by Simone Biles
“Love recognizes no barriers. It jumps hurdles, leaps fences, penetrates walls to arrive at its destination full of hope.”
—MAYA ANGELOU, POET AND AUTHOR
I wasn’t born a Texas girl. In fact, before I called my parents Momma and Poppa Biles, I knew them as Grandma and Grandpa. Actually, I first called them “Hamma” and “Hampaw” because I was only three years old and couldn’t enunciate my gs.
Hampaw was a tall, medium-brown man with a salt-and-pepper goatee, and Hamma was a short, light-brown woman with soft, curly hair. They both had kind eyes. Before I moved to Texas, they’d come to visit our house in Columbus, Ohio, which was where I lived back then. She was a regional nurse who traveled a lot for her job, and he was a retired Air Force sergeant who now worked as an air traffic assistant with the Federal Aviation Administration in Houston. A few years later, they became the only real parents I’ve ever known—the ones who have raised and guided me, and loved me every day of my life.
I’ll rewind a bit. The woman who gave birth to me in Columbus, Ohio, was Poppa Biles’ daughter from a previous marriage. Her name was Shanon, and she’d mostly grown up with her mother in Columbus. Life ended up being a little rocky for Shanon, because as she grew older, she got caught up in drinking and drugs. When I came along on March 14, 1997, my older sister, Ashley, had just turned seven and my brother, Tevin, was almost three. Two years later, on January 27, 1999, my little sister Adria was born. By then, our life with Shanon had started to become difficult.
I don’t recall much about living with Shanon, but for some weird reason I do remember playing with a cat. I don’t think it was our cat. Maybe it belonged to a neighbor or maybe it was just a stray. Anyway, this cat was always being fed—and at the time, we were hungry at lot, so I was always kind of mad at this cat. Another time, we were having breakfast at our uncle Danny’s house. I can still see us pouring dry cereal into our bowls and then putting water on it because we didn’t have any milk. It’s funny how both of my earliest memories have to do with food.
That was the same year that neighbors called social services and said we were being neglected, because they saw the four of us were often alone, little kids playing out in the street with no supervision. Soon after that, child protective services came to take my brother, sisters, and me away from Shanon. The social worker rounded us up and sat us down on the steps in front of Shanon’s house.
“We’re placing you kids in foster care,” she said, carefully watching our faces. “It’s just for a little while, so Shanon can try to get better.”
Most people might think that at age three I was too young to know what it meant to be placed into foster care, but the truth is I understood everything. When the social worker piled the four of us into her car, I knew exactly what was going on. We were going to live with a new family, and we didn’t know if we’d like it there. I think we were all a little scared, because none of us said a word during the car ride. Yet as clearly as I remember the heavy silence in the backseat of that car, with Ashley holding four-month-old Adria on her lap, the rest of my foster care memories are fuzzy images.
One memory I do recall is Tevin pushing Ashley and me on a swing in our foster family’s backyard. I used to imitate my brother by swinging high and doing backflips off that play set, soaring through the air. “Simone, you can fly! You can fly!” Tevin would yell, running to where I’d landed in a tumble on the grass. My brother was two years older, but I could do all the tricks he could.
There was also a trampoline in the yard, but the foster kids weren’t allowed to jump on it in case we got injured. I’d watch my foster parents’ biological children, who were older than us, flipping and somersaulting and having so much fun on that trampoline, and I wanted so badly to join them. It wasn’t that my foster parents didn’t want us to have fun; they were doing their best to keep us safe, especially me since I was so small. But I just knew I could do the moves the older kids did—I was already a fearless little tomboy. I had these miniature six-pack abs and lightning-fast legs. I just couldn’t sit still. I was always running and jumping, cartwheeling and somersaulting.
Back then, Tevin was my rock, my protector. I used to watch him and pretty much do whatever he did. I always looked around to make sure I could see him nearby, because he was our little soldier; he made me feel safe. At night, I’d sneak across the hall into the boys’ room, where I’d curl up and sleep next to Tevin. I knew our foster mother would gently scold me in the morning, but I just kept doing it. I guess I’ve always been stubborn. You could say it’s my best and worst quality. Later, when I got into gymnastics, that stubbornness was mostly a good thing.
In foster care, Ashley and Tevin missed Shanon a lot, but I didn’t really mind our new situation. We ate breakfast every morning and dinner every night, and we even went camping with our foster family once or twice. We always had lots of other kids to play with and even a furry little Beagle named Teddy. And our foster parents, Miss Doris and Mr. Leo, were nice to us. I remember one time I wanted a lollipop from the cookie jar on the counter. I was just a little thing, but somehow I managed to get myself up onto that counter, where Miss Doris found me trying to pry open the cookie jar.
“Now how on earth did you get up there!” she said as she lifted me down to the floor. “Simone, don’t ever climb up here again! You could hurt yourself!” Her voice was stern, but really, she was a softie. After setting me down to the floor, she handed me the lollipop.
We’d been in foster care for just a few months when my grandfather appeared on Miss Doris and Mr. Leo’s doorstep. “Grandpa’s here!” Tevin whispered to me as he came into the living room. Our social worker, a warm-hearted African-American woman, was next to Grandpa. She explained we’d be traveling back to Texas with our grandfather the next day. We’d be going on a plane—my first airplane ride—and our grandparents would take care of us while Shanon tried to get better in an outpatient rehab program.
I learned later that the social worker had called our grandfather to tell him we’d been taken into foster care. When he heard that, he immediately started making calls and talking to lawyers and doing whatever he had to do to arrange for the four of us to move in with him and my grandma. “Nellie,” he’d said to my grandma, “I want to bring the children here to live with us until Shanon gets herself together. I can’t stand the thought of those kids being scattered to strangers.” Of course, I didn’t know any of this was happening until the day he came to pick us up.
Can you imagine suddenly taking in four children? For my grandma, that wasn’t an easy decision, because she didn’t know us very well back then. My grandpa had visited us in Ohio often, but Grandma Nellie had been with him only a few of those times. She usually stayed at home with their two sons, Ron II and Adam. Ron was sixteen and a high school sophomore; Adam was fourteen and a freshman. My grandparents were almost done raising their boys, and now here we were, four young children who needed the kind of attention and care that Grandma Nellie thought she was about to retire from.
“Okay, Ron,” she said to my grandpa. “Let me pray on this.
” She needed time to wrap her mind around the idea of doubling the size of her family. She also had to make peace with the fact that her dreams of traveling the world would have to be put on hold. Busy as she was with her nursing career, she also worried about whether she could truly give us the care we needed, especially after the disruption we’d experienced with Shanon. Grandma figured that Adria and I would be easy enough, but Ashley and Tevin had much stronger memories of life with Shanon. Understandably, they were very attached to her.
That week, during a lunch break at work, my grandma ended up talking to a woman she’d never met. This woman told her a story about adopting a child with extreme physical and emotional needs. At first, the woman had resisted taking responsibility for this child because she didn’t think she was strong enough for the task. But she finally decided to do what God had asked of her. She was so glad that she had, because the chi
ld was doing well and had brought such joy to her life. “That child has been God’s gift to me,” she told my grandma. “I can’t imagine what my life would be like if I’d passed up this great blessing.”
Here was this complete stranger pouring out her heart, and my grandma was getting the message loud and clear. “You know, honey, the Lord doesn’t make any mistakes,” the woman continued. “And he never gives you more than you can handle.” She then patted my grandma on the shoulder and left.
As Grandma was driving home that night, tears flowed down her cheeks. She understood that God was asking her to open her heart to us, and he’d sent that woman as a guardian angel to tell her everything would be okay. God himself was placing us in her care. That’s when she knew we were going to live with her and Grandpa, because we were family, and you never turn your back on family. More than that, you never turn your back on God.
Shanon wanted to see us before we left for Texas, so we met up with her at the child protective services office in Columbus. Ashley and Tevin burst into tears when they saw her walking toward us with the social worker at her side. My sister and brother ended up sniffling all the way to Houston because they wanted to go back home. Adria and I didn’t cry. My grandpa says Adria slept in Ashley’s arms for most of the plane ride, while I was smiling so hard that he put his forehead to mine and teased, “Oh no, little miss Simone, you’re not going to steal my heart.”
My grandpa was actually the one who had suggested the name Simone for me. He’d liked the sound of it ever since he was a teenager listening to Nina Simone records in the housing projects in Cleveland. I’ve always loved knowing that he was the one who named me. It’s like, right from the start, he was watching over me.
The five of us landed in Houston on a warm afternoon in March 2000. My grandma met us at the airport, and from there we drove twenty-five miles north to a suburb called Spring. When we pulled into the driveway, I bounded out of the car and ran into the house, the beads in my box braids swinging around my face. I’d never seen a house as beautiful as Grandma and Grandpa’s home, with its gleaming floors, big eat-in kitchen, and a wide stairway up to the second floor. At the top of the stairs were the two bedrooms where the four of us would sleep. My room was furnished with a crib for Adria and a bunk bed for Ashley and me. Tevin would be in a room with Adam.
Grandma’s friends had thrown her a shower at work, because they knew that with four young kids moving in, she might need some help getting up to speed. They gave her a crib and lots of diapers and baby bottles for Adria; Barbie dolls and clothes for me; and cool stuff like backpacks and Razor scooters for Ashley and Tevin. One friend even gave her the bunk bed that Ashley and I would sleep on—I immediately started swinging and somersaulting from the wooden slats under the top bunk and nearly destroyed several of them! In the closet and chest of drawers were more clothes and shoes, and on the shelves were Junie B. Jones storybooks and a Cinderella collection that, if you put the books together in the right order, created a picture of a castle across the bindings. I think we felt as if we were in a fairy tale of our own, because everywhere we looked there were shiny new things that our grandparents thought we’d need for life in Spring.
I climbed up onto a chair beside the window of the girls’ room as my grandma was pointing out our beds. And guess what I spotted in the backyard? A trampoline!
“Hamma! Hamma! Can I play on that?” I asked, hopping down off the chair and pointing at the window excitedly.
My grandma looked confused, but Adam, standing at the doorway, knew what I was talking about. “The trampoline?” he said. “Sure! Want to go jump on it right now?”
I just stood there for a second, staring at Adam with my eyes wide and my mouth hanging open. And then I ran back downstairs as quickly as my tiny legs would carry me, through the living room and the kitchen, and I didn’t stop till I was in the yard, climbing up onto that trampoline. For what seemed like hours, I bounced and twirled and flipped and somersaulted, my beaded braids flying up into the sky again and again, as if they could touch heaven.
The first thing my grandma did when I came back inside was to put me between her knees to comb out my tangled hair. She undid each braid and removed every bead, then washed and combed and brushed. When she was done, I felt like a brand-new princess with my hair neatly parted down the center and redone in two braids. I loved the feel of my grandma’s hands in my hair. I loved the look of concentration on her face as she worked. I just sat there daydreaming about this new life I was entering, my elbows resting on my grandma’s knees. I was happy; I knew because the knots I usually felt in my tummy were gone.
As the oldest, Ashley helped out with Adria and me, getting us dressed, playing with us, and settling us down to sleep at night. I still didn’t like sleeping alone, and neither did Adria, so most nights I would climb into my baby sister’s crib and drift off next to her. My grandma was always surprised to find us together in the same bed come morning. She thought Ashley was letting down the side of Adria’s crib, until one day she walked in and saw me with one leg slung over the top of the rail, hoisting myself over.
Back then, I had Adria under my complete control, taking her everywhere in the house and yard with me. I seemed to believe that I was in charge of her, and even with our grandparents now looking out for us, I would always hold her hand and wipe her face if she was crying, and I’m sure I also told her what to do and how to do it. Oh, I was a bossy little thing, even though I couldn’t pronounce my gs properly! My big-sister protectiveness didn’t change right away. Actually, it still hasn’t changed. Even now, I watch out for Adria.
It wasn’t long before Adria became super attached to our grandparents. It used to be that she’d fuss if she didn’t see me nearby. After a while, I could come and go without her noticing, but she’d burst into tears whenever Grandma went into the next room. In the mornings when Ashley and Tevin got dropped off at school and us younger ones got dropped off at day care, my baby sister would cry inconsolably. And at dinner each night, Adria would wriggle her way out of her high chair, toddle over to Grandma, climb into her lap, and finish her plate there. Grandma allowed my sister to stick to her like glue because she knew Adria needed that security.
Maybe I needed security in my own way too, but I was way more outgoing than my sister. At least that’s how Adam remembers it. “Simone was this tiny little thing, but she had this big, bright, bubbly personality, and always a huge smile on her face,” he tells others now. “She was just bouncing all over the place with this really high-pitched, really loud voice. She couldn’t quite control her volume at that point. And everything was just so fascinating to her. So if she started telling you a story, it was like she was going to burst with the excitement of it. That was just the way she spoke.”
Adam was describing the cheerful, fun side of me, but I had another side. Yep. Even back then, I was just plain stubborn. The hardheadedness really kicked in at dinnertime. Grandma said we weren’t allowed to get up from the table until we finished our food, so I’d sit there for hours upon hours until I started nodding off, my head drooping into the plate. The problem was I hated the chewiness of meat. And I wasn’t really into veggies either. I’m more of a pasta and pizza kind of girl. Well, my grandma was convinced that meat and veggies were part of a healthy diet, and she’d insist I clean my plate. But it always seemed like more than I could eat, and besides, it was food I didn’t want to eat.
Then I got a brilliant idea. When no one was looking, I’d take the food and stick it in a small, hollow space underneath my booster seat. My grandma never noticed until she went to clean the booster seat one day and ran into all this old food underneath it—mashed potatoes and meatloaf and chicken nuggets and carrots, all this gross stuff. She was so mad, she scraped the gunk onto a plate.
“Simone, you’re going to eat every bite of this!” she said, sliding the plate in front of me at dinner. Oh snap.
“No!” I wailed.
Grandma was only trying to make a
point about me wasting food, so of course, she eventually gave me my real dinner. Soon after, she decided our nightly mealtime battles just weren’t worth it, and she started to puree my meat and serve it to me with noodles. I liked that much better.
Even with all our dinner table confrontations, I adored my grandparents and I was quickly making friends in the neighborhood. All of us were starting to thrive. Then one afternoon, about eight months later, we got home from school to a familiar but unexpected face.
CHAPTER 3
True Home
“You don’t choose your family. They are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.”
—DESMOND TUTU, HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST
Mama!” Ashley and Tevin both yelled, running to Shanon and wrapping skinny brown arms around her waist. My stomach felt as if a hundred frantic butterflies were flapping their wings inside me. I could see how much my brother and sister had missed Shanon and how much she’d missed them. They were all laughing and crying, their voices loud and blending together as they greeted one another. I don’t think anyone noticed how quiet I was, standing off to the side. I was only three years old, but I knew right then that our calm, predictable life in Spring was about to change. Maybe that’s why I hung back.
Since I hadn’t lived with Shanon as long as Ashley and Tevin had, I barely remembered her. Adria didn’t know Shanon at all. She was only six months old when we went into foster care, and she wasn’t yet two when Shanon showed up that day. My little sister held on to our grandma, her tiny fists grabbing the cloth of her blouse, her face pressed against her shoulder.
I learned later that Shanon had called to ask my grandparents if she could come to see us. At first, my grandma was hesitant. She didn’t think it was a good idea, because life in Texas was going along smoothly and she didn’t want to disrupt our routine. The way she saw it, we’d had enough disruption to last a lifetime. But Grandpa didn’t see the harm in letting Shanon visit. He wanted to see her too, to make sure his daughter really was doing better than before.