WE HIT IT OFF—in the beginning. Tom Williams was The Man. He was tall, dark-skinned, with little beady eyes. And he had a good head of hair and full beard. My mom was in her thirties, and Tom was in his mid-thirties, when my mom fell head over heels in love with him. And for a while, so did we.
Tom was a sugar daddy. He was everything my mom wanted. He came in flashy; he left flashy.
The first time Mom introduced him to us kids, Tom had a briefcase and wore a suit. I was eleven years old, in the sixth grade. We were living in the projects down the hall from J.R. I was making enough money from selling drugs and stealing cars that I really didn’t mind where we were living. I would have enjoyed a more middle-class existence, but I was getting along very well on my own, and I wasn’t complaining. I rarely saw my mom, who was working nights, but I had enough friends from the projects and the street to keep me company and fill my time.
When we met Tom, he told us he was a lawyer. Mom and he dated for almost two years, and often he would stay overnight at our apartment. When he did he would get up in the morning, put on his suit, grab his briefcase, walk out the door, and leave as though he were going to work.
“I’m going to the office,” he would say. And he’d drive off in his car.
Moses and I were sure Mom had hit the jackpot.
Mom is dating a lawyer. This is great!
Or so we thought.
“Faye, you won’t have to work anymore,” Tom would say to her. He’d tell us, “I’m going to take care of you guys. You guys don’t have to do anything but be with me.”
Wow, Mom, we’re going to be good, we thought. We’re finally going to be okay. We’re going to be taken care of.
Or so we thought.
Then for three straight days Tom stayed home.
Before my mom left for her job, she’d ask him, “Aren’t you going to work today?”
“No, I don’t have anything to do today,” he said.
We figured he didn’t have a legal case to work on.
“Okay,” she said, and off she went.
After a while Tom began to just stay home. I wondered whether Tom had been lying to us about his being a lawyer. It didn’t matter. Mom loved him, and love is blind.
During the whole time they dated I always wondered why we never went to his place.
“Oh, he lives far away,” Mom would say, or she would cover for him in some other way.
The proof he was a con artist came when it was time to renew our apartment lease. He told Mom to let it lapse because he was buying us a house.
“Hey, I got a new place, in Humble, Texas,” he said. “I’m buying a house, and it’s beautiful. I’m just waiting to close on it, and I’ll sign the paperwork, and we’ll move in.”
It all sounded too good to be true.
We rented a U-Haul truck and packed up our things from the apartment. We drove from Houston to Humble, Texas, a small town with oil refineries located just north of Houston near the international airport.
We five children rode in the back of the U-Haul truck while Mom sat in front with Tom. For us it was an exciting adventure. We couldn’t wait to see where we were going. A house!? I couldn’t even picture it.
Tom stopped the truck. Mom opened the back, and we rushed out to look at the house. In front of us was a big, beautiful brick house with a spacious yard for us to play. I was elated.
Yes, this is it! I thought.
I had been hoping for a middle-class neighborhood, but this was even ritzier than that. This was the high end, where the richest of the rich lived.
Wow!
All the other houses in the neighborhood were equally amazing.
This is so beautiful; Mom struck it rich, I thought.
The euphoria didn’t last long.
“The key is in the mailbox,” he said.
Tom went up to the house.
There was no key.
He looked under the mat.
There was no key.
“I have to run up to the gas station to make a phone call,” he said. “A woman’s going to meet us here in a few minutes.”
We waited. No woman came.
That’s when I started to become suspicious.
Are we moving in or what? I wondered.
“They won’t call me back,” Tom kept saying.
I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Had Tom made the whole thing up, and if he had, why did he go to the trouble, knowing it wasn’t going to work out in the end. To this day I don’t know what sort of con Tom was pulling, whether some sort of arrangement had fallen through or whether he had made the whole thing up. Either way, it never made any sense.
We had left the apartment, handed in the keys, and here we were on the road in a strange neighborhood with no place to go.
Mom and Tom started to get into it.
“What are we going to do, Tom?” Mom wanted to know. “Where are the kids going to sleep?”
We got back in the U-Haul and drove to my mom’s parents’ house in Crosby, Texas. Stella Brock, my mom’s mother, told her, “Baby, come on home.”
But my mom’s father wasn’t having any of it. He wasn’t fooled by Tom’s briefcase, suit, or his big talk. He told her she and the children could stay, but she couldn’t bring Tom.
“I don’t care for men who won’t take care of my daughter,” he said.
My mom refused to leave Tom and was indignant at the rebuff of him. We drove away in a huff.
That night we slept under a tall bridge in our U-Haul truck. We pulled out the pots and pans, lit a fire, and cooked canned Vienna sausages and patties. That night we slept in the back of the truck.
Mom tried to find a place for us to stay, but it wasn’t easy considering Tom had told her she could quit her job, and she had. She didn’t have money for the security deposit. Tom, it turned out, was himself broke and unemployed.
Days went by. Tom did nothing. Homeless, we lived under that bridge for about a month. Mom would cash her food stamps, and every once in a while we’d spend a night in a motel. When her money ran out, we’d go back under the bridge. Sometimes she allowed us kids to go stay with our grandparents while she and Tom stayed together in the truck.
During the day we would drive to our grandparents’ house or to the home of a friend of my mom’s and take showers and change clothes. Then we’d go back and sleep in the U-Haul.
My mom finally decided to accept her parents’ offer with the conditions that her father gave her; her kids went to stay with them but Tom—and my mom—did not. We stayed with my grandparents for a couple of weeks until my mother’s retirement check arrived and she had money again.
“Hey, let’s go.”
My mom found an apartment she could afford in Baytown, Texas, twenty miles east of Houston and only fifteen minutes from Crosby. Mom was able to furnish the new place because in addition to her retirement check, she had just gotten her tax refund. She even bought Moses and me a new water bed. It was awesome for us. We thought it was amazing.
This is perfect. Or so we thought.
And then one day after Moses and I came home from school, we saw a big lock on the door, and we couldn’t get in. I peeked inside. Most of our belongings were gone. The marshals had come and had cleaned the place out. To get in we had to break a window and climb inside.
I didn’t know it, but we had been months behind on our rent, and a collection agency came and took almost everything. We spent the night in the empty apartment, found what clothing was left, and the next day we loaded up Mom’s car and went to school. The other kids in my class had no idea what I was going through. That I could function at all with such chaos happening all around me was amazing.
Moses and I knew it was over for us. I knew we had hit the bottom. After spending two years with Tom, this was how we had ended up.
I remember it all vividly, but above all I remember that I had to grow up very fast. I don’t ever remember being a kid. I don’t remember just being in the backyard playing with my friends. What I remember most about my childhood was always having to pack up and leave, stay a short time, and pack up and leave again. Time and time again.
My mom and Tom were trying to figure things out, where to go and what to do next. My mom decided that she wanted me, Moses, little brother Sam Jr., and Trice to stay with Sam, my stepdad. Even though my mom was still dating Tom, Sam must have taken pity on us and agreed. I suspect that Sam also was still in love with my mom.
Tom waited in the car while Mom and Sam talked. We settled in, thinking this was where we would be staying the night. Moses and I were in our nightclothes in the next room, listening to Mom and Sam argue and fuss.
“Sam, I’m not staying,” I could hear Mom say. “I’m going. Let the kids stay the night, Sam. They have nowhere to sleep, and I’ll be back in the morning.”
Sam wanted her back. He begged her.
“Faye, Faye, Faye. Let’s talk about it,” he pleaded.
But Mom wouldn’t have it. She was in love with slimeball Tom. Looking back on it now, I think Sam was trying to protect my mom and probably us, too, from Tom.
Moses and I stood there as Mom and Sam argued. Sam grabbed Mom, and Mom swung her hand and tried to hit him. When Sam swung back, Moses and I rushed in and grabbed him. Sam was small, and I picked him up and held him up off the floor against the wall. I don’t know where the strength came from—I was barely a teenager.
In slow, loud words I told him, “If you ever in your life lift a finger to my mom again, I promise you, I will kill you.”
My brother was behind me, saying the same thing.
“Get your stuff,” my mother ordered us. I told Moses to get my things while I held Sam, protecting Mom. We left. From that point on, our relationship with Sam was over.
Before we left, Sam insisted that Mom leave behind Sam Jr., who was two. He threatened to call the police if she didn’t. We didn’t have a place to live, and Sam didn’t want his son living in a U-Haul truck. Mom left Sam Jr. with Sam because she was afraid that if the authorities were called, they would take away all five of her kids, and she would have been destroyed if they had done that.
Sam Jr. grew up with his dad and another child Sam had, a girl I didn’t know. My little brother Sam never did understand why we left him behind that night.
“We didn’t want to leave you—but your dad wouldn’t let you go,” we told him many years later.
Leaving Sam Jr. was tough. It was really, really tough.
That night we stayed at Tom’s parents’ house in Kashmere Gardens, near the Fifth Ward of Houston, and we stayed with them for a couple of months.
So much happened in this year of my life. It was like there’s point A and you want to get to point B, but you never get there because there are so many obstacles in the way. I think back to every place I lived as a kid—I lived all over the city of Houston. We moved around so much then that I used to christen every new home by jumping off the roof. My thinking was if I didn’t break my leg it was a good place to live. What a crazy kid I was. I thought I was Superman or Spider-Man. I thought that I could fly.
I never got hurt. I was lucky.
WHEN MOM AND Sam separated and Sam kept Sam Jr. with him, that was the turning point. We had lost little Sam. He didn’t grow up with us and Mom, and that’s what we missed more than anything. We missed the bond we had, always being there for him as his protectors, all of us loving and supporting one another.
It was tough for all of us, and then because of Tom, the family broke up further when my sister Tamela, who was fourteen, went to live with my dad, Marvin Driver. With little Sam gone, Moses, my little sister Trice, and I were left to live with Mom and Tom in substandard housing in the projects of Houston.
It was tough not having all the pieces together. We had called ourselves the Little Brady Bunch, but after the family broke up we struggled with the separation. It’s why we’re so close today as adults, because of the journey we had to take. It’s truly been a blessing, because the ordeal brought us closer and closer together as a family as we got older.
AWAY FROM J.R. and in a strange neighborhood, I wasn’t making any drug money at the time. We were impoverished. We had very little furniture. We’d sleep on the floor, or we lay on a mattress on the floor and slept. We didn’t have a couch or a TV. We didn’t even have an iron to press our clothes. We used to put our clothes under the mattress on the floor and lie on them to press them so we’d look nice going to school in the morning.
For the time being this was home. The water was working and so was the gas, and we managed to get along.
That summer Moses and I went to work at a family seafood restaurant, owned by my uncle Bubba, my daddy’s brother, so that we could earn money to purchase school clothes. It was my last year of middle school. It was my brother Moses’s first year at Kashmere High School. Then Mom moved again, from a house across the street from Tom’s mother into a two-bedroom apartment three blocks away, off Hirsch Road in Houston.
My resentment against Tom was great, and it would only be a matter of time before there was an incident between the two of us.
One morning it was cold and I wore Tom’s sweater to school. Absentmindedly I left it in my locker at school. When I got home, it was late in the day. Mom and Tom were sitting on the couch, and when I walked through the door, Tom stood up, demanding to know if I took something from his room.
I told him I hadn’t.
“Where’s my sweater?”
“I wore it to school. I’ll bring it back tomorrow,” I said.
Tom was furious.
“Don’t you ever take nothing of mine,” he said.
I went off. I lost it. My resentment had gone beyond the boiling point.
“I don’t care about your sweater!” I shouted.
I had a bad mouth then, and I cursed him out and charged at him.
“I’ll beat you … I’ll knock you out!” I screamed.
I was in a blind rage.
Tom stepped back, pulled a .22-caliber pistol, and pointed it at me. I wasn’t cowed. I picked up a baseball bat, intending to swing it at him.
“Hit him!” yelled my brother, who was right behind me. “Get him, Quickie, get him!”
I was lucky Tom didn’t shoot me to death. Tom was also lucky I didn’t beat him to death with my bat.
My mom ran between us.
“Put that bat down!” she screamed.
She was crying. She took the gun away from Tom.
“Don’t you ever pull a gun on my son again,” she said. “I just can’t do this anymore,” she added between loud sobs.
She looked at Tom and then she looked at Moses and me.
“You two guys gotta go.”
“We have to go?” we said. “You’re going to choose him over us?”
Moses and I were furious. We stormed out, and we hung out with friends on the street all night long. We didn’t go to school the next day.
MOM SENT MOSES and me to live with our paternal grandparents, Betty and George Lofton. Betty had been married to my grandfather Marvin Driver Sr., and after Marvin died, she married George Lofton. Betty and George were willing to take us in. After living in hell on and off the streets with Tom for two years, we broke up as a family. I was in the eighth grade.
The Loftons lived in the Hattiesburg section of Houston in the house where I first met my real dad. Now in my early teens, I had been abandoned by both my parents, and as a substitute for family, I was developing a group of friends in the neighborhood whom I could count on. Among my closest friends were Ray Ray, another kid we called Black, Kory Ross, and a cousin named Michael. We all hung together. I resumed selling drugs and making money stealing cars.
Again I was leading a double life. When you were as poor as I was, and when you saw the fancy cars the drug dealers drove and the spiffy clothes they wore, it stopped being a question of right and wrong. Rather it was a matter of self-esteem and survival. Without my ability to make money on the street I don’t know if I could have survived my childhood.
MY GRANDPARENTS, George and Betty, thought I was a good kid. I’m Baptist, and I went to church on Tuesday nights for Bible study. I could name the books of the Bible backward and forward. I went on Wednesday for choir rehearsal, and I went again on Sunday morning for more Bible study and for services the rest of the day.
On Monday I went to school and played football, basketball, or baseball. I was on the drill team, but then after I’d leave school, I’d say to my street friends, “All right, let’s go sell some drugs. Let’s go steal a car tonight.” It was like I was standing on top of a skinny fence wondering, Which way do I really want to go?
My grandmother, a strict disciplinarian, had rules for us. I had to be in the house before the streetlights came on or she would lock me out. As I got older, I ignored her rules. Sometimes I’d come back to the house and my key wouldn’t open the door because Grandma had double-locked it. I’d knock, but she wouldn’t answer it. When that happened, usually I’d jump back in the car with my guys and I’d be gone.
My biological father once tried to intervene in an attempt to get me to walk the straight and narrow. My father, unfortunately, wasn’t any sort of role model for me to follow.
“You can’t do your grandparents like that,” he lectured.
“Whatever,” was my lackadaisical, sassy answer.
Had my stepfather Sam still been in my life, perhaps things might have been different. But then again, perhaps not.
I started making good money again selling drugs. I didn’t put a dime of it in the bank. I didn’t know from banks. I had a lot of money, and I put it underneath my mattress and in a sock drawer. The money was good just to have. I really liked having the money in my pocket. I would walk around with two thousand dollars on me and think I was super-rich. As a teenager it felt like a million dollars.
And I needed the money to buy clothes and more drugs for me to sell.
I REALLY MISSED my mom after she left us with my grandparents. I didn’t have a car, and it was too much trouble to borrow one to go to the other side of town, so I’d jump on the city bus right after school just to say hello to her. If she wasn’t in her apartment, I’d walk around her neighborhood and ask people, ‘Have you seen my mom?’ ”
“She’s over at someone else’s house,” they’d say, and I’d run over there to find her.
“Hey, baby, are you good?” she’d ask, and I’d get a big hug from her.
If I didn’t find my mom I’d get back on the bus to my grandparents’ house.
Whenever I saw Tom, I would see red. I couldn’t stand him. He was around too much for my taste.
“Mom,” I’d say, “you know you don’t need him.”
“I know,” she’d say. “I have to get myself together first.”
It was a long time before that happened. As far as I know, my mother’s relationship with Tom eventually ended when he went to jail for drugs. For all I know, he may still be locked up.