#MarcusStory Pt. 1 | Breaking The Cycle

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In this powerful first installment entitled, "#MarcusStory Pt. 1 | Breaking The Cycle", Marcus Williams courageously opens up about his life growing up in an environment where street influences, difficult choices and survival often felt like the only options available. Through honesty, vulnerability and reflection, Marcus takes us back to the moments that shaped his early years, the decisions that led him down a dangerous path and the consequences that ultimately changed the direction of his life.

This is a story of survival, redemption, self-awareness and hope. A reminder that our past may explain where we've been, but it does not have to determine where we're going.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey RDDC. Man. Okay. I've been trying to figure out how to start this for three days. I wrote it down twice and threw it away twice. Because every time I tried to write it, I was still trying to manage how it came across. Still trying to control what you think of me before you hear what I did. And I'm done with that. What this platform has built, what Story Two Blessings is doing, it doesn't ask you to manage anything. It just asks you to tell the truth. So that is what I'm going to do. My name is Marcus. I'm thirty three years old, and I need you to understand something before I say another word. I'm not one of those stories where the circumstances explain everything away. I made choices, real choices, with real consequences for real people who didn't deserve what I brought to them, and I'm going to tell you about those choices, all of them, because the only version of this story worth telling is the one where I don't leave anything out. I grew up on Hargrove Avenue, specifically the 2400 block. I want you to have that address because this story lives on that block and it always will. A corner store run by a man named Mr. Cho who gave credit to everybody and kept a baseball bat behind the counter. My mother worked at the school district. My father was there until I was eleven, and then he wasn't. Not dramatically. He and my mother split, he moved to the west side, and the visits got further apart until they stopped. I want to be fair to him and say he wasn't a monster. He was just a man who didn't know how to stay. And I want to be honest with myself and say that watching him go taught me something I carried for twenty years without understanding what it was. It taught me that men leave, that the real ones, the ones with authority, the ones worth respecting, they don't sit in apartments with women and children navigating the ordinary business of being a family. They move, they control, they don't answer to anybody. That is what I was taught without a single word being said about it, and I went looking for men who move like that the moment I was old enough to go looking. I was twelve the first time I ran something for Dre. Dre was twenty six. He ran the east end of Hargrove with a calm that I had never seen on a person. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. When Dre spoke, people adjusted. When Dre looked at you a certain way, you felt it in your chest. And he took an interest in me. Not a kind interest, I understand that now. But at twelve it felt like being chosen. He said, Little man, I need you to take this to the building on Clement, third floor, not twice, give it to whoever answers, come right back. Don't stop, don't talk to anybody, don't look around. You understand? I said, Yes, sir, yes, sir, like he was my teacher or my coach. And I walked to that building on Clement with a package in my jacket and knocked twice on the third floor door and handed it to a man whose face I never saw clearly and walked back and gave Dre the envelope the man had handed me in return. Dre opened it, counted, nodded, said Good, you did good. And he put twenty dollars in my hand, twenty dollars for ten minutes of walking, and I felt something I had not felt since my father lived in our apartment. I felt like I had done something right, like I had value in a system that noticed it. I went back the next day and asked if he needed anything else. Of course he did. He always needed something else. I am going to tell you about the night I crossed the line that I have never fully crossed back over. I was seventeen. I had been running for Dre for five years at this point. I was not a runner anymore. I was trusted, which meant I knew more, which meant what I was asked to do had more weight. There was a man on the south end of the neighborhood who had been stealing, not small, significant. And Dre pulled me aside one night outside the corner store and he said, Marcus, I need you to go with Tone tonight. I need you to send a message. I need that man to understand what happens when you take from us. I want you to hear me when I say that I knew exactly what that meant. I was seventeen years old and I knew exactly what I was being asked to be part of. And I said, Okay. I said it fast, not because I wasn't scared, I was scared, but fear and loyalty were the same feeling in that world, and I had been trained for five years to respond to both of them the same way. I went with Tone that night. We found the man outside his building, and what happened in the next four minutes I am going to carry for the rest of my life. The man survived. I want to say that. He survived. But there are things you do to another person's body that you cannot take back. And there are things you do to your own soul that change the architecture of it permanently. I walked home that night with blood on my shoe from where I had stepped in it by accident, and I sat on the edge of my bed at two in the morning and I looked at that shoe for a long time. And I did not cry. And that scared me more than anything else that had happened that night. I should have cried. Something that does not cry when it should have has already started becoming something else. The arrest happened when I was twenty two. I had been in it for ten years by then. Ten years of running and caring and witnessing and participating. I had my own people, my own corner, my own version of the calm that Dre had shown me at twelve, and I thought I was untouchable. Not because I was stupid, because nobody had touched me yet. And after enough time passes without consequences, you start to believe consequences are for other people. I was sitting in a car outside a building on a Thursday evening, ordinary Thursday, nothing notable, and I looked in my rear view mirror and saw the lights, blue and white, coming up fast, and I sat completely still, like an animal that understands that the moment of running has already passed. They had been building it for fourteen months. I found that out later. Fourteen months of watching and documenting and building a case while I was living my life like it was permanent. They pulled me out of that car and put my face on the hood and clicked the cuffs on with the sound that I still hear sometimes in the middle of the night. Just that sound click. And the specific coldness of the metal, and the smell of the hood of the car against my face, and a voice saying, Marcus Jerome Williams, you are under arrest. And somewhere in the distance a woman screaming my name, my mother. She had been coming out of the corner store, grocery bags in both hands. She dropped them. I could hear the bags hit the pavement. I could hear glass breaking, something in a jar, and I could not turn my head to look at her because they had my face on the hood of that car, and all I could see was the sky above me going dark at the edges, and all I could hear was my mother saying Marcus, Marcus, Marcus. Like you she said it enough times, it would undo what was happening. I am not going to tell you prison made me better. That is a clean narrative, and this is not a clean story. Prison was violent and dehumanizing, and there are things that happen inside that I am not going to describe because some things don't need to be carried outside the walls they happened in. What I will tell you is that I survived it the same way I survived everything else before it. By going somewhere deep inside myself and keeping that place protected no matter what they did to everything outside of it. I did that for the first two years. I kept to myself, I watched, I stayed out of what I could stay out of and handled what I had to handle, and I did not let anyone see anything real about me because in that environment real was a liability. And then one Tuesday night in my third year a ministry came in. And I went because I was bored. That is the honest reason. I had read everything in the library that was worth reading twice, and I was bored, and anything was better than sitting in that cell counting the same ceiling tiles I had been counting for three years. The man who led it was named Brother Calvin. He was maybe sixty, small, quiet voice. He didn't come in performing. He didn't come in with the energy of someone trying to save you. He came in the way a plumber comes in, like there was a job that needed doing and he knew how to do it and he was going to do it. He sat down in a plastic chair in front of about thirty men who were looking at him with everything from boredom to hostility, and he said, I'm not here to tell you about God. I'm here to ask you about you. What did you want to be when you were seven years old? Before the neighborhood got to you, before the hustle got to you, before you became what you had to become to survive. What did you want to be? And that room went silent in a way I had never heard a room go silent. Not the silence of intimidation, the silence of thirty men being asked something nobody had asked them in so long that the question itself was almost physically painful. I didn't answer out loud, but I answered in my head, and what I heard myself say was I wanted to be someone my son would be proud of. I had a son. He was three years old when I got arrested. His mother had brought him to see me once, once, and he had looked at me through that glass with eyes that were the exact shape of my eyes, and he had put his hand flat against the glass, and I had put my hand against it from my side, and I felt the temperature difference between them. Glass and my palm, and I thought, this is what I did. This is what I chose, this glass between me and this child's hand. I chose this. I went back to that ministry every Tuesday for the next four years. Not because it got easier, because Brother Calvin told me one night after everyone else had left that the most dangerous thing in that building wasn't the men inside it. It was the stories those men were still telling themselves about who they were and who they could not become. He said, Marcus, you have been running a story in your head since you were twelve about what kind of man you are. And that story is wrong. Not because you didn't do what you did. You did it. Own it. But a man is not the sum of his worse decisions. A man is what he does with what he knows now. And what do you know now? I sat with that question for six months. And what I came out with on the other side of those six months was the first version of myself I had ever built intentionally. Not the one the neighborhood built, not the one Dre built, not the one fear and loyalty built, the one I chose. Piece by piece from scratch, inside a six by eight cell with Brother Calvin's question on the wall of my mind every single morning when I woke up. I walked out of those gates on a Wednesday morning in April. My mother was there. She was thinner than I remembered. Six years of what I had put her through had taken something from her physically that I cannot look at without it sitting on my chest. She did not hug me first. She looked at me for a long moment. A long, searching, complicated moment. And then she said, Are you done? Not welcome home. Not I missed you. Are you done? And I said, Yes, ma'am. And then she hugged me. And she held on in a way that told me every night she had spent not knowing if I was alive in there. And I held her, and I thought about those grocery bags hitting the pavement, that sound. And I promised myself right there in that parking lot that I would spend whatever was left of my life making sure she never had to drop anything again because of me. Reentry is a word that makes it sound like something with a plan, like there is a protocol, a lane to merge into. There is no lane. There is you and a bus ticket and a world that kept moving while you were standing still and has absolutely no obligation to slow down for you now. I applied for twenty two jobs in the first three months. Twenty. I was honest on every application because I had decided honesty was the thing I was keeping no matter what it cost me. Seventeen of them never responded. Four rejected me by email. One called me in for an interview, looked at my record, told me the position had been filled, and I watched him write something on a notepad while I was still sitting in the chair across from him that he did not try very hard to hide. I walked out of that building and stood on the sidewalk in the same April air I had walked out of those gates into and I felt the pull. I need you to understand what the pull feels like, because if you have never been in it, you might not understand how a man who had genuinely changed could feel it. The pull is not wanting to go back. The pull is the sudden, crushing, physical weight of every legitimate door closing and the knowledge that there is a door right behind you that will never be closed to you and will give you everything you need within forty eight hours. That is the pull. And I stood on that sidewalk and I felt it with everything I had. And I thought about Brother Calvin. And I thought about my son's hand against the glass. And I called my mother instead of making the other call. And I went home. I found RDDC through a man at a resource center named Deshaun, who had been out for two years and was doing something with his life that looked like it was actually working. I asked him how. He pulled out his phone and played me about four minutes of an episode, a woman named Lexus T talking about identity, about who you are before the world decides for you, about the version of yourself that exists underneath everything that got piled on top. And I stood there in that resource center, listening to four minutes of audio on a man's phone and felt something I had not felt since Brother Calvin asked me what I wanted to be when felt like someone was talking to the part of me that existed before Hargrove Avenue built something else on top of it. I downloaded the account before I left the building. I stayed up until three in the morning going through episodes, and for the first time since I walked out of those gates, I felt like the road ahead had a direction. Not a destination, not a guarantee, a direction. And that was enough to keep walking. I need to stop here because I need to tell you what happened last week, and I need you to understand why it means part two exists. I was at my mother's house. Sunday dinner. First normal Sunday I had sat through in years without something being wrong. And my phone rang. Number I didn't recognize. I almost didn't pick up. But something made me. It was a woman named Keisha. I knew Keisha from the neighborhood. She said, Marcus, I didn't know who else to call. Your son. I need you to know what's happening with your son. Jamal is 15. And she told me where she had seen him and who she had seen him with. And I sat at my mother's kitchen table with Sunday dinner going cold in front of me, and I heard myself at twelve years old saying, Yes, sir, to Dre, and taking that package to the building on Clement. And my whole body understood something with a clarity that I have never felt before in my life. This is the real reason I survived everything I survived. Not for me, for him. I hung up the phone and I looked at my mother, and she already knew from my face. And she put her hand over her mouth. And I stood up. And part two is what I did next. Stay close to the real double dose channel. It will meet you wherever you are and it will not flinch at what you bring to it. If this reached something in you today, send it to somebody right now. You know who needs to hear it. You already know. Send it before you close this out. And if you have a story in you that's been waiting for somewhere real to land, story two blessings is that place. Not the cleaned up version, the real one. The world was formed by a word, and yours is one somebody out there is waiting to hear. Every step forward. I will see you in part two. Thanks and blessings to all y'all.