Memoir of An African-American Man, Achievement, I

Achievement, 1 of 2 —Time to share— I grew up in a slum where the gang members, at the risk of their lives, fight over their turf. My lullaby was red and blue warning lights flickering from dashing squared cars and ambulances, and my bedtime story was the blow of sirens passing through the streets and alleys between boarded up abandoned houses standing in rows here and there. My mother, though loved me dearly, happened to be a high school dropout and single who brought this world to me at her teens. She was a minimum wage earner, therefore, her life was nothing but struggles, kept body and soul together in misery between laid off to employed to laid off, between paycheck to welfare to paycheck that is thinner than a sheet of paper. Although under educated, she was a pious woman, and that is why her keen desire was not her son to follow the steps of her mistake and suffer like his mother. Her wish was to raise her only child to be a decent citizen with a noble profession and thereby add some value to the community, return some good things to the society. Apart from mother’s great expectation, however, I was a disobedient rogue child, a kind of problem kid on the block when I was a lad. I got into bad company and led astray by them, was irregular in attendance to a school and cut classes whenever I felt like. Until one day I learned of my mother’s tragic death on the way back home from her work, she was struck by a stray bullet in the midst of gang members cross fire.