Oct 8, 2019

I got into quite a few things because I was always following my younger brother. I was always climbing. My mother would tell me “don’t climb because you’re a girl.” One time she found me on a darn fence. She caught me one time climbing, you know, telephone poles and stuff. I went half way because I got scared.

But then another time we really got into trouble. We used to go to, my mother would send us to Sunday school. On a Sunday we went to Browns Memorial Baptist Church. She would send us there. We lived on the corner of Bushwick and Decatur and we had to take the J train to the A train to get off at Washington Avenue. My brother said “Let’s not go” one day, let’s do this, and so we rode the subway system the whole time. We didn’t know that the teacher was going to tell on us and some of her friends from church. She told them we weren’t there. When we got home she asked, “What did you learn in school?” We both made up lies, and she knew we were lying because we didn’t collaborate. She knew we wasn’t there. But we lied anyway. And we got into trouble for that. So pretty much after that I said, I’m not following him because I’m getting into trouble because of him. So, I tried not to get into things anymore after that. But it was fun. We did a lot of things together. We stayed out past the curfew, we would lie about that. We were supposed to watch our younger sister. We had a younger sister and we were supposed to watch her. And I came home without her, and my brother came home he had left her in the park. We said he was supposed to watch her, we got into trouble for that too! It mostly that, I grew up in a house of 6 children. 3 boys and 3 girls. It was me and my younger brother that would be the closest because we were born 13 months apart. He was a middle brother and I was a middle sister. Yeah, we got spanked! That’s putting it mildly. We were the two devils when we were younger.