(In the previous installment of Born Into the Cycle, Lakesha Townsend described the childhood of her mother, Gracie Marshel Wilson, known as “Michelle.” In this installment, Townsend describes her life as a young girl in Michelle’s household in the Imperial Courts project of Watts.)

Not long after turning 18, and a few years after I was born, my mother, Gracie Marshel Wilson, moved from her mother’s apartment at the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts to a two-bedroom apartment of her own in the same complex.  Michelle (that’s what we all called her) had endured a rough life, helping to raise all her sisters and brothers, and now she was raising kids of her own.

The Michelle who had played games with her baby sisters and brothers was not the Michelle we knew as her children. She never played with us. She rarely showed emotion apart from anger. She would scrunch down one eye, with her teeth gritted tight, and frighten us all. If she got angry and wanted to bust our ass, then she whipped us, and she didn’t care who happened to be around. There was no stopping her.

We never called her Mom or Mama. We just called her Michelle. That’s what all my aunts and uncles called her too. (You could always hear “Michelle!” being yelled through the house.) Michelle never seemed to want to be known in any other way.

The happiest times for me were when my aunts and uncles would come over and bring their kids. Michelle would laugh, which she never normally did. Still, she had her eye on all of us. She had all my cousins scared.

Michelle didn’t know much about being a mother, but she did know how to survive—how to hustle. She was the queen of rolling dice. She loved the streets. She robbed and stole. She took no shit from anyone. Whatever she said she was going to do she did.

Since my mother left us alone for hours at a time, we were trained never to open the door for a soul, even if the person knocking was named Gracie Marshel. Otherwise, she’d whip our ass.

Once, when I was four, Michelle had been missing for a while. Only my grandmother was with us. Then we got a phone call from Michelle. We were all excited, because she’d never called on the phone before. When it was my turn to talk to her, she asked me if I missed her.

“Where you at?” I asked.

“I’ll be home,” was all she answered.

Only later, looking back, did I realize she’d been calling from jail.

The only thing that seemed to make my mother happy was smoking weed with her friends. Getting high was nothing new to her; she’d been doing it since she was a kid. When she’d get high, God was the first thing she’d talk about—how she loved Him, and knew He existed. My mother always spoke about God, no matter what was going on. She always felt her suffering and pain was for a reason. She taught us our prayers and never let us eat or go to bed without saying them.

As time went on my mother began to use other drugs. PCP was one of them. They called it sherm. She’d start hallucinating, singing and dancing around the house. One day we smelled the smoke of sherm in the air, and 20 minutes later Michelle was jumping on top of the coffee table singing, “Thank you, Jesus, the blood of Jesus!”

When I was 6 years old, my mother and her friends were in the living room one night smoking sherm, and Michelle sent my older sister Renee some money to go to the candy house—that’s what we called the place where someone in the housing complex would be selling food out of his or her apartment—for some tacos and sodas. I was very hungry, so I sat by the door waiting for her. The smell of the smoke that night was heavy in my nostrils. Then, as I stared out of the door in a daze, I noticed that the trees were talking to me, swaying back and forward saying, “Heeeey! Hiiiii!”

I started acting weird, doing things that were uncontrollable. I couldn’t sit still. I was jumping up and down. I was scared, but I was also trying to calm myself. When Renee returned and saw me, she knew something was wrong. The tacos I’d been so hungry for I no longer wanted. Renee started panicking. She threatened to go tell Michelle. I still wouldn’t settle down.

When Renee went downstairs to tell our mother what was going on, Michelle was too high to respond. Renee said, “Michelle wants you,” but I couldn’t for the life of me make it down the stairs to see what my mother wanted. My nose started bleeding. I remember throwing up blood. Either that or I was super high and it looked like blood.

Throughout this ordeal, Michelle never came to check on me. I remember Renee trying to calm me down. She lay down by my side, and eventually I fell asleep. Waking up the next morning, I was even hungrier than I’d been the night before. I looked for the tacos that I never ate. I couldn’t find them anywhere. I even checked in the trash. But they were gone.

This is the second installment of a multipart series by Lakesha Townsend on her family history in Watts, Los Angeles, California. Zócalo will continue to run Townsend’s recollections every few weeks.  (Next: Lakesha describes some of the men in Michelle’s life.)