Where I'm From

The first house I really remember is on the west side of Detroit. I got there around third grade and I stayed there until about 2001. My family is from Ecorse, Michigan, so when people see Peguese on a family tree they know where we come from, but the west side is where I grew up.

That house had a hole in the roof. We covered it with a blue tarp. The kitchen sink didn't always work, so we washed dishes in the basement. There were rats in the backyard sometimes, because if you keep a car parked in the grass long enough, they build a home there. My grandmother on my dad's side lived with us from time to time. My parents were young. They had me at seventeen, eighteen years old, so I was growing up while they were growing up. My pops told me later they were struggling. I didn't know that as a kid. I knew what I wanted and I knew what I got, and I got enough.

What I had on that block was kids. A lot of them. My cousins Cardario, Bryton, and Isaiah were the ones I wrestled with, WWF on the floor until somebody got hurt. My friends Calvin and Brandon lived a neighborhood over, and we walked home together listening to Eminem and trading Pokemon. We sat on Ebony's porch and talked about whatever the late nineties was doing that week before we walked to the store. We played cops and robbers. We played football in the street. We had to be in when the street lights came on.

That's where my pops put me on. He came home one day and told me I was going to sell candy out the driveway. He took me to the store, bought cases of Faygo and fruit chews and whatever else I picked, and let my mom help me make the signs. She was the silent partner. I sat in the driveway with a bucket and sold to the kids on the block and the people walking past. At night I counted the bucket. My mom held the money. That was my first job and it was my pops' idea.

Later I started bagging Kool-Aid in Ziplocs. Then I carried candy and chips and Capri Suns in a book bag everywhere I went. By middle school I was running fireworks. Pops would drive me to Indiana, pick out what I wanted, front me the money, and tell me to pay him back. I paid him back the first year. The second year my mom held some of it and I didn't pay him back. Third year, no more re-up. He didn't say much. He just stopped. That's how I learned to be smart with re-up money.

My pops ran a mechanical contracting business. His work started landing bigger jobs across the city and the state, and our life grew with it. Around 2001 he tried to buy the house from the family that owned it, and they wouldn't sell to him. So he went and bought a house ten blocks over, on the other side of Rouge Park, and we moved.

The new house was remodeled from top to bottom. I had my own room in the basement. Central air. A real yard. I could walk to my middle school. We had three TVs lined up next to each other in the entertainment area with a switch box, so I could watch a basketball game, a movie, and cartoons at the same time. When I walked in the door, the picture window let the sun in, and the block out front was quieter, mostly older neighbors, no swarm of kids running everywhere.

A year after we moved, Dayoun moved in two houses down. We've been best friends ever since. Video games, basketball, lifting weights, fixing bikes, eating barbecue at his house, talking trash until late at night. He always got the new game first, I'd play it at his house, then he'd hand it down. That kind of friendship.

Detroit is what gave me perseverance. It gave me community. It gave me an understanding that you can be a kid without everything matching the highlight reel, and you can leave a block without losing the part of yourself that block built. By the time I got to high school I was introverted but cool with everybody. I didn't fight, I didn't bully, I was just present with all walks. That's a Detroit thing, and it stayed with me.

I miss Mr. Cool's ice cream truck. That's about it. Everything else I needed to carry, I carried.