Making that journey from boy to man might have been easier if we had stayed on Bennett Road, but that was not going to be the case. My father, Michael Sr.—otherwise known as Big Mike—and my birth mother, Caronda, started having kids when my mom was sixteen. I was the second of five and the oldest boy. Martellus was born eighteen months after me. By the time my mom was seventeen, she and my dad had three kids, and then five kids by age twenty-two. My dad and mom married right after they both finished high school. They never really got to be teenagers, just went from being kids to being parents. It wasn’t any kind of scandal. In a small Southern town, it’s normal for people to get pregnant early and get married. But it also meant tough decisions that affected their lives to this day. My dad had a scholarship to play college football at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, but he abandoned those dreams to support his growing family and joined the navy. (Yes, my dad was in the navy, so—again—don’t speak to me about certain players being “unpatriotic” for taking a knee.)
Joining the navy meant leaving Bennett Road in Louisiana and moving to San Diego when I was six. San Diego is one of the biggest navy towns in the country, and we lived there as a family until I was eight, when my mom and dad decided to go their separate ways. That isn’t too unusual, but what was different from most divorced families was the decision they made with us kids. Out of the five children, the two youngest went with my mom; Martellus and I stayed with my dad; and my older sister went back to Louisiana to live with our grandma. The family was split, leaving me with the feeling that somehow my birth mother didn’t choose me. As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that marriage is hard: to give up your selfish plans in order to build a life with somebody, and to continue to grow while keeping your family together. It can feel next to impossible. Sometimes people grow apart, and trying to keep the family together at all costs can cause so much unintended damage. As long as all the children end up cared for and loved … there is nothing more important.
I often think about their choice to split up and separate the kids—how different everything would have been if we’d stayed together or if we’d been divided up in another way, or if Martellus and I didn’t end up moving to Houston with a new mom when I was ten years old.
To be honest, if I’d stayed in Southern California, I might not be writing this at all, because gang violence was all over the place. There’d be drive-bys on the way to school, and stray bullets were a daily part of my young life. There were teenage twins who lived in the neighborhood, both with colostomy bags. They couldn’t even control their piss and shit because they’d been hit by stray bullets.
My dad kept Tellus and me clear of the worst of it, but there were no real safe spaces. I remember one time a guy in a gang beat up a girl so badly that a group of her people started looking for him. He was running through the neighborhood, jumping over fences, cutting through yards. Our front door was open because us kids were playing football out front. So he ran through our door and headed straight through our house and out the back. About forty-five minutes later, all these gang kids pulled up in their car. They looked ready to search our house, armed like The Expendables, announcing that they were going to get this guy.
My dad came out, no guns, calm as can be, and said, “Y’all come into this house, there’s going to be some problems.”
Then our neighbor appeared with a massive shotgun and said, “If y’all motherfuckers move, there’s going to be a shootout.”
Now everybody tensed up. My dad stood in the middle and told everyone to chill their asses out, that there were kids around. He explained to everyone that this dude who ran through our house was nobody we knew. “We don’t know what he did to this girl. This has nothing to do with my home or my family.”
The gang kids huddled up, and a couple of them realized that they knew my dad from his work as a volunteer flag football coach for kids around the neighborhood. One of the dudes replied, “Nah, you good, you would never do nothing like that.” They slowly backed away and waited around the corner. I don’t know what happened next, but I can’t imagine it was anything nice.
After that, we moved our asses to Texas. You know it’s bad where you’re living when you’re worried about guns and see Texas as a safe alternative. But we really moved because my dad met the woman I would learn to call my mom. In Louisiana for my Uncle Earl’s funeral, my dad met Miss Pennie, was struck by lightning where he stood, and just said, “We’re moving.”
I think about what my life would be if I’d never had the blessing of Miss Pennie, my new mom, a Grambling State University graduate and junior high school teacher, a woman who taught me to stand up for myself. Miss Pennie’s entrance into our family was a defining moment of my life. She was somebody who would not let us be “normal,” who said that no matter what the world tried to beat into our heads, we could be extraordinary. When I got in trouble, my punishment from her wasn’t spankings or sitting in a corner. It was reading encyclopedias. At first I hated it, but I learned to love this “punishment” and would get in trouble just to have some quiet space to learn about the world. Later,
