Amber Jeannine - Rabbit

To my husband and our four kids, I love you all

Lifes a bitch. Youve got to go out and kick ass.

Maya Angelou

Wed been living in our new place in Indianapolis for only a couple of days when I heard a knock at my front door. I opened up to find a white lady with a big smile standing on my porch, holding a huge chocolate cake wrapped in plastic. I want to welcome you to the neighborhood, she said. So I baked you a little something.

What the hell? Where Im from, if somebody shows up at your door with something nice in their hands, its probably stolen.

As soon as she left, I went right to my kitchen and called my girlfriend, Ms. Jeanne, back home in Atlanta.

You aint gonna believe this, I said. A white lady just made me a cake. You think I should I eat it?

Yeah, girl, said Ms. Jeanne. White folks always bake you shit when you move in so you dont break in to their house.

It turns out, there was a whole lot I had to get used to moving from the hood to the suburbs. Strangers bringing me chocolate cake was only the beginning.

I grew up in the 1980s in the inner city of Atlanta. My mama was an alcoholic single mother with five kids. She could barely read and only knew enough math to play the numbers and count out the exact change to buy herself a couple of bottles of Schlitz Malt Liquor and a nickel bag of weed. Almost none of my relatives, going back three generations, ever graduated high school. Instead, you could say I came from a family of self-employed entrepreneurs. My granddaddy ran a bootleg house, selling moonshine out of his living room; my uncle Skeet robbed folks; and my aunt Vanessa sold her food stamps. With role models like that, what could possibly go wrong?

Even though I came up in the hood, I dreamed of a different life. My fantasy came straight off TV, from my favorite show, Leave It to Beaver. You probably thought I was going to say Good Times, but I didnt need to watch TV to see black folks struggling. The Struggle was all around me. Compared to how we were living, life on Leave It to Beaver looked like heaven. I was mesmerized by the way the house was so clean and everybody was always smiling and jolly. What I liked most was how Mrs. Cleaver would walk around grinning at her kids like she couldnt believe her good luck. In my house, my mother would get drunk off her gin, whoop me with an extension cord, call me ugly, and tell me to take my ass to bed. Id be thinking, How you gonna tell me to go to sleep when its ten oclock in the morning and I just woke up?

I know a lot of people think they know what its like to grow up in the hood. Like maybe they watched a couple of seasons of The Wire and think they got the shit all figured out. But TV doesnt tell the whole story. It doesnt show what its like for girls like me; how one thing can lead to another so that one minute youre a twelve-year-old looking for attention, then suddenly you end up pregnant at thirteen, with nobody to turn to for help. Folks dont know about that kind of life because, for a lot of people, girls who grew up like me are invisible. Unless you come to the hood, you wont see us. Its easy to pretend we dont exist.

By the time I was fifteen, I was a single teen mom with a seventh-grade education, no job skills, no money, and two babies under the age of two. My dream was to give my kids a better life, but most days I didnt even have enough money to buy Pampers. All I wanted was to find a way to get myself and my babies out of the ghetto; I was willing to do whatever it took.

Let me tell you something, moving up in this world is not easy. I worked at factories, gas stations, and fast food restaurants. Ive hustled and schemed, been shot twice, beaten with a roller skate, locked behind bars with a bunch of junkies and hookers, and nearly got my head blown off for talking shit. Somehow, I survived. Hell, I did more than survive. I got myself and my kids a whole new life.

These days I live with my family in Indianapolis, in a six-bedroom house overlooking a man-made pond with a bunch of ducks swimming around in it. During the day, I do regular suburban-mom-type shit. I go to Walmart, get some lunch at Chick-fil-A, and head over to the gym for Zumba class. Okay, I dont really do Zumba. I went once, but the teacher was plus size, like me. I kept thinking, Does this shit even work?

At night I hit the clubs. Im a comic and tour the country telling stories about my messed-up childhood and getting out of the hood. When I started comedy, back in 2004, all I wanted was to make folks laugh. Then I noticed something strange. After almost every show somebody would come up to me and ask the same question, How did you turn your life around? It felt like they wanted me to give them some kind of secret tip.

I wish I had a simple answer. But the truth is, its a long story. I went from living in an illegal liquor house, to running from the cops, to living in the suburbs with a flock of ducks outside my window. The only way I can explain how it happened is to tell you exactly what went down. So Im laying it all out in black and white, sharing stories Ive never told a soul, not even my husband, which reminds me, I should probably warn him about chapter 5.

I used to get embarrassed about the shit I did to survive. I wanted to push it all away and pretend it never happened. But Ive learned that laughing at my pain helps me heal. I hope my story will inspire you to laugh through your hard times or try something youve always dreamed of doing. Maybe you want to get out of a bad relationship, or go back to school, or change your career. Hell, maybe you want to be an overweight Zumba instructor. I dont know what the hell you lie in bed thinking about at night. Thats your business. All I know is when you finish reading this book I hope youll take away the same message that Ive been carrying in my heart since I was eight years old. Its a lesson an angel taught me. That angel happened to be my third-grade teacher, who wore badass leather boots and had really good hair. The words she spoke to me all those years ago helped me change my life, and maybe theyll do some good for you, too. Patricia, she said, I want you to always remember, you can do anything and be anything. All you have to do is dream.

My granddaddy is the only black man Ive ever met who was never broke a day in his life. He ran an illegal liquor house in Decatur, Georgia, selling moonshine for fifty cents a shot from behind a bar he built himself out of plywood and old scraps of carpet and red leather. Granddaddys real name was George Walker, but folks called him Bear Cat or .38 for the two pistols he kept in his front pockets. Granddaddy didnt believe in banks and didnt trust anybody, either. He stored his jugs of corn liquor in the living room in a beat-up old refrigerator the color of baby-shit yellow, which he locked up with a thick metal chain. And he stashed his money in a dingy white athletic sock he pinned to the inside of his pants. My brother Dre, who would steal anything that wasnt nailed down, used to say hed be one rich muthafucka if he could only get his hands on that sock full of paper. But Dre didnt want to swipe anything that hung so close to Granddaddys mangy old balls.

Most folks were scared to death of my grandfather, not just because he was built like somebody put a human head on a gorilla body, but also because he didnt take shit from anybody. I remember one night my uncle Skeet was acting a fool while Granddaddy was trying to watch Walter Cronkite on the evening news. The news was serious business to Granddaddy. He liked to talk back to Mr. Cronkite like the two of them were having a real conversation: Whats wrong with these dumb-ass honkeys? hed yell at the TV. They finna elect a movie star to run this whole gotdamn country. This why a nigga dont vote! Or, Them Iranians some mean muthafuckas. Thats why I dont go nowhere! Granddaddy said other than Jesus Christ, Walter Cronkite was the only white man he could trust. Yet here was Uncle Skeet, drunk as Cooter Brown, bouncing on the balls of his feet and shadowboxing right in Granddaddys face in the middle of the news.