My mother threw me a look that spoke volumes, warning me to amend my tone and my words, to be polite.

I sent her a look right back, telling her that I would obey her. Turning back to the man, knife still in hand, I spoke again, this time saying, “You can’t talk to my momma like that, Mister.”

He backed down, soon leaving us alone. It was, unfortunately, not the last time I heard that dismissive, superior tone being used toward my mother, my siblings, and myself. Throughout my life I would battle that same reflex to want to strike back when certain individuals of a different race or class spoke to me in that way.

The more immediate consequence was that Freddie came back. The roller coaster crested the top and plunged down again. Each time I hated him that much more. Barely gone more than a week, we packed up and returned to the back house, with Freddie giving us a respite of no less than a week without violence. Disappointment, and not understanding why, ate at me. Because I didn’t know that Momma had been in prison before, I couldn’t yet grasp that she was mostly afraid that Freddie would send her back again. Only later would I fully understand that she had little financial independence, certainly not enough to raise four kids, and no means of escape, but I could already sense that she was stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

This made my need to find that remedy to fix our situation that much more urgent. The answer came one Sunday afternoon, while watching Freddie eat a plate of Momma’s cooking—in this case, her unrivaled neck bones. As a rule, watching Freddie eat was as close as a city boy like me ever got to a pig trough. But on this occasion it only took this once to watch him suck, break, and knock neck bones on the kitchen table to experience permanent revulsion. Lacking any sense of embarrassment, Freddie not only embraced the porcine essence of himself while eating but combined that with the apparent ability to fart, belch, and sneeze all at once. Who was this Sonny Liston–looking and –acting, Pall Mall–smoking, whiskey-drinking, gun-crazed giant pig man? Where was the humanity in a man who didn’t seem to give a damn what anyone else thought of him and never missed an opportunity to batter, insult, embarrass, or humiliate any of us, especially me? Was it because I was the only male in the house, because I could read, because I was my mother’s only son, or a combination of all of those things and others known only to himself?

The answers to those questions were long in coming, if ever. But finally, I had an answer to what my short-term plan of action should be. I wasn’t even eight years old when it hit me like a strike of lightning, that Sunday afternoon, watching him suck on those bones as I thought to myself: I’m gonna kill this motherfucker.