MY LAST DAY AT FAITH FARM GROUP HOME, JULY 15, 1987, was bittersweet. Mama had left Tim and wanted me to come home; that was the good news. The bad news, of course, was that I was leaving my closest relationships in the world again. I knew I would miss the kids, but I had also come to appreciate the staff at Faith Farm, recognizing that some of them genuinely cared for me and had poured their lives into trying to help me survive for the past four months.
The day of my departure, the entire staff and all the kids gathered around the wooden dining table to share ice cream and apple pie. We laughed about our experiences and took Polaroid pictures.
Mama was present, along with Penny, a dyed-blonde, older teenager Mama introduced as the niece of a friend. I’d never before met Penny, but she was cute so that was enough of an explanation for me. Besides, I was focused on saying my final good-byes to everyone.
There were lots of hugs and even a few tears at my “victory” party. I had lived at Faith Farm for fifteen weeks and a day. Although it had taken me a while to adapt, I’d grown to love Faith Farm. I recognized that it was going to be difficult to make the transition back to life outside, especially since I still had a lot of trust and anger issues toward Mama percolating within me. But I loved her, and love gave me hope that someday she might change. Unfortunately, my love for her also enabled her to mistreat me.
MAMA, PENNY, AND I DROVE AWAY FROM THE PEACE AND order of Faith Farm to a small house in a gully on Maine Street in Bessemer City, where Mama introduced me to her new boyfriend, Harvey. I wasn’t surprised that she had already hooked up with another man. Mama always had to have a man.
Harvey seemed to be a nice guy, but I had thought Tim was pretty nice, too, when I first met him. I could not have dreamed of the potential evil within Tim. Now I could, so I was cautious around Harvey.
I settled into the back bedroom in the far corner of the small house. Later that night I realized why Penny was staying the night. Mama intended her to be a sort of welcome-home-gift to me.
Anytime Mama had been released from prison, the first thing she did was find herself a man. Since Mama perceived me as being a prisoner who had just been released, she assumed I needed sex. It was a long night with a very short ending. I didn’t even know Penny’s last name.
The transition back to Mama’s lifestyle was tougher than I thought it would be. I had no plans, no dreams, goals, or purpose. I spent every day trying to figure out what I should do next. There were no weekend trips to the beach or going to church and watching 60 Minutes every Sunday night, as I’d done at Faith Farm. Although I probably wouldn’t have admitted it—and may not even have realized it yet—what I missed most was the structure in my life that Faith Farm had helped me establish. I missed someone holding me accountable for my actions. I missed group meetings and Inspection Day, when we cleaned the entire house, all the way down to wiping the baseboards and vacuuming under the couch.
In some ways I did feel like a prisoner, recently released from prison, who didn’t know how to function in a society that had no structure. The prisoner then becomes depressed and, all too often, finds a way to get back behind those walls, where he feels safe.
I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, and no discernable reason to be alive. So I plunged into a deep depression. Fortunately, Harvey owned a lawn mower, and he allowed me to use it. I kept busy trying to earn some money by mowing lawns.
ON THE EVENING OF AUGUST 8, 1987, I RETURNED HOME after working in the neighborhood all day, mowing lawns. I rolled the push-mower down the hill of our yard and parked it under the porch, as I always did.
Just then Mama rushed out the front door, carrying a large bundle of her clothes in her arms. I could tell by the look on her face that something was wrong. It was the same look she had the night she left Carroll.
“Mama, where ya going?” I asked.
“I don’t have to tell you where I’m going,” she snapped, as she headed up the hill toward an old Ford Galaxy she had picked up somewhere. Mama tossed all her clothes in the backseat and slid behind the wheel of the car.
I ran up the hill, reaching the driver’s side window just as she turned the ignition key, frantically asking her again, “Mama, where ya going?” She didn’t reply; she stomped down on the gas pedal and the car roared away.
I ran back to the house, calling out for Harvey. He wasn’t there, but he returned home shortly afterward. I could see the sadness in his eyes when I told him about the way Mama left. He was determined to find her.
Harvey and I got in his car and headed to Belmont, a short drive away, to where Mama and I had been living prior to my going to Faith Farm. He seemed to know exactly where he was going. Harvey turned by the Stowe textile mill and slowly drove down Belmont Avenue toward the house of Tim Allen’s sister, Kay.
Mama was standing in the yard with Tim. Oh no! I thought. Not again. Sure enough, just as I had suspected, Mama had gone back to Tim.
Harvey stopped the car in the middle of the street, stared at Mama and Tim for a few seconds, and then slammed the car in reverse. He knew. He backed up, turned the car around, and without saying a word to Mama or Tim, he drove to Gastonia and pulled into a parking lot with a phone booth on the corner. He parked the car beside the phone booth, handed me a quarter, and asked me to call Mama.
I had no idea what I might say to her, but I stepped inside the grimy metal-and-glass phone booth, put Harvey’s quarter in the slot, and dialed Kay’s number.
A male voice answered, “Hello?” It was Tim.
“Is Mama there?” I asked.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” he said, then hung up the phone.
Probably to discourage me from calling back, Tim picked up the receiver again and laid it on the coffee table beside the phone. He didn’t realize I was still on the line; I had not disconnected, so I could still hear Tim and Mama talking and laughing in the background. I stood in that phone booth and listened. I screamed again and again for Mama to pick up the phone, but she never did. I knew what that meant.
For a long moment I couldn’t move. Cars whizzed past as I stood in the filthy phone booth, staring through the hazy glass, smeared with fingerprints, spit, and tobacco juice. Thoughts of Mama having fun with Tim tormented me. I wondered if she knew I was on the phone, listening to her giddy behavior and raunchy talk.
When I could no longer endure listening to them, with tears streaming down my face, I hung up the receiver, yanked open the rickety folding door, walked out of the phone booth, and flopped down in the front seat of the car.
“Did you talk to her?” Harvey asked. I told Harvey what had happened, and he asked no more questions. He merely shook his head sadly, cranked up the car, and drove back to Bessemer City.
A week went by, and Mama still hadn’t returned. Other kids and their families were getting ready for schools to open soon, buying new clothes, getting their backpacks stocked and ready, but I had nowhere to go. I was lonely and depressed, and part of me even began envying the kids in Grace Group Home, a foster care home one block away and across the street. I could see its back door and the kids going in and out of the house.
Some friends of mine from Faith Farm, Tia and Raymond, had been transferred to Grace, so I stopped over to visit them. Seeing them reminded me of all that I was missing. I never thought that I’d want to go back to a group home, but anywhere was better than being abandoned.
But Mama would be back soon, I felt sure. She always came back. Then she’d leave again or dump me off with somebody. But she always came back.
NOT THIS TIME. AFTER A FEW WEEKS IT BECAME INCREASINGLY obvious that Mama wasn’t coming back, so Harvey decided to move on with his life. Nevertheless, he was concerned about me and wanted to make sure I had a place to live before he moved away from Bessemer City. Ironically, a man I had known only a short time, who had been shacking up with my mother when I met him, was more concerned about my well-being than my mom. Despite his faults, Harvey was a good man.
One afternoon he said to me, “My sister would like to meet you.” Harvey’s sister was older than him, in her midsixties. We went to her house in south Gastonia, and I spent the entire day with Harvey’s sister and her husband. It was an awkward visit and felt more like a job interview.
When Harvey had said, “My sister wants to meet you,” he had conveniently omitted, “to see if she and her husband like you.” But I understood. I had read somewhere that back in the 1880s, immigrant orphans were loaded on trains in New York City and transported west. The train stopped at depots in small towns along the way. At every stop the orphans stood outside by the train as ranchers sized them up, pinching their arms and checking their teeth to see if they were healthy enough to work on the farms. When a rancher found an orphan to his liking, he gave the child a home in exchange for work.
One of those orphan train kids, a fair-haired, blue-eyed boy named William Bonnie, became one of America’s most notorious frontier outlaws, known as Billy the Kid. Legend has it that Billy was a mere fifteen years old when he shot his first victim. I could understand that.
I moved in with Harvey’s sister, her husband, and their grandson a few days later, but my stay was short. The adults were kind, but I didn’t fit in.
Harvey’s relatives hinted to me that I could stay with them only until I found someplace else to go. A few days passed before they told me that their grandson’s mother, who lived in another state, was coming to North Carolina and needed my room.
I really didn’t want to leave—where was I to go? So I pretended that I didn’t understand what they were implying. I went on to school as if everything was all right.
I was sitting in class when a woman’s voice came over the intercom, requesting that my teacher send me to the office—with my books.
I knew what that meant.
For a brief moment I considered running out the back door of the school. But, resigned to my fate, I reluctantly walked toward the school office. Sure enough, when I looked through the office windows, I could see Kathy Flowers sitting in the office waiting area. I walked in, and in an emotionless, matter-of-fact voice, Kathy told me why she was there. “I’ve come to take you to the Dallas receiving home, Jimmy.”
I felt weak and betrayed. I’m not sure why, but that rejection hurt more than most. Harvey’s relatives had been so nice to me; they had convinced me I was welcome to stay in their home. But now they were asking me to leave. Actually, they weren’t asking.
I turned over my books to the school secretary and trudged to the DSS hatchback vehicle parked out back beside the school cafeteria. As Kathy and I walked past the long line of kids standing outside, waiting to go into the cafeteria, I noticed several of them pointing and laughing at a pair of white underwear pressed against the window in the white DSS car.
The underwear was mine, and I was totally embarrassed.
When we got to the car, I found my other clothes, strewn on the floor and up under the hatchback window as though they had been hastily thrown into the backseat of the car. Another woman was seated in the front passenger seat, so I slid in the back and tried to collect my clothes.
I turned to Kathy and asked, “Where’s my twenty dollars?” She didn’t know what I was talking about. I explained to her that I had hidden twenty dollars in the drawer under some clothes.
Silence. Kathy wasn’t about to return to the house for my twenty bucks. In fact, as we headed down the road, Kathy looked at me in the rearview mirror and said, “This is my last day at the DSS, so this is Carla Moore, your new case worker.”
Carla looked not much older than a kid herself, around twenty-two years old, I guessed. “Hello, Jimmy,” she offered a smile. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”
“Hello, Carla.” I didn’t say anything else to either of them. I sat in the backseat, seething about how Harvey’s relatives had done this, not to mention my hard-earned, missing twenty bucks.
Looking idly out the back window, I suddenly realized Kathy was driving in the same direction in which Harvey’s relatives lived, the same folks who had just evicted me from their home. As we approached the road that led to their house, a crazy thought occurred to me: I decided to visit them one last time before being sent back to a group home. With the car still moving, I opened the back passenger-side door and jumped out. I hit the ground and rolled to break the blow of striking the surface.
I heard Kathy slam on the brakes, the car sliding to a stop. She and Carla quickly got out, and Kathy yelled, “Jimmy! Jimmy, get back here. Get back here right now!”
I brushed myself off and stood up straight. I cursed them and held up my middle finger as I walked backward and away from them. They continued to yell for me, demanding that I get back in the car.
I turned and ran toward Harvey’s relatives’ home. When I glanced over my shoulder, I saw Kathy and Carla getting back into the car and driving away. I slowed to a brisk walk, continued down the street, up to the door, and rang the doorbell. Harvey’s older sister opened the front door, but when she realized it was me standing there, she quickly slammed the door closed. I heard her yell, “Call the cops!” and then the old man began yelling, too, telling me I’d better leave.
I stood on their front porch and cried. I cried so hard I could barely breathe. No one came back to the door, so after a few minutes, I walked off their steps, still crying.
The next-door neighbors heard me and called me into their home. We sat in the kitchen, and they talked to me and helped me calm down. Since I had nowhere else to go, they notified the police and told them where I could be found. Shortly afterward the same white DSS car pulled up in the driveway. Kathy and Carla picked me up and took me to the receiving home in Dallas, North Carolina, a home designed for about ten kids in transition. All the kids would be placed in another home within thirty days.
ONCE I GOT CHECKED IN AT THE RECEIVING HOME, I WAS happy to see Marcus Ray. I hadn’t seen him since Faith Farm. But Marcus now acted very differently than he had when I first met him; he seemed much angrier. A black guy shared a room with Marcus.
One night shortly after I arrived, Marcus planned an escape. He had taken a butter knife and had rigged the alarm system over the back door so the alarm wouldn’t go off when he opened the door to escape. In the middle of the night, I heard a loud scream from across the hall. It was Marcus’s roommate, crying out that Marcus had stabbed him with a dart. He kept yelling and crying until the staff arrived at their room. Marcus claimed it was an accident, and the staff permitted him to remain in the receiving home. His roommate’s outburst apparently scuttled Marcus’s escape plans for the time being, but I was too scared to sleep the rest of the night, knowing there was a chance Marcus might stab me too. He just was not the same Marcus I’d met at Faith Farm.
The next day I contacted JR Wilson, the man who moved Mama, Patricia, and me out of Reed’s Trailer Park and into Sante Trailer Park. I had kept JR’s phone number on a three-by-five-inch card in my wallet. About forty handwritten phone numbers were on this card—contact numbers as diverse as Faith Farm’s to the number of the local hospital. I kept the card with me for years (and still have it).
I told JR that I was at the Dallas receiving home and asked him if he would come pick up all my belongings. I didn’t tell JR, but I knew I was going to run away, and I didn’t want to leave my drawings and poems and letters behind because I feared I would never see them again. JR arrived that afternoon and loaded my things into his vehicle. “I’ll keep them for you in my lawn mower shed,” he promised, “until you find out where you’re going.” I had no way of knowing at the time how significant JR’s simple act of kindness would be in my life. (Had he not preserved my belongings, many of the notes and resources for this book would have been lost.)
That evening, September 4, 1987, I slipped out the front door of the receiving home, ran away, and never went back. It was colder outside than I anticipated, so after walking a while, I found a pay phone and called JR again. He met me at a store up on the hill and took me to his home in Bessemer City. As we were riding down the long dirt road, I saw a Gaston County patrol car sitting in JR’s driveway. I guessed that the police might already be looking for me. “Please, JR, don’t stop. Please. Just drive to the bottom of the road and let me out at Reed’s Trailer Park.”
JR reluctantly complied. As soon as he stopped the car, I got out, fled into the woods, and hid.