CHAPTER ONE
It always started at a low rumble, drifting through our bedroom wall.
I would pull my pillow (if I was lucky enough to have one that night; otherwise, my coat or whatever else I happened to be sleeping on) up over my head, hoping that if I blocked out the sound, it meant that it would stop.
But it almost never stopped.
Soon enough, the rumble would increase in volume, becoming sharper and more distinct, until it very clearly became two human voices—the low, harsh tones of my mother’s most recent boyfriend, and the higher, angry and frightened sound of my mother.
The pillow didn’t help anymore. Neither did the blanket that I would pull up over the pillow. Their voices only grew louder, throwing around accusations and curses, calling each other bitch and asshole, hurling insults and threats … they might as well have been standing right there in the room with us.
All six of us kids would be awake by then: David and Bee, me and Kareema, Gerb and baby Washika, all holding our breaths and squeezing our eyes shut and hoping against hope that somehow what we knew was coming next just wouldn’t happen this time.
But it always did.
A smack. A crash. The sound of a fist hitting flesh. Broken glass. A shout. A scream. The door smashing open and the thud of a body falling to the floor, sometimes tumbling down the stairs.
We’d huddle like baby mice in a nest, quaking and crying as we listened to the sound of our mother’s screams. Until her voice would finally hit a note that was so desperate and pleading that we wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore and we’d all tumble out into the hall as one, blinking our eyes in the bright light, moving in a herd toward the bathroom where he had his knees pinned down on our mother’s arms, one hand over her mouth, forcing her head down onto the floor next to the toilet—her legs kicking desperately, her dark eyes wide with fear—the other hand in his pocket, grasping his gun and telling her he was going to fucking shove it in her mouth and shoot her fucking bitch brains out.
* * *
Later, after our next-door neighbor called the cops and the boyfriend finally got off my mother, and my mother—with blood dripping from her mouth, and a bruise already forming on her cheek, with her hands still trembling and her voice coming out in a strangled, raspy whisper—answered the door and insisted that everything was fine and refused to press charges—later, after all that, the boyfriend lined us up and sheepishly handed out five- and ten-dollar bills like he always did. It was his way of proving that he wasn’t really a monster, that he took care of all these kids that weren’t even his. He told us that he was sorry that we’d had to see what our mother had forced him to do to her again.
* * *
When my mother, Lazette, was a little girl, she was fast and strong. Faster and stronger than any of the boys in her class. She didn’t like to hang out with girls. She would rather run races down her street and play football in the vacant lot with the neighborhood boys. She played basketball and climbed trees and jumped fences. She had dreams that maybe if she was strong enough and fast enough, she might somehow run right out of The Bottom.
But my mom was also beautiful, with her brown, flashing eyes and wide, warm smile. Pretty soon the boys who used to race against her and tumble around with her in the park started seeing her in a brand-new way.
She had her first baby, David, when she was fourteen years old. My mother loved her new son, but the adjustment from being a child to being a mother was brutal. At first, she wanted to continue to act like a kid, slipping away to hang out with her friends after her baby fell asleep, messing around on the street corner, but her mother, Sheila, was not having any of that. She insisted that her daughter stay home and care for her baby, and when my mom didn’t listen, my grandma would march on out and drag her home by the ear if necessary.
Even after my mother had David, my mom still thought there might be a way out—that maybe she could be strong enough to carry him with her. But then, not more than a year later, she had her second baby, and then four more of us—with three different men, none of whom had a hand in raising us—all before she turned thirty. And as every kid came along, the losses started piling up. Her sister died of AIDS. One of her brothers was shot dead in the street; the other lost his legs to diabetes. It became clear that it didn’t matter how strong or fast my mother once was; we were too heavy a responsibility. There was no way out, and the only thing left that she could possibly do for us was teach us all how to survive right where we were.
* * *
My mother never let us go hungry; there was always food in our house. We had new clothes and shoes when we really needed them, and she made sure we went to the doctor and the dentist. And we always had a roof over our heads, even if all six of us had to share a room and a bed, or sometimes sleep on the floor. She had an open-door policy; cousins and aunts and uncles, friends and friends of friends, anytime anyone asked, they could stay with us, as long as they needed. Even if it meant that we kids were pushed out of our beds, even if it meant stretching things as far as they would stretch and then some. Sometimes we wouldn’t have heat or hot water, but she’d boil water on the stovetop so we could bathe, tell us to put on our coats and hats and mittens, hang sheets over the entryways, and turn on the oven in the kitchen and let it warm up as much of the first floor as it could. We’d all sleep in a puppy pile on the living-room floor, our breaths puffing out in little white clouds, but our hands and toes warm from the body heat of seven of us curled up against each other.
My mother hustled to take care of the basics in every way she could. She always had at least one job. Minimum wage. She’d dropped out of school when she got pregnant at thirteen, so her options were limited. Fast food, janitorial work, the corner store. She also had her weekly welfare checks. And she had the occasional boyfriend, most of whom she kept around much longer than she should. Even after they turned mean, even after they hurt her, even after things started to burn down around her and fall to pieces.
When I was a kid, I used to wonder why she stayed with these guys, how she could stand it, but now I can see that our food, our shoes, our dental and doctor bills, the rent, the utilities, the never-ending needs of six children, it all had to be paid for somehow, and these guys contributed. And really, she was not much more than a kid herself. She was growing up alongside us. These men were older and wiser, she thought. She says that they were helping her mature. She says she loved them, or at least, loved some of them. But sometimes I wonder if the real truth was that our mother stayed because we needed so much, and these men sometimes came through with money for us when she couldn’t, and if that meant she took a beating, it was worth it to her.
* * *
The six (seven if you included my mom) of us grew up in West Philadelphia on Viola Street. Think block upon block of narrow row houses, some filled to the brim with family and extended family, some boarded up or burned down, leaving a space in the row like a missing tooth in a smile. There weren’t any gangs in our neighborhoods, but you had your people based on where you lived and maybe a five-block radius in every direction around that. That was your safe zone. If you had blood relatives—cousins or aunties or uncles—who lived farther out, you might be okay on their block, too. But other than that, you stuck to your streets, your neighborhood, and knew the consequences if you drifted too far abroad.
Parents in our neighborhood had two choices when it came to raising their kids. They could try to make them safe by keeping them locked up, by taking them by the hand and walking them to school, and doing their best to steer them away from the drugs and sex and guns and violence that were right out there on street for anyone to see. They could whisk them home at the end of the day and lock their doors and pull their curtains and not even talk about what was out there. Or they could do what our mother did, which was to take us everywhere and let us see everything up close. We saw the drug dealers and the prostitutes and the guns and the makeshift altars of wooden crosses and scattered flowers on the street that meant someone had been killed there. We saw the knock-down, drag-out fights and people smoking crack and men drinking in the empty lots. We saw women selling themselves for drug money and men hustling on the corners. From the time we were babies, our mom would throw open our door and we’d come out trailing after her into the streets like ducklings in a row, and she’d introduce us to it all, letting us talk to these people and watch it all up close and hoping that by making us see how she dealt with it—showing us the danger—we would turn hard enough and smart enough to know what to do when we inevitably had to face all that stuff alone.
It was no surprise that with all the pressure in her life—the neighborhood and the money worries and the shitty jobs, the violent men and the never-ending needs of six kids—my mother had to find ways to escape. She often disappeared with the men she dated, sometimes for days at a time. Left us with our grandmother or an older cousin, or on our own once my big brothers hit an age where they could keep track of us all. And even when she was home, she let us run wild; with no curfew, no rules to follow, the only time she corrected us was when she didn’t get her own way. We had good home training, we knew how to be polite and say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am,” we had some table manners and knew to say please and thanks, but the rest was left up to us—whether we went to school, whether we came home at night, who we ran with, what we did with our time. I was a mama’s boy, but even I learned quick that I could only depend on my brothers and sisters and myself, that my mom only had so much she could give. She was practically a kid herself, and we needed so much. Trying to keep us all in line on top of just trying to keep us safe and alive was more than most anyone could handle.
She had other ways to escape. She was a functional addict, coke and weed and booze, for as long as I could remember. She’d bring strangers and friends into the house at night and we’d wake up to the thick skunky smell of last night’s weed in the air, empty crack vials strewn on the kitchen table, tipped-over beer bottles dripping their last dregs onto the floor.
She didn’t use all the time, but I hated it when she did. I could always tell when she’d been partying because even if she was physically there, she was absent in almost every other way, sitting on the couch, her eyes dull and her face slack. I’d ask her a simple question and her response would be delayed just enough to let me know that she wasn’t present, that once again, she had chosen the drugs over us.
She sobered up sometimes. She’d go to Narcotics Anonymous and swear she was turning over a new leaf. For a month or two, she’d stay home with us, clear eyed and aware. But then, something unbearably bad would happen like it always did; she’d lose her job, or someone we knew and loved would get shot, or she’d find a new man who was just as much of an asshole as the last man she’d been with. And she couldn’t run fast anymore, so she’d have to find another way out.
* * *
Viola Street wasn’t all bad. There was a sense of everyone being in it together. If you needed to borrow money for gas or food or rent, and your neighbor had a few extra bills, you could be sure they’d give it to you. The children played in the streets and the adults didn’t hesitate to call you out if you were doing something foolish, even if you weren’t their kid. Most doors were open and everyone knew each other’s business and when something went wrong, they helped when they could, because we were all in the same barely floating boat, and if we didn’t have each other, we didn’t have anyone.
My siblings and I made up our own little group. We ran in the streets like our mom once had, playing basketball at the schoolyard and football in the empty lots. We poked around in puddles and through the grass, looking for frogs and bugs; we caught fireflies in the summer and threw snowballs in the winter. Even in a place as full of need and violence as our neighborhood was, even with our mom getting beat up, even with her and my grandmother using, our fathers nothing more than drunk strangers we passed on the street every once in a while, we were still children, and there was still joy.
But we never forgot that we were in a dangerous place. We saw people get beaten up by the cops, buying and selling on the street corners, shot down where they were standing. We lost people, over and over, uncles and cousins and friends. Dying young was just the way things were.
And we knew that even if we managed to survive, we’d just end up living through the same hard times, the same fear, the same need, that our mother had been living her whole life. And so, on those cold winter nights, when we were all huddled up together on the living-room floor, trying to sleep, we’d whisper to each other about how our family was going to be different. How our family was going to get out.
We just didn’t know how yet.
CHAPTER TWO
It was my big brothers David and Bee who first found the Work to Ride stables. David was twelve and Bee was ten. As they tell it, they were riding their bikes on a gray and cold Sunday morning when they decided to explore Fairmount Park, a huge swath of green space only twenty minutes from our neighborhood. They took a turn at a dead-end road that they’d never been down before and screeched to a stop, staring at the long, curved lines and vine-covered walls of a sprawling and worn-down barn. Fenced corrals were on both sides, and inside the corrals—heads bent to the ground, moving slowly through the mist as they grazed—were the horses.
My family loved animals. We were always dragging home stray dogs and feeding mangy cats, hiding half a dozen snapping turtles in our back shed, capturing frogs and snakes, putting whatever insects we could find into empty tomato-sauce jars stuffed full of grass and leaves, and then begging our mom to let us keep whatever poor creature we’d carried through the back door. When our dog Tummy (so named because she had a swollen belly full of worms when I found her) first came home, I would wake up early each morning and creep into my mom’s room, quietly cleaning up whatever mess the dog had left in the night before my mom could open her eyes and see it and decide Tummy was more trouble than she was worth.
But horses were our favorites.
Even if you’re not from Philly, I’m sure you’ve heard of the Liberty Bell and cheesesteaks and Will Smith. You probably know all about Ben Franklin, the City of Brotherly Love, and the Declaration of Independence. But there are also some things you probably don’t know about my city. You might be surprised to learn that less than a ten-minute drive from the Ivy League campus of University of Pennsylvania there are neighborhoods so messed up that any baby boy born there has a good chance at either being shot or incarcerated by the time he turns twenty. You might not know that Philly has one of the highest poverty rates in the U.S. or that many of our public schools are desperately starved for funds.
But the thing that seems to shock most people about Philadelphia, above all else, is when I tell them about the horses in our neighborhood.
Imagine walking down an inner-city block; there are the usual papi stores (our name for bodegas), folks sitting out on their stoops and hanging on the street corners, men drinking in empty lots and kids running wild, and then, out of nowhere, a Black man comes charging down the street on a full-grown horse.
In my neighborhood, that could happen anytime.
There is a history of horses and horsemanship in The Bottom that goes back a century or more. Men who still call themselves Black Cowboys keep horses in their tiny backyard sheds or garages, they graze them in empty lots, they ride them through the streets and race them down the Speedway (a long stretch of uneven path in Fairmount Park), making bets on the winners. Some of these guys have created clubs made up of a few horses that were on their way to being turned into dog food when they saved them from the livestock auctions in New Holland. They’d bring them home, fatten them up, and then welcome in kids from the streets to learn to groom and ride.
Kids in our neighborhood might not ever learn to swim or be offered much of an education, we might see way more bad shit, way too young, than any kid ever should, but most of us had taken advantage of the cheap pony rides offered in the neighborhood and at least sat on a horse by the time we started walking. Most of us know what the staccato beat of hooves hitting the concrete sounds like. Most of us have had the chance to feel the way a horse will blow his warm breath into your hand if you cup it to his nose. And when you’re around horses like that, even when you’re in a neighborhood as hard as ours was, you can’t help falling a little bit in love.
Or at least that’s what happened to me and my brothers.
Back in the park and mesmerized by the ponies, my brothers abandoned their bikes and crept up the path toward the barn, absolutely sure they were going to get shouted at and chased off at any moment. They stuck their heads in through the barn door, taking their first deep breath of that sweet, acrid smell of hay and manure and dampness and mud, and the unmistakable warm, musky scent of the horses themselves. They took one step in, and then another, silently daring each other on until they turned the corner. Then they stopped, wide eyed and shocked.
The stable was full of kids. Kids shoveling out stalls, kids carrying flakes of hay, kids currying their ponies, saddling up and then leading them out of the barn; some kids so young that they could hardly lift a shovel or reach their horse’s mane. And all these kids looked like my brothers, they looked like they were from our part of the hood. David and Bee didn’t know what to think. They kept looking around, trying to find the adult in charge. It was like some strange fairytale where children had magically taken over the village.
“Hey, you two.”
Bee and David almost jumped out of their skins when a stern-looking white lady with long blond hair rounded the corner and caught them both standing there, mouths hanging open.
They turned in unison, ready to run.
“You guys want to meet the horses?” she asked.
* * *
Bee came home that night with a chunk out of his face where a horse named Devil had reached over the fence and bitten him. He had a big white bandage on his cheek, and would end up with a livid scar, but he didn’t care. He and David had found the best place in the world, he declared, and the lady who ran it said that if they kept their grades up and stayed out of trouble, they could come back every day and she’d teach them to ride for free.
I was wild with jealousy. I wanted to be where my big brothers were. There were not a lot of men in my life. My father was a stranger who spent his days drinking in a vacant lot around the corner from where we lived. I used to pass right by him on an almost daily basis and he never even so much as nodded at me. I was close to my mother and my grandmother, but I craved the attention of my big brothers so bad it made me itch.
Even before my brothers found the barn, they weren’t around the house much anymore. They were gone more than not, but at least I still had access to them. If they were just hanging out in the neighborhood, they’d sometimes let me tag along, and even when they didn’t, it was easy enough to find them when I wanted to. They couldn’t go far. But once they started going to Work to Ride, they were out of my range. There was no tracking them down; they were just gone. And I was stuck at home with Kareema and Gerb and Washika—a bunch of babies, as far as I was concerned.
I begged David and Bee to take me with them, but they just shook their heads and laughed.
“You’re not big enough,” said Bee.
“And you’re a little punk, basically afraid of everything,” said David.
They weren’t wrong. I was scared shitless of pretty much everything. Unlike my fearless brothers who always dove in headfirst, I preferred to hang back and watch from afar, get a full measure of the situation before I decided to get involved. I was all eyes and ears. And if something seemed even remotely dangerous (which, let’s face it, most everything in our lives was) I would walk half a dozen blocks out of my way to avoid it altogether. Those teeth marks on Bee’s cheek would normally have been enough to keep me home, but I couldn’t stand my brothers’ absence. I pestered them endlessly, and when they wouldn’t give in, I pulled out the big guns and started whining to my mom instead. It took about two weeks to wear her down, but she finally told my brothers that if they didn’t take me with them, they couldn’t go at all.
They were probably pissed that they had to drag me along that first morning, but all I remember about that day was just how happy and excited I was. They had been talking about nothing else but the barn and riding for weeks now, and I already felt like I knew every horse in the place. I was shivering as we made the twenty-minute walk from our neighborhood to the stables, but I couldn’t tell you if it was from the early winter cold, or if it was from excitement, because I was with my big brothers and we were going to the place they described as a paradise.
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