To Ena, Irvin,
Christopher, Sebastian, Joseph, Emily and Karron
CONTENTS
PART TWO: APPLY THE PHILOSOPHY
7 Hate me, but don’t Disrespect Me
PART THREE: ACQUIRE THE FINANCIAL SECURITY
14 Destroying the Destroyer . . . Finally
23 A Sweet Tooth and Swollen Eyes
Mandela
To whoever it may concern: There isn’t any bigger slavery than the slavery of compromise and acceptance of all the wrongs perpetrated against the African and Africa.
I never thought thoughts to make me otherwise than what I am, so my obliviousness to what you have been taught to think I should be is a statement of my humanity. As a footnote to that, it is a fact that human character is independent of colour and creed.
‘Ice cream, jelly and a punch in the belly.’ Dorothy used to say this to me every time I went round to her house. She was a very old, German Jewish lady, aged 93, whom my mother worked for as a live-in nurse in New York. I was only 19, negotiating my way through life in one of the toughest cities in the world. I had been sent to the Big Apple to distract me from the life of delinquency that threatened to pull me under back in England.
I loved Dorothy; she used to call me ‘sonny boy’. She accepted me. She was wheelchair-bound and I used to pick her up to put her into bed. I would sit and talk to her while my mother, a kind and extremely generous woman, busied herself. The house was crammed full of nostalgic bric-a-brac from over the years. There was also money lying around.
In those days, I never had a penny, so I started to take $20 bills from Dorothy’s room. This went on for about two years and added up to over $2000. I knew it was wrong, but I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that Dorothy wasn’t using the money and my mother didn’t notice.
There are certain things you do in your life that you regret but, if you put them right, you feel so much better. I knew I had to give that money back, especially when it became clear Dorothy was becoming progressively more fragile. By now, my fledgling boxing career had progressed quite nicely and I was taking bouts in England, flying back and forth between Brighton and New York. At that point, I was earning a small weekly allowance