Brooklyn 593

"Brooklyn 593" is my own true story. Its the story of the life and times of a teenaged African-American youth who was born on a small farm in Southeast Georgia during the 1930's - into a loving, caring, sharing family that suffered immensely from the ravages of the kinds of social and economic injustice and exploitation that ran rampant in the American Society of that day. After the untimely death of my mother and my father's subsequent remarriage, my sisters and I were uprooted from the backwoods of Southeast Georgia and transplanted into the hustle-bustle of big-city life in Brooklyn, New York, where we grew up in a dysfunctional and abusive household at 593 Halsey Street.

These memoirs are designed to provide a written record of some of the many difficulties that my sisters and I encountered during our teenage years. Hopefully and prayerfully, our children, their children, our kinfolk and others who read about our experiences will gain some useful insight from them, and will take whatever steps are necessary to see that children over whom they have parental, custodial or supervisory control, do not have experiences the same as or similar to ours. Hopefully and prayerfully, our memoirs will inspire others who grew up in dysfunctional and abusive surroundings, and who received little if any parental or custodial support. Hopefully, they will be able to overcome bad past experiences and build their own successful futures - futures that contain an abundance of the love, affection and acceptance that was missing during their earlier years - just as my sisters and I have been able to do.