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emphasis on damned. If you wanted to give me the benefit of a few doubts, the best that you could say for me was that growing up, I was sort of half angel and half devil. I may have been doing Bible raps and singing in the choir, but as soon as I got out on the streets, my more devilish half was definitely getting his due. For better or worse—mostly worse, I’m sure—doing bad things felt like second nature to me.
    So at an age when other kids might be out selling lemonade, I stole my ass off. Looking back at it now, I’m trying to think what was going through my head. I’m not trying to make excuses for my bad behavior here, but maybe I felt as if life had already ripped me off by stealing my father away from me before I even got a chance to know him. Whatever it was that had been stolen from me early on, I couldn’t wait to try to get myself a little payback.
    I started out shoplifting, trying to be sophisticated, then regressed to just snatch and grab. I remember one time cutting school with friends—which we loved to do whenever possible—and taking the train to an Atlanta Braves game downtown. The mischief began with us just fooling around on the train and grabbing people’s hats. Mind you, I was a criminal with some conscience, so I didn’t bother old people, for instance. No, I liked to pick on people closer to my own age or a little older. Soon I moved on from grabbing hats to stealing starter jackets and shoes. It was a slightly more innocent timewhen all the rage was kids stealing Air Jordans. Truth be told, I’m not proud of this, but I made lots of people take off the shoes on their feet and hand them over. What I was accused of—and frankly, mostly guilty of—was what is sometimes called strong-arm robbery. I intimidated people into giving me whatever I wanted at that specific moment. These weren’t crimes of passion—more like crimes of convenience. I wanted things, so I took things. From sneakers, I moved on to jewelry and anything else shiny that caught my eye. Thinking back, I was sort of like a shorter, younger version of that character Deebo from the movie
Friday
that starred Ice Cube and Chris Tucker. Yet I wasn’t the star of any movie other than the one constantly running in my head. Instead, I was just some little neighborhood thug always making trouble in the streets.
    In some strange way, I think a hero is really just a villain who’s had a change of heart. I’m trying to be honest here, and not too cavalier, because in the end, most of my crimes may have been petty, legally speaking, but not to the innocent people who got robbed. Those poor people were probably truly scared and paid an emotional price for being threatened and taken advantage of by a street thug like me. For what it’s worth—which is probably not nearly enough—I am sorry.
    In my own weak defense, I hardly ever stole at gunpoint. The thing is that I didn’t usually need a gun because people sensed somehow that I was not to be messed with. I guess I always came across like a bad kid who looked like he didn’t have a lot to lose. In a way, I felt like I didn’t.
    Growing up the son of two preachers, I heard a lot about sin and salvation—and right away I was interested in the whole combo platter. The way I saw life, it was never as simple as good and bad—it was always good and evil in my world. I associate both good and evil with the Spirit, they seemed somehow Supreme to me. Growing up without a father figure, moving from place to place, being a highly impressionable child, I felt like I was an ideal dwelling for good and evil, so that both instincts kicked in powerfully at different times. I leaned more toward the evil back then. I’ve become measurably sweeter since then. But make no mistake, I still see the darkness and the light, and I understand both. It’s like Walt Whitman wrote in a great poem called “Song of Myself”: “I am large, I contain multitudes.”
    I’ve often said I was a