No one ever laid out the sequence of events that led to my mother being prosecuted and imprisoned for alleged welfare fraud. It started out with an anonymous tip, apparently, that somehow she was a danger to society because she was earning money at a job—to feed and care for her two children (Ophelia and me) and a third on the way (my sister Sharon)—and was receiving assistance at the same time. That anonymous tip had come from Freddie, a man willing to do or say anything to have her locked up for three years because she had committed the crime of trying to leave his sorry ass.

It was because of Freddie’s actions in having her sent away that Ophelia and I spent those three years either in foster care or with extended family members. Yet we never knew why or when changes in our living situation would take place.

Just as no one told me that it was my mother who came to make candy and visit us at the foster home under special, supervised leave from prison, no explanation accompanied our move when Ophelia and I went to stay with my Uncle Archie and his wife Clara, or TT as we all called her. Way back in Louisiana, the entire Gardner family must have signed an oath of secrecy because serious questions about the past were almost always shrugged off, a policy my mother may have instituted out of her dislike for discussing anything unpleasant.

Later on in my adolescence there was one occasion when I pressed her about just who my father was and why he wasn’t in my life. Moms gave me one of her searing looks, the kind that got me to be quiet real fast.

“But . . .” I tried to protest.

She shook her head no, unwilling to open up.

“Why?”

“Well, because the past is the past,” Moms said firmly. Seeing my frustration, she sighed but still insisted, “Ain’t nothing you can do about it.” She put a stop to my questions, wistfully remarking, “Things happen.” And that was all there was to it.

Even as my questions continued, while waiting for clarification to arrive of its own accord, I went back to my job of trying to be as happy as possible—not a difficult assignment at first.

*  *  *

The land of the familiar where I grew up in one of the poorer areas of the north side of Milwaukee was a world that I eventually viewed as a black Happy Days. Just like on that TV show that was set in the 1950s—in the same time period in which my neighborhood seemed to be frozen even in later decades—there were local hangouts, places where different age groups gathered to socialize, well-known quirky merchants, and an abundance of great characters. While on the TV show the only black color you ever saw was Fonzie’s leather jacket, in my neighborhood, for nearly the first dozen years of my life, the only white people I ever saw were on television and in police cars.