Tag: memoir

The Accident

“She shouldn’t have been running across the street!” said a familiar voice in the crowd.

It was Cousin Rachel and if I had the energy to throw a scowl her way I would have. I still had not felt any pain and only prayed now that I would live. I scanned the crowd, it appeared the entire neighborhood had come to see the event. Heads popped outside of windows, neighbors stopped in their places and strangers huddled together alongside family, shoulder to shoulder, as if shielding me from the outside and encasing me inside the core of the sidewalk.

Meanwhile, my fingers tingled with blood that raced toward the tips because someone was squeezing the life out of my left hand, and their tears kissed their apologies on top my skin. She was the woman who hit me and was knee deep in apologies and instant compassion consumed me. I forgave the woman over and over again while simultaneously praying I wasn’t going to die. But I was talking in my head again. The lady had not heard me, my mouth still had not moved, and my memory only went as far back as rolling off the hood of someone’s car, down the window and onto the ground. (For some reason I remember sliding down the window). Prior to this I was on a quest for ice cream and decided a quick dash across the street would grant me this prized possession. Needless to say I was wrong.

It wasn’t until I looked down at my right thigh that the full realization of what happened came to me: my right thigh was twice the size of my left one. Still, I felt no pain. I felt nothing in fact. I just lay there consumed by thought and words that had no sound. It wasn’t until the Ambulance arrived and I made the transition from the ground to the vehicle that the shock wore off and the excruciating discomfort started.

emergency-room-sign

The arrival to the hospital itself is a blur. I was in so much pain that everything seemed surreal. It turns out that I’d broken my leg, or more precisely, my femur bone (the longest bone in your body, located near the thigh). I remember staring into the ceiling, my little brown body highlighted against the white sheets. My mom was to my left as we waited for the doctors to return. My whole right leg had been wrapped in some kind of casing and the feel of it was that it was getting heavier and heavier as time passed. As I cried out in agony, I could not understand what was taking them so long to come back. I also wondered who had done this cruel thing as to wrap my broken leg in a cast, which made my leg so unbelievably heavy that I could not lift it and supposed then that it was not only paralyzed, but by the time the doctors felt like getting started I would have no leg left, for it was diving deeper into the bed and the mattress began to fold over.

Of course, none of this really happened. My leg was not wrapped in a cast and was not sinking into the bed.

When the doctors and nurses finally did return, in what seemed hours later, they started to cut my clothes off which added to my rising dislike of these people. I was wearing something really cute that now sat in shredded pieces of nothing. Meanwhile, in my head, I was explaining to no one in particular about the evil doctor who commanded his men to try and make my leg disappear and cut up my nice clothes. I’m sure he wanted to do away with me and I was being taken to a secret laboratory in which this would happen. I was just about to imagine what he was going to do when someone put a pill in my mouth. When I woke up I was laying in recovery with a steel plate replacing my leg, twenty-four surgical staples piecing me back together and surrounded by family.

check-up

I still remember when mama took me to my first check-up. I assumed the clever doctors had found me and sought to continue their plan. In my head, I’d been rescued by family who found a way to piece me back together and store me away in recovery. Now however, we were on our way to the doctor’s office and had to cross a big street that I’m sure came out of nowhere. On my journey to get across, I wondered what kind of technology they were using. I’d better be careful not to step on the yellow lines; it may activate some special gadget and suck me deep into the ground. Because my enemies had decided it was better that I use a walker instead of crutches, which I’d hoped to experience, it took me what seemed forever to get across the street. The evil doctors had done it this time, they were back and I was sure that they had somehow stretched the already wide road so that with each step I was not getting closer, I was only getting further and further away. I thought about telling mama about these corrupt men but I didn’t want to blow my cover. If she was protecting me they couldn’t know about it.

When we got to the office and they removed the staples, I was instructed by the doctor to move my leg back and forth but I couldn’t do it. My body had not all the way adjusted to the steel plate and told me this wasn’t a very good idea. Instantly, I stopped and threw a scowl the doctor’s way, “Way to go genius that hurts.” But I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to kill me. I better not say anything, they may try to kidnap mom and throw me in that laboratory again.

*****

I would like to publish a memoir one day. While I am still undecided as to publish an entire manuscript, I have taken to writing down bits and pieces of my life story and publishing excerpts to this blog for practice. What you have read is the true story of when I was hit by a car at ten years old. Names of real persons have been changed to protect their identities.

My “Something You Didn’t Know” Blog-Share: Memoir Sample

Something You Didn't Know-PBSSince I’m currently researching how to write a memoir and am prepping myself for writing my own one day, I have prepared for you a mini bio. It includes information about me I have never shared on this blog.  I think this will help me to access how to go about the memoir writing process and to also see if I have what it takes to bring my story to life. Ready? Here we go:

Concrete Children – Life inside the Robert Taylor Projects

My name is Yecheilyah Ysrayl, also known as “EC” but a lot of people don’t know that I was born Stacey Hereford on May 26, 1987 at Billings Hospital on the south side. I actually changed my name back in 2008, a year after my road to self-discovery and identity had begun.

The unique thing about my birth is that I was not born alone but I have a twin sister as well, but I will not reveal her name because I did not get her permission to do so. I also have two other sisters and three brothers but my twin and I are the youngest. So total, between my mom and dad there are seven of us. We grew up in the Robert Taylor Projects on Chicago’s south side. When it opened, The Robert Taylor homes housed up to a peak of 27,000 people, although they were built to maintain only 11,000 and comprised of 28 high-rise buildings; with 16 stories each, and a total of 4,415 units, mostly arranged in U-shaped clusters of three, stretching for two miles. It was located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of the south side of Chicago, on State Street between Pershing Road (39th Street) and 54th Street alongside the Dan-Ryan expressway.

“If yo mama’s on dope and yo frigerator’s broke go to chokes! Go to chokes!”

I didn’t make that up, it was an actual song. We sang the hood hymn down the hall of the largest housing project in the country. We sang from the eighth floor to the first every chance we got to make it to the free breakfast program offered by CHA, or Chicago Housing Authority. It was nicknamed chokes because the sandwiches were so dry we were sure to die of thirst if water didn’t deliver us. Yet these raggedy choke sandwiches erupted inside of us a sense of excitement every week, surely preferable to the empty air soup available at the moment. Like most of the families who resided in the buildings, our mother’s twitching mouth and search for the white stuff on the floor proved that the 1980s crack epidemic had taken root especially well, and was a normal scene. For a while I didn’t understand why they bent so much so, wetting their finger slightly before placing it back in their mouth after its short journey to the floor. What they tasted I did not know, but became used to seeing their backs bent in anxious investigation of the corners of the house. I didn’t understand then about the invisible shards of cocaine embedded in the cracks of the floor or the disappointing realization that it is just white paper. But since many of the people who hung around were drug addicts, I became accustomed to such behaviors and could tell at an early age when someone was high. It was not splinters of judgment coming from the walking planks of my childhood perspective; it’s just that to us it was normal. Their faces contorted as their entire presence was invaded by an outside force they could not control. It was more than a decision to get high, it was a need. I imagine the ecstasy of it all took them places, sat them on the tops of clouds and let them see the room spin. They picked imaginary lint from their clothing and laughed at jokes only they were in on. I imagine worry lifted itself from their shoulders piece by piece until peace descended like nothing before and everything was right in the world. At this point nothing is more important than getting back the feeling of the first hit. Every other moment after that is a quest to repeat the trip to the moon the demons took them on. Not even food was more important than feeling that same feeling again. It’s not like they were in their right minds; it is taken out of their heads and resting somewhere in another dimension. They steal and sometimes kill to be taken to this place and they don’t see you. There is no focus on anything but the next hit until they come down from the clouds they’ve been riding. But the urge and thirst of it makes them want it again almost instantly. They are walking zombies, vampires seeking to do whatever it takes to draw blood. It is the price of being hooked, and if they could, they would sell their soul to the devil for a chance to get high. Everything is happy and forgetful all at the same time. They scratched, laughed, talked, and from my naïve perspective they even seemed to love better.

The Robert Taylor Homes faced many of the same problems that doomed other high-rise housing projects in Chicago such as Cabrini Green. Whether it was drugs, violence, murder, disease, you name it, it happened here. The dull, concrete high-rises, many blackened with the scars of fires, sat in a narrow stretch of slum. It seemed the wind carried us to the next step one 4th of July weekend where the wrong turn can be the epitome of a beat down or casual robbery. The tall narrow hallway swallowed us down pee scented stairways and rat infested incinerators. The floors loitered with crack vials, weed and potato chip bags, and walls covered in the scars of spray painted names, profanity, and other scars of wear as we zoomed throughout the building. An explosion of innocence resurrecting our footsteps; unaware of the war taking place on the exterior of where we found hobby. At a time where children had nothing important to ponder except penny candy, concrete children were rocking themselves to sleep on burnt orange sofa’s while their mother’s roamed the streets for the next hit. Fathers were non-existent since their mother’s couldn’t get welfare without them. They were around though, standing on the corners or hiding underneath the beds of women. They were the Uncle Pookie’s and Cousin Ray-Ray’s of hundreds of children who knew them as nothing more than the Big Mike’s of the block. My father wasn’t around either in those early days, at which we’ll explore more deeply later. But today, like all Holidays, was an exception. Our mother’s had sacrificed Food Stamps so that we may take part in the energy of the gods. Today we were sacrificial as a lamb, but tomorrow no one will eat.

The authority of drug dealers overtook CHA (Chicago Housing Authority) and they became the owners. As is common in any hood, dealers fought for control of the buildings. In one weekend, more than 300 separate shooting incidents were reported in the vicinity of the Robert Taylor Homes. Twenty-eight people were killed during the same weekend, with twenty-six believed to be gang-related. Running home from school to escape the presence of gun fire was common for children growing up in the buildings. I can distinctively remember Uncle Huey picking us up from school early as not to be caught in the fury of “wild bulls in a net”. The most noted case is that of little Vinyette. On June 25, 1983, an infant, Vinyette Teague, was abducted from Robert Taylor after her grandmother left her alone in the hallway for a few minutes to answer a phone call. An estimated 50 people were in the hallway at the time of the abduction, but police were unable to gather enough evidence to make any arrests. She has never been seen or heard from since, and her real name I use only because the Newspapers have long since made it public.

Vinyette’s disappearance and the people’s failure to assist in her return was due to the social system that burrowed deeper than the hoods ever infamous rule of “No Snitching”. But due to the extent of poverty, Robert Taylor housing projects developed a system of social welfare and reciprocity between the tenants and gang organizations such as the GD’s (Gangsta Disciples), and BKs, (Black Kings). The gangs protected the tenants and homeless people living in their territory. In return, the gangs were allowed to sell product (drugs) out of the Robert Taylor homes. They also negotiated with the Chicago Housing Authority (who were for the most part scared of the gang members anyway and had little desire to offer assistance to its tenants) for renters. Tenants often exchanged use of appliances for food, money, or services. A community said to have been built to counteract the Chicago slums quickly became an emblem of failure.

End of Memoir Sample

And this has been an EC Blog-Share…whose next?