My mother tried to abort me twice and failed. The day she went into labor, she was found digging a grave for me in the hog shed. My grandfather dragged her to the hospital where I was born. She refused to feed me, and my grandmother made formula for me with maple syrup, coffee and canned evaporated milk.
We lived in a tar-paper shack that had been a chicken coop. It didn't have electricity or water. We lived with a mattress on a dirt floor and had bed bugs. Our only light was a kerosene lamp.
When I was four years old, my mother married a man who was not my father, and we moved into a house th...
