MY MOTHER

MY MOTHER

My grandmother kept me on the right path. Had I been with my mother, I would probably have been insane. My mother acted like she wished she didn’t have us. She had 3 children, all from different fathers. I think this lack of love is what destroyed my brother and sister in adulthood. I escaped that because I had gotten a lot of love from my grandparents and stepdad. For awhile we all lived together.

I know my stepfather loved me more than he loved his own son. But soon after we moved in with them, I saw my stepfather beat my mother one night, it was so bad that it has traumatized me to this day. He left and soon after that my mother moved us all to the Encinal Projects.

I wanted to live with her to escape the confines of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. My mother was unstable. She wasn’t an alcoholic at that time, but she was drinking a lot. It was constant men at that apartment. This is where she fell for the love of her life, a man we all hated. His name was Roosevelt. In retrospect, he was hostile toward us kids. We hated his guts. But looking back he wasn’t that bad. Later in life we got to know him. He and my brother Harry were in prison together.

I only lived with my mother one year. I went back to the other projects, the Estuary (The Alameda Projects), and lived with my grandparents. It wasn’t long before my mother, Harry and my sister Sharon all moved back in with my grandparents.

We hadn’t been back there for hardly any time before we all moved to Oakland. I was eleven, in sixth grade, and went to school at Manzanita Elementary. It was very white, very segregated there. I had some white friends, but same problem, I couldn’t go to their house.

 

Eventually, the neighborhood started changing and getting poorer and more dangerous. When black families move in there, the whites move out and the blacks are going to get those places.