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Atlantapublic school system and told to go somewhere else—anywhere else. So where else does a kid who is trouble end up? That’s right. If it’s not jail, it’s military school. And so I—the Thug Formerly Known as Chickenhead—somehow ended up entering the ninth grade at the Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia.

Big Gipp: Atlanta called itself the City Too Busy to Hate, and that’s true enough. But the Dirty South has its dark side. Everything that seemed clean, it was not what it appeared to be. If you knew the right people you could do anything you wanted. There were people who got money on one side of the street, people without money on the other. But we saw that people from both sides dibbled and dabbled in the underworld. From the police to the mayor to everybody. That’s why it’s called the Dirty South.
    Along with the magnolia trees in Atlanta there’s a history of thug life and enough prisons and jails to hold our bad guys and take the spillover from other states. Rice Street for the locals. Metro for the bad youth. Jackson for the grown-ups. And the Federal Pen right downtown for all the notorious criminals, political and otherwise. Marcus Garvey served time there, and so did Al Capone and some more recent mobsters from the Lucchese family. Cubans from the boatlift tried to burn the place down in the eighties. The eighties was a decade when Atlanta’s kids grew up fast. And let’s not forget, when we all were busy getting grown, Atlanta was not just our home—it was also home to the Atlanta Child Murders, which scared both whites and blacks who wanted their kids in by dark. The whole city was terrified.
    Things calmed down a bit after they locked up Wayne Williams—the man and the myth. But then the whole game changed around 1984 to 1985 when I was going to middle school. That’s when drugs first started really hitting the streets in Atlanta. Suddenly, the ghetto kids were showing up to school with better clothes than we had, and they always had lots of money stuffed in their pockets. We asked ourselves, what are these kids doing? They come from bad homes, but they have designer clothes and they’re presenting better for the girls than we are. All of a sudden kids in eighth grade were showing up to school in cars—kids like Rico Wade, who went on to become the leader of Organized Noize. Rico drove his own car to middle school even though he wasn’t old enough to drive then.
    There were so many kids from rich families being drawn into trouble and then into crime. We all mixed it up in the streets. You had kids like Maynard Jackson’s children who were known to fight and get in trouble. Andrew Young—his kid Bo Young, he
stayed
in trouble. Our friends were always a mix of kids who had and those who didn’t have. The street element was so strong then it drew us all in. The lure of the street was so strong then that it was like playing football—the biggest game in town.

    I had already started turning myself around a little bit. During the summer between eighth and ninth grades I took a good job on a construction crew, building some of those houses that were popping up all over Atlanta. I was making $9 and $10 an hour, which was exceptionally good money for someone that young. Now anything I wanted, shoes and starter jackets, I’d do it out of pocket. It felt good. I liked that feeling of independence. Amazingly, it was my idea to go to military school, and even more amazingly, I loved the joint. The Riverside Academy was an hour and some change north of Atlanta. But for me, this new place was a few worlds away from the streets where I had been so successfully wreaking havoc. The campus looked like an old-fashioned fortress with ramparts, high up on a hill. Cadets were marching around the parade ground in blue uniforms and garrison caps—I felt like I had landed in military Oz. They say that young people actually want rules, and I think that’s true—even if some kids like me