I Was On My Seventh Foster Home. Then A Family I Barely Knew Took Me In

I was twelve years old, and I was in my third foster home. And my very first foster father had just called.

He called to say that he was very sorry to hear about my mother. But what he didn’t know was that nobody had told me she was dead.

I was in foster homes because my parents drank. They weren’t bad people; I always felt loved. But when they weren’t drinking, they were better parents. And they were drinking more and more frequently.

Eventually people started to notice. I never noticed, because I didn’t have another childhood to compare it to. So when I got taken out of my home, I was very confused and upset.

When I found out that she had died, I just got empty – hollowed out. And then when no one else called to say that she had died, I started to get really angry.

You know, like, burn-the-world angry.

And being a kid, a black kid, in foster homes in Maine, and burn-the-world angry, there’s not a lot of foster homes that wanna hang on to you for very long.

I started going through ’em pretty quick. I learned the magic number was five. If you get to five foster homes, you’re marked. You’re trouble.

So you can’t get placement, and you are homeless. And then you go into shelters. You can only stay in a shelter for thirty days, and then you’re on to the next, and on to the next.

This is affectionately called the “shelter shuffle.”

The education you get in the shelter is nothing to mention. When I was a little boy, I remember my father telling me that, because I am black, I will have to be twice as smart as the smartest white man in the room to get recognised half as much.

So education was always a very important thing to me. I knew I had to straighten out. When I was fourteen, and I got my seventh foster home, I knew I had to hang on to this for dear life, no matter the cost.

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