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Margaret B. JonesMargaret B. Jones, born in Ponoma, California, was brought up in the foster caresystem in Los Angeles. She graduated from the University of Oregon with a degreein ethnic studies and is an active member of International Brother/SisterHood,which works to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens.Q: How did this book originate?A: During my senior year of college one of my professors told me a friend of herswas working on a book and wanted to interview me. I declined. I wasn’t interestedin the whole “South-Central-as-petting-zoo” thing. Then my home girl said theteacher might mess around and fail me for rejecting her friend, so I ended upcalling the author and doing the interview. She was real nice and asked me if Ihad ever written anything. I ended up giving her one of a number of short storiesI had written for my brothers’ kids and for the kids of my homies serving lifesentences. (Many of them are teenagers now and have no reference to understand whotheir fathers are, what they were into and what the hood was like for us when wewere their age and younger. Stories about their dads and where we came from seemedlike the greatest gift I could give them.) She said she loved the story and askedif she could give it to her agent to read. I figured, why not? Her agent called methe very next day and said she wanted to put me under contract. I’m not realworldly about this whole publishing thing, but it didn’t cost anything so onceagain I figured why not? I signed the contract and sent it back. She said, “Whenyou get to 100 pages I’ll pitch it as a book.”Q: What happened next?A: I’m from the school of thought that says money in hand is better than the moneyyou might get down the road. I was a single mom, in school full time and working,so it took a while to reach 100 pages. I stayed at it after graduation andeventually had enough material to give to my agent. She submitted it and called methe very next day to tell me she had a few people who were interested; that shewas going to close offers by the end of the week; and that she was then going tobid it off in rounds. Once the dollar signs reached a certain level I had mychoice of three publishers.Q: You say you were caring for kids. How many children do you have?A: I have one daughter but I also have my sister’s son. I took him out ofCalifornia and brought him up here to Oregon to live with me. I’m now officiallyBig Mom. It’s crazy. Talk about coming full circle!Q: There are writers who struggle for years just to get an agent interested inthem let alone a bunch of publishers in a bidding war fighting over what they’vewritten. How did that make you feel? A: It didn’t seem real. Sometimes it stilldoesn’t feel real. There’s a disservice we do to inner city kids. We tell them ifthey grow up in certain areas, don’t have certain clothes or go to certain schoolstheir lives won’t amount to much. An even bigger disservice inner city kids do tothemselves is that they believe it. We also feed kids on dreams of making it outof the hood through basketball or football, through selling dope, or by making itas a rapper. But nobody makes it out by being intellectual, or at least that’swhat we’re led to believe. The fact that I could write something that people wouldwant to read, let alone buy and publish, is still unbelievable to me. I alwaysthought no one cared about the ghetto. My agent recently sold the Danish printversion of the book and I keep thinking to myself why would someone in Denmarkwant to read what I have to say?

Q: What was it like for you going back and digging up all those painful memoriesof your childhood and teen years?A: It was heart wrenching. And the amazing thing is that no matter how many roundsof edits I sat down with, it was heart wrenching each time. Sarah McGrath, myeditor at Riverhead Books, said, “Every time I hit a certain page I cry.” I toldher, “If you only knew! I hit that same page and cry every time too.”Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from theKorean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and themilk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad asshe stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her Iwasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone.Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices youwere given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry. As a kid youdon’t know you’re depressed, or sad, or over-burdened. You don’t realize you’redealing with things that are not little kid things. You just know you’re trying tosurvive.Q: You said you’ve learned a great deal about yourself while writing this book.What did you learn?A: What you quickly realize is that nothing goes away. Time heals all wounds butyou still have the scars. You say to yourself, those things happened in the past;I’ve grown up now; they don’t affect me anymore. But they still do. When I startedwriting the book I began researching Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. When I waslittle, if someone were to say to me “you’re depressed” or “you have PTSD” myreaction would have been an indignant, “there’s nothing wrong with me.” But whenyou get a little older you can look back and say there were occasions where Iperhaps ended up acting a bit irrationally so maybe I was depressed; maybe I wassuffering from PTSD. I remember one time I had a fight with a boyfriend. Thingsgot so heated that he wanted to go for a walk to clear his head. I knew he lovedme and that I loved him and yet as he walked out the door I got it into my headthat he was leaving forever and that I would never see him again. I completelypanicked. That’s not a healthy reaction. And it didn’t just come out of nowhere.Q: At the start of the book you allude to an incident of sexual abuse you sufferedwhen you were still with your birth family. It was the triggering event thatresulted in you being placed in foster care and yet you barely reflect on it. Itcomes across as hardly being traumatic at all. Was that the case?A: There are things in your head that are clear and very real, and things in yourhead that are unclear, unreal, and barely remembered. Sometimes one thing justgets piled in and people want to look at it and say, “That was a huge traumaticevent!” Well, not really. When you go into foster care it’s the sudden instabilityof getting swept away that is traumatic. In my head that’s what sticks out. Thewoman who took me away from my family offered to have someone go to my home andget some of my favorite things. I asked for a particular teddy bear and theybrought me the wrong one. I don’t know why that sticks out more than anythingelse, but it does. I guess maybe it’s because the people that were supposed to behelping me weren’t listening to me. In an ideal world the foster care system worksgreat. But we’re not living in an ideal world and there are all kinds of reasonsthe system fails kids. So the traumatic things all blend together.Q: Do you think it was a good thing you were removed from your parents’ home andput into the foster care system?

A: Who knows? Who can say? What would have happened if I hadn’t been put into thesystem? To answer that you have to enter the realm of speculation and I try not toget caught up in “would have,” “should have,” and “could have.” What I can say isthat I’m a strong person and that I’m very proud of the person I am today. I don’thave a lot of room for regrets, especially over choices I didn’t have.Q: You describe going from one foster home to the next and suffering various formsof mental, physical, and sexual abuse along the way. You also say each abusechipped away a new piece of your soul and brought you closer to giving up. Whatkept you from giving up altogether?A: I don’t know. I was talking with someone about this the other day —a woman whosaid she was depressed. I know it’s a serious thing but I’ve never had the luxuryof being depressed. You have to keep it moving. My philosophy of life is that youput one foot in front of the other, trust that God will handle the things thatdon’t always make sense, and if you hit a wall you turn one way or the other andjust keep on going. I don’t know what kept me holding on to hope. In a lot of waysI didn’t. Then again, I had younger siblings who looked up to me. That kept mepushing and kept me positive. I also have nieces, nephews and 14 godchildren soyou always feel like you can do more for them. That alone made me want to dobetter with my life. And I’ve always said people either love me or hate me.Fortunately there have always been a few people who loved me.Q: You describe a heated confrontation between your foster parent, Big Mom, andone of her grandsons. She’s urging him to turn away from his “street punk homies”and instead rely on his family and God. He feels God has turned his back on them.Did you ever find yourself feeling the same?A: I think we all go through that because things don’t always make sense or turnout the way we want. I went through a period like that when the brother of one ofmy friends got killed. He was not a gangbanger, he was simply in the wrong placeat the wrong time. That was a big blow to me. I couldn’t understand why God wouldtake someone who was doing everything right, while so many others are doingeverything wrong. But then a visiting pastor reminded me that although God maywant someone who’s obedient, He allows you to be angry with him. Also, I have alot of friends and relatives who ended up in worse situations than me. One of mybest friends is doing life in prison for murder. He’s already done 15 years and hemight be in for 15 more. He said to me, “You know I didn’t do this, and you know Ididn’t do this, but there were plenty of things I did do. Maybe God was sparing mefrom what could have happened out there. Maybe He didn’t want me to walk that roadany further. And now I can write letters to my son to maybe keep him from walkingthat road too.” Another friend, who’s on death row, once sent me a picture at atime when I was going through a difficult situation at school. On the bottom of ithe wrote, “We’re in the death house, but we’re keeping it G’d.” If he and theothers on death row can keep it together knowing they’re going to be executed bythe state, who am I to think my life is hard. If people in that situation can havefaith, I have to have faith too.Q: Your brothers found it impossible to break away from the street and the lure ofthe gang. You just said you were “doing everything wrong” and yet you managed toavoid their fate. How?A: When you ask things like that it’s easy to say I was resilient or smart. Butthe fact is that people are going to give a light-skinned girl more opportunitiesthan dark-skinned boys. People fear black boys. By the time my brothers were inhigh school they were six feet tall. I’m five foot nothing and weigh 100 pounds.I’m easy to take a chance on. I honestly believe that’s what made the difference.