Ms. American Dream: A Memoir of Making It, No Matter What
Autor Patricia Williams-Lee Cu Jeannine Amberen Limba Engleză Hardback – 5 noi 2026
“America is supposed to be the land of opportunity—where any poor kid can grow up to become a millionaire. That’s the story. But I’ma tell you how it really went down.”
Before she was the star of the Emmy-nominated smash sitcom The Ms. Pat Show, before the Netflix specials, sold-out tours, and her critically acclaimed memoir, Rabbit, Ms. Pat was a fifteen-year-old eighth-grade dropout raising two babies in one of Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. With no mentor, no road map, and no safety net, she wasn’t chasing the American Dream. She was told it wasn’t meant for people like her.
If you’d seen her back then, you wouldn’t have bet on a happy ending.
And yet...look at her now.
In Ms. American Dream, Ms. Pat picks up where Rabbit left off—chronicling the hard-fought climb from food stamps and Section 8 housing to television deals, Hollywood writers’ rooms, and a suburban life so comfortable her doghouse has its own built-in washer and dryer.
In a country where the rich get richer and regular folks are told to “work harder,” Ms. Pat learned the rules of a system that wasn’t built for her to win. She outmaneuvered caseworkers, bill collectors, con artists, and hustlers. She found her place in an industry where she was told she didn’t belong.
Raw, fearless, and laugh-out-loud funny, Ms. American Dream is not your average rags-to-riches Hollywood story—it’s a sharp, hilarious look at class, strategy, and reinvention.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781668044216
ISBN-10: 1668044218
Pagini: 224
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.39 kg
Editura: ATRIA
Colecția Atria Books
ISBN-10: 1668044218
Pagini: 224
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 18 mm
Greutate: 0.39 kg
Editura: ATRIA
Colecția Atria Books
Notă biografică
Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams-Lee, “the real hero of sitcom TV” (HuffPost), is the creator and star of BET+’s Emmy-nominated The Ms. Pat Show, based on her riveting memoir, Rabbit, the story of an inner-city drug dealer turned suburban mom. One of the country’s most exciting stand-ups, Williams-Lee regularly headlines comedy clubs and theaters nationwide. Her signature charisma and candor are featured in Netflix’s Ms. Pat: Y’all Wanna Hear Something Crazy? and the top-rated comedy podcast The Patdown with Ms. Pat. On her TV court show, Ms. Pat Settles It, she trades her mic for a gavel to referee disputes with hilarious results. In her downtime, Ms. Pat invites guests to teach her culinary skills on Whiskin’ It All with Ms. Pat, her delightful YouTube cooking show. Ms. Pat lives in Atlanta with her husband and a house full of dependents.
Extras
Chapter 1: A Different World CHAPTER 1 A DIFFERENT WORLD
The summer after second grade, I learned three important lessons that would shape me for the rest of my life. Back then, I lived with my mama, Mildred, my sister, Sweetie, and our three brothers in a run-down one-bedroom duplex on Griffin Street on the south side of Atlanta. The neighborhood was filled with hardworking poor folks and people on public assistance, like my mama.
Most kids I knew spent their days at the YMCA rec center on Butler Street. It had a summer program with all kinds of fun activities, like basketball, kickball, and double Dutch competitions. For snacks, everybody got Little Hugs juice boxes and little bags of chips. I would have gone to the Y just for that.
The cost of the summer program was on a sliding scale based on income, which meant Mildred could have sent me for free. But when I gave her forms to fill out, she waved me away like I was handing her a stack of bills she couldn’t pay. Mama and I was having this conversation in the living room, which was also Mama’s bedroom. She slept on a ratty old sofa. Me and my sister had the bedroom. Our brothers, when they were home, stayed in a little room off the kitchen that didn’t even have a door.
“Get that shit out my face,” Mildred said, taking a slow drag off her Winston. “And why you lookin’ at me? Bitch, you better fix your face and fix me a drink.” I don’t know if she was too lazy to fill out the paperwork, or if the problem was that she didn’t know how to read. Maybe she was ornery that morning because she hadn’t had her breakfast gin. Whatever the reason, my mama didn’t sign me up for the YMCA, which meant I had nothing to do on those long, hot summer days. I sure as hell wasn’t trying to stay home with my mama. That’s why I started sneaking out of the house.
One thing about Mildred: she watched TV like it was her full-time job. Starting at eleven in the morning when The Price Is Right came on, she’d sit there, eyeballs glued to the set, until damn near four in the afternoon when the credits rolled at the end of Guiding Light. She was so mesmerized by her stories and her liquor that she didn’t even notice her youngest child was missing.
The first time I took off, I didn’t tell nobody I was leaving. It was the middle of the day, and the house was hot as hell. My brother Andre and my sister Sweetie were in the kitchen, making all kinds of racket arguing over which one of them would get the last slice of the bread to make a sugar sandwich. I’m sick of this shit, I thought to myself.
I went out to the yard, picked up an old rickety chair that was lying upside down in the bushes, and pulled it up to the side of the house. I went back inside, checked to make sure the bedroom was empty, then climbed out the window, stepping onto the chair. I jumped my little ass into the yard, and just like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, Thank God Almighty, I was free at last!
I was gone all day and into the night. It felt so good to be out on my own, the next day I did it again. Pretty soon, sneaking out of the house became my daily routine.
When I took off, I never had a plan or particular place to go. I’d just walk up and down and all around the neighborhood. I’d pass the corner store where my brothers stole cans of Vienna sausages when we was hungry, and the convenience store where the owner would let folks buy stuff on credit. Every month Mildred would run up her tab buying Winstons and Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, then pay the owner with her food stamps when they came in.
Mildred had a lot of problems: she was broke, unemployed, uneducated, and addicted to alcohol. But her worst quality was her mean-ass fiery temper. If I did any little thing wrong—like taking too long to light her cigarette off the hot plate—she’d lose her fucking mind. “You got an ass whooping on the shelf!” she’d holler, which meant if she caught me messing up again, she’d beat my ass until the switch was as thin as a pencil.
One morning, a couple of weeks after I started sneaking out of the house, Mama hollered from the living room that I needed to go fix her a drink. Her beverage of choice was Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin—which we called Bumpy Face, after the texture on the bottle—and tap water. Only, I wasn’t no damn bartender. I was an eight-year-old trying to keep her mama from getting bent. So when I mixed her drink, I went heavy on the water and light on the booze. She should have thanked me for keeping her hydrated. Instead, Mildred hit the roof.
“Girl, why you fuck up my drink like this?” she yelled. “You know it’s equal water to equal gin. Get me a switch—that ass whooping coming right off the shelf now.”
That night, I lay awake with my ass on fire and hatred in my heart. I thought long and hard until I came up with a plan to solve all my problems. The next day when I climbed out the bedroom window, I decided I wasn’t never coming back.
My big idea was to go stay by my daddy. I barely knew the man. He’d walked out on the family when I was still a baby. And I’d only been to his place a couple of times, when Mama, drunk as a skunk, dragged me over there then made me sit on the stoop while she banged on his door and screamed that he wasn’t nothing but a low-down dirty dog. I wasn’t even sure I remembered what he looked like (I pictured a cross between Lamont Sanford from Sanford and Son and James Evans from Good Times). But none of that mattered, because I’d watched enough television to know that my plan would surely work.
On TV, daddies love and protect their kids, and they enjoy having them around. Even that shriveled-up old white dude on Diff’rent Strokes loved those two little Black boys he adopted. If a father’s love was powerful enough to bond different races, I reckoned my daddy would be more than happy to take me in.
That morning, I gathered up two pairs of pants, some underwear, and two T-shirts—my entire wardrobe—to take with me. I couldn’t find a bag to carry them in, so I just threw everything out the window before climbing out myself. I picked my clothes off the yard, scrunched them into a ball, then marched my little ass, with all my worldly possessions, to the bus stop around the corner.
I paid the fare with loose change I stole from my brother Dre’s pocket, rode for a while, and got off at the stop where I remembered Mama taking me. Then I walked up one block and down another until I found a wood frame house with a yellow door that looked like the one Mama banged on when she had her screaming fits on Daddy’s porch.
It was high noon and all I wanted was a cool drink and something to put in my empty belly. But my daddy, who had a job in construction, was still at work. For hours, I sat on the front stoop waiting on him and daydreaming about my wonderful new life. The longer I sat, the better my fantasy got. In my imagination, my daddy was not only going to rescue me from my mama’s bullshit but he was also going to tell me nice things every morning, like, “Don’t you look pretty today!”
I was hungry and thirsty and halfway to a heatstroke when I saw my daddy walking towards the house. He was bigger than I remembered, dressed in dusty jeans and work boots. His forehead was dripping sweat. When he noticed me waiting for him, he stopped dead in his tracks.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
For a while, the two of us just looked at each other in silence. Finally, he asked, “Yo’ mama know you here?”
“Yes, sir,” I lied. “She told me to come.”
“Huh,” he said, scratching his head. “Well, shoot, I guess you might as well come on in.” He opened the door, and I followed him into his tidy one-bedroom apartment. When he disappeared into the bathroom to shower off the day, I got busy inspecting my new accommodations.
My daddy, I discovered, was living a life of luxury. He had food in the fridge, electric and gas turned on, and hot water flowing from the faucet. At home, Mildred was always behind on the bills, so we never had all those things at once. She kept the lights on so people outside couldn’t see we was struggling, but inside, the stove didn’t work. She used a hot plate to boil water and cook food, when she had it.
My favorite thing about Daddy’s place was how peaceful it was. Compared to the chaos and commotion I was used to, his home felt like the quietest place on earth.
He gave me a bowl of spaghetti and a clean pillow and told me I could sleep on the sofa. The next morning, he said, “Don’t touch nothing.” Then he left for work. With no one to bother me, I had the most relaxing day of my life. I turned on the TV and watched The Price Is Right and The Young and the Restless; I went outside to sit on the porch and watch people go by. I fried up some bacon for breakfast and made myself a bologna sandwich for lunch. Before Daddy came home, I cleaned all the dishes and put them away. The next morning when he left for work, I had the same excellent day as the one before.
I thought things were going pretty good. But it seemed my daddy felt different. On Saturday morning, after I’d been sleeping on his sofa for almost a week, he woke up and came into the living room, scratching his belly.
“You still here?” he asked.
I nodded.
He shook his head and turned to walk away. Then he paused, as if having a second thought, and swiveled back to face me. “This ain’t gon’ work,” he said. “You can’t stay here no more.”
“How come?” I asked, confused.
“I’m paying yo’ mama child support,” he said. “You gon’ mess up her money. I gotta take you back.” I knew he was lying. That man ain’t never gave Mildred a single penny. He was just looking for excuses to hide the fact that he was a deadbeat daddy kicking his own baby girl to the curb.
I didn’t try to argue. In fact, I didn’t say nothing at all. I put on my stone face to let my daddy know that if he didn’t want me, I didn’t even care. On the way back to Mildred’s, I stared out the passenger-side window fighting back tears, clutching my tangled ball of clothes to my chest. I couldn’t believe the man I’d thought would protect me was driving me right back to the gates of hell.
My daddy was no James Evans or Mr. Drummond. His ass wasn’t any better than my mama. I realized then that I had exactly zero people in the world to count on. No one was going to save me from the bullshit. If I wanted a better life, I needed to figure it out on my own.
That was lesson number one.
Looking back on that summer, I can’t believe how damn negligent both my parents were. My daddy was way out of order for taking me back to live with my abusive, alcoholic mama. But Mildred was even worse for paying me so little attention that she didn’t even know I was sneaking out the house. Letting your eight-year-old daughter roam free is bad behavior for any mother at any time. But this was 1980. There was a killer on the loose, and children like me were the targets.
Between 1979 and 1981, more than two dozen Black folks, most of them children and teens, were murdered in Atlanta. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair was found dead in a wooded lot on Campbellton Road, not far from where I lived. The killer had bound Angel’s hands with an electric cord and stuffed a pair of underwear in her mouth. Angel was his fifth victim. The body of his twentieth victim, Curtis Walker, was found floating in the Chattahoochee River. Curtis Walker was my cousin, on my mama’s side. The Atlanta Child Murders hit that close to home.
Folks could see the police weren’t doing enough to keep us safe. Black mothers were terrified and kept their children close. But not Mildred. Most nights, she’d only discover I was missing after I got picked up and brought home by the police. They’d tell her to be careful having a little girl out past curfew. She’d smile her no-teeth-having grin and thank the officers for their trouble. But the second they were gone, she’d beat the dog shit outta me for bringing police to her door.
I wasn’t scared of the beatings, the cops, or Mama’s temper. The next day, I’d go right back to climbing out the window, again.
That summer, like every summer in Atlanta, was sticky and humid and miserable as hell. It wasn’t no walking-around-type weather. So one afternoon, sweaty and worn-out, and with my flip-flops so thin they was melting on the pavement, I decided to get on the bus that stopped near the corner of Griffin Street and Simpson Road.
This time, I didn’t have a dime, a nickel, or even a penny for the fare. But I smiled at the driver and asked him for a ride. He looked me up and down, nodded his head, and told me to take a seat. I stayed on that bus for hours, riding his route back and forth, with my face pressed against the window. The farther we got from where I lived, the nicer the neighborhoods became.
We drove through Vine City and into Dixie Hills. The houses weren’t big and fancy, but I noticed little things, like the way I didn’t see no busted-up refrigerators sitting on anybody’s front porch or broke down hoopties with mismatched doors parked at the curb. Instead, I saw houses with tidy yards, clean windows, and pretty matching curtains. At home, Mildred covered her windows with bedsheets that were faded and torn.
The first time we passed through Dixie Hills, I saw a mama in a flowered housecoat sweeping dust off her porch and a man in a T-shirt mowing his lawn with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The second time we drove through the neighborhood, I saw a whole happy-ass family on what looked like an afternoon stroll. The mama was pushing a baby stroller. The daddy was holding hands with a little kid. But what really got me was the way the parents were laughing and talking together, both of them wearing cheese-eating grins. The only other time I saw Black folks looking so jolly was in McDonald’s commercials.
Around five thirty in the afternoon, the Bus Driver said it was time for his lunch break. “You hungry?” he asked, glancing my way.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I sure could eat something right about now.”
He stopped the bus, ran into a quick mart, then drove around the corner to a quiet street, where he pulled over and parked the bus. He took out his silver lunch pail and offered me half of his bologna sandwich. Then he handed me the can of apple juice, bag of cheese curls, and Little Debbie oatmeal pie he’d picked up at the store. I enjoyed the hell outta that lunch. But I liked the conversation even more.
The Bus Driver wasn’t anything like grown folks I was used to. He didn’t get mad when I asked him questions. Not one time did he tell me to shut the fuck up.
“How many kids you got?” I asked.
“Three.”
“What they names?”
“Frederick, Franny, and Fabian.”
“Fabian? What kinda name is that?”
He sighed. “My wife picked it out.”
“How many baby mamas you got?”
“Just the one.”
“You ever seen The Young and the Restless?”
He chuckled. “I don’t reckon I have.”
I had a real good time with the Bus Driver. When he dropped me off at the end of his shift, I asked, “Can I ride with you tomorrow?”
“You sure can, little lady,” he replied. The next day, I spent all afternoon keeping him company. By my third day riding his route, me and the Bus Driver were best friends.
I liked the way he asked me questions and always seemed interested in what I had to say. Sometimes he’d act real goofy just to make me laugh. He had a little transistor radio he kept in the front pocket of his jacket. When the route was slow, and it was just a couple of people on the bus, he’d turn up the music and sing along as he drove.
“Ain’t no mountain high enough,” he belted one day. “Now, you can’t tell me I don’t sound just like Miss Diana Ross,” he said, winking at me in the rearview mirror. I laughed my head off and told him he sure as heck did not.
The Bus Driver worked from two in the afternoon until ten at night. When his lunch break came, at five thirty sharp, he always asked if I was hungry. And he always had something for me to eat. At first, he’d share whatever he was having. Then one day, he shocked the shit outta me by reaching into his lunch box and handing me a brown paper bag. Inside was my very own bologna, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, carefully wrapped in wax paper, plus a little-kid juice box, a bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a snack box of Sunkist raisins.
“You made this for me?” I asked, smiling so big I thought my face might crack open.
“My wife did,” he said. “She thinks you keeping me outta trouble. She told me to tell you, ‘Hello.’ ”
I don’t know what that Bus Driver told his wife, but that lady fed me real good. She made all types of sandwiches: tuna salad, peanut butter and jelly, and ham and cheese. Sometimes, she sent cut-up carrot sticks or half an apple. One time, I reached into my paper bag and found two Oreo cookies wrapped in a paper towel. “Your wife’s real nice,” I told the Bus Driver. “I never had no lunches this good before.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he said. For me, those sandwiches were more than just a treat. When Mama’s food stamps ran out at the end of the month, sometimes that lunch I had with the Bus Driver was the only food I’d eat all day.
Every afternoon during his break, we’d sit on that empty bus eating and chopping it up like a couple of lifelong friends. I learned he had a pet dog named Bo and his favorite hobby was fishing. I told him my mama drank too damn much and that the kids at my school were mean as hell to me. “I don’t like none of them hoes,” I shared one day.
He raised his eyebrows. “So what do you like?”
“I like riding the bus with you.”
He smiled.
“And I like my teacher,” I added. “She’s bad to the bone.”
I told him about the big-ass globe my second-grade teacher kept on top of her desk. “You ever seen a globe before?” I asked. “My teacher says all them different shapes is different countries. You ever been to any of those places? Like China or Africa? They look so far away.”
The Bus Driver said one time that he and his wife went to Florida for a vacation. “But we saving up for someplace special,” he added. “My wife wants to go to Egypt to see the ancient pyramids. When you grow up, you can visit all kinds of places, too.”
“I already seen all kinds of different things.”
“That right?”
“Every day, riding your bus.”
“See how God works,” he said, chuckling. “You didn’t even have to travel that far to see something new in this world.”
Before that summer, I thought that all of Atlanta was like my broke-down neighborhood, and that the only way I would ever see something different was to visit one of the countries my second-grade teacher showed me on her globe. The Bus Driver showed me that another kind of life—one with clean curtains, happy families, and tidy front yards—was possible not that far from home.
That was lesson number two.
It’s a miracle I survived that summer. I could have been another murdered child. Or stepped onto a different bus and met a child-predator instead.
For a girl with no supervision, the world is a dangerous place. At that young age, I’d already seen plenty of evil up close. I’d been beaten, molested, and neglected. My own mama treated me worse than a stray dog. Maybe God sent me the Bus Driver to show me what kindness feels like. The Bus Driver gave me shelter, kept me safe, and fed me when I was hungry. He never asked for anything in return.
That summer I learned that the devil isn’t always trying to get at you. Sometimes, God will send you an angel instead.
That was lesson number three.
The summer after second grade, I learned three important lessons that would shape me for the rest of my life. Back then, I lived with my mama, Mildred, my sister, Sweetie, and our three brothers in a run-down one-bedroom duplex on Griffin Street on the south side of Atlanta. The neighborhood was filled with hardworking poor folks and people on public assistance, like my mama.
Most kids I knew spent their days at the YMCA rec center on Butler Street. It had a summer program with all kinds of fun activities, like basketball, kickball, and double Dutch competitions. For snacks, everybody got Little Hugs juice boxes and little bags of chips. I would have gone to the Y just for that.
The cost of the summer program was on a sliding scale based on income, which meant Mildred could have sent me for free. But when I gave her forms to fill out, she waved me away like I was handing her a stack of bills she couldn’t pay. Mama and I was having this conversation in the living room, which was also Mama’s bedroom. She slept on a ratty old sofa. Me and my sister had the bedroom. Our brothers, when they were home, stayed in a little room off the kitchen that didn’t even have a door.
“Get that shit out my face,” Mildred said, taking a slow drag off her Winston. “And why you lookin’ at me? Bitch, you better fix your face and fix me a drink.” I don’t know if she was too lazy to fill out the paperwork, or if the problem was that she didn’t know how to read. Maybe she was ornery that morning because she hadn’t had her breakfast gin. Whatever the reason, my mama didn’t sign me up for the YMCA, which meant I had nothing to do on those long, hot summer days. I sure as hell wasn’t trying to stay home with my mama. That’s why I started sneaking out of the house.
One thing about Mildred: she watched TV like it was her full-time job. Starting at eleven in the morning when The Price Is Right came on, she’d sit there, eyeballs glued to the set, until damn near four in the afternoon when the credits rolled at the end of Guiding Light. She was so mesmerized by her stories and her liquor that she didn’t even notice her youngest child was missing.
The first time I took off, I didn’t tell nobody I was leaving. It was the middle of the day, and the house was hot as hell. My brother Andre and my sister Sweetie were in the kitchen, making all kinds of racket arguing over which one of them would get the last slice of the bread to make a sugar sandwich. I’m sick of this shit, I thought to myself.
I went out to the yard, picked up an old rickety chair that was lying upside down in the bushes, and pulled it up to the side of the house. I went back inside, checked to make sure the bedroom was empty, then climbed out the window, stepping onto the chair. I jumped my little ass into the yard, and just like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, Thank God Almighty, I was free at last!
I was gone all day and into the night. It felt so good to be out on my own, the next day I did it again. Pretty soon, sneaking out of the house became my daily routine.
When I took off, I never had a plan or particular place to go. I’d just walk up and down and all around the neighborhood. I’d pass the corner store where my brothers stole cans of Vienna sausages when we was hungry, and the convenience store where the owner would let folks buy stuff on credit. Every month Mildred would run up her tab buying Winstons and Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull, then pay the owner with her food stamps when they came in.
Mildred had a lot of problems: she was broke, unemployed, uneducated, and addicted to alcohol. But her worst quality was her mean-ass fiery temper. If I did any little thing wrong—like taking too long to light her cigarette off the hot plate—she’d lose her fucking mind. “You got an ass whooping on the shelf!” she’d holler, which meant if she caught me messing up again, she’d beat my ass until the switch was as thin as a pencil.
One morning, a couple of weeks after I started sneaking out of the house, Mama hollered from the living room that I needed to go fix her a drink. Her beverage of choice was Seagram’s Extra Dry Gin—which we called Bumpy Face, after the texture on the bottle—and tap water. Only, I wasn’t no damn bartender. I was an eight-year-old trying to keep her mama from getting bent. So when I mixed her drink, I went heavy on the water and light on the booze. She should have thanked me for keeping her hydrated. Instead, Mildred hit the roof.
“Girl, why you fuck up my drink like this?” she yelled. “You know it’s equal water to equal gin. Get me a switch—that ass whooping coming right off the shelf now.”
That night, I lay awake with my ass on fire and hatred in my heart. I thought long and hard until I came up with a plan to solve all my problems. The next day when I climbed out the bedroom window, I decided I wasn’t never coming back.
My big idea was to go stay by my daddy. I barely knew the man. He’d walked out on the family when I was still a baby. And I’d only been to his place a couple of times, when Mama, drunk as a skunk, dragged me over there then made me sit on the stoop while she banged on his door and screamed that he wasn’t nothing but a low-down dirty dog. I wasn’t even sure I remembered what he looked like (I pictured a cross between Lamont Sanford from Sanford and Son and James Evans from Good Times). But none of that mattered, because I’d watched enough television to know that my plan would surely work.
On TV, daddies love and protect their kids, and they enjoy having them around. Even that shriveled-up old white dude on Diff’rent Strokes loved those two little Black boys he adopted. If a father’s love was powerful enough to bond different races, I reckoned my daddy would be more than happy to take me in.
That morning, I gathered up two pairs of pants, some underwear, and two T-shirts—my entire wardrobe—to take with me. I couldn’t find a bag to carry them in, so I just threw everything out the window before climbing out myself. I picked my clothes off the yard, scrunched them into a ball, then marched my little ass, with all my worldly possessions, to the bus stop around the corner.
I paid the fare with loose change I stole from my brother Dre’s pocket, rode for a while, and got off at the stop where I remembered Mama taking me. Then I walked up one block and down another until I found a wood frame house with a yellow door that looked like the one Mama banged on when she had her screaming fits on Daddy’s porch.
It was high noon and all I wanted was a cool drink and something to put in my empty belly. But my daddy, who had a job in construction, was still at work. For hours, I sat on the front stoop waiting on him and daydreaming about my wonderful new life. The longer I sat, the better my fantasy got. In my imagination, my daddy was not only going to rescue me from my mama’s bullshit but he was also going to tell me nice things every morning, like, “Don’t you look pretty today!”
I was hungry and thirsty and halfway to a heatstroke when I saw my daddy walking towards the house. He was bigger than I remembered, dressed in dusty jeans and work boots. His forehead was dripping sweat. When he noticed me waiting for him, he stopped dead in his tracks.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
For a while, the two of us just looked at each other in silence. Finally, he asked, “Yo’ mama know you here?”
“Yes, sir,” I lied. “She told me to come.”
“Huh,” he said, scratching his head. “Well, shoot, I guess you might as well come on in.” He opened the door, and I followed him into his tidy one-bedroom apartment. When he disappeared into the bathroom to shower off the day, I got busy inspecting my new accommodations.
My daddy, I discovered, was living a life of luxury. He had food in the fridge, electric and gas turned on, and hot water flowing from the faucet. At home, Mildred was always behind on the bills, so we never had all those things at once. She kept the lights on so people outside couldn’t see we was struggling, but inside, the stove didn’t work. She used a hot plate to boil water and cook food, when she had it.
My favorite thing about Daddy’s place was how peaceful it was. Compared to the chaos and commotion I was used to, his home felt like the quietest place on earth.
He gave me a bowl of spaghetti and a clean pillow and told me I could sleep on the sofa. The next morning, he said, “Don’t touch nothing.” Then he left for work. With no one to bother me, I had the most relaxing day of my life. I turned on the TV and watched The Price Is Right and The Young and the Restless; I went outside to sit on the porch and watch people go by. I fried up some bacon for breakfast and made myself a bologna sandwich for lunch. Before Daddy came home, I cleaned all the dishes and put them away. The next morning when he left for work, I had the same excellent day as the one before.
I thought things were going pretty good. But it seemed my daddy felt different. On Saturday morning, after I’d been sleeping on his sofa for almost a week, he woke up and came into the living room, scratching his belly.
“You still here?” he asked.
I nodded.
He shook his head and turned to walk away. Then he paused, as if having a second thought, and swiveled back to face me. “This ain’t gon’ work,” he said. “You can’t stay here no more.”
“How come?” I asked, confused.
“I’m paying yo’ mama child support,” he said. “You gon’ mess up her money. I gotta take you back.” I knew he was lying. That man ain’t never gave Mildred a single penny. He was just looking for excuses to hide the fact that he was a deadbeat daddy kicking his own baby girl to the curb.
I didn’t try to argue. In fact, I didn’t say nothing at all. I put on my stone face to let my daddy know that if he didn’t want me, I didn’t even care. On the way back to Mildred’s, I stared out the passenger-side window fighting back tears, clutching my tangled ball of clothes to my chest. I couldn’t believe the man I’d thought would protect me was driving me right back to the gates of hell.
My daddy was no James Evans or Mr. Drummond. His ass wasn’t any better than my mama. I realized then that I had exactly zero people in the world to count on. No one was going to save me from the bullshit. If I wanted a better life, I needed to figure it out on my own.
That was lesson number one.
Looking back on that summer, I can’t believe how damn negligent both my parents were. My daddy was way out of order for taking me back to live with my abusive, alcoholic mama. But Mildred was even worse for paying me so little attention that she didn’t even know I was sneaking out the house. Letting your eight-year-old daughter roam free is bad behavior for any mother at any time. But this was 1980. There was a killer on the loose, and children like me were the targets.
Between 1979 and 1981, more than two dozen Black folks, most of them children and teens, were murdered in Atlanta. Twelve-year-old Angel Lenair was found dead in a wooded lot on Campbellton Road, not far from where I lived. The killer had bound Angel’s hands with an electric cord and stuffed a pair of underwear in her mouth. Angel was his fifth victim. The body of his twentieth victim, Curtis Walker, was found floating in the Chattahoochee River. Curtis Walker was my cousin, on my mama’s side. The Atlanta Child Murders hit that close to home.
Folks could see the police weren’t doing enough to keep us safe. Black mothers were terrified and kept their children close. But not Mildred. Most nights, she’d only discover I was missing after I got picked up and brought home by the police. They’d tell her to be careful having a little girl out past curfew. She’d smile her no-teeth-having grin and thank the officers for their trouble. But the second they were gone, she’d beat the dog shit outta me for bringing police to her door.
I wasn’t scared of the beatings, the cops, or Mama’s temper. The next day, I’d go right back to climbing out the window, again.
That summer, like every summer in Atlanta, was sticky and humid and miserable as hell. It wasn’t no walking-around-type weather. So one afternoon, sweaty and worn-out, and with my flip-flops so thin they was melting on the pavement, I decided to get on the bus that stopped near the corner of Griffin Street and Simpson Road.
This time, I didn’t have a dime, a nickel, or even a penny for the fare. But I smiled at the driver and asked him for a ride. He looked me up and down, nodded his head, and told me to take a seat. I stayed on that bus for hours, riding his route back and forth, with my face pressed against the window. The farther we got from where I lived, the nicer the neighborhoods became.
We drove through Vine City and into Dixie Hills. The houses weren’t big and fancy, but I noticed little things, like the way I didn’t see no busted-up refrigerators sitting on anybody’s front porch or broke down hoopties with mismatched doors parked at the curb. Instead, I saw houses with tidy yards, clean windows, and pretty matching curtains. At home, Mildred covered her windows with bedsheets that were faded and torn.
The first time we passed through Dixie Hills, I saw a mama in a flowered housecoat sweeping dust off her porch and a man in a T-shirt mowing his lawn with a cigarette hanging out the side of his mouth. The second time we drove through the neighborhood, I saw a whole happy-ass family on what looked like an afternoon stroll. The mama was pushing a baby stroller. The daddy was holding hands with a little kid. But what really got me was the way the parents were laughing and talking together, both of them wearing cheese-eating grins. The only other time I saw Black folks looking so jolly was in McDonald’s commercials.
Around five thirty in the afternoon, the Bus Driver said it was time for his lunch break. “You hungry?” he asked, glancing my way.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “I sure could eat something right about now.”
He stopped the bus, ran into a quick mart, then drove around the corner to a quiet street, where he pulled over and parked the bus. He took out his silver lunch pail and offered me half of his bologna sandwich. Then he handed me the can of apple juice, bag of cheese curls, and Little Debbie oatmeal pie he’d picked up at the store. I enjoyed the hell outta that lunch. But I liked the conversation even more.
The Bus Driver wasn’t anything like grown folks I was used to. He didn’t get mad when I asked him questions. Not one time did he tell me to shut the fuck up.
“How many kids you got?” I asked.
“Three.”
“What they names?”
“Frederick, Franny, and Fabian.”
“Fabian? What kinda name is that?”
He sighed. “My wife picked it out.”
“How many baby mamas you got?”
“Just the one.”
“You ever seen The Young and the Restless?”
He chuckled. “I don’t reckon I have.”
I had a real good time with the Bus Driver. When he dropped me off at the end of his shift, I asked, “Can I ride with you tomorrow?”
“You sure can, little lady,” he replied. The next day, I spent all afternoon keeping him company. By my third day riding his route, me and the Bus Driver were best friends.
I liked the way he asked me questions and always seemed interested in what I had to say. Sometimes he’d act real goofy just to make me laugh. He had a little transistor radio he kept in the front pocket of his jacket. When the route was slow, and it was just a couple of people on the bus, he’d turn up the music and sing along as he drove.
“Ain’t no mountain high enough,” he belted one day. “Now, you can’t tell me I don’t sound just like Miss Diana Ross,” he said, winking at me in the rearview mirror. I laughed my head off and told him he sure as heck did not.
The Bus Driver worked from two in the afternoon until ten at night. When his lunch break came, at five thirty sharp, he always asked if I was hungry. And he always had something for me to eat. At first, he’d share whatever he was having. Then one day, he shocked the shit outta me by reaching into his lunch box and handing me a brown paper bag. Inside was my very own bologna, lettuce, and tomato sandwich, carefully wrapped in wax paper, plus a little-kid juice box, a bag of Lay’s potato chips, and a snack box of Sunkist raisins.
“You made this for me?” I asked, smiling so big I thought my face might crack open.
“My wife did,” he said. “She thinks you keeping me outta trouble. She told me to tell you, ‘Hello.’ ”
I don’t know what that Bus Driver told his wife, but that lady fed me real good. She made all types of sandwiches: tuna salad, peanut butter and jelly, and ham and cheese. Sometimes, she sent cut-up carrot sticks or half an apple. One time, I reached into my paper bag and found two Oreo cookies wrapped in a paper towel. “Your wife’s real nice,” I told the Bus Driver. “I never had no lunches this good before.”
“I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself,” he said. For me, those sandwiches were more than just a treat. When Mama’s food stamps ran out at the end of the month, sometimes that lunch I had with the Bus Driver was the only food I’d eat all day.
Every afternoon during his break, we’d sit on that empty bus eating and chopping it up like a couple of lifelong friends. I learned he had a pet dog named Bo and his favorite hobby was fishing. I told him my mama drank too damn much and that the kids at my school were mean as hell to me. “I don’t like none of them hoes,” I shared one day.
He raised his eyebrows. “So what do you like?”
“I like riding the bus with you.”
He smiled.
“And I like my teacher,” I added. “She’s bad to the bone.”
I told him about the big-ass globe my second-grade teacher kept on top of her desk. “You ever seen a globe before?” I asked. “My teacher says all them different shapes is different countries. You ever been to any of those places? Like China or Africa? They look so far away.”
The Bus Driver said one time that he and his wife went to Florida for a vacation. “But we saving up for someplace special,” he added. “My wife wants to go to Egypt to see the ancient pyramids. When you grow up, you can visit all kinds of places, too.”
“I already seen all kinds of different things.”
“That right?”
“Every day, riding your bus.”
“See how God works,” he said, chuckling. “You didn’t even have to travel that far to see something new in this world.”
Before that summer, I thought that all of Atlanta was like my broke-down neighborhood, and that the only way I would ever see something different was to visit one of the countries my second-grade teacher showed me on her globe. The Bus Driver showed me that another kind of life—one with clean curtains, happy families, and tidy front yards—was possible not that far from home.
That was lesson number two.
It’s a miracle I survived that summer. I could have been another murdered child. Or stepped onto a different bus and met a child-predator instead.
For a girl with no supervision, the world is a dangerous place. At that young age, I’d already seen plenty of evil up close. I’d been beaten, molested, and neglected. My own mama treated me worse than a stray dog. Maybe God sent me the Bus Driver to show me what kindness feels like. The Bus Driver gave me shelter, kept me safe, and fed me when I was hungry. He never asked for anything in return.
That summer I learned that the devil isn’t always trying to get at you. Sometimes, God will send you an angel instead.
That was lesson number three.
Recenzii
“Wildly entertaining. . . . Williams-Lee’s story illustrates how humor can help reframe adversity and overcome it by tenacity, faith, generosity, and resourcefulness.”
—Booklist
—Booklist
Descriere
From the author of the acclaimed memoir Rabbit and star of BET Networks' The Ms. Pat Show, a heartfelt, raw, and hilarious new memoir about rising from strife to success, tackling obstacles, and celebrating your wins with a laugh.