Put Out at Eight: The Friend's Father Who Let Me Stay

I was eight years old the first time my mother put me out of the house. I packed some clothes in a bag and walked out with nowhere to go. What happened next is a part of my story I don't tell often: a school friend and his father opened their door to me, and a group of kids made sure I never had to face the street alone.

Walking out with a bag of clothes

It was 1995, and I was living in South Florida with my mother and her husband. Life in that house was already hard. One day my mother told me to pack my things and get out, and she said she never wanted me back. As I left, she called me Satan.

I want to be honest about how I saw myself back then. In my memoir I wrote that I was looking at myself as a bad person with a bad mind. But I also wrote what was really going on underneath: "all that I was going through was stressing me somehow and making me want to be loved by someone."

That is what a lot of "bad" kids are. Not bad. Hurting, and hungry for love.

If a child is in immediate danger, call 911. In the U.S., the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline is 1-800-422-4453.

The door that opened

I went straight to the home of a school friend and told him my mother had kicked me out. He let me in. When his father came home and heard what had happened, his first question was whether I wanted him to report it to the school.

His father was a Jamaican man, so he knew about these kinds of family conflicts, and I'm sure he knew what was going through my mind. I spent a lot of time sitting in a chair, looking lost, not knowing what to do about my problem. He told me the same thing every single day:

"Just don’t go back over there and become a killer."

Those words sound blunt, and they were. But he said them because he knew how much anger a boy in my position was carrying. He was not trying to scare me. He was trying to steer me. Years later I still remember them, because an adult saw the danger I was in and spoke straight to it.

The friends who waited outside

I stayed there and missed two days of school. My mother was not answering the school's calls, and when someone from Sunshine Elementary came to the house, no one opened the door. Then my mother told the police I had run away, and they started looking for me. My friend's father told me I would have to go back home.

I didn't have many friends, but the ones I had were real. Besides that friend, most of them were girls and the A students who helped me pass my tests. When it was time to go back, my friend and a few others who knew what I was going through got together. Another friend's older brother drove, and there were about five of us in the car.

When we pulled up, I walked to the door alone. They stayed in the car. They told me they would wait outside for a while in case I got turned away again, so I would not have to walk the streets by myself. I was eight. They were kids too. And they understood something many adults never do: sometimes the most important thing you can give a person is to simply stay nearby.

Walking back in, I wished my friend's father had bought me a ticket to Jamaica, where my grandparents were. He couldn't do that. But he had already given me something.

What I told my mother

When my mother asked whose house I had been sleeping at, I never told her. I said I had been sleeping "in boxes and bushes." I protected the family that protected me.

What one adult's kindness can do

That family did not fix my life. I still went back to a hard house, and harder years were coming. But they gave me a few days of safety, a place to sit and think, and a voice telling me not to throw my life away. Small things, maybe. Not small to a child.

If you are an adult who knows a child in a hard situation, here are a few things that family taught me without meaning to:

• Open the door first, ask questions second. A child who shows up at your house with a bag of clothes needs safety before a lecture.
• Ask what they want to happen. My friend's father asked whether I wanted the school to know. That respected me.
• Name the danger kindly but clearly. Hurting kids carry anger. A steady adult can talk about it out loud.
• Bring in the people whose job it is to help. Schools, child-protection workers and hotlines exist for exactly this.
• Don't let them walk alone. Even waiting in a car outside says, "You matter."

And if you are a kid reading this, know that it is not your fault, and it is okay to tell a teacher, a counselor or a friend's parent what is happening at home.

Be the door for someone

I have thanked a lot of people in my life, and in the acknowledgments of my book I thank friends' parents who guided me away from bad influences. That Jamaican father was one of the first friends' parents to look out for me. He may never have known how long his words would stay with me.

You may never know either. Open the door anyway. My full story, including the years that followed, is in my memoir Neglected But Undefeated, which you can find on my Books page. If someone once opened a door for you, take a minute today and tell them thank you.

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