I Beat the Odds Read Free Page B

nets in them most of the time we lived there. Toward the back of the neighborhood, closer to our house, was the Green Lot. There was a blacktop for basketball (where we always played by street rules, which are not as formal—or consistent—as league rules), plus a couple of open, grassy areas there; my best friend, Craig, and I laugh now about the fact that the areas probably weren’t meant for kids to play in. But that didn’t matter to us because in the neighborhood, we kids came up with our own set of rules for the fields: The smaller lot was the Regular Season Field and the larger one was the Play-Off Field.
    We followed the NFL’s schedule, so it was always exciting when we made the switch over to the big field in January. If there were older kids playing on the Play-Off Field, though, we would wait until they cleared out. A bunch of eleven- and twelve-year-olds can’t really challenge seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds for playing space. A lot of times, though, we would play with the older guys—some even twenty-one or twenty-two years old. I think they enjoyed running around and knocking into people just as much as we did. We played full-tackle football, but there wasn’t much blocking; everyone pretty much played receiver, running out once the ball was snapped and hoping you could catch it if the quarterback threw it your way. Each team’s QB would get to the count of ten to throw the ball or run with it. Anything beyond ten Mississippis would qualify as delay-of-game. I don’t remember that we ever pretended that we were one NFL team or another—we were our own team, I guess: the Hurt Villagers.
    When we were still kids, a made-up team was something great to be a part of, but as we all became teenagers, something else started to appeal to a lot of boys more than football. There were gangs and everything that goes with them: gang turf, gang thugs, gang fights, gang wars. The Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples were the two big ones I remember. If you saw big cars roll up with the leaders inside, you would scramble to get inside the house unless you wanted to risk getting caught in the crosshairs. All-out shooting matches were pretty rare, but I do clearly remember one time watching a baby get shot in the midst of an argument.
    The most scared for my own physical safety that I ever was as a kid was when I was eleven years old, and the gangs had an all-out shoot-out in the middle of the neighborhood. We were just playing outside when the guys in red (the Vice Lords) started shouting at the guys in blue (the Gangster Disciples)—or maybe it was the other way around. I didn’t pay attention once they stopped yelling and the bullets started flying instead. We just all ran into the nearest house, kept away from the windows, and prayed that the walls were thick enough to keep any stray shots out.
    But that was my neighborhood and most of the people there didn’t know any other way of life. They knew it wasn’t great, but they didn’t do much to change things. People who were born there usually never left except to go to another project—or to prison. Life in Memphis ghettos didn’t really have its ups and downs. It was pretty much the same—all downs all the time. There would be exciting moments like shoot-outs or arrests, but as far as the big picture—the way people lived and died—that didn’t change much from generation to generation. And, unfortunately, that’s probably the biggest problem for anyone who wants to get out.
    The history of public housing in Memphis has always been pretty bad. At first, the developments were racially segregated by law. Because so many slums had grown up along the river during the Depression, the downtown area was getting very run-down by the end of the 1930s. The city decided to demolish a lot of those neighborhoods with plans to put real homes instead of shacks in their place. The goal was to make those houses and apartments safer and cleaner places for the poor