Meet Michele. She’s a 40-year old black female, two kids deep, a former drug dealer, ex-con, and Conservative.
Michele is a strong woman, the result of being on her own since she was nine. Yes, you read that right.
Michele’s mother was a drug addicted prostitute and her step-father (term used loosely) was her mother’s pimp and a coke dealer. Michele’s mother walked away from her at the hospital, a situation that landed Michele in foster care.
At the age of four, Michele’s mother returned to her life, stealing her from a foster family. But it was not from maternal love, as Michele’s mother was a monster.
“Strangely I loved her through the hate, if that is possible. I didn’t have a choice.”
Michele was beaten daily and locked in rooms on the weekends. Her mother had a card game that provided a cover for Michele to be raped by her mother and her clients.
Michele’s “father” was a coke dealer, and not her biological father. Because of the family business, she learned how to cut coke at an early age. Michele was her paranoid and abusive mother’s right hand. Michele felt the hate from her mother, likely born of hatred of herself. Hatred aside, her mother trusted Michele to cut dope. Imagine your only memory of feeling good emotions from your mother is her pride in your cutting cocaine.
“Many nights I have stayed up wishing for her death and his. Days would go by and I wasn’t fed because I cried or said no.”
Michele’s mother eventually died of AIDS. Before she died however, she sold Michele to a new “dad” for drugs. Sure, slavery for blacks is over, right?
When the new “dad” wasn’t doing to Michele what pedophiles euphemistically call “loving her,” he was using her for a punching bag.
Michele’s “new dad” died on her ninth birthday. I’d like to think that God gave Michele that present.
“They both got what they deserved,” Michele mused as she related her story to me.
A dead body, but a place to say, Michele stayed with her “dad’s” dead body for two weeks, only leaving as the stench became unbearable. She had his coke and a game plan. She never looked back.
Michele told nobody of her “dad’s” death. She recalls the moment he drew his last breath, as she knew her life had begun. She would suffer no more, but not just because he was dead. She now controlled her own destiny, as she was now a coke dealer.
Michele wanted was she wanted to sell coke. Selling coke wasn’t about right or wrong; it was about eating or not eating.
