by Gucci Mane
But I never knew my father as a working man. I never saw him hold a nine-to-five job my whole life. All of that happened before me. I understood my father as a hustler, an alley cat, someone who more than any other person I’ve met was shaped by the streets. But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on all that later.
My momma’s from Bessemer too. Vicky Jean Davis is the daughter of Walter Lee Davis. Walter and his siblings were raised not too far from Montgomery, Alabama, in Autauga County.
Walter was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, where he served aboard “Old Nameless,” the battleship officially known as the USS South Dakota. He was a cook on Old Nameless, but when the Battle of Santa Cruz went down in October 1942, he hopped on one of the antiaircraft machine guns and got it poppin’. He took down a few planes before he got chewed up by one of the Japanese strafers. He got shot up so bad it made it into the papers.
“He looked like one of his own kitchen colanders,” said the captain, Vice Admiral Tom Gatch. “But they couldn’t kill him.” It was a miracle he survived that battle.
When he came home Walter relocated to Bessemer, where he found employment at Zeigler’s, a meat packaging company not unlike Oscar Mayer. He was one of their first black supervisors.
He also met his wife, Bettie. Together they had seven children—Jean, Jacqueline, Ricky, Patricia, Walter Jr., Debra, and Vicky. Bettie had two sons—Henry and Ronnie—from two prior marriages.
My momma’s upbringing wasn’t easy. Around the time of her birth Walter and Bettie took up drinking. Soon enough, violence became an everyday occurrence in the Davis household. To this day my family tells the craziest stories about my grandmomma. Bettie Davis was a mean drunk like you wouldn’t believe. This little lady would get to fighting with somebody at dinner and reach across the dining room table and stab them with a fork. Hell, I heard she shot my granddaddy once.
When she passed away from a stroke at the young age of forty-four, my mother’s sisters had to take on the role of caretaker for their younger siblings. They kept a roof over everyone’s head and food on the table, but there was a lot to be desired. My aunties were only a few years older than my momma and they hadn’t had the best role models themselves.
But as resilient people do, my momma adapted to survive. Vicky Davis always was, and to this day remains, a very smart, hardworking, resourceful woman. And tough. She graduated from Jess Lanier High School in 1975 and went on to get an associate’s degree at Lawson State. After Lawson she enrolled in Miles College, a historically black school in Fairfield, Alabama, where she studied to become a social worker.
That’s around the time she met Ralph Dudley, in 1978. My father already knew the Davis family. He’d been classmates with my aunt Pat at Lanier. But he’d never met my momma. When he did it was instant attraction. They fell in love quick.
My momma already had a son, my older brother, Victor. He goes by Duke. But Duke’s father wasn’t in the picture. Duke’s got another half brother, Carlos, who was born the same month and year he was. So that’s what his daddy was up to then.
During my momma’s pregnancy my father got into trouble with the law. He’d been arrested for having drugs on him—no small crime in the seventies—and was facing time. James Sr. had recently passed away unexpectedly and my grandmother Olivia—whom we call Madear—still had kids to raise. So instead of facing the music, which would cause Madear the undue stress of seeing her son sent to prison, my father fled.
He headed north to Detroit, which was where he was on the day of my birth, February 12, 1980.
Because my father wasn’t around to sign the birth certificate I was born Radric Delantic Davis, taking my mother’s last name. Like my conception nine months before, my first name, Radric, was a product of my parents’ union—half Ralph, half Vicky.
II
* * *
1017
I came up in my granddaddy’s house at 1017 First Avenue—an olive-green, two-bedroom in Bessemer near the train tracks. Inside were my granddaddy, my momma, Duke, and me. But it was never just us.
1017 had a rotating cast of family characters who could be staying there at any time. Walter Jr., my uncle—we call him Goat—was always in and out of jail. When he wasn’t locked up, he’d be there. Or one of my many aunties and her kids might move in for a while.
The house was small, 672 square feet to be precise, so things got tight. Sometimes Duke and I got the bunk beds. Sometimes I’d be on the couch. Other times the floor. My granddaddy had an extra roll-away bed in his room. At one point there was a bed in the living room. It switched up.
Growing up, I called Walter Sr. Daddy. He and I were close. Tall and slender, my granddaddy appeared every bit the gentleman. He wore a suit and tie every day. On Saturdays one of my cousins would go to the cleaners and pick up his freshly pressed clothes for the week. They’d grab him cigarettes too. This was back when kids could buy cigarettes. Camel Straights.
My granddaddy and I had this thing where I would see him up the block coming home from the First Baptist church. As soon as I’d see him turn the corner I’d stop playing kickball or football or whatever it was I was doing and race up First Avenue to meet him. I’d grab his hand and help him walk the rest of the way home.
“Your grandson sure loves you, Mr. Walter,” the old ladies would call out from their porches.
The funny thing was my granddaddy didn’t need help walking. His cane had gotten himself to church just fine. But he played along, putting on a limp like he needed my help. That was our inside thing and I felt proud to walk alongside him.
Like many in my family, he had his demons. I don’t know if my granddaddy turned to the bottle to cope with the mental or physical effects of war. Deep scars crossed his body. Or maybe it was something invisible. Whatever it was, the man was a drinker.
In Bessemer most folks drank the wino wines—Wild Irish Rose, Thunderbird—but my granddaddy liked liquor. Bourbon. He had a girlfriend, Miss Louise, and the two of them would get pissy drunk at one of the shot houses nearby until they were stumbling down the street with bloodshot eyes.
But I loved my granddaddy. Every night I would sit on his knee and we’d watch TV. When I would act up he’d chase me around the house, saying he was gon’ whip me, and I’d dive under his bed laughing, knowing that he couldn’t catch me down there.
I was just as close with Madear, my grandmother on my father’s side. She’d played a big part in my childcare while my momma was in college working toward her degree.
Madear’s house was over in Jonesboro Heights, an even quieter, even more country part of Bessemer that sits on a hill outside the city limits. It’s a tight-knit community made up of three streets—Second Street, Third Street, and Main Street—with two churches: New Salem Baptist and First Baptist. It’s known fondly by its residents as the Happy Hollow.
As soon as I learned to ride a bicycle I struck out on my own to go there. I’d get in trouble for doing that. It wasn’t like the Hollow was around the corner. It was a ways away. You had to cross the main highway to get there. For a little boy, the mile-and-a-half trek was a real journey. But I loved spending time with Madear. She spoiled me.
Whenever I’d come over she’d have something for me—toys, coloring books, GI Joes. We’d watch TV for hours. Sometimes wrestling, sometimes Wheel of Fortune, sometimes Jeopardy!
“There’s my smart grandbaby,” she’d say if I knew the answer to one of the trivia questions. “I don’t even have to think anymore because I know Radric knows the answers.”
If I wasn’t with one of my grandparents, then I was following my brother around. Duke is six years older, so you know how that goes. To me he was supercool, and I was his shadow. I really got on his nerves. I would always be stealing his clothes to wear and trying to hang with him and his buddies.
Duke didn’t care for that much, but I didn’t care that he minded. I’d trail him and his little crew on my bike, usually from a distance because my brother would beat my a
ss if he knew I was following them. He didn’t want me to see what he and his friends were up to. I’d watch them steal beers from the corner store or throw rocks through car windows and take off running. It wasn’t much. Country teenagers getting into country teenage shit. But I was a curious child. I needed to know what everyone was up to.
Duke was a bona fide music enthusiast. He put me onto all the great hip-hop of the eighties. Every week he would go to the Bessemer Flea Market and come home with whatever new album had just come out. He’d pop the cassette in his boom box and we would listen to the albums endlessly. We’d focus on the lyrics, committing them to memory. Then we’d start rapping to each other, alternating verses.
Even when Duke wasn’t around I would listen to his tapes on my own. Actively, carefully, diligently. Damn near studying them.
Duke brought me to my first concerts at the Birmingham Civic Center. The summer of 1986 I saw Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Whodini, and LL Cool J on the Raising Hell Tour. I was six years old. That shit blew my mind. Two summers later I saw Kool Moe Dee, Eric B. & Rakim, Doug E. Fresh, Boogie Down Productions, Biz Markie, and Ice-T on the Dope Jam Tour. What a lineup. When Kool Moe Dee dropped “Let’s Go,” his diss going at LL Cool J, the whole arena went crazy. In 1989 I saw N.W.A perform there. That was the concert after which MC Ren was accused of raping a girl on their tour bus.
The bedroom Duke and I shared was covered with posters of all these guys he’d pulled out of Word Up! magazine. Top to bottom. His favorite was one with LL and Mike Tyson on it. You couldn’t see a speck of the room’s wall, there were so many posters.
•
From time to time my father would slip into Alabama. We looked forward to those visits. He would pull up in a clean, white Cadillac—a Fleetwood Brougham with white leather interior. He was tall, six-four, and slim. He would step out of the car bearing gifts; clothes and toys for me and Duke and a bankroll for my momma. Back then we always knew my father to have some money on him. To me the guy was rich as hell.
As a child I was told my father was a lab technician, which at some point had been true. But by the time I was born those days were far gone.
“Oh, he’s a lab technician?” Madear laughed when I said it. “So tell me, what does he wear to work?”
How was I supposed to know what he wore to work? I hardly knew the man.
The closest thing I had to a father passed when I was seven. Duke and I were in the house when Goat rushed in, carrying Walter Sr. in his arms. He’d collapsed in the street.
I had witnessed similar scenes earlier. I said before that my granddaddy could walk just fine but not when he got drunk. I’d see him falling into the ditch that ran along our street. My uncle or one of the neighbors would scoop him up and usher him into the house. Honestly that was a normal occurrence.
But this time was different. This time was a heart attack. This time was the last I’d see Walter Sr. Goat brought him into the bedroom and closed the door. By the time the paramedics arrived he was gone.
The next day the whole Davis family arrived. It was something else. Hysteria. At the funeral my momma and my aunties were cuttin’ a fool, jumping up and down, crying and screaming like they were fittin’ to climb up in the casket with him. It was a real scene.
“Why, Lord, why?”
My grandfather’s passing marked the beginning of the end of my life in Bessemer. It wasn’t more than a few hours after the funeral that the Davis family was at odds. This fighting, primarily among the women, would go on for years. On the surface the conflict was over Walter Sr.’s house. But it went deeper than that. It was a power struggle over who was the new matriarch. And my momma was pitted against her two older sisters, my aunties Jean and Pat.
Listen, when I say that my momma and aunties got to fighting, I mean there was blood, on multiple occasions. This shit would be like a saloon fight, spilling onto the front lawn for all the neighbors to see.
One night my momma pushed Aunt Jean through the front window. Another time Aunt Pat came through with a can of gasoline, hollering about how she was going to burn the house down. Things got so bad that my momma took Duke and me to her friend’s house just so we could get away from the chaos.
In the midst of the bickering and fighting my momma became more involved in the church. Prior to this religious awakening, Vicky Davis smoked cigarettes and I think even weed on occasion. I’ve heard she even sold some weed. But all that stopped after she got saved. She even stopped cussing.
With all that was going on with the family, my momma got it in her head that she wanted to get us out of Alabama. Life in Bessemer didn’t get much better than finding a job at Pullman-Standard, the railroad car company that paid more than anywhere else. That was all there really was to aspire to. The ceiling was low. She wanted more. For herself, for me, for Duke.
At the time, my momma had a boyfriend who would travel back and forth to Atlanta for work. He’d once taken us all out there to Six Flags. One day my momma told Duke and me that we were moving to Atlanta with him. Pretty soon our stuff was packed up and out on the curb, ready to go. But the guy never showed.
It would take nearly a year before we actually made the move. Through church my momma met another man, Donald. Donald always struck me as a nice guy, very much a churchgoing man. He drove truck for a living. My understanding was that he and my momma were just friends, but he was planning on moving back to Georgia, and because he knew about our tumultuous family situation, he invited us along. We would stay at his house while my momma looked for a job and got her money right.
I didn’t know what to think when my momma told us for the second time we were moving. Duke was still embarrassed from when we got stood up, so he wasn’t paying it any mind this time around. He didn’t tell his football coach or his friends that he was leaving. He didn’t pack up his things. So neither did I. Sure enough, Donald showed up.
Duke wasn’t happy. My brother had a life in Alabama and he had plans there too. All Duke ever wanted was to play Alabama Crimson Tide football and go on to the pros. To follow in Bo Jackson’s footsteps and be the next star athlete to make it out of Bessemer. He didn’t want to leave and he didn’t understand why we had to.
But I did. As much as I loved my aunties and my cousins, it was troubling to have everybody fighting the way they was. It was no way to live. Even at nine years old I thought it was so stupid how these grown folks were fighting so hard over this rickety little house. It was crazy to me.
Everybody from our street came outside to see us off the day we left for Georgia. It was a big deal for us to leave Bessemer. Nobody in that town just up and moved. This was a community of families who’d lived there for generations.
As the U-Haul pulled off I waved good-bye to family and friends as they chased the truck.
Wow I’ll probably never see any of these folks again.
III
* * *
WELCOME TO ATLANTA
We arrived in Ellenwood, Georgia, in August 1989.
Ellenwood is a suburb a few miles outside of Atlanta. It didn’t seem that different from my community back in Bessemer. Folks hung out on their porches to escape the heat. Squirrels and rabbits ran through people’s yards. Children played outside and rode their bikes without fear of something happening to them. It felt familiar. But our time in Ellenwood wouldn’t last long.
A few months after the move Donald reconciled with his ex-wife and she and their son moved into the house with us. Donald was a decent guy and as far as I know he never told my momma we had to leave. But from the day his wife moved in it was clear she did not want us there. One day she tore down all of Duke’s posters that he’d brought from Bessemer and threw them in the trash. My brother was heartbroken.
This lady and my momma couldn’t share a home. Small arguments turned big. It wasn’t long before my momma wanted out.
Problem was we had nowhere to go. My momma had no idea where to move us nor did she have the means to get us there. We were brand-ne
w to Georgia. No family, no friends, no support system.
We knew my father was somewhere nearby. After fleeing Alabama for Detroit, he’d settled down in Atlanta, where his older brother, my uncle James Jr., put him up until he found a spot of his own. But he and my momma hadn’t spoken in some time. A year or two back my momma found out my father met another woman and that he had two other boys—my half brothers, Ralph and Courtney Walker. That news put an end to his visits to Bessemer.
But we were desperate. So my momma got ahold of Madear, who sent my father to Ellenwood to get us. He came right away. He couldn’t wait to see us; it had been my momma who hadn’t wanted him around. We moved our things into a storage unit and my father put us up in a Knights Inn motel on Bouldercrest Road on the Eastside of Atlanta. It was here that I began to get acquainted with the city that would shape me.
•
Atlanta’s drug trade is tied to its roots as a railroad town. The city quickly became the primary transit hub of the Southeast, with rail lines that ran north, east, south, and west of it. Even after the railroads were destroyed during the Civil War, Atlanta’s identity as a mecca of transport lived on. The rails were replaced by a web of interstate highways connecting cities in every direction. A Spaghetti Junction. Long story short, Atlanta’s got a history of moving people and things. Drug trafficking is a natural part of that history.
When crack hit in the mideighties, it hit Atlanta hard. A crew out of South Florida called the Miami Boys were behind a lot of the dope flooding into Atlanta’s projects. But by the time I arrived, those guys were on their way out. The city was working hard to land the ’96 Olympic Games and increase tourism. To do that, Atlanta had to deal with its reputation as unsafe and drug-ridden. So the Miami Boys had to go. The feds came in and took them out.
But that didn’t fix anything. Taking one big gang out just made room for the smaller ones to step up. When they did, they clashed. The violence continued. The drugs continued. Same shit, different toilet.