The War From Within, James Anthony Love [e textbook reader .txt] 📗

enemy. The image of your mother scrawled out on the floor lying in a pool of her own vomit, never leaves one’s mind. These memories outweigh any good times that we shared together, just as nightmares are more vivid than regular dreams.
This was my life. There were times when I thought about escaping, wanting to run away but what laid outside the house frighten me enough to make me stay. Over time that too changed.
I hated myself and I hated my life. I cursed God for allowing me to be born, because I thought that surely nonexistent had to be better than my life at the moment. Though I curse God, I knew very little about him at the time. Only thing that I knew was the bits and pieces that I learn when Emma and I would visit the Church. This was during one of her clean stints, which did not last long. She would vow to get her life right and she would tell me that it meant that we must first get right with God. She would drag me to Sunday school and church for a couple of weeks, if that, but she would go back to doing her own thing sooner than later.
It did not bother me one bit when we would stop going to church because I did not like the people that attended the church very well anyway. They would always look down their nose whenever we came to their church. They whisper behind our backs talking about our rags that we call clothes, while they were dressed in their finest linens. Just because of this they thought that they were better than us. They dislike us coming to their church, viewing us like a stain on a previously unblemished fabric. Whatever hatred they held for me I returned it tenfold. And they had the audacity to say that they were made from the image of God. I was sorry to say that they made God extremely unattractive.
Still the only part that I would missed about our church outings, was the fact that we actually got to go somewhere together. Other than the occasional church trips and school I was stuck at home, mostly by myself. Again I hated myself and I hated our lives.
I hated everything about myself. From my unusual size, I was always much taller and bigger than the other kids my age, to my looks. My nose was too big, as were my ears as well. My bottom lip was large also, so large that kids would tease me by saying that it looked like I was always pouting. My skin was much to dark and ashy, I just could not believe that someone that looked like I looked and lived where I lived could be beautiful. This eternal hate lasted for years and years.
Though I hated my looks, there was something that I hated more and that was my name. I thought that I hated my name because it sounded like it belonged to someone five times my age. Or the fact that I had to correct everyone when they would say it because they would leave off the first letter because they thought it was silent. However, I came to realized that I hated my name because it connected me to Emma, being that she was the one that name me.
I once asked her, during one of her sober times, why she had given me my name. She just smile and told me that it was because she thought my name was beautiful. When I asked her what it meant she replied, “It means you have something greater than this world inside of you.”
When she spoke she held a look of love in her eyes that I rarely saw. I wanted to ask her what she meant but that look alone made me forget to ask my question. For that moment we lived a regular life, unfortunately reality was all too quick to reenter our lives.


Though, I hated my life I had no choice but to live it, I could have cry about it but my cries would a fallen upon deaf ears. So rather than sit and sulk about my misfortune, I kept on pushing hoping that the next day would be better than the last. However where we lived it was hard to decipher the good days from the bad ones.


We lived in an apartment complex called Prince Hall Village, or the Hall, as the tenants simply call it. Living where we live you somehow become immune to the violence, drugs, and crime even when it’s happening in your own home. Survival is all that is important, this again was something I learn earlier.
We lived in a two bed apartment that was paid for by the government. Our apartment complex was our city’s answer to New York’s projects. They were three sections of five building each places tightly together. They were so tightly place that you could watch, and hear, what the person in the adjacent building was watching on their Television. The sections were numbered with letters A, B, and C. Sections A and B, we lived in B, housed almost all of the complex’s residents. While in section C houses what was known as the crack houses. This was where the drugs where sold and used. Even though there were some actually resident in these buildings, every one knew that you did not go into section C unless you were selling or looking to buy some drugs.
The apartment complex was in the “black” part of our city, meaning the most ran down part of town. Our apartment complex was also caged in, all of the complex was surrounded by a ten foot tall gate. At the front of the complex we had security entrance point were you had to checked in with your apartment issued id. If you had any visitors their names had to be on an approved list or they were not allowed to enter. Entering and exiting our apartments was like going to the border.
This was no matter though because if someone wanted to get in they could. This was mostly just to show us that we were separated from a world that we did not belong to. We might be allowed to visit that world but we had to remember that our place was behind that gate. We were in prison, literally, the laws inside of the gates were different for the laws outside of the gates.
The management treated us like we were inmates also. Each year every resident would have to provided a updated list, with photos, of every man, woman, and child that leave in the apartment. Every six months some unlucky soul would have to come out, usually escorted by the police, and checked that only the people listed were living in your apartment. If they found out that you were housing someone not approved, then you would get kicked out immediately. They said this was for health reason, but I knew it was because of how most residents took advantage of the free rent. Believe it or not, there was a long waiting list to get an apartment in our complex. So most people just shacked up with someone that they knew that was already approved. Sometimes there would be two families of four living in a two bedroom apartment.
The apartment checks did not stop people from coming in neither. Most know when they were coming and they would just moved out and lay low in Section C, which they never checked, and come back when the coast had cleared.
This may sound abnormal to some but this was my home and to me this was normal. I thought that everyone had to show their id’s to get into their apartments. I thought that everyone had three chains and a dead bolt lock on their doors. I thought that everyone had to check in their visitors with security before they came, or they wouldn’t be allowed in the complex. I was not naïve enough to think that we were living well, but I just thought this was the way of the world because it was how I live.

The government also supplied my food. Emma being a jobless single mother was on what they call food stamps. Later in life I learned that I should had been embarrassed about buying food with colored money, but back then everyone I know use them so I had no need to be embarrassed. Emma would send me to the store with the “stamps” as she called them, to buy what the little groceries that the “stamps” could buy.
At first I was hesitant thinking that she would beat me if I made a mistake but by the time I was eight years old I was more fluent in food stamps than I was in “real” money. I could calculate the items in my head and know just how much change I would receive back. I always kept the change when I went to the store for Emma. Sometimes she was too high to care and the other times, when she was coherent, I just made the price of the food equal the amount that she gave me. Math wasn’t her best subject to say the least and she never asked for a receipt. Plus, she trusted me because she thought that I feared her; her being the parent and me being the child. Only problem was that I did not view her as a parent, but I played my role.
I could not be cheated by anyone because I could count faster and higher than your average eight year old, this did not hinder crooked people from trying to cheat me though. People would try to get over on me just because of my age. They would try to take advantage of my innocence, what they did not know was that I had lost that before I even realized that I had it. Because of the behavior of some people that I had to associated with, I taught myself to always try to be one step ahead of the next person. Because I thought that they were trying to cheat me, I had to get them first.
An example that comes to mind is one day when I was eight, I was literally starving. Emma hadn’t been home for a couple of days and we didn’t have any food in the house to eat. Now I didn’t worry when Emma disappearance because she pulled this act quite frequently. I would just lock all of the locks and just wait until I heard her beating on door. I normally would not leave the house, but on that day I was hungry. I decided to get my stash of food stamps that I kept, just in case something like this happened, and go to the corner store for some weenies and hot dog buns. My favorite meal at the time and also the only meal I knew how to make.
I decided to go to the corner store instead of the farther away supermarket for two reasons; one I didn’t have a key to our house and leaving your house unlocked and unattended for a long period of time was the same as inviting someone in to steal your possessions. The fact that we possessed little did not matter, thieves would steal anything that was not nailed down. Two was that I knew that it would be dark soon and our neighborhood was not one that you wanted to walk in during nightfall. The criminals were like vampires they would sleep all day and stalk their prey at night. A