For the last few weeks I have been working on my life story, a book I hope to finish before my birthday in February of 2012. During the week of July 18th, I went down to South Florida to touch on my past. Sometimes you need to face your past in order to make a better future. Homestead, Florida and Florida City, Florida hold lots of bad memories for me. For some reason I always come back looking for the part of me I that I left there. Homestead, Florida is where my mom came after leaving Mississippi. 

My first stop was on Fourth Street where the buses drop off most of the migrant workers. I was around 12 years old. While standing there, I remembered my mom telling me how our new daddy acted when he saw all of us coming off the bus. As number one child came off the bus, he was smiling all the way until number four. When number five came off, the man started to cry. At number eight, he walked away. She found him later at somebody's bar and brought him home. He stayed and helped my mom with all of us, and he put a number (my baby sister) in there for himself .

I have always wondered why people don’t talk about all the people that left Mississippi and came down to South Florida. They always talk about Chicago or other places. The way people were thrown on top of one each other back then was a shame. I do believe that’s why there was so much killing going on. I went to the first house that we lived in. I could not believe how small this place was. It was a two story building that had two apartments up stairs, and two downstairs. There was only two rooms, a living room, a bedroom, a very small kitchen, and a little bathroom with a shower. Seven of us kids slept in the bedroom, and the grown-ups had the living room.

After about a year, my mom moved us to a place called China Camp/Golden Nugget off of Fourth Street. This place was made up the same way just with more apartments; it had to be about forty of them. The new place still had just two rooms, but we had a bathroom that had a bathtub and a bigger kitchen where some of us slept. At this time, I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. A lot of things went on here: drinking, gambling, fighting, killing. You name it, and it was there. I found out from my mom that a white lady owned it at that time in 1965. This is where I went wild and this is the place we stayed until we moved to Miami three or four years later.