Scenes from My Life: A Memoir

by Michael K. Williams

He knew how pain kept inside multiplies and how pain shared subtracts.

We cannot make good decisions from a distance…. If you are not proximate, you cannot change the world. —Bryan Stevenson

Way before I was anything or anyone, I was an addict. That was my identity, what people thought of me, if they thought of me at all. Into my mid-twenties, I was on the verge of being discarded, like so many of my brothers and sisters who never got a chance to be

something else. But through God’s grace, I...

Not a day goes by when I don’t think how easily it could have gone the other way. So I live my life as testimony to that fact. The closeness of the ledge keeps me sharp. Taking nothing for granted keeps me h...

like water—that keeps me, me. I get through it all by feeling it all, taking it all in, and putting it back out there as honestly as possible. I still feel one false move away from losing ...

There’s no line that divides making it from not making it, because it never ends.

I still wrestle with demons that won’t leave me be. They never go away; they just get quiet enough so I can think straight.

Getting out only matters if you take your blessings, your hard-fought wisdom, your scarred humanity, and go back in.

Think about meaningful or memorable things that happened to you around that age, how you carry them with you, how they shaped who you are. Most people can’t fathom what that kind of trauma does to a young mind.

I said, “my friend once explained that the word ‘happy’ is derived from the word ‘happenstance.’ Which means things that are given to you. So when you seek happiness, its source is outside of you.”

Show me a struggling man and I’ll show you a boy never given a chance to change.

When my parents met in the early 1960s, my father was already married with six kids, all under eighteen, living in the Lafayette Gardens projects in Bed-Stuy.

what the projects meant back then: housing preceding a house. When white people predominantly lived there, the projects were just an arm of the community. But across cities in America, as the Blacks moved in, everyone else cleared out.

Five years later, when she got pregnant with me, he tried to convince her to get an abortion. She refused; in her late thirties, she figured it was her last chance to have the girl she always wanted. My father dropped that fight,

Booker would end up with ten children by four different women. It’d be unfair to single him out for this, because this is what we knew: fathers disconnected from their children.

My memories of my father are thin, like glimpses in passing—him rubbing my head, calling me Schnuckle

Head or Flat Top. I thought of him as this locked box, shut down, guarded. There was something hard and unknowable about him. Kids learn, whether they

are directly taught or not, and I absorbed things from my father: Don’t show them who you really are. Keep tha...

glimpse, they’ll rip you ap...

My mother fought hard for that marriage, but you cannot drag a man into a life he’s committed to escape. So I was startled that Sunday morning when she pulled that...

They all stepped on her shoulders in order to get this better life: green cards, money, jobs, apartments. And she was strong enough to hold them. So I was raised by a fearless woman and I got both ends of that.

Mom’s love was harsh like sandpaper, suffocating like a thick pillow. I had to carry myself according to her rules, which stretched from my language to my walk to my manners to my clothing, which was the front for a lot of our battles.

She grabbed me hard by my arm and dragged me to my bedroom. Then she threw me onto the bed, put her knee into my chest and just started whaling away on me. It went on so long and loud that my father had to come in and pull her off me. “Don’t mess with Mrs.

They carried love, but also their own trauma, which made it hard for them to forgive. They learned how to mask their pain and I learned from them. — After my father left, there was a bitterness in the way my mother treated me.

was like she felt stuck with this boy who looked like the man who toppled her life. I became my father’s surrogate,

the well for her anger and the target of her violence. If I talked back to a teacher or did poorly on a test, I’d get a beating. If I didn’t clear the table or wash the dishes, I’d get a beating. She’d say, “Michael, don’t touch it” to the thing I had to touch. If she said, “Don’t do ...

In hindsight, I see that she just passed down what she knew, what she was taught. But it stunted me. Any of my assertiveness was seen as disobedience,

disrespect, a threat to her authority. For a long time, it confused me about speaking up for myself. In my home, that was treated as wrong, and I internalized that.

She taught me that I had disappointed God—that I was unworthy of his love—and I took that into my heart. Heavier than the blood in our veins are the stories we inherit about ourselves.

And the older I got, the more that feeling of being unworthy grew. My father left, and my brother didn’t want anything to do with me. God became just another man I was seeking approval from.

When I was young, I was picked on a lot in public school because of the wa...

I’d wear clothes she made, things like a bow tie, vest, and short pants. In first grade, two kids jumped me in a bathroom stall, and in order to break free I clocked one in the head with my metal Snoopy lunchbox, cutting his face open. The next d...

classroom, he said, “Point him out, son.” As though in slow motion, the kid raised a finger at me. “Okay,” the...

When my mother heard about the lunchbox fight, she put me into a private school up the block, St. Stephens Lutheran. The structure, the uniforms, the Christian grounding—it was all supposed to help wash away that defiance. And it worked for a time.

But I had trouble with reading, and not long after I had to be put back in the previous grade, like they had made a mistake. When I returned, mortified, my classmates mocked me relentlessly. “Oh, what happened?” they laughed.

“You too dumb to be up there?” The taunting got so bad that I started acting out. If kids don’t get positive attention, they reach for the negative kind. And I was no different. The last straw was in third grade when a female teacher bent in front of me and, like a knucklehead, I smacked her behind. That was the end for me

the time my parents split up, things began to fall apart. I started to seek out that negative attention like it was fuel.

“Some of you are not going to make it.” I felt like he was talking directly to me.

My troubles at school were always treated in opposition to my brother Paul, eight years older and

everything I wasn’t. Paul was the golden boy, literally (lighter-skinned than me) and figuratively: he was the well-behaved and proper student, the dutiful son, the good citizen. “My boy, my good son,” my mom would say to Paul, patting his head, touching his face. And he’d sop it up like gravy to a biscuit. She called him Bun—short

short for Bunny—a pet name that stuck i...

Whether Mom realized it or not, she was re-creating the dynamic she had with her sister back in the Bahamas. I was her “black and ugly child,” she would say, like it was a fact as certain as my name. I remember the first lotion my mother ever put ...

My defiance, my darkness, my weakness—they were all fodder for my mother. I learned to perform from an early age, imitating what I thought she wanted to see, hiding who I truly was. ...

Into my teen years, I was still looking for acceptance, for validation. And if you don’t find it in one place, you’re going to look for it somewhere else.

The soul needs that. It needs someone saying, I see you, something that makes you feel alive.

Even if that someone—or something—can ...

On that court you’d have your first victory, your first loss, your first kiss, your first fight. Besides school and church—and a few other places we were dragged to—the courtyard was our experience of the outside world. The world in one city block. We were poor, and we had to invent our fun, but I didn’t feel like I was missing anything.

My attraction to boys, my desire for acceptance, and my yearning for a male figure in my life were all jumbled together in my mind. It was confusing for me, and what hurt was that the boys whose acceptance I wanted the most picked on me the hardest.

“Yeah, Faggot Mike’s mom won’t let him do anything,” Eddie said. Daryl ignored him.