The Blind Side

by Michael Lewis

  But he knew something else, too. He knew that Michael had spent his life running. Not long before, he’d been in his Memphis office when a woman named Bobby Spivey, who worked for the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services, finally returned his call. Spivey was the officer who had handled Michael’s case. Sean had phoned her three times to see what he could learn about the missing years in Michael’s life, and each time he found himself in conversation with Spivey’s voice mail box.* Now, finally, Spivey herself was on his speaker phone, and embarrassed to say that most of the details of Michael’s case were unavailable. The Department of Children’s Services had lost his file. She remembered very clearly some things about Michael Oher, however. She recalled, for instance, the night that Children’s Services had sent the police to remove seven-year-old Michael Oher from his mother’s care.

  “It was raining that night,” said Bobby Spivey. “She was homeless. She was on drugs. Someone called the police and said she was walking around in the rain with her kids.”

  She recalled that Michael Oher had been taken away and put into a foster home—but that he hadn’t stayed. “He was a runaway a majority of the time,” she said, laconically. “He was real quiet. He wasn’t disrespectful. He just ran.” Eventually, the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services had given up looking for Michael Oher. “He ran so much that we stopped trying to stop him,” said this woman who had handled his case. The government had officially taken charge of Michael at the age of seven, she said, but lost track of him around his tenth birthday. She was curious to know what had become of him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FREAK OF NURTURE

  NCAA Lady: Can I ask you this—

  Sean: He has no hate. No animosity. His memories are all good.

  NCAA Lady: To be quite honest with you—do you fully know his childhood?

  Sean: Oh, absolutely not. First of all he doesn’t have a great relationship with me. Because he never had a daddy. I’m more of just an older man. He’ll talk to my daughter or my wife. But we don’t ask questions like that. Because a lot of times we don’t want the answers.

  NCAA Lady: You don’t care.

  Sean: I only care about what he cares about.

  NCAA Lady: You don’t ask, I should say.

  Sean: We’re trying to take care of geometry class tomorrow. What happened when he was four years old—if he’s okay by it, we’re okay by it. The timeline to us, we figure it’ll come one day. We’re in no hurry. We got a long time.

  DENISE OHER COULDN’T SAY who murdered her father—just that he had been shot several times in his bed when she was a little girl. She couldn’t tell you exactly when she had been removed from her mother’s custody. She knew her mother was an alcoholic and totally incapable of taking care of her and her half-brother, Robert Faulkner. Her mother never cooked her a meal, read her a book, or took her to school—at least, not that she could recall. One day the police came for them, and took her and Robert away to an orphanage. She still didn’t feel especially cared for—she never felt loved or anything like that. She skipped plenty of school, and even more when, at the age of fifteen, her mother somehow sprung her from the institution. Once out she fell in with the wrong crowd. It led her to drugs and other things and, at twenty, she gave birth to a baby boy. Four more babies soon followed. Around the neighborhood people would say, “Dee Dee is a breeder.” And she was: inside of six years she had five little boys. Their father, she felt sure, was a man named Odell Watkins, but he declined the offer from the Department of Children’s Services to acknowledge his paternity. Instead he took a DNA test. The test proved, just as she’d said all along, that Odell Watkins was the father.

  By the late summer of 1985 Dee Dee was twenty-seven years old, and finished with Odell Watkins. She wasn’t even half-finished having babies, however, and the father of her next child had just arrived on her front porch. He came directly to her from Robert, her brother.

  Since they’d left the orphanage Robert had gotten the nickname “Skillet.” Oddly enough, it was a skillet, and then a horseshoe, that Robert later used to crush his wife’s skull after she told him she wanted a divorce. His wife’s brutal murder landed Robert on Death Row at River Bend over in Nashville; but that all came later. The first time Robert had been thrown in jail for murder he’d been sent away for just a few years. Denise couldn’t tell you who Robert had killed, or why. She just knew that her brother had been convicted for murder and sent away to Fort Pillow prison, where he’d met a man named Michael Jerome Williams. Why Michael Jerome Williams had been in jail Dee Dee either didn’t know or would soon forget. All she knew was that Robert had wanted to send word to her of his well-being and that Michael Jerome Williams, on his way out of jail, had been kind enough to serve as messenger. “When I met him I wasn’t with nobody,” said Dee Dee. “We got to talking and we wound up together. But he was a little bitty fellow. Five foot six, maybe.”

  Soon after Michael Williams visited her, Dee Dee discovered she was pregnant again. She had no money, no job, and was now flirting with a serious drug problem—but still she didn’t worry about the welfare of this new baby. “God put it there,” she said, “and He ain’t going to put no mouth on this earth he can’t feed.” Unlike Odell Watkins, Michael Williams didn’t dispute his paternity, and she named the baby after him: Michael Jerome Williams.

  But right around the time the child was born, Michael Jerome Williams vanished. The Department of Children’s Services went looking for him, and it was a full year before they found him—back in prison. By then Dee Dee had decided she didn’t want her baby named for Michael Jerome Williams. Though she made no effort to change the baby’s legal name, she began to call him “Michael Oher.” Oher was her family name, which she had taken from her mother.

  In the next four years Denise bore four more children, by several different fathers, none of whom stuck around. By the time Michael was five years old, and his memory kicked in to record events for posterity, Dee Dee was caring for seven boys and three girls, all under the age of fifteen. Only she wasn’t really caring for anyone, as she’d become addicted to crack cocaine. “On the first of the month she’d get a check,” recalled Marcus, Michael’s eldest brother, “and she’d leave and we wouldn’t see her until the tenth…. Them drugs tear everything up.” As Dee Dee had no income except for whatever the government sent her on the first of each month, the children had no money for provisions. They had no food or clothing, except what they could scrounge from churches and the street. Surprisingly often, given the abundance of public housing in Memphis, they had no shelter. When asked what he recalls of his first six years, Michael said, “Going for days having to drink water to get full. Going to other people’s houses and asking for something to eat. Sleeping outside. The mosquitoes.” The winter was cold, but the summer was worse because the heat was so oppressive and the mosquitoes bit all night long.

  Yet, by the time Michael turned seven his greatest fear was that some man in a uniform would come and take him away from his mother. His mother had her problems but she was never overtly cruel: she never hit them, for instance, and she often said she loved them. She just wasn’t around that much and, when she was around, had nothing to give them. Marcus, now sixteen years old, knew that the police sometimes broke up families such as theirs. They’d heard snippets about foster homes, and the snippets hadn’t been reassuring. The police just took you away and dumped you with people whose only interest in you was the cash they received for your presence. Michael’s brothers spoke of the possibility that the police might take them away, and decided that, whatever happened, they would try to stick together.

  On April 14, 1994, the Memphis courts, for the first time, registered Michael’s existence. Listing Michael’s name, as well as the names of his siblings, it rendered the following verdict: “It appears to this Court that said children are in need of immediate protection of this Court and that said children are subject to an immediate threat of said chil
dren’s health to the extent that delay for a hearing would be likely to result in severe or irreparable harm.”

  A month before Michael’s eighth birthday, the police cars rolled up in front of the shed behind the cottage that Denise had told the children belonged to a cousin of hers. The three little girls were out in front. Andre and Rico were someplace else. The four other boys—Marcus, Deljuan, Carlos, and Michael—were inside the shed. “We seen them pull up and we already knew what they were coming for,” said Marcus. “We done seen it happen before with other people. We really thought they were going to scatter us up.” Seeing the police, Marcus turned to his brothers and said, “Run!”

  Michael prided himself on his foot speed. “I can fly,” he liked to say. Speed was essential to the new plans he had for himself—plans he would cling to, with an amazing tenacity, for the next ten years. On June 20, 1993, he had been inside someone else’s house and seen a basketball game on television. On that night Michael Jordan was using the Phoenix Suns as his foil for the public display of his greatness. The moment he saw Michael Jordan play basketball, Michael Oher knew who he was meant to be: the next Michael Jordan. Because he was seven, he thought it was an original idea. Because he was quiet, the idea went unexpressed, and so undisturbed.

  But Michael Oher now had a secret ambition, and it would define much of what he did with himself for the next ten years. The ambition stood in defiance of a world that had assigned him no value. His father hadn’t valued him enough to meet him. His mother hadn’t valued him enough to feed him. He’d never been to a doctor, or been given medicine of any sort. He’d missed nearly as much school as he’d made. His older brothers cared for him and were good at finding food. But they had their own problems; they had no real ability to nurture. No one invested in Michael Oher, and so he yielded no visible returns. Michael did not consider himself without value, however. From the moment he laid eyes on Michael Jordan, he was, himself, destined to become the richest and most famous black athlete on earth.

  When the police cars came and his brother screamed at him to run, Michael didn’t really know what was going on. He just saw Marcus (sixteen), Deljuan (thirteen), and Carlos (eleven) sprinting out the back door. He flew after them. To be the next Michael Jordan, Michael Oher needed to be quick and agile—and he was. His older brothers were still faster than he was, but Michael pumped his little legs as fast as they’d go, and he finally caught up to them. When they’d finished running they stood on the second floor of an abandoned auto repair shop down the street, huffing and puffing. From a broken window they watched their mother scream as the police took away her three baby girls—Denise, Tara, and Depthia—and put them in the back of the squad car. Marcus told his brothers that they’d probably never see those little girls again, and he was right.

  Dee Dee wasn’t capable of caring for her children, and she knew it, but she didn’t want anyone taking them away from her. The boys wanted to stay together; they felt safe together; together they at least had each other. They all knew that the police would be back for the boys, and so they left the shed. Dee Dee got her hands—she wouldn’t say how—on an old beat-up Monte Carlo. For weeks she and the seven boys slept in the car. “Bodies on top of each other,” is how Deljuan, who was now thirteen, recalled it. “We’d get up in the morning and go wash ourselves in the bathroom of a service station.”

  Unwilling to leave the small area on the west side of Memphis where she’d been born and raised, Dee Dee found herself at a disadvantage. A few weeks after the police nabbed her daughters, they caught up to Carlos and Michael on a day they attended school. The police took them from school to the home of a woman they’d never met, named Velma Jones. “Velma was a big lady,” said Carlos, “about three hundred seventy-five pounds, and she got angry when you made her move.” The children found her terrifying—and their fear was only heightened when she showed them what she did to children who misbehaved: sat on them. That was Michael’s most vivid memory of the first few days, being sat on by Velma Jones. Carlos recalled being taken, with Michael, to the home of Velma’s equally gargantuan twin sister, Thelma, who made them mop out the raw sewage that had spilled into her basement from a burst pipe. It was the first of a long series of unpleasant chores the boys were expected to perform for the fat twins.

  BUT THAT WAS JUST the beginning of their misery. The house teemed with other foster children, older and bigger than Michael and Carlos, who picked on them. (When asked how many foster children the State of Tennessee had deposited with her, Velma later said, “I really don’t know. I just got so much love and patience and energies. They just brought ’em to me.”) Velma had a single biological child whom, in Carlos’s view, she spoiled. She sent Carlos and Michael out to sell newspapers on Sundays, and when they returned she took away the money they’d made and gave it to her child. “Living with The Twins wudn’t no happy thing,” said Carlos. “They just treated us like we weren’t people. Every night Mike cried hisself to sleep.” The two boys slept in their first bunk bed, only Michael’s lower bunk couldn’t be called a bed, as it had no mattress. “I was sleeping on wood,” he said. Carlos remembers Michael saying, almost every night, ‘Carlos, I just want to go home.’”

  Two nights into their stay Michael ran away, all by himself. (“I can fly.”) He was just seven years old, but still he ran right across Memphis and found his mother. Dee Dee told him that she had to take him right back to the foster home or they would all get in trouble, and Michael cried all the way back. A few weeks later he ran again—with the same result. Once his mother came to visit him. “That was a happy day,” he said. “Yes, that was my one happy day.” He and Carlos stayed with Velma Jones for nearly two years. Then, one afternoon, Velma sat them down and told them they were going to be sent to Knoxville. She might as well have said they were being sent to the moon. Neither had ever left a tiny little area in western Memphis. She told them to go back to their room, pack their few things, and prepare to leave. They went back to their room, ignored their few things, and jumped out the window.

  This time it took the police two days to track them down. The Department of Children’s Services had noted by now that Michael was a runner, and they must have requested some sort of psychological evaluation. At any rate, instead of packing him straight back to foster care, they took him to St. Joseph’s Hospital. There he was deposited on what he took to be “the floor for bad kids.” They subjected him to tests that caused him to conclude later that they were seeing if he’d gone crazy. But it wasn’t half-bad; and the living conditions were a vast improvement on the foster home. “We had good food,” he said. “I had a bed with a mattress. They even had videos.”

  Michael had just turned ten years old. After two weeks in the hospital, he ached to go home. “It got old,” he said. “You want to be free after a while.” Incredible as it might seem to anyone who knew only the bare facts of his case rather than his emotional predisposition, he missed his mother. It was as if Dee Dee had been put on earth to answer a question: how little can a mother care for her children and still retain their affection? His mother hadn’t cared for him, but still he loved her. “I guess you’re just supposed to love your mom,” he said later. “Just because she’s your mom.” That hard-to-shake feeling would explain why, much later, when he was asked for the first time about his mother and her problems with drugs, he would stare blankly and pretend the subject didn’t bother him. But when asked a second time, his brown eyes filled with tears.

  The doors on both ends of the floor were locked. The hospital was old—it would soon be torn down—and Michael noticed that the big metal doors at one end of the hall rattled. “I remember it like it was yesterday, actually,” he said later. “We’d play up and down the floor. And at the end of the floor was an exit. One of those two-door exits that closed together with a lock between ’em. I got a sheet of paper and folded it together and stuck it down there. And it opened.” At his moment of discovery there were too many people wandering around for him to es
cape cleanly. He kept his secret, and his piece of paper, to himself the rest of the day. “That night when I went to bed I kissed the paper and put it under my little pillow,” he said. Between his room and the locked door a nurse’s station intervened. The nurse at the window could monitor the entire hall. Early the next morning, when the halls were clear, he crawled on his belly directly beneath the window of the nurse’s station. He reached the door without being seen, jimmied it open with his paper tool, and fled.