Wards of the Court

I remember my family starting out as a shattered group of people. There were six of us children then, all boys, ranging in ages from nine down to our then youngest brother Clinton who was less than two years old. We were all born so close together that people used to call us little stairstep kids.

There was our mother,-- Esther, who to my very young recollection, seemed to be around at best on a part time basis, and our father Ulysses, who would occasionally show up to delight us kids with a few magical tricks of squeezing quarters from our noses or pulling coins from behind our young dumb ears and then he’d disappear for an elongated period of time again. The only unified members of our disjointed family were us kids, and even that was destined to change some where and at some time in the future.

I recall Bates street rather well, but to this day I don’t know if I do so because the place held so many fond memories for me and my brothers, (for some reason I’m almost positive that wasn’t why) or if it was because the memories that were fertilized in the Bates street soil were cultivating the strengths and characters that would carry each of us on the incredible journey that lay before us. It is only now, some forty something years later that I’m most certain that the latter is true.

In any case, there are two things that I’m definitely sure of. One is that only God knows the answers to the whys and the how comes for sure, and secondly, it was God and only God alone that knew how to prepare us for whatever we were to encounter on our life’s path. I thank God for doing that, and herein I attempt to share the various accounts of our journey with you.