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“Mom,” and although she had some inkling her real mother was the woman who visited on weekends, it would take many years and a bit of snooping to figure out what had happened.
    My father didn’t have to wait long for new siblings, though. After Mannish went AWOL from his military duty, changing his name to Kenneth Washington to avoid trouble, he returned home and fathered three more children with Marion—Carolyn Mercedes in ’45, Gary Kirby in ’46, and Kenneth in ’47. Time apart had done nothing to help the couple, and their fighting grew worse as responsibilities piled up. Soon after Kenny’s birth, Mannish left for good. His children didn’t miss him; he had no presence in their lives, and as Muddy Waters once sang, “You can’t lose what you ain’t never had.” But for Marion, life only got harder. Deserted, dejected, emotionally battered by her husband and his family, powerless to reclaim her first daughter, she began battling a new foe—depression.
    Fortune hadn’t finished dealing her fresh blows, either. Soon after his birth, Gary—whom everyone called Kirby—contracted measles, which led to acute encephalitis. He slept straight through a week or two asthough in a coma, Marion sitting by his bedside in anxious agony the whole time. When he awoke, she noticed his movements had changed. The sickness had left Kirby mentally challenged. My grandmother would have to watch him like a baby his entire life, which meant she couldn’t take a job until one of the other kids got old enough to handle the responsibility. From an early age, Curtis helped with the small things—Marion remembered that by three years old, he could diaper Carolyn as well as she could. Still, she was the only adult and had to handle the big things. With government aid now her only possible source of income, she stared desperation dead in the eye.
    Hunger hounded the family, but my grandmother kept them alive any way she could, stretching every dollar until the eagle grinned. Most times they ate rice, or beans, or anything that cheaply filled a grumbling belly. Meat was a delicacy enjoyed maybe one weekend of every month, and it consisted of chicken necks, or backs, or any other part of the animal that people with money wouldn’t eat. “Mom had this great big pot and she would cook beans and neck bones,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “She’d cook it on Monday, and we’d eat all the meat out on Monday, but it was always on the table until we ate up all the beans. I just now learned how to eat beans again, because I swore when I got grown, I would never eat beans.”
    The family lived on the run, chased by creditors and landlords from one seedy flophouse to the next. Being a poor Negro in Chicago meant you rarely got a sense of belonging anywhere. After Mannish deserted the family, they lived in a dingy apartment on South Washtenaw Avenue, where Marion began dating a man named Eddie who abused her. One of Aunt Carolyn’s earliest memories is scrambling up the fire escape to Grandma Sadie’s apartment, which was just above theirs, and begging her to come down and stop Eddie from hitting Marion. “Mama was kind of on the timid side, and Grandma was just very boisterous,” Aunt Carolyn says. “Mama wasn’t a fighter, but Grandma was. And [Eddie] didn’t mess with Grandma. Grandma ended up putting him out.”
    Sadie was often the family’s only refuge. “She was always around,” Aunt Carolyn recalls. “She was Mom’s backbone.” Not affectionate by nature, Sadie possessed the kind of steel will necessary to survive the Chicagoslums. She worked all day cooking in rich white people’s kitchens, and at night she often brought home food her employers didn’t eat to feed her daughter and grandchildren. Many times she saved them from starvation.
    At home, young Curtis watched his mother get beaten; at