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  She opened the wallet, took out a wad of bills and shoved them in her bra.

  “Where’s my dollar?” I asked, holding out my hand.

  Mama’s eyes got real squinty. She took the stolen money out of her bra, peeled off a single dollar bill, and held it out to me. When I went to grab it, she hung on to it a second longer than she needed to.

  “Listen,” she said, real slow. “Go put this wallet back in Po Boy’s pocket. Then go get the wallet from Mr. Jackson. Do it quick, before he wakes up. I’ll give you another dollar.”

  That was the first time Mama made me steal. But I knew by the look on her face and the money in her bra, that she was going to make this a regular thing. Sure enough, from then on, almost every Sunday morning before the sun came up, Mama would kick me awake so I could help with her crime spree.

  The upside was that with all those blackout drunks, I was making good money—five dollars was a lot for a kid in 1980—and I spent it all at the corner store. I wasn’t stingy, either. I treated my brothers, sister, and cousin to all-they-could-eat Laffy Taffy, Hubba Bubba, and Pop Rocks. And I played so much Pac-Man that my name stayed at the top of the scoreboard: R-A-B for Rabbit, which is the name Mama’s boyfriend Curtis gave me when he came home one day and found me sitting on the porch eating a carrot.

  But as much as I liked the money and respect, deep down I hated my job. My stomach went in knots every time Mama made me sneak my hand into somebody’s pocket. I wanted to tell her, “I’m a little kid. I don’t have the nerves for this!” Even Curtis tried to get Mama to stop. “This ain’t right,” I heard him tell her one night. “All you doing is teaching your little girl to steal.”

  But Mama didn’t care. To her, there was no such thing as a bad hustle. It was all good, just as long as you didn’t get caught.

  Chapter 2

  Hot Lead

  I was out in the yard catching fireflies and holding them up to my face pretending they were earrings, when I heard Granddaddy call my name. “Mildred Baby Girl!” he hollered. It was Saturday night, and he was calling me to come watch our all-time favorite TV show: Georgia Championship Wrestling.

  “Baby Girl!”

  I dropped everything and flew up the front steps to the screen door. Granddaddy had thrown out so many customers without opening it first that the mesh screen hung off the doorframe like a skirt flapping on a clothesline. I pulled the screen aside, and ran indoors.

  It was still early, but the living room was full of people. The Numbers Man was sound asleep in a chair by the window with his belly resting in his lap like a giant egg; Mama and Auntie Vanessa were on the sofa sipping on corn liquor and arguing about who got the better voice, Lou Rawls or B. B. King; Mr. Tommy and his brother were sitting at the card table in the corner, playing spades. Granddaddy was behind the bar, waiting on me.

  I whipped through the room and hopped on my stool just as he was switching on the little TV that he had sitting on the bar. The set flickered and Granddaddy turned to me, “You ready to see some ass whooping, Baby Girl?”

  “You know it!”

  Granddaddy’s favorite wrestler, Claude “Thunderbolt” Patterson, was in the ring, crouched down low and strutting around like he was doing the funky chicken. “That’s my man,” Granddaddy said. We leaned in close and watched Thunderbolt charge at his opponent, head-butting him so hard he fell to the mat like an old wet rag. “Look at Thunderbolt whoop that cracker’s ass!” yelled Granddaddy.

  “Are they fighting for real?” I asked, bouncing on my stool.

  “Of course it’s real,” he answered. “You see how that cracker’s laid out? Ooooweee! Thunderbolt put a hurtin’ on his ass.” Granddaddy gave me a sideways smile, then slowly backed up off his stool with his fists up, like the two of us were gonna fight. I jumped down and squared off against him, weaving from side to side, with my scowl face on. The two of us practiced our wrestling moves every Saturday night; it was the best part of my week.

  “What you got for me, Baby Girl?” Granddaddy growled. “What you got?”

  I wound up my arm and took a step back.

  “You know what’s coming for you!” I hollered, and ran toward him.

  Granddaddy caught me in his giant paws and threw me over his shoulder. “I got you now!” he yelled. “I got you!” Giggling like crazy, I tried to get him in an upside-down headlock while he spun me around. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see everybody pass by in a blur: Mr. Tommy, the Numbers Man, Aunt Vanessa, and Mama in the corner. And then I saw Miss Betty. She was walking through the door, wearing a faded red dress that was buttoned wrong so that the hem hung uneven. On her head was some hair that looked like it might have originally been a good Sunday wig, only it was raggedy as hell and sitting way back, so her tore-up edges were on full display. Miss Betty stepped up to the bar just as Granddaddy was putting me down.

  “Bear Cat, lemme get a drink!” she demanded, slapping her hand down on the counter.

  To this day, I don’t know what she was thinking interrupting us during wrestling. Everybody knew not to bother Granddaddy when he was watching TV. But here she was with her half a wig, right in the middle of our show. “C’mon, George,” she said. “I need a drink.”

  Granddaddy didn’t even look away from the set. “Where your money at?” he asked.

  “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” she said. “You know I’m good for it.”

  It’s true that Granddaddy sometimes let his regulars get drunk on credit. Like if they were teachers or construction workers, folks with regular jobs and steady paychecks. But Miss Betty didn’t have any kind of job. She was a full-time drunk and sometimes ho, which I knew for a fact because once a month Granddaddy would pay her twenty dollars to go in a bedroom in the back and fuck Uncle Stanley.

  Uncle Stanley had something wrong with his legs, sort of like they were nailed shut at the knees. When it was time for him to get it on, Granddaddy would call for me and Sweetie to help. “Go on back and help your uncle get started,” he’d say.

  Uncle Stanley would pull himself on top of Miss Betty, then I would take one leg and Sweetie would take the other and we’d yank them apart. As soon as he got a steady rhythm going we knew he was good to go and we’d run outside to play. I guess Granddaddy thought he was doing some good parenting by helping his disabled son get some pussy. Who cared if it was from a broke-down ho with two little girls holding down his legs?

  For a minute Miss Betty just stood at the bar looking stupid, while Granddaddy ignored her. Then she started to yell: “Fuck you, Bear Cat! You ain’t nothing but a big black faggot!” The whole room suddenly got quiet. Even I knew Miss Betty had messed up. You don’t call an old black southern man a faggot unless you’re ready to be carried by six. Granddaddy jumped off his stool, grabbed Miss Betty by the arm, and pulled her out the front door. She stumbled down the steps and fell into the dusty yard, still hollering and cursing.

  “Get the fuck outta here,” Granddaddy called from the porch. “You ugly-ass bitch.” I had come running out after him and stood beside him with my eyeballs bugging out of my head, watching the action like I was at the movies.

  Miss Betty got to her feet and pointed her finger at Granddaddy. “Go to hell and kiss my muthafuckin’ ass!” she hollered. Then she turned around, bent over, and slapped her behind. “Kiss it, you gotdamn faggot!”

  That’s when he shot her.

  The first bullet hit Miss Betty in her left butt cheek. She spun around and he shot her again. This time he blew off her pinkie finger. She fell to the ground screaming, but Granddaddy just kept on firing like he was at a shooting range.

  “Lord have mercy!” cried Aunt Vanessa, running onto the porch. “Daddy, what’d you shoot that lady for?”

  “Fuck her,” Granddaddy answered. Then he added, turning to my aunt. “’Nessa, go on inside and pour the liquor down the drain.”

  Auntie Vanessa just stood there.

  “Girl, go do what I told you!” he yelled. “Hurry up and get rid of th
e shit. Then call the police.”

  To this day, I don’t know why my Granddaddy was more worried about getting caught for moonshine than attempted murder. Maybe it’s because he thought Miss Betty had it coming. “I shot her,” he said matter-of-factly when the police showed up. “I gave that bitch some hot lead.” The cops shook their heads, put my grandfather in the back of their patrol car, and took his ass to jail.

  Granddaddy got locked up for a lot of years behind that mess. Once he was gone, there was no one to run the liquor house and we all had to leave. Aunt Vanessa took in Uncle Stanley; Uncle Skeet got busted for burglary and ended up in jail. For a while Mama and us kids lived with her boyfriend, Curtis, in a three-bedroom house with a chicken coop in the back yard. Curtis took care of us, paying the rent and keeping us fed. But it wasn’t long before Mama ran him off by drinking too much and acting too crazy. Then it was Mama all by her lonesome, drinking her gin and struggling to take care of all us kids by herself.

  When we lived in the liquor house, I used to hate the noise and commotion and the smell of stale cigarette smoke that never went away. I hated waking up to strangers in the living room and stealing from folks in the middle of the night. But I didn’t realize that compared to what came next, that shit-hole bootleg house with the bedsheets in the windows and drunks passed out on the floor really wasn’t all that bad. At least at Granddaddy’s I always had food to eat, a roof over my head, and somebody who loved me. After he went to jail, and Curtis left us, all I had was Mama. In other words, I was eight years old and I was pretty much fucked.

  Chapter 3

  Struggling and Scheming

  “Patricia!” snapped Miss Thompson, looking at me with her face twisted up like she smelled some dog doo-doo. “You’re very tardy.”

  It was 8:45 a.m. and I’d just walked into my third-grade classroom. Miss Thompson was doing her best to make me feel bad for showing up late. But she didn’t need to. I had my own reasons for wanting to get to school on time. If I wasn’t there by 8:00 a.m., I missed getting Free Breakfast. That little box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and itty-bitty container of apple juice were the only things I liked about school. I hated being late more than Miss Thompson could ever imagine. But I couldn’t get to school on time when nobody woke me up.

  It had been more than a year since we’d left the liquor house, and Mama, Sweetie, my brothers, and I were living in a run-down two-bedroom duplex on Griffin Street, on Atlanta’s West Side, across the street from a family who kept a dirty brown sofa and busted refrigerator in their front yard. Mama didn’t see a reason to open her eyes until The Price Is Right came on at 11 a.m. So it was usually Dre who woke me up in the morning by kicking me in the leg and hollering, “Git up, girl!” But he wasn’t the most reliable.

  Dre was eleven years old and “living his life,” as he liked to say, which meant he was busy stealing college kids’ bikes off the campus at Georgia Tech. Sometimes he’d get caught by the popo and thrown into juvenile detention. When that happened, nobody would wake me up and I’d come to school late.

  Miss Thompson stared at me standing in the classroom doorway, sighed, and rolled her eyes. “All right,” she said, finally. “Go hang up your coat and come take your seat.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I could feel the eyeballs of every kid in the class on my back as I walked across the room to the closet behind the blackboard. I hated those kids almost as much as I hated being late.

  Porsha and Mercedes were my biggest enemies. I don’t know what I ever did to make them mad, but those two little bitches made it their mission to make my life miserable. After school they’d roll up on me and Sweetie and tease the fuck outta us. “Nasty-ass bitches!” they’d scream. “Look at your nappy-ass hair! Your shoes is raggedy! You nasty and you stink! Y’all smell like dog shit.” I guess being named after luxury vehicles made them feel like they were better than everybody.

  “Fuck you, Pontiac!” I’d holler at Porsha, and she’d damn near lose her mind. “It’s POR-SHA!” she’d yell.

  In the closet, I slid off my jacket and hung it on my hook. My coat was red with a dingy used-to-be-white collar and dirty cuffs. I leaned over and gave it a sniff. In fact, it did not smell like dog shit. But it sure did smell. The odor was more a mixture of wet mildew and dried funk. It wasn’t even my funk, either. I don’t know who that jacket used to belong to. Dre and Jeffro had stolen it one night, along with a bunch of other clothes, from the donation bins out behind the Goodwill store on North Avenue. Most poor folks shopped inside the Goodwill, but we were so broke my brothers had to rob the place.

  As much as I hated school, I liked being alone in the coat closet. It was cozy and quiet. I ran my hands over the different-colored jackets hanging on their hooks. Porsha had a light pink coat with pretty fake fur around the hood, so I stuck my index finger in my nose and wiped it on her collar. “There’s your present, bitch,” I whispered.

  Above the coat hooks was a shelf where all the kids who didn’t get Free Lunch kept their lunch boxes. They were filled with every kind of sandwich you could think of—bologna, peanut butter and jelly, souse meat, sliced ham, government cheese—all of them cut in triangles and wrapped in tinfoil. At lunchtime kids would sit in the cafeteria and lay out their sandwiches, thermoses filled with Kool-Aid, and little sacks of Lay’s potato chips, like they were at a swap meet. All by myself in the closet, surrounded by all that food, I could hear my empty belly calling out to me. “Girl,” it said, “I’m hungry!”

  I had missed Free Breakfast, and Free Lunch was hours away. But it occurred to me that Mercedes, who was fat as hell anyway, probably wouldn’t notice if I ripped off an itty-bitty piece of whatever sandwich her mama had packed in her lunchbox. Hell, sometimes that heifer had two sandwiches. There was no way she’d notice if a little corner was missing. I grabbed her blue Smurf lunch box off the shelf and crouched down under the coats. When I opened the lid, the smell hit me like some good perfume: ham and American cheese on soft white bread, dripping with Miracle Whip.

  We didn’t have this kind of top-shelf food at home. Mama used her food stamps to buy runny no-name ketchup and cheap Sunbeam bread. Put those together, you got a ketchup sandwich, also known as dinner. One time Mama came home with a big tin can of government peanut butter. You knew it was government because it said “surplus” on it. That’s not a brand they sell at the Super Saver. That peanut butter was a health hazard. It was dry as hell and would get stuck in your throat like a ball of concrete. After the time Andre almost choked to death on a sandwich, we learned not to eat the government peanut butter unless you had a big cup of water right there ready to wash it down.

  I pulled off a tiny piece of Mercedes’s sandwich and put it in my mouth. But I was so hungry, and she was so fat, I thought, Fuck it, and started shoving that delicious sandwich in my mouth faster than I could swallow. I closed my eyes and let out a little moan. It was like I’d died and gone to sandwich heaven. I was so deep in my feelings of enjoyment for this good-good food, I didn’t even hear Miss Thompson come into the closet. I opened my eyes and there she was, standing right beside me.

  “Patricia Williams!”

  “Yeth?” I said, looking up and swallowing hard.

  “Young lady, are you back here eating up somebody else’s lunch?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Then whose is that?” she asked, pointing at Mercedes’s blue lunch box in my lap.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. Miss Thompson glared at me with her eyeballs popping out of her head.

  “Why?” I asked, holding up the sandwich. “You want some?”

  Miss Thompson didn’t answer. Instead she grabbed me by the top of my arm and yanked me up. “Honest to God!” she cried, “I’ve seen better behavior in a barn full of animals.” Then she dragged me out of the classroom and across the hall to the principal’s office. “We’ll see what Mr. Dixon has to say about this.”

  I’m pretty sure Miss Thompson had been waiting for an
excuse to take me to the principal’s office ever since I landed in her third-grade class. That lady never liked me. One time I came to school looking extra raggedy, not only because of my Goodwill outfit of a faded yellow T-shirt and high-water jeans, but also because the night before Mama had decided to take out my hair and rebraid it. Only she passed out when she was halfway done. I showed up for school the next morning looking like I was wearing one of those half-man, half-woman costumes, except on one side I was Buckwheat from The Little Rascals, on the other side I was Penny from Good Times. When Miss Thompson saw me walk into her classroom she just stared with her hand covering her open mouth like she’d never witnessed this kind of child abuse. At first I thought she felt bad for me, but when Porsha came in behind me, Miss Thompson said nice and loud, “Don’t you look pretty as a picture, Porsha, It’s nice to see your mama takes such good care of your . . . grooming.” Then she gave me the side eye like it was my fault Mama was a drunk.

  In the principal’s office, Miss Thompson went behind the counter and talked to the secretary. The two of them kept looking my way and shaking their heads. Then Miss Thompson went back to her classroom, leaving me sitting on the wooden bench swinging my feet and waiting on Mr. Dixon.

  Maybe if he’d asked me why I took the sandwich, things would have been different. Maybe if I’d had a chance to tell Mr. Dixon I was hungry, that I missed Free Breakfast, that Mama didn’t cook anything the night before and all I had for dinner was a few bites of the Jumbo Honey Bun Dre had stolen from the corner store and split three ways with me and Sweetie, things might have turned out another way. But the minute I stepped into his office, it was obvious Mr. Dixon didn’t give a shit about my empty belly. He just wanted to teach me a lesson.

  He stared at me from behind his desk. “I’m very disappointed in your behavior,” he said. “This is a very serious offense.”