I remember finding a picture from the early 70’s of me and my sister, Donna. We were still unpacking everything after moving across the ocean to Spangdahlem, Germany. The picture was taken outside the apartment building we were moving into. Concrete sidewalks, grass, and dirt. Empty moving boxes were outside on the ground. We had this tricycle/wagon where right behind the seat the frame went down towards the ground and then turned backwards about 2 ½ feet to where the wheels were. There was a wagon bed made on this tricycle. I was sitting on the seat, my baby sister was sitting in the wagon bed. I guess I was trying to back the wagon part into the box with my sister just sitting there, because the picture shows the wagon—and Donna—halfway in the box and me on the seat trying to drive it out of the box.
Generally speaking, I was a good child—my mother’s favorite. Years later she would always say I was naughty—but nice.
In Germany I joined the Cub Scouts and later moved up to the Boy Scouts. When Christmas would come around, we would go up in the mountains and cut down Christmas trees to bring back to the military base to sell. The apartment buildings where families lived were all three stories high and had tennis courts behind them. We would unload the Christmas trees and use the fenced-in tennis courts as our “store” to sell them to all the military families. That was just one of the fundraisers we had to help support our dens and our troops. We would string Christmas lights up all around the fencing and help people load their trees in trucks and on cars. We never thought about the environmental damage we were causing.
I wrote a poem called “Bicycles.” Those are the tennis courts we would zip by on the dirt trail. The sad truth is that it once was a beautiful grassy lawn around those courts and the apartments too. Those apartment buildings supported a rotating mixture of military families with small children. The destruction of the grounds around the buildings and tennis courts was a direct by-product of the U.S. government warehousing military families in another country. Children need things to do. Let them ride their bikes, tricycles, pull their wagons, and do everything else that children do. In the 70’s, in another country, nobody cared about, thought about, or considered the amount of damage large numbers of children could cause when confined to small areas together.
Each building had 24 apartments, for military families. Almost every family I remember had at least two children. Throughout my father’s military career, his best friend was George Smith. George and his wife, Mrs. Pat, had five children—two boys and three girls. All the children were deaf except for Bobby. For years, Bobby was my best friend. His mother used to change my diapers when I was a baby in Blytheville, Arkansas. Our fathers were stationed at the same military bases throughout both of their careers. Blythville Airforce Base in Arkansas. Spangdahlem Airforce Base in Germany. Carswell Airforce base in Fort Worth, Texas. I believe they met through the war, as they were both Vietnam vets; my father served two tours of duty in Vietnam and then the Philippines. My father and George’s friendship lasted well beyond my father’s 25-year military career.
While in Blytheville, our home was burglarized one year before Christmas, in military housing. Everything was stolen. The only things left were small pieces of ripped-up wrapping paper and a half-bare Christmas tree. In the grand scheme of things, I guess the best part is that it was so long ago I don’t even remember how I felt about it.
After living on base for a period of time, we were allowed off base and actually in the Spangdahlem community. I remember the cobblestone road we lived on, even the small pub across the street. The German community was nothing like the concrete and paved roads on base. The yards were unkempt, the cobblestone roads were narrow, and people didn’t speed through the neighborhood. I think the cobblestones played a large role in that. Our neighbors were elderly couples and some were nicer than others. Hindsight allows me to realize that in that community the people were not trying to keep up with the Joneses. For the most part they were just living their lives. Like us, they were common folk.
Some of my greatest memories from Germany revolve around an old oval dirt racetrack. Young military people, my parents included, would go there. My favorite race car was a blue Chevy two-door. #00 was painted on the doors in bright white. We went to the races every weekend—it was a military thing—and a family thing. My father’s first car that he put on the track was a souped-up VW Beetle. It took a lot of work to get that car ready. It was faster to cut the top off and put the roll cage in, then weld it back on. The car was yellow and the exhaust pipes went back and then pointed up about midway up the back window. When that car was parked, Dad kept a green tennis ball pressed into the end of the pipe, to keep rain or anything else from getting in it. They stripped that interior down to bare metal, then put the seats back in. Removed all the glass for safety reasons on the track. On Saturdays, before the races would start, the cars would fly around the track slinging dirt and mud everywhere, warming them up, and then they would offer rides around the track to all of us kids. The cars were loud and the kids would scream as they flew by the stands. Hot dogs, hamburgers, and sodas made the day. All the races were male drivers except for the 1 Powder Puff race on Friday and Saturday evenings. Eventually Carol, my mother, talked Dad into getting another car so she could drive it in the Power Puff races.
I think Dad got the other car for her so that when she wrecked it, he would still have his. We lived for the weekends because weekends meant going to the races. I never really thought about it before, but I believe those early memories are what started my lifelong love for hotrods. I remember sitting in the bleachers. The wood was weathered and the paint was worn, and when it rained I loved it even more because that’s when the mud would really fly, and the cars would lose their grip and spin out—everybody screaming, oohing, and ahing. Excitement always in the air waiting for the next wreck, but hoping nobody got hurt. I remember the smell of burning rubber when Dad would get new tires because he would always melt bigger grooves into the treads before putting them on the cars. Everybody helped everybody because even though they were against each other on the track, military made them family.
Terry, my older brother, and I had a Kiss live double record set. Mom had this big console TV. The whole top lifted up to reveal an AM/FM radio, cassette player, and record player. Mom was proud of that thing; I want to say it even had 8-track. I don’t remember what we were doing that day, but I do know we had been listening to one of the records in that album. I don’t know why we didn’t put the record up, but I’ll never forget what happened when Terry and I came back inside from playing. Mom was waiting and she was not a happy camper. Who left the record on the turntable in her TV? Why did we not put it up? and a loud sharp crack of that record as she busted it into pieces over her knee. That was her teaching moment. Don’t leave your things out—put your stuff away when you have finished with it, or she would find a place for it (in the trash). If we left our toys or things out, sometimes she would destroy them to help us understand that we had to put them up. Man, she would piss me off sometimes.
While we lived in Germany, my parents came back to the States twice, but we kids only came back once. They went to Las Vegas for a wedding anniversary, and the whole family came back for a funeral when Uncle Ronnie, my father’s younger brother, was killed.
My family has had its share of tragedy. Mama Dunn, my father’s mother, was a hell of a woman. She buried two husbands and three children before she passed away. Uncle Mike died when he was twenty, crushed between two railroad cars. Uncle Ronnie was twenty years old when he was run off the road, crashed his motorcycle into a telephone pole, and died.
My grandfather was a doctor, but he also used to run moonshine in Memphis. I guess being a doctor had its advantages. I don’t really remember much about him; he died when I was little. I’ve seen pictures of me sitting on his lap at the kitchen table drinking coffee together, but my memories of that age are gone.
After Germany, we were stationed at Carswell Air Force base in Fort Worth Texas, and I started becoming the person I am today. I don’t tell this to many people, but I played a saxophone in my school band and the violin in my school orchestra. The only thing I lettered in, in school, was for playing the violin. We would take field trips to malls and play John Denver songs. I still remember the nerve-wracking screeches as I pulled the bow across the strings, not knowing what I was doing. “Mary had a little lamb” was the first song I learned to play—how dashing is that? There weren’t many boys playing violin in the orchestra and the school must have felt I was better than I thought. To find our positions, we would have playoffs. I never wanted to be first chair because that was the lead position for that section, but I was really good at second. So—I played my violin, kept my spot as second chair, and earned my school letter.
. . .
When I was 16, I dropped out of school. I was already regretting it two weeks later, but too proud and stubborn to go back. At that point in my life, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I was a dropout with no job. We lived 17 miles outside Fort Worth, in a place called Excel Ranch Estates in Joshua, Texas.
One morning around 7:30, a so-called “friend” came by the house on a horse. After a while, he called someone to see if they would be interested in buying that horse. When the man showed up at my parents’ house and inspected the horse, he didn’t want anything to do with it. Honestly, I knew it was not my “friend’s” horse but I believed it was probably from his grandfather’s ranch because that was where he was living. After being turned down, he asked me if I could take him up the road to another ranch, to see if he could find someone interested. I took him to three different ranches within two miles. At the last one, which was only about a half-mile from my parents’ house, he came back to the car and said to wait for this lady because she was interested in the horse. We got back to the house, got out, walked out back, and she inspected the horse. Running her hands all over him and looking in his mouth, she was satisfied with what she saw. Turning around, she walked almost to me, opened her purse, and had a gun. “That is my horse and I am going to use your phone to call the Sheriff’s Department.” Deputies came, the woman’s husband came with a horse trailer and took the horse, my so-called friend was arrested right there, and everybody left.
Two days later, Friday evening, I went out with my girlfriend. Remember, we lived 17 miles outside Fort Worth. My girlfriend lived in a small city called White Settlement across Fort Worth, so I had to drive to the city then across it, and to her parents’ house. After picking her up, I realized I didn’t have my wallet, so we had to drive all the way back. It was about 8:00 p.m. when we got there. I pulled into the first of our two driveways, drove to the front of the shop, and stopped at the end. A sheriff’s patrol car was parked in front of the house and my mother on the porch was talking to the office. I hadn’t seen the car because the shop had blocked it when I turned in. My girlfriend was stranded 40 miles from home, had to spend the night, and my parents took her home next morning.
My “friend” said I had had the horse and I was arrested for theft of livestock. The only thing that saved me was that he had stopped and talked to two other people before he got to my house. They said he was alone and on horseback when he went to their home early that morning. They remanded the charges to my file and released me.
When I turned 17, I went to work for Don and Donna, who lived across the street from us and had a company called D+D Equipment. They owned carnival kiddie rides and a couple of concessions. I spent the next two years traveling the country, zigzagging back and forth from Texas to Iowa, Wisconsin to Louisiana, and all the states between.
We had twelve Kiddie Bumper Cars, just like the big ones, only small. Each had a “tire” wrapped around the lower frame with an inner tube that had to be aired up, to allow the kids to ram into each other safely. Kids loved these because in them, they could be just like the big kids. The ride I was over, the one I considered my baby, was the “Turn Tyke.” It was a two-story car ride—a semi trailer with hydraulic side walls so both sides of the trailer folded down and made a huge platform. The second story floor, you had to manually lift and lock in place with pins and keys. It was sectioned in small pieces, about eight feet each. It had five cars; each car held two children. Out of the two years with that ride, only once did a child manage to get out of one of those cars. I shut the whole ride down—had cars on the top floor and on the bottom floor, and was super grateful that that child came out of a car on the bottom. Don’t think I ever moved that fast. I had all five cars shut down in different places, and was halfway to the kid before he got out of the car. Then I had to get back to the central panel and turn everything back on before other kids tried to climb out, and then attend to that kid and his mother. In the end, the night went on and everybody was happy.
We had a castle-shaped bounce house for kids to climb in and jump and bounce around in. I remember using it only one time during two years, and that turned out really bad for me because I got paid the first day the fair was open. My boss left that morning and went to another fair with the other rides. An hour after the fair opened, someone snuck around behind the bounce house and stole the fuse out of the breaker box that powered the fan motor that keeps the bounce house inflated. It was starting out slow that night. I was on my car ride and a co-worker was standing in front of the bounce house when I looked over and saw it collapsing. In the process of finding the problem, locating another fuse, and getting it going again, I lost my paycheck—the money I had been paid that morning. That really sucked, but there was no way I was going to call my boss and tell him that!
. . .
While I was traveling with the carnival, my parents moved from Texas. My father was getting ready to retire from the Air Force so they moved my mother and sister back to Memphis to be closer to our grandparents and family. Dad stayed by himself in Texas where he was stationed for that last year, while Mom prepared a new home for him to come to.
I met Bitzi at the Minnesota State Fair. My ride was set up next to the little green alligator roller coaster she was running. The first time I saw her, I knew I wanted to be with her, even though I thought I’d never have a chance. For some reason, even to this day and knowing our birth dates, she still swears I was 20 when we met, but she was 16. I’m only 2 ½ years older than she is; there is no way you can make it be 4. When I asked her if she would come with me and be with me, she said yes. I made it past the first hurdle. Now I had to talk to my boss, Don, because that meant she would be traveling with us. If he had known she was only 16, I’m sure he would have said no, but at that time, I didn’t even know how old she was. We didn’t break the ice by saying “How old are you?” When I talked to Don, all of my co-workers were standing in a circle talking, after we had torn our rides down and had them ready to go. I said, “I met a girl and I want her to come with me.” Then I said, “And she is worth quitting over.” Everybody got quiet. It felt like a standoff but Don agreed. Two weeks after that, he hired her, too. I made sure Bitzi called home to her mom every week. Every week I got a roll of quarters for the pay phone.
We put almost 30,000 miles on my car that year, zigzagging back and forth and up and down the country. I always had to get someone to drive my car for me when we would go from one fairground to another, because I drove my boss’s truck pulling his camper.
Two years later, I was dumb and left my family when I met another woman named Inez. This did not last long because when I was 24, Inez died from cancer, and it messed me up in the head. We worked at the same place, Midsouth Greenhouse and Produce, located at the International Agricultural Center in Memphis, bordering Germantown. One Friday, she was sick and told me she wanted to go to the hospital. Inez was admitted. She cried that night because she did not want to be there, but I made her stay. They wanted to keep her overnight and run some tests. Saturday, May 4, the doctor was convinced something was wrong and requested a biopsy. Afterward, he came to the room and asked me to come out to the hall. We sat on a window sill in the hallway and he went on to tell the “standard assessment,” that she had cancer and had six months to one year to live. And then the results came. Back out in the hall again, only to be punched again—twice as hard. He told me what kind of cancer it was, but don’t ask me because it was four or five words all crammed together. But the kicker was, this was a very rare type of lung cancer and normal life expectancy is “up to three months from time of discovery.” I took Inez to the hospital on May 3, she died on the night of June 16; she lived one month and thirteen days. I was a wreck. The night Inez died, she told me to get her kids and call her family, because she knew she was not going to make it through the night. All of her siblings came except for one brother and one sister. Her brother lived in California so there was no way he could make it. Her sister lived about four miles from the hospital, but her husband would not let her come. Sorry bastard. Her other three sisters came, and both of her sons. Inez died about 30 minutes after her younger son got there. She held on to see them one last time.
. . .
As I struggled through my pain, my life began to spiral out of control. I ended up serving life in prison. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the heartache and pain I have caused others. I cannot go back in time and change anything, so my only option is to move forward, to live my life of service doing what I can to help others. It started with a simple Bible study program. However, I could only do so much. I needed to do more, to be involved with helping others.
Since I have been incarcerated, I have not really been able to accomplish as much as I’d like, but I have not finished, either. In 2009 I earned my GED with a score of 584. I became a teacher’s aide in a Life Skills/Pre-release class. Then the teacher and I transferred to Adult Basic Education and started teaching the things people needed to know for them to earn their GEDs. It was a fulfilling job. The best times were when you are teaching something like the formula for working a math problem and you see that lightbulb come on in their brain when it finally clicks.
Just recently, in March 2024, I was talking to Ms. Ratliff on a zoom meeting. While sharing my accomplishments, my own lightbulb came on. Most of my accomplishments are geared toward humanitarian issues. For instance, I was allowed to raise money for and participate in an American Cancer Society Relay for Life Offender Walk-A-Thon, for four years in a row. I was allowed to participate in the Global Leadership Summit, a faith-based leadership program with speakers from around the world, five years in a row.
Through the University of Mississippi, I have been blessed to take a few classes in the Entrepreneurial Leadership Program. I have taken Restorative Justice through UM, too. I have been honored to sit on a panel at the University of Mississippi for the Just Mercy Panel Review, about Restorative Justice, about Steven Robinson and his fight for justice across the South.
As part of the Restorative Justice class, we were allowed to meet and talk with a non-profit organization out of Minnesota, Feed My Starving Children. We, the twelve students in the class and the prison administration, set about hosting a mobile food packing event at the Marshall County Correctional Facility. It started with the twelve of us in class and spread like wildfire through the prison. At Marshall County, we were the second prison in the USA to host a Mobile Pack event, but—we were the first prison in the USA to have an offender-driven fundraiser to pay for it. We raised over $23,000 to buy the bulk food so it could be shipped to the prison for us to repackage into individual meals. We packaged over 101,000 meals, boxed them up, and loaded them on an 18-wheeler for transport. A ragtag group of inmates moved a whole prison population to reach out for donations to support this event. Our biggest donor was former Head Coach at the University of Mississippi Hugh Freeze, who with his wife donated $5000 to our cause. In the end, the food we packaged and donated went to Africa. The second time we were offered an opportunity to work with Feed My Starving Children, the funds were donated prior to the event. I was truly blessed to be part of both of these Mobile Pack Events.
At Marshall County, I worked in the library for ten years. When I left that prison, Marshall County Correctional Facility had the best library in the Mississippi prison system.
I completed a course on computer literacy and typing, and was given the opportunity to take a 409 History class offered by the University of Mississippi: African American Women of History (women from the equality movements). My latest achievements are the “Criminological and Sociological Theory” certificate I received about two months ago, that was issued to me by the Mississippi Department of Corrections and the Re-entry Academy; and ENG 404, the creative writing course for which I have written this narrative.
Currently, I work at Unit 25 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. I am a clerk in the Re-entry Academy. The last fifteen years of my life have been devoted to bettering myself and truly trying to help others. To fulfill my purpose in life, I am living a life of servitude.
