My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (6 page)

Fred took off. He didn’t want to be around “drama,” as he called it. Anyway, I barely had time for him. My entire life was focused on getting Marshall better.

I couldn’t work because Marshall was too ill. We had to go on welfare. It broke my heart. I’d never begged for anything before. I did my best to hold everything together, but there were many nights when I just sobbed myself to sleep.

I’d found out DeAngelo Bailey’s name from Marshall’s friends, but it took months before I could coax anything about him out of my son. Even though I was now home-schooling him, teaching him how to read and write all over again, he was still terrified Bailey would come after him again. I reassured him constantly that he was safe.

Slowly, he told me what had happened on January 13. It was snowing, and he was playing “king of the hill” with a group of pals in the schoolyard when Bailey appeared. He threw a chunk of ice at Marshall, striking him on the head. Marshall lost his balance and fell backwards through a snowdrift. He cracked his head as he hit the ground.

I decided to consult a lawyer to see what, if anything, could be done. I was going through living hell with my son, and I didn’t want anyone else to suffer like that at the hands of bullies. Marshall’s medical bills were thousands of dollars, and I hadn’t been able to work while looking after him. I found a lawyer and filed an affidavit, explaining what had happened. A staff member laughed at me.

“You won’t sue us. I’ll say he bumped his head on the school door on the way out of the building,” he sneered.

Eventually the case was thrown out of court. The judge ruled that Michigan schools were immune from lawsuits. But I organized a petition, gathered other parents’ names, and did my best to make sure everyone knew what had happened to my son. Shortly afterwards, the education authorities offered insurance to buy in case of an accident on school property. I like to think that my case against Dort Elementary went some way to making that happen.

Marshall also got his own back: in 1999 he named Bailey as his tormentor in his song “Brain Damage” on
The Slim Shady LP
. Bailey, then a sanitation worker, tried to sue Marshall for a million dollars, claiming that his privacy had been invaded and that he’d become an object of hate. He said Marshall’s slurs had harmed his potential career as a rap star. I was shocked when I heard this. How dare he?

Marshall improved slowly. One day he could tie his shoelaces; the next he’d forgotten. It was terribly frustrating for him, but every day he got a little bit better. Then, one morning, almost exactly a year after the attack, he shook me awake at 5 a.m. He was all excited. He’d dressed himself and made breakfast.

“Look,” he said, dragging me by the hand to prove he’d laid the table properly and poured cereal into his bowl. He’d even collected the newspaper from the doormat and laid it out for me. I had to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. My prayers were finally being answered.

A few hours later he peered out the window, watching other children heading to school. “How come I can’t go too?” he asked. I was delighted. Marshall was on the mend. I phoned his doctor with the news—I wanted to shout it to the world—and initially he was skeptical but agreed to run some more tests on Marshall in the morning. Excitedly I took Marshall in and he underwent some fresh electromyogram (EMG) and brainwave studies. His doctor couldn’t believe the improvement. He simply couldn’t explain it. I said that miracles never cease, and he agreed that Marshall’s recovery was indeed nothing short of a miracle. But he warned that another injury to Marshall’s head could kill him. So I bought Marshall a football helmet and made him wear it when he went outside to play. He hated it, but the other kids thought it was cool—for a while they all wanted one.

Marshall loved rollerblading, football, and baseball. I encouraged him to play, to make new friends. But he was still terribly shy around strangers. Then he joined the Boy Scouts and became tight pals with a lad called Ronnie. They were inseparable. Ronnie, often with his two younger brothers in tow, loved spending time with us. I filled the house with children.

Parents often said to me, “What are you doing to my child? He doesn’t want to come home!” I never understood why they said that. All I did was let the children play, help them with their homework, and cook them supper. We would also go bowling and roller-skating—only now I had become way too overprotective.

I’d always loved music. From the age of twelve I’d hung around recording studios with Bonnie and Theresa, getting excited over local bands. The radio was always on, and Marshall and I used to practice singing in front of the mirror using combs or hairbrushes as microphones.

The first concert I took Marshall to was the Talking Heads—their hit “Burning Down the House” was one of our favorites. Everyone was smoking a cigarette, and when someone passed a lit one to me, I took a drag. I started coughing and passed it on. I nearly passed out; the ground swam in front of me; I felt sick. I tried to take a step but couldn’t walk. The guy laughed when I asked what it was. He said it was pot, laced with an elephant tranquilizer. The show was almost over, and Marshall and I left. I wanted to crawl out, I felt so weird. A friend had to help me home.

That was the one and only time in my life I tried pot. It turned me off forever. Luckily, it didn’t put Marshall or me off of live concerts.

Next we saw Stevie Nicks. Marshall loved every second of the show. He stood just in front of me jiving, singing along to all her hits, including old Fleetwood Mac numbers such as “Rhiannon.” For someone who’d been unable to retain even the simplest of rhymes in his head after the attack, he’d bounced back like a champion.

My brother Todd had a guitar; a couple of my friends played keyboards. But Marshall wasn’t interested in musical instruments. He was always humming and bouncing around to music, right from an early age, whether it was on the car seat, on the sofa, or in his high chair. And when he was tired he would bounce himself to sleep, humming as he bounced.

As he got older, he always had a beat in his head. He’d play tapes on his boom box over and over, writing rhymes.

Marshall and I wrote poetry to each other. I’d work several hours to get something just right, but he always managed to dash off a few lines at the speed of light.

The disc jockey Kool Herc introduced the Jamaican tradition of “toasting”—firing off impromptu poetry over the top of reggae, funk, and disco beats—to inner-city New Yorkers in the 1970s. “Break-beat deejaying”—where the most danceable sections of funk songs are continually repeated—followed. The craze became known as hip-hop. It took a few more years to go mainstream, but Marshall caught on early.

If I asked Marshall what he wanted to do when he grew up, he’d just shrug. I thought he’d make an excellent auctioneer—he fired off rhyming lyrics so fast that no one could understand him. I worried because he was asthmatic, yet he rarely paused to come up for air.

For a while he wanted to be a scientist. He was fascinated by dinosaurs for years and had many books on the subject. He quizzed me constantly about where they had come from and why they had become extinct. Evolution intrigued him.

His other big love was Nintendo. He could beat all the other kids hands down.

Even my brother Todd, who adored Marshall and was always a father figure, constantly lectured me for spoiling him. He admitted he’d occasionally put Marshall in a headlock—when I wasn’t looking—for behaving badly over food. He didn’t hurt him; he just wanted to get his attention.

“Listen, sister,” Todd said. “When you let that kid have a whole pizza, eat the center, then just throw the rest away, that’s too much even for me.”

Todd was right: Marshall was forever taking one bite of a pancake or waffle before demanding something new to eat. But, after what he’d been through, I just wanted him to be happy. I could never be cross with him. I wanted him to have anything—everything—his heart desired.

Marshall’s recovery, after that first awful year, was rapid. But despite his initial excitement about returning to school, it quickly became a problem again. I refused to send him back to Dort Elementary, but every time I enrolled him at a new school, within days he demanded to leave. He only had to hint that he was being bullied or that a teacher didn’t like him, and I kept him out of school. I always believed Marshall, no questions asked. He seemed truly happy only when he was at home, drawing cartoon characters, reading comic books, or writing poems. Then, as soon as school was over for the day, his stomachache or whatever it was would miraculously disappear, and he’d want to go outside to play football or basketball. I called it playing possum, after the marsupial that pretends to be dead when fearing danger.

I watched Marshall constantly. I’d been overprotective before the attack, and now I became worse. I’d nearly lost him once. He wasn’t going to be beaten again. Marshall was always great at wrapping me around his little finger—he knew exactly how to play to me. So, of course, when he was upset at school, I sided with him. Every time he was bullied, I moved him. I never questioned him. I just wanted him to feel safe after what had happened to him. It’s fair to say he attended at least twenty different schools. I only wanted my son to know I would do anything to protect and please him, and allay his fears. The ghost of DeAngelo Bailey remained. It took Marshall a long time to get over his fear of kids who resembled him. The doctor said it was post-traumatic stress. Like Vietnam War veterans, he had flashbacks. Every time he saw someone who resembled Bailey, he panicked.

In the car, he would slide down the seat or even try to open the door and run if he thought he saw Bailey. I’d quickly pull over, grab him, and do everything I could to calm him down. Afterward he would remember nothing of it, as though he’d had a blackout.

Once he was walking along a low wall with his arms held out wide. A bigger kid came towards him, doing the same thing. Marshall tumbled off the wall, screaming.

“Mom, Mom, he’s going to get me,” he sobbed.

The other boy was upset, too. He couldn’t understand what had happened—he was just being friendly. But Marshall was hysterical, hyperventilating, gasping for breath.

As I cradled my son in my arms, I told him, “This awful thing happened to you, but God doesn’t want you to be frightened of black people. It could have been a white person, or a yellow or green one, who did this to you.”

I asked him if he’d like to go back to play with the boy, but he shook his head. I could see his fear. He wasn’t ready to do that yet.

The panic attacks continued. Every time a bigger kid who bore a passing resemblance to DeAngelo Bailey approached, Marshall froze. Then the tears would start to fall.

I sought out children his own age and invited them to come over to make sure he had lots of different friends. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a good or a bad child, only good or bad behavior. I told Marshall all races had good people and some badly behaved people like DeAngelo Bailey. Gradually, his fears subsided.

Fred and I got back together. Even though he had taken off when I needed him most, I forgave him. Nursing an injured child was hard enough for me, let alone Fred.

Fred agreed to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. I hoped he would learn why I got upset if anyone drank around Marshall. I was well aware that addiction was a disease that ran through my family.

I’d tried alcohol just once. It was Christmas Eve 1975, not long after I’d divorced Bruce. Todd was upset because our hard-drinking stepfather had refused his gift of whiskey. So he and I sat on the bathroom floor drinking it. I spat the first mouthful out, but over the course of the next few hours we somehow finished the bottle. Then I puked. I missed Christmas Day totally. Marshall got to spend the night with his Uncle Ronnie, playing with their gifts that we’d opened the night before. I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol since. Unfortunately, the men I attract like to drink.

In fairness, Fred did most of his drinking apart from me. He’d stop off for a couple martinis at his parents’ house on his way back from work. Or he’d take off to a bowling alley bar with friends. But it still bothered me, and getting him into AA was a step in the right direction.

We also decided to move back to Missouri. Marshall was unhappy at first, but soon his Uncle Ronnie was once again his best friend. They came home all excited once because they’d cut their arms, merged their blood, and made a pact to be blood brothers. They were both crazy about hip-hop. Our home resounded to the sounds of LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys.

One evening, just as it was getting dark, I was grilling hot dogs and hamburgers for supper when my half-sister Betti, two other women, and two guys stormed into my house. I was looking after my neighbor’s baby. They snatched her from my arms, tossed her onto some carpeting, then threw my food everywhere.

Betti went for me. I was on my way inside when someone grabbed me and cracked me over the head with a beer bottle. They dragged me across the kitchen by my hair and yanked me back outside. I yelled, but Marshall, in his room with a couple of friends, had his Nintendo turned up loud.

Betti screamed, “Bitch, you’re dead!” and I was dragged across the yard and onto the pavement beside the house.

She jumped on my chest and pummeled me, while the girls held me down. Even the guys joined in, kicking me with their cowboy boots. Then they tried to drag me into their car. I remember kicking out, screaming as loud as I could.

An old man, turning into our road in his car, saw in the light from his headlights what was going on. He fired a shotgun in the air to frighten them off. They ran and jumped in their car and backed up the hill. I thought they were going to try to run me over, but instead they sped off.

Marshall appeared as the car roared off. He picked up a handful of rocks and yelled, “Leave my mom alone!”

The man helped me into the house. I’d lost one of my sandals. My hair was in knots from the blood streaming down the back of my head. My white blouse had turned brown-red.