The Good Food Revolution: Growing Healthy Food, People, and Communities by Will Allen & Charles Wilson

Author:Will Allen & Charles Wilson [Allen, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101577882
Publisher: Gotham Books
Published: 2013-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

As Karen came to trust me, she told me that she had divided her past and present life into stages: the older men stage, the beating stage, the drugs stage, the fire stage, the Will’s Roadside stage.

The older men stage began at age thirteen, when a member of her extended stepfamily, who was thirty-one, came up behind her in his sailor’s uniform at her great-aunt’s house and told her she shouldn’t have her comb like that, sticking out of the back of her hair, and pressed his whole body up against her back.

She loved him. She felt their age difference was okay because when you flipped the numbers 1 and 3 around, they were the same. He got what he could get out of her and then left.

She moved from Milwaukee while still thirteen to live with grandparents in Detroit. Her grandmother was a maid for Warren and Nancy Zide, a wealthy couple who owned movie theaters in Detroit. Karen began to babysit for their son Warren Jr., who later in his life would go on to produce the American Pie movies. The Zides had a screening room in their house with a real film projector, and sometimes when Warren Jr. was sleeping, Karen turned it on and dreamed that she was a director watching the film she had made.

The reality of her life was different than a Hollywood movie. Her mother had died when she was five, her father was not a consistent support, and she always needed to make her own money. She had started on a paper route at eleven, and then a job at McDonald’s on 8 Mile Road in Detroit when she was fifteen, handling the fries and shakes and eventually moving up to the cash register and becoming a crew leader.

At sixteen, she decided to move out of her grandparents’ home and to share a place with a single mom from her job at McDonald’s. She added a job as a waitress at a joint called Burgers&Beans. Holding down two jobs, exhausted, still in high school, she’d often come home crying at nights. It was then that her roommate introduced her to a reverend at a missionary Baptist church that operated out of a one-story, windowless building in downtown Detroit. The reverend and his wife agreed to take Karen into their home, rent free.

That summer, before Karen’s senior year, the reverend called Karen on the phone while she was at her job at McDonald’s. He told her he could drive by and pick her up from her job so that she would not have to take the bus. By this point, Karen was calling the reverend “Daddy.” She felt like he was more her father than her real one.

When the reverend picked her up at the restaurant that day, several other boys from church were in the car, and Karen sat on the middle partition between a boy in the passenger seat and the reverend. She had changed out of her McDonald’s uniform, and she was wearing shorts.

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