I Beat the Odds Read online

  I know there are many people out there who have the love, energy, talents, and resources to make a difference in someone else’s life. It might seem intimidating at first to try to figure out how, where, and who to help. I want this book to help give some advice and direction for anyone who wants to be a part of the solution.

  The numbers can seem overwhelming, and it can be hard to imagine that anything you have to offer could possibly make a difference with so many kids in the foster system and stuck in terrible neighborhoods and bad home situations. But you have to remember that every small act of love and concern makes a difference to that child.

  And as I have learned, a lot of tiny gestures of kindness can add up to something great.

  After The Blind Side came out, I had all kinds of people asking me questions about what my life had been like before I started at Briarcrest Academy. Some questions came from reporters. It didn’t really bother me that I didn’t have much I could share with them. But then those letters started coming in: to the Baltimore Ravens’ office, to Ole Miss, to the Tuohys’ house. The more I thought about the kids writing me, the more I realized that I had a responsibility to look into my past and really think about what had happened and what had helped in my life to give me hope for the future. It wasn’t just time for me to be honest with myself about what I had been through; I owed it to all those other kids who looked at me and saw a role model. Kids who were in the same place I was just a few years ago were watching me not just because they liked the movie or enjoy watching sports. Sure, a lot of people write to me wanting to talk about football. But the letters that truly stood out to me were the ones from those kids whose stories I understood. They weren’t writing me for an autograph. They were studying me because they wanted to learn how I had managed to make something out of my life when all of the statistics and studies you read point to kids like us having no shot.

  So that was why I was sitting at a table with Ms. Spivey on a hot July afternoon, talking about stuff that happened a decade or more ago. I had decided to write a book that reached back before my happy ending to look at what happened to me and how I ended up where I did.

  It was scary for me to think about opening up. I had shut down a lot of my memory for a reason. But I was also interested in being able to draw a line that would connect a lot of things I kind of recalled and to make more sense out of some of the confusion I still had about it all.

  Mostly, though, I was genuinely excited about figuring out what lessons I could share about making a better life as a kid with a past like mine. I knew that I wanted this book to be more than just a story about my early life. I wanted it to be a guidebook for kids like me and the adults who want to help them.

  I always felt as a kid that God had something special planned for my life. Now I know what it was. It wasn’t to make me a professional athlete; it was to make me a role model for kids who, like me, are missing that person in their lives. He wanted to use me to show the world anybody can be successful, no matter who they are or what their history is. But I had to trust in that plan and be an active, real part of making it happen. I had to believe that it was possible even when it seemed it wasn’t, and work for it even when it seemed pointless.

  I did, and I think that’s what made the difference.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Begging and Bumming: Life in Hurt Village

  You’re not poor if you know where your next meal is coming from.

  That’s one of the first lessons I learned growing up. The lines were pretty clear: There were people who had food, and there were people who had to scrounge. Most of the time—way more than most of the time—I was in the second group.

  I think about that now, whenever I sit down to dinner at a nice restaurant or open the refrigerator in my own home, which I always make sure is full. If I pass a homeless person on the street, I try to be pretty generous with what I drop in their cup because I know how it feels to be sitting in their spot.

  It’s crazy now, as I look at my career and the opportunities I have, to think about how I was living just a few years ago. I had to beg for anything I needed; now I have everything I could possibly want.

  But before my happy ending, there was a very sad story.

  I THINK IT IS IMPORTANT, before I talk about my life when I was little, to explain how it was when I remember it best. It’s going out of order a bit, but I think it will help put everything else in context. In order to understand my life, you have to understand my world.

  Like most kids, when I was younger I didn’t really understand that my life was not normal. It wasn’t until I had a chance to see how other people lived that I realized that the way my family lived wasn’t the way everyone else lived. A child can only understand what he or she sees on a daily basis—that’s what seems normal. And until I saw another way of life, the things that I was surrounded by seemed totally normal to me, so the problems with it didn’t stand out in my mind.

  But from the time I was almost eleven years old to the start of high school, I called Hurt Village my home. There were some foster places mixed in, but Hurt Village was always what I considered home. The name fit—Hurt Village. It seemed like everything and everyone there was hurt, broken, depressed, beaten down. And by that point, I was finally old enough to understand that it was a pretty bad place to be and a pretty bad way to live. It was all I had, but I knew I wanted something better. In some ways it looked like every other housing project in every city in America: rows and rows of identical brick buildings that were two or three stories high, busted screens and broken windows, a place empty and boarded up every few units, rusty handrails on cracked concrete steps, broken toys and broken lawn chairs in the little patches of grass outside each door. Even the air smelled greasy, dirty. It was the kind of place that depressed you instantly if you took a wrong turn and ended up driving through it. But most outsiders never drove through it because it was also the kind of place you took a U-turn in the middle of the road to get out of if you ended up there accidentally.

  There were some empty lots where the kids played sports during the day and where drug deals probably went down at night, but they were my favorite places to be. Up in the front of the neighborhood was a park—not the kind with swings or a slide or anything, just four soccer goalposts that probably didn’t even have 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 goe
s 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 residents of Memphis—and almost all the African Americans in Memphis were poor.

  After World War II, the city put up a couple of different neighborhoods just for black people to live in. There were places like Castalia Heights, which at the time was called the “South’s No. 1 Private Negro Apartment Development.” It provided low-cost homes for more than four hundred families. There were also places like LeMoyne Gardens and Klondyke Arms, which were built during the 1940 and 1950s. The goal was to keep black families away from the white ones, so the poor white housing projects were completely separate. There were a lot of those, too, but at the time there were still laws that restricted where in the city black people could live. For most of the 1960s, there was a halt on all public housing, so no new projects were built then. But the population kept growing, and many discrimination laws were still in place, which meant a lot of black families literally had nowhere to go.

  Racial tension was a big problem in the city, and the housing situation was a major part of it. Groups like the Black Panthers eventually got involved when other protests didn’t bring about any change. They staged “live-ins” where they would occupy housing units to bring attention to the shortage of available places and the bad conditions of the existing ones.

  Hurt Village started out as one of those housings projects that was originally built for poor white people in the 1950s. But that changed as Memphis did. The unfair housing laws finally were defeated as the schools were integrated, and by the 1970s, there wasn’t a white person to be seen in Hurt Village. They’d all moved out as the new laws allowed black families to move in. I guess when you’re that poor, you hold on tightly to your identity because it’s all you’ve got, so the neighborhood went from one kind of segregated to another.

  Some of the other projects stayed just as they had been built. LeMoyne Gardens has always been a black neighborhood, first by law and then just because that was who continued to live there. But it changed, too. At first, it had been designed to be a place where lessons on hygiene and job skills and parenting were offered as part of a community outreach effort. But as time went by, many of the hardworking families were able to get out and buy their own homes. They were usually replaced by people who weren’t as motivated to make good life choices. By the 1980s, LeMoyne had to be put under a curfew and “foot patrols” by police officers who would walk around all night because of the drug deals and high crime. It was that way in a lot of places, black neighborhoods and white ones. The people who really cared and worked for success almost all eventually left for better neighborhoods as opportunities opened up for them, and the people who replaced them in the old neighborhoods didn’t have the same sense of pride or vision.

  The crime problem kept growing and finally, in the late 1990s, someone decided that in order to fight the crime problem in Memphis’s housing projects, they’d knock most of them down and spread the residents all over the city to new areas. The idea, I guess, was to break up the “problem people.” Many condemned homes were fixed up. Others were taken down completely. By the end of 2001, more than 3,500 apartments in eleven of the biggest projects had been closed. Robert Lipscomb, the executive director of the Memphis Housing Authority, said in an interview that the goal was to “deconcentrate” the population of poor people and help move them to better neighborhoods. He explained, “I think if we eliminate some of these problem structures, we will also reduce crime.”

  It was a nice thought, but all it managed to do was to spread crime to new areas.

  The first HOPE IV neighborhood, which is what the city called the new effort, opened where LeMoyne Gardens used to be. It got knocked down to build a mixed-income neighborhood with some middle-class homes and condos and some public housing apartments. That started a trend that you can see all over the city now. Hurt Village ended up as part of that movement. It got bulldozed not long after LeMoyne did. In fact, a lot of the places where I lived growing up have been knocked down and replaced with shiny-looking buildings and beautiful middle-class homes with shutters and big porches. But for a large chunk of my childhood, one of the ugliest and most dangerous parts of the city was where I felt the safest because it was better than the alternative. At least my family was there . . . most of the time.

  My mother did her best. I have to give her that much. When she was sober, she worked hard to give us a good home and look after us. The problem was that she wasn’t sober much. When she got back into her old habits, life at home kind of fell apart. We didn’t always have a roof over our heads. Sometimes we’d get kicked out of one place and just wander over to another. If one of us kids had a friend who would let us stay longer than just a night or two, we’d sleep there until my mother got another place, and then we’d eventually make our way back to the new place to live with everyone else again. Once, seven of us kids lived in a car with her for about a month. We piled on top of one another to sleep, kicking and hitting one another trying to carve out a little space of our own.

  We managed to stick it out, though, because we all loved one another. Neighbors used to comment on how attached the Ohers were to their family, and they were right. We truly were loyal to one another. I loved my brothers and sisters so much that I was always determined to look out for them and wanted to live as near to them as I could. I loved my mother so much that it hurt even more when she would relapse with her addiction, because I knew how much damage she was doing to herself and to our family.

  Social workers would come over for visits, to evaluate how we were living, how my mother was doing, what the condition of the house was like. They would ask us questions and make notes on their clipboards. They wanted to make sure we were still going to school and not getting into trouble. We told them whatever we thought they wanted to hear because we didn’t want to end up separated again. That had happened before and I think we all hated it too much to risk it again.

  Besides, things could be good at home. When my mother was off drugs and working, she would remember to buy groceries, and there would be a mad scramble to grab whatever you could before anyone el
se got to it. If you put anything down, someone else would grab it immediately, so you learned to eat fast. It wasn’t the best system, but at least we were together. Those were the good days. But they usually didn’t last.

  One of the first things you learn in the ghetto is to look forward to the beginning of the month, because that’s when you have money. Paychecks from work come at the very end of the month and government checks come at the very start, so for the first week or two, life is good. There is no sense of saving money because when your future is that uncertain, you just live in the moment and let tomorrow deal with itself.

  It was the same in my house, except that a day or two after the welfare check arrived, we knew that there was a pretty good chance that the door would be locked when we got home from school and my mother would have disappeared.

  She’d often spend a couple of days gone—no note, no goodbyes—but we knew why she’d left and we knew what we had to do until she got back. She was buying crack, and we had to fend for ourselves. But we never worried too much, because the beginning of the month was good for everyone, so we would bum food from other families, and maybe even bum some old clothes.

  My brothers and sisters and me—there’s a total of twelve of us, five boys older than me and then my younger siblings, some who were born while I was in middle and high school—learned the routine fast. We’d wander over to a friend’s house at suppertime and then just stay, sleeping on the sofa or the floor until the next day. We’d go by the house to see if our mother had come back, and if she hadn’t, we’d just find somewhere else to get food and crash for the night. Begging and bumming was just a way of life, whether we were living in Hurt Village or had gotten bumped to another project.