Lewis says that Michael’s mother Denise (“Dee Dee”) never felt loved or cared for. Her father was murdered when she was a little girl. Her mother was an alcoholic. Children’s Services placed her and her brother, Robert, in an orphanage. At fifteen, she dropped out of school and drifted into drugs. By twenty-six, she had five sons, then met Michael’s father through her brother, who was in prison for murdering his wife. By the time Michael was five, Dee Dee had seven boys and three girls in her care, though she had become addicted to cocaine and was incapable of caring for her children. She bought her drugs from gang leader Delvin Lane, who had been a promising quarterback with a scholarship to the University of Wyoming until he went to prison on “an aggravated assault charge” (248). When he got out, he put his skills to work running a “huge and growing drug business” with a security chief called Big Brim whose job “was to watch Delvin’s back. His blind side” (248).

Michael recalls his first six years being marked by hunger and homelessness, yet by the age of seven, his greatest fear was to be taken from his mother (241).