s degree at Lawson State. After Lawson she enrolled in Miles College, a historically black school in Fairfield, Alabama, where she studied to become a social worker.
That’s around the time she met Ralph Dudley, in 1978. My father already knew the Davis family. He’d been classmates with my aunt Pat at Lanier. But he’d never met my momma. When he did it was instant attraction. They fell in love quick.
My momma already had a son, my older brother, Victor. He goes by Duke. But Duke’s father wasn’t in the picture. Duke’s got another half brother, Carlos, who was born the same month and year he was. So that’s what his daddy was up to then.
During my momma’s pregnancy my father got into trouble with the law. He’d been arrested for having drugs on him—no small crime in the seventies—and was facing time. James Sr. had recently passed away unexpectedly and my grandmother Olivia—whom we call Madear—still had kids to raise. So instead of facing the music, which would cause Madear the undue stress of seeing her son sent to prison, my father fled.
He headed north to Detroit, which was where he was on the day of my birth, February 12, 1980.
Because my father wasn’t around to sign the birth certificate I was born Radric Delantic Davis, taking my mother’s last name. Like my conception nine months before, my first name, Radric, was a product of my parents’ union—half Ralph, half Vicky.
II
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1017
I came up in my granddaddy’s house at 1017 First Avenue—an olive-green, two-bedroom in Bessemer near the train tracks. Inside were my granddaddy, my momma, Duke, and me. But it was never just us.