EverythingWillBeAllRight

It has been said that those born into poverty remain enchained in an endless cycle of poverty. This was true for both of my parents. This book is about how I broke the chain.
I am a child of the rural South. I grew up in a series of small towns and backwoods in upstate Tennessee. I was the third oldest of eight children-six boys and two girls. Our father spent most of his life drinking, raging, and drifting from job to job. Our mother was a battered wife, who held the family together with ferocious love and weary grit. We lived like itinerant refugees. We subsisted at the very bottom, invisibly, and among those members of society whose voices go unheard or have been silenced. Finding my own voice-freeing that choked spring within-remains an ongoing challenge for me.
There's nothing good about poverty. It can steal your life away from you. It isolates you, degrades your sense of self-worth, renders you a third-class citizen, leaves you feeling un-whole, and threatens your very survival. I was born at home in one of the most beautiful parts of the country-where hills and trees surround you as far as the eye can see. But I was also born into bone-crushing poverty-a hopeless lack of money, year in and year out, with no reason to believe it would get any better. From my earliest memory, as a little child, I felt the constant stress of being poor, as do all children and teenagers growing up in poverty. As you grow into adulthood, you may settle for a life of quiet desperation. Or all that stress might explode in ways that bring painful consequences. Over many years, I've watched dear friends and beloved family members, one by one, allow poverty to pull them under, allow the shame to diminish them when there is no reason for shame, allow addiction to draw them away from any real solutions. As a boy, as soon as I was old enough to articulate it to myself, I was determined to not ever let this happen to me, and I haven't.
My story is about how I was able to overcome the odds. It includes good choices, bad choices, and hard choices; wrong turns, right turns, and dead-ends; it includes chance encounters of both the violent and nonviolent kind-and I have learned from both. I've written this book to make sense of my life, to put to rest some demons, and to be of possible help to anyone struggling to find their way.
One of the blessings of starting out with nothing is that practically every person, every situation, every encounter becomes your teacher-at least that's how it was and continues to be for me and I considerate myself very fortunate in this. The teacher or the teachings can be cruel or kind, but the lesson is always valuable. For example, when I was eight-years-old, I experienced the ridicule of my third grade classmates who laughed when I, the poorest kid in the school along with my older brother and sister, dared to say that I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up. The school principal backed them up and gave me my first taste of low expectations, or no expectations, for the poor. It was a defining, life-changing, moment for me, for which I am now grateful. It ignited a determination in me. It motivated me. From that moment on, rather than having collapsed, my dream of becoming a lawyer crystallized. It became more real, a true goal for my life. And I did, indeed, end up becoming a lawyer, a lawyer with his own firm, successful enough to enable me to retire at the age of fifty with financial independence.
Knowing what I wanted to do in that aspect of my life gave me a star to steer by, however wobbly at times. My mother, by the power of her example, fostered in me the strength not to perish, the strength to persevere no matter what. Also, my life would have been a completely different life, I am convinced, had I not had a belief in a power greater than myself-both to guide me and to sustain me. When I was a boy, I had a spiritual experience which altered the course of my life profoundly and permanently, and which I write about in this book. The philosopher William James talks about several kinds of spiritual experience. Some come to a person slowly, over time; others-which are rarer-come more suddenly. Mine came more suddenly and ineffably. In all this time, it has been an impossibly difficult task to try to put this experience into words. Imagine an undeniable inner voice saying to you, deeply and tenderly, "Everything will be all right, Everything is all right, You are all right." This is the closest I can come to the translating the profound undercurrent of inner peace upon which my entire life now rests. Sometimes it's stronger than others, but it's always there for me, and I believe this possibility exists in everyone.
As you read my story, you'll come upon many times when I've skated off-track-or been terribly afraid, or terribly depressed, or lacking in confidence. It was my unwavering faith in the mantra-like message "Everything will be all right" that enabled me, time and again, to keep going.
Over the years, friends and acquaintances have urged me put my story down on paper and the book you hold in your hands is the result. I've written it with the hope that it might serve as an inspiration. My story proves that those born into discouraging circumstances are not destined to remain there. Whether we are poor materially or spiritually, I believe we each have choices. I believe that positive action is always possible and failure never inevitable. I also believe that help lies all around us if we only are willing to see it and open ourselves to it.