RANDY HAD A POINT. THE ranch was a place filled with love and peace and harmony. That was something Anthony felt in his heart while he toiled there at 5 a.m. every morning. The urgency of preserving the ranch was starting to kick in and his own history with it and the horses came into clear focus.
Long before Anthony learned to put a saddle on a horse, before he learned how to keep a Stetson hat crisp by brushing it counterclockwise, he was a gangster.
Anthony’s initiation into the Acacia Blocc gang occurred in the early hours of a humid late spring morning on Acacia Avenue in 1991. He was eight years old. His mother had recently walked out, leaving his father to raise him single-handedly, a task that was nearly impossible for Thaddeus Harris, who worked as a high school janitor on the other side of town and couldn’t be home to supervise or keep Anthony out of reach of the local gang.
Anthony was alone in his house when three hard knocks interrupted his breakfast and the voice of his older friend, Tre, boomed outside the double-bolted door.
“Come outside, Anthony!” Tre, a neighborhood elder, said. “Don’t take all day.”
He had spent the entire night thinking about this moment, knowing they could come for him at any time. He pushed his bowl of cornflakes aside and approached the door, rested his hand on the deadbolt and peered out through the peephole.
Five people stood at the bottom of his front stoop. Tre, Marcus, and a few other kids from the neighborhood. They were between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, and each wore a blue handkerchief on their shoulder, a badge of honor that indicated they’d been inducted into the Acacia Blocc Crips themselves. Like Anthony, they had all come from broken homes, but now they were fixed up as the youngest recruits who would be raised within the hierarchy of one of the most notorious gangs in Compton, feared by their enemies and by local law enforcement. Drug dealing, extortion, and murder were central to the Acacia Blocc operation.
Outside, Tre continued to yell loud enough for the neighbors to hear. “Come on out! We know you’re home.”
Anthony unlocked the first bolt, then the second, and then took a deep breath.
He thought about his family. Not the family of the dysfunctional home he was born into. Not the relatives his father had spoken about for years in his home state of Louisiana, or his mother’s family, local Compton residents who had also journeyed from the Deep South. The family that crossed his mind were the very people who would in a few minutes violently pound his eight-year-old body into the pavement in front of all of his neighbors.
The violence was justified, he felt. Getting jumped into the set was about proving your loyalty and earning respect. After this fight, he would have a family he could go to for anything, both big and small, and they would always have his back. It would make up for the absence of love and attention he felt at home.
In the city of Compton, these experiences were rites of passage, an intergenerational practice that began with Anthony’s uncles and naturally carried over to him. If you lived on or around the Acacia Blocc you were either a part of the gang or you were against them. There was no middle ground. Those who refused to join would be tormented and harassed on a daily basis. They were considered traitors and were often the victims of violent assaults. The only people who received a pass were star athletes who showed promise on the field or on the court, and Anthony, unfortunately, could never dribble a ball or run routes on the football field. But he also wasn’t a traitor.
Perhaps subconsciously, even then, a part of him recognized that he was born into a time and place shaped by forces outside his control. That he never really had a choice. That he would always—one day—become a gangster.
Outside, Tre wanted to know if Anthony was ready. He was one of the older cats in the ’hood and someone Anthony looked to for the help his father could not provide. Anthony had shown promise, and Tre finally felt like he was ready.
Anthony opened the door and stepped forward, ready to face the inevitable.
The fight that branded Anthony with the new nickname “Ant Dogg” only lasted five minutes, but it set Anthony on a treacherous path for the next fifteen years.
Soon after the fight, when the bruises on his face and body healed, Anthony received his first gun from one of the gang’s elders, a .380-caliber revolver. He kept it on his body at all times. He carried it on his walks to the corner store to buy soda and chips; he carried it to school on the days he decided to go. He and his gun were inseparable, particularly when the Mexican CV 70’s began a war with Acacia over drug territories. He even carried his gun to Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital whenever he accompanied his grandmother for her checkups.
But he didn’t fire it until two years later, when he was ten years old. The older gang members told him he needed to earn his stripes and forced him to come along on a drive-by shooting on a block controlled by the Tree Top Pirus, a local Blood gang.
Anthony missed his target that night, but the gun made him feel invincible. It gave him a sense of power that he never knew he could have.
The days came and went. Another test, another duty. A shooting, a drug run, a jumping. It wasn’t long before Anthony was earning a name for himself on the streets.
It was shortly after he dropped out of middle school that Black told him about a woman he wanted him to meet. Her name was Mayisha and she was teaching the kids in the neighborhood how to ride horses. Anthony had never been to the ranch before, but he was intrigued by rumors of horses and cowboys, of all places, right here in his city, his ’hood.
His father’s stories of his early childhood in Louisiana conjured up images of the backcountry roads, the grazing cows, the rustic barns built on rolling green hills. Black had a feeling that Anthony would take a liking to riding, and he was right. Anthony was still a kid, after all, and despite the tough front he had to put up, he’d always been enthralled by the cowboys and horses he’d seen in western movies.
Anthony and Black set off for Richland Farms on a blazingly hot afternoon in August. When they arrived, they were hit by the pungent smell of hay and manure, and the whimsical and frequent neighs of the horses. Anthony had entered a world he never imagined, a world that he thought only existed on the lots of Hollywood studios. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. But this world was real.
They watched a group of horses trot before a row of swaying palm trees and, in the distance, the Compton City Hall building. It was captivating, like an oasis in the middle of their city. It felt like a place he could call home.
Black pointed to a large sign above the entry to the stables. In bold text it read “Compton Junior Posse: Equestrian Club, Est. 1988” and showed a gold painting of a horse rearing, as if it meant to throw off its rider. Anthony had never seen that word before, “equestrian,” but a posse was like a gang, wasn’t it? If so, he thought, then what did that make a cowboy?
He didn’t have much time to figure it out, because a woman was already walking toward them. She was wearing a cowboy hat with a blue stripe wrapping its brim. Clutched under her arm was a dusty leather saddle. She had kind, sparkling eyes, and a purposeful stride as she approached.
“You must be Anthony,” she said, extending her free hand.
And that was how he met Mayisha Akbar and the Compton Junior Posse.
Anthony was immediately drawn to the horses. He had never seen anything like them before, and up until that point the only cowboys he had ever seen were white. He quickly met other members of the Posse, kids his own age with names like Rasheed, Terrance, and Koffer. When the school bell rang, he would rush to the ranch with excitement, eager to jump on the back of a horse.
However, he was leading a double life. The time he spent on the ranch allowed him to unplug from the realities of Compton street life. The police helicopters that, he assumed, were chasing friends of his continued to buzz over the ranch, but while he fed the horses and cleaned their stalls, he was free. It felt like they were surveilling him, but he knew he was safe.
Being on the ranch opened him up to feelings of tranquility. When he was on a horse he was exempt from the life of crime and violence that he was living on Acacia Avenue. But even these moments had a daily expiration date on them. As soon as he closed the gate behind him and stepped back onto Caldwell Street, he transformed back into Lil’ Ant, one of the youngest and most ambitious members of the Acacia Crips.
“Alright, cuz!” he would yell to anyone he would see before leaving the property and heading home on his bicycle. “I’ll see you on the other side!”
As a child, Anthony had always been attracted to flashy cars. He admired the way the older guys on his block drove down the street in their blue chrome Buick Regals and Chevy Impalas as the cars rattled from the powerful kick of the eighteen-inch Alpine speakers in their trunks. Anthony’s love for cars also came from the time his father owned a mechanic shop on the westside of Compton. It was there that he learned everything from installing a speaker system to an oil change to installing a new carburetor.
His first car was a Nissan Altima that he bought from a friend for three hundred dollars. But it didn’t live up to the thrill he felt when he saw a Buick Regal for the first time. That was love at first sight, and he would stop at nothing to one day own one.
Anthony was faced with a choice: save up for a car the traditional way working for his father, or make money quicker by hustling drugs on his block. He chose the latter.
His first drug deal occurred on the corner of Acacia and Alondra Boulevard when he sold a ten-dollar bag of weed to a local homeless man. His business immediately picked up and within months he had a consistent clientele.
Having money in his pocket felt good. It came quick, and every deal that he made brought an immediate adrenaline rush. As his business prospered, the need to be in school every day began to dwindle. After getting kicked out of Compton High for fighting, he was sent to Inglewood High School, where he was also expelled for fighting. He ended up in a continuation high school, the last resort for at-risk teenagers.
While this was happening, Anthony also began to spend less time at the ranch. He had gotten a taste of drug dealing and wanted more. Above all, he still wanted to buy the car of his dreams. He did what any young hustler in the ’hood would do, moved on from weed to selling more dangerous drugs.
The coop was one of the best-known crack houses on the farms, and it’s where Anthony began to spend most of his days. It was an ideal location, just close enough to Wilmington Avenue but also quiet enough not to raise any suspicion. It was once a home but had been repossessed during the early 1990s when the family who lived there were unable to continue payments on their home. The backyard once had a thriving chicken coop, but the first time Anthony set foot on the property it held only the remains of wilted feathers and dried feces. Every door except for the back was bolted shut as a safety measure for both the inhabitants and the dealers who lived there. Every fiend who walked to the front door was received either by Anthony or by one of his trusted associates.
“What do you want?” he would yell from the other side of the door while as many as fifteen people smoked crack cocaine on the living room floor behind him. Sometimes the drug fiends would stay for as long as two weeks, finding creative ways to support their addiction by completing tasks around the home like cleaning or delivering food for Anthony and his friends. Sometimes, when the fiends would get out of hand, Anthony would be forced to respond with the threat of his gun or physical violence.
The money he earned at the coop helped Anthony purchase his dream car, a 1992 Buick Regal with one of the best hydraulic systems on his block. At seventeen years old, he was riding in style. His Regal came with a shiny navy blue paint job, the same color of the bandana he wore on his forehead.
Earning money stoked his appetite for more. While he earned upwards of five thousand dollars a day, he also supplemented his income by stealing cars. Sometimes he would get caught, sometimes he wouldn’t. On days when business was slow at the coop, he and his friends would go looking for Mexican men to rob. The Mexicans wore expensive ostrich boots and flashy belt buckles on Friday and Saturday nights. Those boots alone would bring in at least two hundred dollars, and if they were lucky, there would be more money stashed inside them.
Anthony was eighteen the first time he went to jail for grand theft auto. He had been caught a few months before he turned eighteen but released the same day because he was a minor. Being eighteen, however, came with a different reality. This time he was locked up for three weeks. A year later he was jailed again for possession of a firearm. A year after that he would be caught again.
The first and last time the police would ever bust into Anthony’s home was on an early August morning.
“Fuck,” Anthony said when he heard the door violently crash open. “They’re here for me.”
As his home filled up with more than ten police officers, he immediately thought about the movie scenes he had watched as a kid, films like Scarface and Goodfellas. Getting busted, as each of these films depicted, was almost like a rite of passage. It was a way to earn stripes and respect, and when the officers burst into his room, he didn’t put up a fight. Instead he calmly put his hands in the air. He had known this day would eventually come.
As one officer handcuffed him and read him his rights over the barking of police dogs, another group of officers reached under his bed and grabbed his hidden backpacks full of cocaine. A different group cut open his living room sofa and found other packages of cocaine. They had found his stash. But all Anthony could think about was the tens of thousands of dollars in cash that he had buried in his backyard. It was enough, he hoped, to eventually bail him out.
The judge didn’t offer Anthony the bail he expected, and his public defender—or “public pretender,” as they were known in the ’hood—did the very least for him. He suggested Anthony take a two-year plea deal, which is exactly what he did. Within a few weeks he was off to a federal prison in California near the Mexican border.
As a member of the Acacia Crips, Anthony was relegated to a side of the prison for black inmates. Latinos, whites, and everyone else were lumped into separate holding cells because of the frequent race riots. As Anthony settled into a cell with a black man from Northern California, he began to think about what his friends and family were doing back in Compton. Being locked up meant that he would be forced to cope with true isolation. While he sometimes ran into friends that he knew from Compton, life in prison meant that he would be completely removed from the horses he dreamt about on Mayisha’s ranch.
The first three weeks were the hardest. Prison was unlike the time he had served in Los Angeles County jails. This was an entirely different world, and he was forced to become tougher and more hardened the minute he arrived. He had to fight to let his fellow inmates know that he wasn’t a punk, and had to fight to let people know that he wasn’t afraid of them. He had to man up quickly and find smart ways to survive within the prison walls. He did push-ups daily and fought other prisoners, often just to prove a point—that he wasn’t afraid of them. If he didn’t, it showed weakness, and that meant more difficult times ahead.
He got into a total of ten fights during his first three weeks, both with old enemies from back in Los Angeles and with other inmates who were intent on testing him. Anthony got into so many fights that he got sent to “the hole” and sat in a room that was more isolating than his eight-by-six-foot cell. The hole was a dark, small, one-person cell meant to isolate testy inmates from the rest of the prison population. If the correctional officers believed you were in any way involved in a fight, you were sent there. The goal was to deter future transgressions, but the hole was also a way to psychologically break inmates down. It was a place where the screams and wails of grown men could be heard at night, echoing throughout the prison.
Anthony spent a total of two weeks in the hole’s darkness. The only light that came into the room was through a small rectangular opening through which he received food three times a day. The darkness made it hard to see what he was eating. Mealtime was the only time when he would hear another human voice, even if it belonged to a white man who hated everything that the color of Anthony’s skin represented.
“It’s time to eat, Harris,” the officer would yell, opening the window, depositing the food, then slamming it shut.
The first year was the hardest. During his free time, Anthony spent hours exercising in the prison yard or running laps around the makeshift track that some of the inmates had created. He was never an athlete, but having a chiseled body and staying in peak shape wasn’t about impressing girls anymore; in prison it became a matter of survival. The stronger he got the better he could defend himself.
Because he was a newcomer, he continued to make a name for himself by proving his toughness to the rest of the prison population. Inmates were housed in different cells and sections of the prison according to their race. African-Americans and Latinos, who comprised the majority of the prison population, had the largest sections and were housed on opposite sides of the prison. Race riots were common, and every section in prison was run like a complex organization, a Fortune 500 company, even. Resources and money were allocated for different reasons according to one’s needs. There was a formal code, and then there was the code that Anthony was forced to live by. Some weeks were better than others. But Anthony wouldn’t have to fight only his own battles in prison. He was often asked to fight and discipline fellow inmates who didn’t obey the rules.
As Anthony’s first year began to round out, he found himself spending less and less time on the prison yard and more time in the solitude of his own cell. Though it had been years since he last rode a horse, in isolation his mind kept returning to the horses he used to ride at Mayisha’s ranch. Minutes turned into hours and hours turned into days as he dreamed about the feeling of riding bareback through the streets of Compton. He missed the feeling of working on the ranch and riding around the Richland Farms on Misty, the horse his father had purchased for him when he was eleven. When his cell gates opened up twice a day for recreation, he opted out and stayed inside and did push-ups in his cell. He was slowly withdrawing from prison life and an environment meant to control him.
One day, he felt compelled to draw and paint, though he’d never done so before. He began to draw images of wild horses and aspects of the ranch that were vivid in his memory. He drew the contours of the giant oak tree that housed hundreds of chirping birds every morning. He drew groups of black boys and girls, as he remembered them, riding on horses wearing light blue T-shirts, like the ones Mayisha required everyone to wear on the ranch. Drawing materials were scarce, but Anthony managed to trade batteries with other inmates for a notepad and pencils.
The first time he drew horses, they looked nothing like horses. The figures were weirdly shaped brown blotches that barely resembled an animal. But just like riding, practice made perfect, and after several months Anthony’s drawings morphed into realistic illustrations.
He began checking out books from the prison library that had horses in them. He checked out children’s books, history books, and animal books, anything that had images of horses that could serve as a model to improve his drawing. He spent hours sketching them onto another sheet of paper and putting them up in his cell, creating a makeshift art gallery for passersby to admire.
Inmates weren’t allowed to have colored pencils or paint because correctional officers feared they could be used to make makeshift narcotics that could be sniffed or ingested, but Anthony worked with what he had and devised a method for creating watercolor paintings in his cell using Skittles candy, a favorite among inmates and highly sought after. If the candy’s colored dye could leave a mark on his fingers, he thought, then it would be sure to also leave a mark on a sheet of paper. He was right. He dipped individual candies into a bowl of water one afternoon and shouted with excitement, almost loud enough for the guards to burst in and shut his secret operation down.
Anthony learned by experimentation that if he wanted to paint a brown horse, he should mix red, blue, and yellow together. If he wanted a black horse, he should mix red and green Skittles. His drawings became lifelike with the color that the Skittles provided, giving them a texture that he could feel. He painted every day, sometimes long into the early hours of the morning while his cellmate groaned in the top bunk and Anthony crouched near the bars, painting under a dull, flickering light outside of his cell.
In a matter of months, other inmates started calling him the “painter” and requested their own horse drawings.
The watercolor paintings that he painted every day were meant to keep him out of trouble. But they did more than that. They kept him alive. Drawing and painting horses for hours at a time helped him cope with the realities of being locked up in a cell meant to eradicate every ounce of humanity from his body. Painting horses reminded him of the world that existed outside of the eight-by-six cement walls and the humanity that every stroke of paint brought him closer to having again.
Every week on the phone, he spoke with Lozita, his girlfriend and mother of his two children, and told her about his plans to ride horses and work on the ranch once he got out. She supported him and continued to send money to fill up his prison commissary so he could buy more materials for his paintings. During one call, he told her that if he had never stopped riding horses, he would never have gone to jail. She agreed.
As he painted more and more horses, he made a decision that this would be the last time he would ever spend in prison. His daughter, Acacia, was five years old, and his son, Anthony Jr., was two. He wanted to be around for them and knew that getting back to the horses in the Richland Farms would be the only way to do that.
TWO WEEKS AFTER Anthony was released from his two-year sentence, he decided it was time to go back and visit the ranch. He felt the same nervousness that he had felt the first time Black brought him there so many years ago. It had been more than ten years and nothing had changed, he thought to himself. The blue-and-white-painted Compton Junior Posse sign still hung high over the ranch’s entrance, but now it was weathered from storms and in need of a fresh coat of paint. The storage shed that housed the hay, tools, and general equipment still looked like it was in need of a proper cleanup. There was more dirt in the arena and a few new horses, but practically everything else remained the same.
Most importantly, he felt the same peace that he had felt as a child.
Anthony immediately spotted Mayisha sitting on the bleachers with a group of youth riders. Some were faces he recognized from the community, while others were new.
“Is that who I think it is?” Mayisha excitedly yelled as Anthony walked up to the group wearing a pair of dark blue jeans, an extra-large white T-shirt, and black Nike sneakers.
“You know it,” replied Anthony as he approached Mayisha for a hug he had been dreaming about for the past two years.
As the hug with Mayisha came to a close, Anthony looked at the tightly coiled dreadlocks that had greyed since he last saw her. Her soft blue-hazel eyes hadn’t changed. Neither had her cinnamon-brown skin.
She looked at Anthony like a mother who hadn’t seen her own child in years. As if her own son had just gotten out of prison for the same crimes she had fought so hard to keep her riders from committing.
Still, Anthony, like all the other riders who had been part of her program, would always be family.
“Welcome back, Anthony,” Mayisha said as she continued to hold him for what seemed like an eternity. It had been two and a half years since the last time they had held one another. The warmth of her hug took him back to the memories of their camping trips and trail rides that she had organized for kids from the Compton Junior Posse. Those trips, he remembered, were the only times he had ever left Compton.
She grabbed his arms and then his shoulders and then looked at him with a pair of seasoned eyes that had seen hundreds of boys and girls grow up from children to adults. The dark brown eyes that looked back at her were the same ones that she had seen grow up, but something about them looked different. The eyes that she stared at had seen things in prison that no human should ever be forced to see: murder, rape, violence, and terror.
Anthony wondered if it would be the right time to ask Mayisha if he could come back to work on the ranch as a groundskeeper. After all, this was the plan he and Lozita had discussed during their weekly phone calls over the past year. He figured that working on the ranch would be the only way to keep himself from going back to prison for a parole violation. He hadn’t been an active member of the ranch since he was fifteen, and a lot had changed since then. He was an ex-convict and had very few options to find legal work. Most well-paying jobs required a high school diploma and would not accept an ex-felon regardless of their rehabilitation. The odds and the system were completely stacked against him and he was faced with two options: go back to hustling on the streets or turn his life around by recommitting to horses and working on the ranch. His future rested in Mayisha’s hands.
Anthony didn’t muster the courage to ask her about working for her that day. There were too many people around and it would be another two weeks before he would eventually bring up the subject.
“You want to come back and work on the ranch?” Mayisha inquisitively asked two weeks later. They were sitting on a bench overlooking the arena. Anthony nodded his head, a bottle of Sprite in his hands.
“You know we don’t have a lot of positions open right now, right?”
“Yeah, Mayisha,” Anthony quickly replied. “I came to ask for a chance to work on the ranch. My parole officer said I have to find a job, and you know it’s hard for people to find work once they get out of prison. If I don’t find something, I’ll go right back to the streets. Probably back to prison.”
Mayisha looked out at the horses. “Maybe we can figure something out for you,” she said. “There’s already somebody working as the groundskeeper, but they’ll be leaving soon. Come back next week and we’ll figure something out.”
Anthony was overjoyed. Drawing horses had kept him alive in prison, and caring for them would also help him stay alive back in the city of Compton. The old Anthony would have moved back to the Acacia Blocc to be with his friends, but he knew if he wanted to stay out of trouble he had to live somewhere else.
Within a week he had moved into the Imperial Courts housing projects with Lozita and their children. His new two-bedroom apartment was humble but big enough for his family. Unlike his prison cell, his room had a door that he could open and close when he pleased, and a light switch that he could turn on and off.
The first few weeks were the toughest. Sometimes when he woke up in the morning, he would look around and pause, expecting to hear the barking orders from correctional officers who controlled every second of his life. It both relieved and scared him to know that the old order was gone, but the structure of prison had become so ingrained in him that his body felt lost without it. When he couldn’t sleep, he found himself getting up in the middle of the night to check on his children who slept in the next room.
The phone didn’t stop ringing, but every time someone from his past called and asked for him, he would tell his daughter or his wife to say that he wasn’t home. He knew his old crew would be getting in touch, and that meant trouble.
On top of his having to hide from his old friends, Anthony’s new neighborhood also provided its own unique challenges. The “blue bricks,” as the Imperial Courts projects were called, were home to the PJ Watts Crips, and to the Grape Street Crips, who were located in a nearby housing project. Both of these gangs at one point had been at war with the Acacia Crips. As it stood, Anthony would be in danger, especially with a conspicuous “A” tattoo on the left side of his neck, which everyone in Compton and Watts knew meant that he was from the Acacia Crips.
To Anthony’s surprise, nothing happened the first week after he moved into his new neighborhood. He introduced himself to members of the PJ Watts Crips and assured them that he had left that life behind.
“I’m an old head,” he described to the young men in the projects. “I done paid my dues already and lived that life.”
After a few weeks, head nods turned into handshakes and then into hugs. People started calling him “O.G. Ant”—short for “original gangster”—as a form of respect. In the meantime, Anthony and his family were busy catching up on the birthdays, football games, and holiday parties that they had missed while he was locked up.
Anthony’s workday on the ranch usually began at 5 a.m. and ended around 12 p.m. His schedule allowed him to pick up his children from school every day and be present in their lives in ways that he only dreamed of when he was imprisoned. He never had been an early riser, but he grew accustomed to the 5 a.m. early morning wake-up calls in prison. Being on the ranch before anyone arrived gave him a feeling of peace that he had yearned for for so many years. The early mornings were still and quiet and mysterious.
The more removed he became from the life he used to live, the closer he became with the horses on the ranch. Dakota, a ten-year-old short-haired black American quarter horse, became his best friend. He began to confide in her while brushing and braiding her hair every morning. He told Dakota things that he couldn’t say to anyone else and shared some of the horrors that he had witnessed in prison. When he spoke to her his voice transformed into a soft, caring version of himself. Parts of the boy who had left when he first got jumped into the Acacia Crips returned during these conversations. Dakota listened. He spoke. It became a cycle that was repeated every single morning. He could be soft and tender and share anything with her, which fought off the message that the world had forced on him—that black men couldn’t be soft.
The biggest thrill was the moment he freed Dakota from her stall and let her run into the arena. It was a feeling he knew too well. He related to her, knew what she felt. Freeing her from her stall every morning became the highlight of his day, as if he were atoning for all the days he was locked up. He knew what it felt like to be caged for hours at a time. Her stall was the same size as the cell that he used to spend his entire day in. His was surrounded by cement walls, hers by long metal gates, and both were controlled by someone who decided whether or not they could leave. The resemblance was uncanny.
When Anthony rode his bike to the ranch every morning, he could hear Dakota neighing, waiting for him to open the gate so that she could jump and run around the arena and play in the dirt.
“I’m on my way, girl!” he would say as he walked to the back of the ranch.
Her joy meant everything to Anthony. The time he spent in prison had made it hard for him to express his feelings and fears. But he did not feel that around Dakota.
After a while, Lozita also began to see this change. Anthony was opening up to her and his family in ways that seemed impossible before. He started calling his father more often. He smiled more and spent more time around the home. When he picked up his children from school every day he hugged and kissed them and told them how much he cared for them, how much he loved them. If they behaved well, he would ride to their school and pick them up on Dakota. This was also the point in his life when he attempted to reconcile with his mother, who had abandoned him and his father. Forgiving her for leaving him as a child was one of the toughest things he had to do. He did it with the help of Dakota.
On the ranch Anthony became one of the most sought-out mentors. Children gravitated toward him because of his knowledge of horses and his willingness to help them become better riders.
“You guys know what the rules of the ranch are, right?” he would ask eager groups of children between the ages of eight and fifteen the same way Mayisha had taught him years before. “Rule number one is you have to clean up the stables before you can ride the horses. Rule number two is you have to feed the horses, brush their coats, and clean their hooves. After that, and only after that, you can ride.”