Chapter 3

LaDonna—Before this story goes any further I need for you to know me. Maybe knowing my past will help you understand me better. Like most of the black kids in my neighborhood, I was raised in a single parent home. When I was younger, I would ask my mother about my father. She had all kinds of stories. In one he was a long-distance truck driver. She would tell me about all the exciting and beautiful places he had been to. In another, he was a soldier who had saved his men in a big battle and had been awarded many medals. All lies of course. It was most likely he had been a one-night stand in the back of his mother’s Pontiac and when he found out she was pregnant he had left town and never came back.

We lived in her mother’s house and when she died momma got the house. Momma was a hairdresser and had a good job. We were not rich, but we got by and I had a good life for many years. Our neighborhood was getting rougher and rougher each year. Families moved out and drug dealers moved in. There were robberies and home invasions, even a drive-by shooting every now and then.

One day I noticed momma talking to our new neighbor from across the street. He was nice looking and so was momma. In no time she was spending time with him. Then she started missing work. She was fired and money got scarce around the house. Then I noticed that she was going to parties with Leroy, our neighbor and now her boyfriend, almost every night. She had money again. That’s when I figured out she was working as a prostitute for Leroy. Then I found her crack pipe. Now I was the ‘crack whore’s kid’. My life could not get any worse. Nice guys at school did not want to be seen with me and the only ones’ who asked me out wanted to fuck me and asked if I knew where mom kept her stash of drugs and if I could steal some.

As I walked home that day, I was thinking about my future. Leroy would probably get me hooked on drugs, then he would start fucking me, then ‘loan’ me to a few of his friends and before long I would be turning tricks like my mother. I would be just another crack whore prostitute. Not what I had planned but this was reality, not a stupid little black girl’s dream of living in a nice house, in a safe neighborhood with a family of my own.

That’s when I saw the truck. I had seen this truck before. He was one of mom’s ‘clients’. Probably waiting for his turn with my mother. I walk by his truck thinking I am going to sit on the porch and read. As I pass him, he grabs me and before I can scream, I feel a rag over my mouth. As I begin to pass out, I see Grandma Lincoln get up and go into her house. Maybe she saw what he was doing.