About when Nicholas got jumped into a gang, Karen met a new man. In the fall of 1989, she had enrolled at East Los Angeles College for a certification as a medical records accredited records technician (ART), but at the end of her first semester, in her Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she met Henry McAdam, a jack-of-all-trades who picked up whatever work he could in construction, maintenance, and laboring. The sex was great, and they may even have been in love. As she had for Paul, she once again dropped out of school.
Michael was ten when his mother met Henry, and Michael loved him. Henry took him fishing for trout and catfish. They did many things together and spent real time, and there was a certain kind of intimacy. When she was in middle school, Roslyn used to say that she had two dreams: one, to go to Stanford and, the other, to be a stay-at-home mom and raise a family. Michael dreamed of family, too, I’m sure of it, conjuring up a stable world in his rooftop meditations. Henry stepped into the empty place Michael’s riverine meditations must have carved in his soul.
I was back home from my first year at Princeton the next summer, working as an electric meter reader, racing from house to house in my little brown Southern California Edison shorts, just so I could steal a few hours reading Lincoln’s speeches parked beneath a shady tree in my electrical company truck. In July, Pastor Rinehart married Karen and Henry in a simple but serious ceremony. Henry, Nicholas, and Michael looked handsome in their tuxes with big white carnations in the buttonholes. With her hair tightly pulled back, and pearls around her neck, Roslyn looked statuesque in pink satin. Karen wore antique ivory. I expect I wore a sundress. I vividly remember a spirit of triumph around the occasion, similar to Karen’s graduation from nursing school. After the wedding, the new family moved to Bay Springs, Mississippi, Henry’s hometown, a hamlet of about 1,500 souls, so named for mineral springs that had once been surrounded by bay trees. Here was a single mother’s dream, no? First a nursing degree, then some college; followed by marriage and a move out of the city—if not to the suburbs, at least to the country.
But the dream was not to be. Even at the wedding, other emotions were also in the air. I didn’t personally feel much warmth toward Henry. And there were other warning signs. Neither Nicholas nor Roslyn is smiling in the wedding photos. They look, in fact, as though they are steeling themselves against some coming torment invisible to the rest of us. Even Henry isn’t really smiling in the pictures. Only Michael has a grin as broad as the dawn.
After a decade in which Karen, painstakingly and methodically, had built up her resources, income, and opportunities, she was poised to lose it all. The five of them had moved to Bay Springs, motivated at least partially by a desire to extract Nicholas from growing gang entanglements. But on the first anniversary of their move, Karen and the kids were unceremoniously back in California without the groom and with nearly all of their money, energy, and joy spent. The fifteen months with Henry were, Karen says, “The Nightmare.” For all of them.
Before the wedding, Karen did not know that Henry had a criminal record and that back in his home town, he was entrapped in a dense Mississippi thicket of violence and vendetta. As it turned out, he had shot a man when he was fourteen or fifteen and had served time for it. Now that Henry was back in Bay Springs, his adversary’s grandson wanted retribution. The grandson sought it by trying to rape Roslyn. Although her family pressed charges, Roslyn, then twelve, did not in the end want to go court.
There is more. Even before this new paroxysm of personal violence, Karen had had to send Nicholas to live with his grandfather, her father, for safety’s sake. It turns out that Henry had already hit and gone after Nicholas in California, even before the wedding. Now, in Bay Springs, things only worsened. One night, after a long, languid day, Nicholas was sitting on the living room couch watching television. He thought he heard the sound of tussling coming from his mother’s and stepfather’s bedroom. Alarmed for his mother’s sake, Nicholas rose and walked to where the living room met the hallway leading to the bedroom.
It couldn’t have been a big house, nor a long distance. Suddenly, the door burst open and Henry flew out, coming straight for Nicholas. To this day, Nicholas doesn’t know why Henry charged at him, but terror struck and he turned on his heels and ran. He thinks Henry grabbed some sort of implement, maybe a frying pan. Henry was, Karen says, trying to kill Nicholas. By that time, Henry had started to drink again and was abusing Karen, especially when he was drunk. He must have been drunk that night. Nicholas ran to the neighbors and didn’t come back. So Karen had to send Nicholas away.
In exile in a strange land, Karen became focused on protecting Nicholas and then Roslyn. Ten-year old Michael wandered around on his own in the Mississippi woods. It could not have been easy for Michael, a sociable, gifted boy, to move from the urban climes of Southern California to this rural town, and to change schools after the school year had already started. But no one knows, really, what Michael’s life was like during the six or seven months under the water oaks and red maples in Bay Springs. Karen’s impression was that Mississippi was pretty much okay for Michael, the ten-year-old (soon to be eleven). He played a lot. There were plenty of trees to climb, nature’s rooftops on which to meditate. He spent a lot of time by himself out of doors, always his favorite place to be. Karen doesn’t remember with any precision what Michael was up to then. No doubt he noticed, though, when his older brother Nicholas was sent away to Georgia, like a refugee, to live with their grandfather. The boys had never before been separated.
Finally, one Mississippi evening—in April or May, not too long after the beating of Rodney King—Henry came home drunk again and in a fighting mood. This time Karen took the kids and ran. She left without her shoes. She had to sneak back to get them, her money, and their clothes. Then the three of them—Karen, Roslyn, and Michael—jumped into the car and drove.
When his mother, all of thirty-five, ran away from Henry, Michael became her boon companion. First, they escaped to his grandparents in Baxley, Georgia, yet another time-bound Southern hamlet ensconced in the deep woods. Roslyn was along for this panicked journey. Then, in June, Karen packed Roslyn off on a plane to Big Ros, to Oakland, for the summer, and took Michael, her good luck charm, to Americus, Georgia, a much bigger town with a state university 125 miles due west. She intended to reconcile with Henry, who was now staying with a brother who lived there. When Karen and Michael reconnected with Henry, though, they found that, before leaving Mississippi, Henry had matter-of-factly sold all of the children’s toys. Michael was devastated. For the first time in his life he had nothing. It was one thing to lose his toys; it was quite another to find that the man who had filled the hollow place in his heart had sold them. Living wasn’t easy that summertime.
By early autumn, as I was headed back to Princeton’s gothic halls for my junior year, Karen pressed charges in the Americus courts for domestic abuse. Determined to leave Henry, she sued for divorce, winning alimony of $25 per week. All the while, Henry’s brother stalked her, riding around in a car with a shotgun. And with this welter of violence washing over the family, Michael got into trouble for the first time. Sometime that fall, a few months shy of twelve, he stole a jar of coins, amounting to something under $10, from a white family across the street. He was starting to want things, impatiently, and he was also naïve, a little California kid, transplanted to the Deep South. Only out of naïveté could he have thought to steal anything from a white family in southern Georgia.
Rather than merely telling Karen about the theft and asking for repayment, the family pressed charges. This was the eleven-year-old’s first encounter with the law. Michael—still two year’s shy of his teens—went to court with his mother. By then Karen had her plane tickets to California. She duly showed those to the judge, who told her he would drop the charges, but only if she would get on the plane and never come back.
Once more, with the school year already having started, the family was in flight. George H. W. Bush happened to be president and was celebrating the triumph of Ronald Reagan’s family values. But the touters of marriage as the solution to the single mother’s woes neglect a fundamental point: the quality of the man makes all the difference. Henry ripped through their lives like a Mississippi twister.
Between the 1990 wedding and the summer of 1993, when Karen was finally resettled in Los Angeles with a measure of stability in a job that she would hold for more than a decade, Karen would go through four jobs and the kids through six mid-year school transitions.
These were the years that Michael grew from eleven to fourteen. This is clearly when things went wrong.