It was always the same story while I was growing up. “Darryl, we’d like you to take a special test for us.” Then would come the questions. “Does your mother read to you at home?” “Did someone help you write this story?” “Can you write another one in front of us?” Teachers always had a hard time believing that, somehow, I might be really smart. I don’t blame them for their surprise at my intelligence. I was a poor black kid. I didn’t fit into their idea of ‘genius’. The thing is, intelligence exists in equal ratios in every community, regardless of income or race. The difference is how that intelligence is nurtured. I grew up around all kinds of smart people, but one by one, they all flickered out. Poverty has a way of smothering even the brightest flames. As the burden of life becomes increasingly heavy, kids stop being curious, stop caring about school, and give up hope for a better future. We start life with resilience, but we all have our breaking points. A person can only take so much disappointment, and growing up poor is a life of constantly being told ‘no.’ I decided at a young age that it wasn’t God watching over my family: it was my mother. And I could see the life being drained out of her as she tried her best to do it all. It wasn’t God who kept me safe, it was those few friends who’d join me in a fight, even when we were outnumbered and
sure to lose. If there was a God, I reasoned, why did he think it was okay that my mother had to work so hard every day for so little? Why did my family and the families of those around me have to suffer so much? The world was a cruel place, and I didn’t see where a benevolent God could fit. “What do you think happens when we die?” my sister asked one day when we were playing outside. “Nothing,” I replied, drawing with my stick in the dirt. “I think you die and that’s it.” I was five years old, and my sister was seven. We were a Christian family, but looking back, I think my logical young mind simply couldn’t reconcile itself with the concept of heaven when God so clearly played favorites. Being born poor felt like a curse that sucked the soul right out of me. Many in my community doubled down on their faith while I walked away from mine. No one was coming to save me or any of us. My parents got divorced when my mother was five months pregnant with me. At twenty-nine, she went from being a full-time homemaker (at my father’s behest) to becoming a single mom and the sole provider for herself and her four children. My mother was the only person who was always there for us. She worked tirelessly to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and love us. She cried and struggled like everyone else’s parents, but she kept trying—and she never left. She did this all while never earning more than $30,000 a year, and most years we came nowhere close to that figure. As a child, I never thought we had it all that bad. Everyone around us was poor. On a relative basis, we seemed to be doing well. We missed a few meals here and there, but we never went more than a day without eating. Our clothes were used but clean. My mother did her best to keep her children at a safe distance from the chaos of our world, and when she wasn’t able to, we got through our trauma one way or another. Anyone who grew up poor will understand when I say that I grew up poor, but not dirt poor. Many of my friends, neighbors, and relatives weren’t so lucky. They grew up with nothing. Life was stressful. If any word can summarize poverty, it’s stress. You
CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 9 stress about rent. You stress about bills. You stress about food. You stress about losing hours. You stress about crime. You stress about the police. You stress about your children. You stress about your parents. You stress about health. You stress about life. You stress about death. Poverty is all-consuming. And it’s that way by design. Socio- economically speaking, if you want to keep the poor under control, you need to saddle them with overwhelming burdens. That way, they never have the time to question why so much is falling on their shoulders while so little falls into their coffers. My mother was no different than every other struggling single mother. She was tired, always tired. We share tales of incredibly strong black women who raise kids all by themselves as if they’re uplifting stories—but they’re not. I watched my mother cry, just like my aunts, my sisters, and all the other women doing the job of a village by themselves. It’s too much. Her life was an endless sacrifice. She never bought herself new clothes. She pretended she wasn’t hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She didn’t sleep enough. She never went to therapy to heal her childhood traumas. She was able to make it through it all, and today is deservingly proud of everything she overcame in life, but she didn’t get the life she deserved because she had to do everything alone. Few things hurt the way seeing your mother in pain as a child hurt. I had a seriousness about my demeanor by the age of five that only poverty and struggle can manufacture. I tried my best to be strong and mature for my mother. I stayed out of trouble and did whatever I could to make life a little easier for her. I wasn’t a perfect kid by any means, but I always kept my mother in mind when I was making decisions, and I tried not to do anything to embarrass her. A lot of the silent trauma that existed in our family made outward affection difficult for us—as it does with many families—but we did our best to be there for one another. Although I can’t say I truly appreciated my mother’s love when I was a child. I’m talking about the kind of love that motivates someone to wake up every single day, catch a bus, go to a job they hate, catch another bus, come into a messy home with arguing
kids, clean up, cook, solve quarrels, and keep everyone alive. That level of love isn’t easy for a child to comprehend. I complained and was bratty about not getting cuddled and showered with the loving attention I thought families were supposed to give. I always respected my mother, but poverty kept us from having the warm relationship we should’ve had. She couldn’t pick me up and smother me with kisses or go outside and run around with me. She didn’t have time to do science projects with me or sit and talk about how things were going with my friends. A hard life made her incredibly tough and determined to keep her children healthy, out of trouble, and in school. But like most mothers playing the role of a village, she didn’t have much else to give after all of that. It wouldn’t be until adulthood that I understood and appreciated how much love my mother poured into all of us. I’ll never be able to thank her enough for that love. Ultimately, what my mom showed me was that you have to keep fighting, regardless of the circumstances you’re in. You must do whatever you can to get out of that situation. She accepted the burden of poverty but did everything she could to help her children find a way out of it. There isn’t much room for being a child when you’re poor. There’s so much burden saddling down every adult, the children are forced to step into their own almost immediately. Life is about survival; there’s no time for childhood innocence and love. Despite the stress we faced being poor, we didn’t live under a shadow of doom and gloom. I’ve always found poor folk to be a lot more fun than other groups. When you face that much struggle, you learn to smile and let it go. You try to appreciate the good moments and be grateful for what you have. Poor people are also some of the most generous people because they have so little to give; we understand the importance of community and will lend, give, and help out friends and family in whatever ways we can. I played outside with my friends every day from sunup to sundown. I never was enrolled in any camps or shuttled from one activity to the next.
CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 11 The morning routine was to gather all of my friends and find free ways to entertain ourselves, ideally without getting into too much trouble. We didn’t have family events often, but when we did, they were full of kids laughing, adults dancing, and an uncle with a watchful eye over the grill. All the adults treated us kids like we were their own, for better or worse, fully exercising their rights to both spank you and hug you afterwards. We all struggled, but at least in those early days we struggled together. Poverty is most tolerable when there’s a sense of community. At those rare gatherings, I’d play with the kids some, but it was only a matter of time before I’d start peppering the adults with questions. I wanted to know everything. How does a car work? What’s fire made of? How does Santa have time to get to every single house in one night? Why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? At home, my questions drove my mother crazy after a while. She had enough on her plate from the meat grinder of poverty without my endless queries. She did her best to humor me, but I would eventually wear her down and she’d tell me to go find something to do. Then, I’d go and bother my siblings. Being the youngest of four children, I had all the knowledge I could ever want within reach. I’d ask my brother to teach me how to wrestle, then bug my sister to teach me the Spanish alphabet again. I begged them to take me to school with them in the mornings. When they weren’t looking, I’d steal their books and struggle through them. I started off going to kindergarten in the housing projects where we lived. The public housing had a big open courtyard in the middle, surrounded by buildings with barred windows and unkempt lawns. I’m pretty sure whoever planned our projects based them on the architectural designs that were used to build prisons. No effort was made to create a visually appealing aesthetic. It had a negative impact on the area. No one cared about where we lived, and it showed. Residents in our neighborhood were deprived of a sense of pride in their home and community. City planners certainly weren’t concerned with ‘frivolous things’ like beautification initiatives in the housing projects. The neighborhood had a constant sense of tension. Everyone was dealing with too much stress,
too much trauma, and there was always a feeling that something could explode at any moment. In my neighborhood, everyone struggled. Poverty is a fully immersive experience because when you’re poor, you always deal with it. You don’t have the luxury of focusing on anything beyond survival. You can’t lift your head up long enough to think about personal fulfillment because you’re too busy trying to ensure your basic needs are met. I remember when I was young, if we ordered pizza, we’d have to walk several blocks away from our house to meet the delivery guy. He refused to come into our area because he’d been robbed too many times. When people are very poor, the urge to steal can be compelling. Even a few dollars from the cost of a pizza can make a big difference for people who are hungry. The neighborhood tension spilled into our kindergarten classroom. At school, the teachers spent most of their time trying to get kids to sit still or dealing with emergencies happening in their students’ homes. Kids would come to class hungry, neglected, abused, and dirty. Sometimes there were adults at home, sometimes there weren’t. I was lucky to have my mother and siblings, and they provided enough safety and stability in my life to keep me from falling into despair. Kids in my neighborhood didn’t have a nanny or caregiver constantly watching over them, but my friends and I always felt safe together. That didn’t mean scary things didn’t sometimes happen, though. I remember being about seven years old and was playing outside with my friends when a police cruiser pulled up. My friends and I took off running even though we weren’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t know why I was running, but I was afraid, and I had this sense that the police were bad. The officers rounded us up and made us all sit down for a lecture, cuffing us all for added effect. It was a scary experience, but I didn’t think much about it after the fact because it was just part of life in that neighborhood. It’s only when I got older that I realized how absurd the experience was. It’s not something that would ever happen in a wealthier community.
CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 13 As my mother fought and struggled to get a hand onto the economic ladder, we moved a lot. This instability makes it hard for poor communities to stay intact. Rampant increases in housing prices and gentrification eroded the one thing that made life bearable—community. I went to three different kindergartens, and by third grade, I’d attended eight different schools. I became accustomed to the routine of change. Once the teachers at each new school had sufficiently poked and prodded me, they’d call my mother and ask her permission to place me in a gifted and talented classroom, or to skip me up a grade or two. My mother cared about my social development and wanted me to be around others my own age, so she always went with the gifted classes. Those classes were a safe haven in the madness of the Indianapolis public school system. The kids were all bright and relatively well-behaved. The teachers could actually spend their time teaching. I can’t say much about the effect that pulling the fastest learners out of class had on the rest of the students, but it allowed me to learn at a pace that wasn’t as painfully slow. People are more likely to give opportunities to poor kids if they’re smart. At least that was my experience. My teachers all seemed to like me and would give me extra assignments because they knew I liked the challenge. They played their part in making sure my intellectual thirst was quenched. That usually meant giving me separate assignments or asking me to lead group projects. Sometimes I would read to the other students to give my teachers a break. I loved school. It had rules and structure. It was predictable. I thrived in environments where the tasks were concrete and hard work appeared to be rewarded.