a formidable barrier, her body between me and Uncle Hotsy—protecting me, as she always did.
The year was 1986. I was nearly sixteen. It was the first time I had to reckon with the possibility of losing my home—and my mother. “He belongs in foster care,” Dot said calmly.
It is said that home is where our stories begin. The story of how this book came about also begins at home, and from what I learned from Mom. She defended her home so that it included not just her biological kin but kids from the neighborhood like me, whose families couldn’t look after them for various reasons. Now, I can see that Mom rightly defined our home and family based on our circumstances, and she vigorously defended her definition of family against people and systems who would not accept it—even if those people were her children. I survived Hotsy and Dot’s campaign and managed to stay in that home until I left for college at the age of eighteen.
Before that day in 1986, I didn’t know what it was to be devalued as a human being. Until that day, I understood rejection only in terms of the dates with girls I couldn’t get. Nothing had prepared me for that moment. Our very presence on 1320 Hill Avenue, in the small city of Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, was a testimonial to acceptance. I lived in a Black-majority city that we bragged about; we weren’t like “those other Blacks” we looked down on, the ones who lived in neighboring Pittsburgh, because folks who lived in the city were somehow lesser. Calling Wilkinsburg home made us feel special during a time when the region was anything but.
Wilkinsburg was once a part of Pittsburgh, until its powerful White residents seceded in 1876, setting up an antagonistic relationship with the bigger municipality early on. In the late 1960s, though, when work disappeared and demographics shifted, Whites fled Wilkinsburg, too, leaving the town half empty. Black folk trickled in, and this new Black majority eventually adopted Wilkinsburg, just as Mom had adopted me.
The adage goes that when White folks catch a cold, Black folks get pneumonia. When work disappears for White people, as it did in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area in the 1980s, Black people suffered even more, and Black women adjusted their families in ways to keep children from feeling the effects of extremely high unemployment. “In January 1983, the regional economy officially—that is, numerically—bottomed out,” wrote journalist Bill Toland of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.1 “Unemployment in Allegheny County [where Pittsburgh is located] hit 13.9 percent, a rosy figure compared to the rest of the Pittsburgh metropolitan statistical area, where the adjusted unemployment rate hit an astonishing 17.1 percent (unadjusted, the number was actually higher, 18.2 percent).” Many families struggled to realize the American Dream in Pittsburgh, but Black families, including my own, found it especially hard.
When Hotsy and Dot talked with Mom about sending me to foster care, I didn’t feel I could turn to my biological family. My father, Floyd Criswell, had been killed at the age of twenty-seven in Jackson State Prison, about seventy-five minutes west of Detroit, when I was eight years old. He wasn’t involved in my life prior to his death. I don’t remember ever meeting him. My biological mother, Karen Perry, lived in Garfield, a low-income Pittsburgh neighborhood at the time, about four miles away, where she raised my half-sister Danielle, the youngest of her four children. Karen gave birth to my older brother Kevin when she was sixteen, me at eighteen, my younger brother Dorian at twenty, and my sister Danielle at twenty-two.
Kevin and Dorian lived in Wilkinsburg with Mom and me. Growing up, I didn’t have much interaction with Karen, who I call by her first name. Every summer, a few weeks before the start of the school year, Kevin, Dorian, and I got excited about the prospect of Karen taking us back-to-school shopping. Then, taking us clothes shopping seemed to be her most important role in my life. And I was just fine with that.
Karen never talked to me about why she gave me into Mom’s keeping. Mom told me Karen handed me to her at Magee-Women’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, where I was born. Even as a kid who knew nothing other than our home on Hill Avenue, I always knew that the senior citizen Elsie Mae couldn’t be my biological mother. Though I was quick to fight anyone who challenged my calling her Mom, I came to know through my surroundings who and what a godparent was in relation to a biological mother. I grew up knowing my “cuz,” “auntie,” and “brotha” could be the kin of my heart or of my blood. The similar backgrounds of many of my friends reinforced this understanding of family. In Wilkinsburg, many in my peer group lived with their grandmothers, aunties, or other surrogates. The African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” is especially true when you factor in the economic and social realities Black people face. From our village, Black folk had developed an informal foster care system long before I became the beneficiary of that support. That system was as familiar to me as the texture of Mom’s hands.
I came of age seeing how various hardships made parents give their children to surrogate parents for safekeeping. I bore witness to mothers who, to make ends meet, worked endless hours on multiple jobs as domestic workers and janitors. Mom used to be a domestic worker in the homes of wealthy White families, but she stopped her cleaning jobs around the time I was born and began watching children full-time to earn money.
Mom was the first entrepreneur and business owner I ever met. She filled a vital need in the market. Mom had help with her makeshift family; her daughter, Mary, lived with us. Mothers in our neighborhood had little choice but to entrust someone like Mom and Mary to love their children when, often, those Black women were taking care of White people’s kids in their roles as domestic workers.
Mary and (from left) Kevin, Dorian, me, and Angie
Mary also had cleaned people’s homes, but she suffered a stroke, and after her recovery she assisted Mom with us kids. We called Mary our aunt, which was more believable than Elsie being our mom because Mary looked like most of the women who dropped kids off at elementary school.
Mom was married to Theodore Boyd until his death in 1977. Teddy, who served in the Second World War, was the first father figure in my life. I have fond memories of Teddy sitting on the grassy knolls outside of a nearby shopping mall. I remember him leaving for work in the mornings to go to his job as a security guard before we kids went to school. After he died from “black lung,” Hotsy, also a veteran, moved into our house. But his was no benign presence—Hotsy’s name was on the deed of the home we lived in, and he eventually pushed to kick us kids out (or, at least, me). Compounding matters, Hotsy had “nervous breakdowns”—psychotic breaks—every few years, something I always attributed to his involvement in the war. Now I see that the post-traumatic stress from racism in Pittsburgh may have compounded the damaging effects of war.
More than a dozen children of varying ages spent significant chunks of time in our house. Some came just when they needed to be babysat, after school every day. Others would spend long stretches with us—days, even weeks—sleeping over. Six to seven of us lived in the 2,260 square foot home at any given time. Kevin and Dorian shared the master bedroom, where other children were also occasionally housed. They would share beds, if needed, or use pillows from the couches downstairs as a makeshift mattress. I slept with Mom in her bed until Kevin and Dorian moved up to the attic, whereupon I moved into their room. Hotsy and Mary had their own bedrooms.
The condition of the house reflected its numerous, active occupants. Fallen plaster and eroded drywall left the walls pockmarked, the wood frame exposed. The house went through a paneling phase when Hotsy did his best to cover the damage we did, but sections of it eventually came down, adding to the variations and blemishes. The roof bowed and the external brickwork buckled in places. The house needed significant repairs, but it was good enough for Kevin, Dorian, me, and others until we graduated from high school.
Mom and Mary made $5 a day per child, $25 per week for babysitting—if people paid. I don’t recall Karen paying Mom for my brothers and me. Instead,
