WHO IS DEMETRIUS DEWAYNE SMITH?

An Autobiography

 

As told by Demetrius Dewayne Smith

Edited and organized from original handwritten letters, 2024–2025

A Note on This Manuscript

Demetrius Dewayne Smith wrote this autobiography by hand, in letters, from death row in Texas. Each letter was sent to his editor and friend, who brought his words to the page with care and deep fidelity to his voice. The humor, warmth, hard-won wisdom, and tender self-reflection in these pages belong entirely to him.

The letters have been reorganized by theme rather than arrival order, so readers can follow the threads of his life — family, childhood, the streets, relationships, faith — as continuous stories rather than fragments. His voice has been preserved throughout. Nothing essential has been changed.

 

Chapter One: Who I Am

 

An Introduction

My name is Demetrius Dewayne Smith. I am an African American man, born and raised in Houston, Texas — specifically in a neighborhood on the north side called Acres Homes. It was a large, vibrant community, a real mix of Black, Latino, and white families living side by side. Looking back, I think that neighborhood shaped something in me that I carry to this day: a genuine love for all kinds of people.

As for what I look like — I have black hair, brown eyes, and brown skin. I stand about 5'9" and weigh around 228 pounds. I was born on May 13, 1977, which makes me 49 years old. I have never been married and have no children.

 

My Character

If I had to describe myself, I would say I am smart, witty, confident, and compassionate. I am spontaneous and adventurous — someone who genuinely loves life, nature, animals, and people. I will try almost anything at least once, just to know whether I enjoy it. I am also, without any shame, a mama's boy. And I consider that one of the best things about me.

I will confess one thing: I am completely, utterly terrified of heights. No airplanes. No helicopters. No hot air balloons — not ever. Heights do not just make me nervous; they paralyze me. I am not too proud to admit it.

I am also what I would call a people person at heart. I love all races and all cultures. I was raised that way, and it took root deep.

 

What I Love

Some of my favorite foods: pizza, enchiladas, spaghetti and meatballs, BBQ, shrimp fried rice, crab and sausage gumbo, fried chicken. I will eat almost anything as long as it tastes good. I grew up mostly on soul food, Mexican, and Chinese cuisine, and I honestly wish I had been more adventurous with other cultures' food while I had the chance.

Music has always fed me. As a teenager I was drawn to hardcore rap, but also R&B, blues, gospel, country, jazz, and instrumentals — wider taste than people might have expected. These days I am drawn to music that is soft, positive, and soothing. Something that quiets the noise.

My favorite color has always been blue. But lately I find myself drawn to blue-green, yellow-orange, purple, green, black, gray, and white. Make of that what you will.

 

Chapter Two: Family Roots

 

My Parents

My parents were Mr. Kenneth Smith and Mrs. Audrie Bell Smith, and they were the foundation of everything.

I recently lost them both. My father passed away on November 24, 2024, at the age of 76. My mother followed him on January 26, 2025 — her birthday month — at 74 years old. Losing them both within two months of each other is a grief I am still learning to carry. But I would rather carry it than have never had them at all.

 

My Siblings

I have three siblings. My oldest sister is Angela Dyer, 56. My oldest brother is Kendal Ray Smith, 54. My youngest brother is Deondrea Smith, 43. Together, the five of us are the Smith family — and that will never change.

 

My Mother: My Superhero

My mother was a devout Christian woman, strong in her faith long before any of us children were born. She never forced her beliefs on us, but she shared them with a quiet, steady confidence. She would say that God is love — that He created every human being equal, that He hates evil, and that He wants people to love one another and treat each other well.

Because of her, we were not raised to be prejudiced or racist. I grew up with friends of every background, and I am deeply grateful for that. It is one of the greatest gifts she gave me.

My mother worked minimum wage jobs at fast food restaurants for most of her life — bringing home around two hundred dollars every two weeks — because racism during her generation meant that better opportunities were simply closed to her, no matter how hard she worked. And she worked hard. She worked harder than anyone I have ever known.

When my father began struggling with drugs and alcohol, the financial weight of our family fell almost entirely on her shoulders. There were seasons of real hardship — candles burning in the house because the lights were off, Christmas mornings with no gifts under the tree, carrying jugs to a church or gas station just to get water, cold baths, a small wood heater in winter, sugar sandwiches and syrup sandwiches when that was all there was. We stayed with my Aunt Ada Lemons more than once while my mother saved enough to get us back into our own home. My Aunt Ada's love and generosity during those years made her one of the most special people in my life — she will always hold a place in my heart.

Through all of it, my mother never stopped believing that God would provide. And somehow, He always did. She is my superhero. She always will be.

 

My Father: A Real Character

My father was a complicated man, and I say that with love.

He grew up uneducated in a difficult household, and he carried wounds from that upbringing that eventually caught up with him. When I was around thirteen, he began drifting into heavy drug use and drinking, and it cost our family dearly. But I have never stopped seeing him as a good man — because he was.

He taught us to respect our elders, do our chores, work hard for what we wanted, and never steal. He never abused us. He told us to stay in school. He was, at his core, a man who wanted better for his children.

He was also — and I mean this with the deepest affection — a real character. He was funny, adventurous, and endlessly resourceful. He could cut grass, trim hedges, build flowerbeds that people in the neighborhood talked about for years. He could fix a car or frame a wall. He loved fishing and rabbit and raccoon hunting. He picked berries and pecans and different fruits to eat or sell. He kept animals. And on the nights when the mood struck him — especially if he had had a little something to drink — he would pick up his guitar or his harmonica and play.

I see so much of myself in him. The adventurousness, the humor, even the fear of heights. He had that too. I think about that and it makes me smile.

 

My Mother's Family — Twenty-One and Counting

My mother's side of the family had twenty-one siblings altogether. Yes, twenty-one. My grandfather was clearly a very enthusiastic man. What it meant practically was that I grew up with an enormous number of aunts, uncles, and cousins — more than I could ever fully know — along with extended kinfolk that seemed to stretch across half of Texas.

Every year we traveled to east Texas, to Jasper, for the Brooks Family reunion. The numbers there were staggering. I could never get through a reunion knowing everyone's name, let alone their story. But I loved every minute of it. Something about being surrounded by that many people who shared your blood, your food, your laughter — it filled something up that ordinary days could not.

 

My Father's Family

My father came from a family of six siblings — two sisters and four brothers. His parents never stayed together, and though I do not know the full story of how that affected him growing up, I suspect it left marks of its own.

My grandfather's name was Billy Smith. I have good memories of him. When we were around him, he made us feel genuinely loved, and that is not something a child forgets. My father's mother was Joyce York — sweet, kind, warm to us whenever we visited. Both of them smoked and drank, which was simply the way of things on that side of the family. Drugs and alcohol ran through my father's family like a current, and I think my dad picked up those habits the way children pick up most things — by watching the adults around him.

 

Faith Running Through the Family

My mother was a committed Christian woman from before I was ever born, raised by two believing parents who gave her a genuinely good upbringing. Her faith was not something she performed on Sundays and set aside the rest of the week. It was the operating system she ran on every single day.

And it got into me whether I was paying attention or not. There were times — more than a few — when people I considered friends tried to pull me toward something I knew was wrong. In those moments, I would hear my mother's voice in my head. Not a memory, exactly. More like a warning signal she had somehow planted deep enough that it survived everything. I did not always listen. But I always heard it. And the times I did listen, it kept me from choices I cannot afford to think about now.

I am grateful beyond words that she raised me the way she did. That was her gift to us. And it cost her nothing but love.

 

Chapter Three: Acres Homes — A Place Worth Knowing

 

The Neighborhood

Acres Homes is not just a neighborhood. It is a community with layers — and it deserves to be described properly.

The housing in Acres Homes is divided roughly by economic class: low, middle, and upper. In the lower-income sections, you find shotgun houses — long, narrow wooden homes sitting up on brick foundations, often with large front and back yards. There are brick homes scattered in, and some trailer homes too.

The name Acres Homes, I was told, came from the thousands of acres of pine trees that had to be cleared just to build the neighborhood. I cannot say for certain whether that is true, but I will tell you this — there are still tall pine trees standing all through Acres Homes today, along with patches of wooded land that remind you what was there before.

 

Animals, People, and Churches

Because some of those yards are large enough, people have built horse stables, cow pens, and chicken coops right there in the neighborhood. Animals and people, living close together. With the horses, the chicken coops, the cow stables, and the dogs running loose, a stranger passing through might easily mistake it for the country. I smile thinking about that, because nothing could be further from the truth — and yet, in the best possible way, nothing could feel more right about it either. That mix of urban and rural was just Acres Homes. It was its own thing entirely.

The people in that part of the neighborhood were, by and large, kindhearted. They looked out for one another. Mixed in among the houses you had small stores — most of them run by Chinese or Japanese owners who were always friendly and fair — along with clubs, motels, and apartment complexes. And churches. Lord, the churches. It seemed like there was a small congregation on every other block. For a neighborhood that struggled in a lot of ways, it held onto its faith.

 

Exploring It All

I loved all of it. To me, Acres Homes felt vast and full of possibility. As a kid and teenager, I used to ride my bike through every section I could find, genuinely excited to discover what was around the next corner. Sometimes stray dogs would come flying off porches after me and I would have to pedal hard to outrun them. Looking back, it makes me laugh. It was just part of the ride.

Beyond the bicycle, my great loves were go-carts and mini bikes. Those three things — my bike, my go-cart, my mini bike — were my freedom. I got good at fixing and maintaining them too, and I helped plenty of neighbors repair theirs over the years.

 

Chapter Four: Growing Up — The Best Parts

 

The First Day of School

My mother had been preparing us for school long before the day arrived. She would say it with genuine excitement — I cannot wait until you all are old enough to start going! — and she made it sound like the most wonderful thing imaginable. By the time my turn came, I was ready. Happy, even. I told my siblings about it like I was going somewhere they could not.

We drove to the school together. I had my sack lunch. We went to the front office to get enrolled, and then a staff member walked us down to my classroom. My mother knocked on the door. The woman who opened it was a beautiful African American teacher with a smile so wide and warm it filled the whole doorframe. She shook my mother's hand, bent down to greet me, and led us both inside.

Everything was fine — right up until my mother tried to leave. I followed her to the door without even thinking about it. She turned around and looked at me: This is school. You have to stay. I will be back after work.

What followed was not my finest hour. The moment she stepped out of that classroom I cried as though the world had ended. Loud, full, completely committed tears. Then a little Black girl in that classroom walked up to me. She stood there with a toy extended in her hand, steady and patient. She told me not to cry. She told me to come play with her. She stayed right there until I ran out of tears.

I looked at her. She was not crying. She was calm and present and kind, and something in me shifted. I thought: she is a girl and she is not even crying. I have to be stronger than this. I wiped my face. I reached out and took the toy. We played together, and the world started to look manageable again.

When my mother came back at the end of the day, I ran toward her and jumped into her arms. She kissed me and asked how my first day went. She told me she was proud of me. She thanked me for being a strong boy. After that first day, I never had another problem going to school. Not once.

 

School Days — Discipline, Candy, and Stickers

After that first day, I never had another problem walking through those school doors. I loved school — truly and completely. The talent shows, the plays, the Christmas performances, gym class, computer class, music class. I loved all of it. And I understood something even then, in my child's way: school was a place where you could keep learning who you were.

My mother made sure I paid attention. During my third and fourth grade years, she quietly arranged with my teachers that I could receive paddle pops — disciplinary swats on the backside, up to three, for misbehaving in class. Back then, a parent could authorize this, and mine did. I did not appreciate it at the time. But looking back, I am grateful. She knew me. She knew I could be hardheaded, and she wanted my education badly enough to make sure I stayed in line even when she was not in the room. It worked. My behavior improved. My focus improved. That was her doing.

There were gentler rewards too. Our reading teacher gave out chocolates, hard candies, and scented stickers whenever we paid attention and did well. Some of those stickers had a beautiful fragrance, and we would stick them on our shirts, our lunch kits, our books — even our bikes at home. Those small rewards were the highlight of the school day. It is funny how much a sticker can mean to a child who has earned it.

Reading class had its own pressure. We took turns reading aloud, each student picking up from where the last one left off. If the teacher called on you and you were lost — daydreaming instead of following along — she would send you to stand outside the door. The whole class would go wide-eyed. Some students would quietly smirk, until the teacher caught them and they found themselves in trouble too. It kept everyone sharp.

 

The Morning Everything Changed — The Trailer Fire

Before we lived in the house in Acres Homes I remember most, we lived in a long white trailer — three bedrooms, the three boys sharing one room, my sister in her own, my parents in theirs. I was around four or five years old. I remember it as a good place, the way young children remember their first home: simply, and with warmth.

I also remember the morning I burned it down.

We were going through a stretch without electricity, which meant candles burning throughout the house for light. My mother was strict about this: every morning before school, she told my older siblings to blow out any candles in their rooms before they left, and to keep lighters and matches away from me and Deondrea. She understood exactly what a small boy and an open flame could mean.

The morning routine was the same every day. Around six-thirty or seven, my mother got my older siblings up and ready for school. They caught their bus. She either rested a little longer or started getting ready for her own job, which did not start until around ten. On this particular morning, Kendal left for school without blowing out a small red candle sitting on top of our wooden clothes dresser.

I woke up and saw it.

I lay on my back for a while just watching it — the way the flame moved, dancing and shifting, throwing light across the ceiling. I had never seen anything so beautiful in my young life. It was hypnotic. Alive. I could not stop looking at it.

Then, the way a child's mind works, I started thinking about how to reach it. I was too short to reach the top of the dresser on my own. But there was an old wooden desk chair in the room. I climbed out of bed and pushed that chair with everything I had. I got it next to the dresser, climbed up, stood straight, stretched onto my tiptoes. The candle was near the edge. I was so close.

I reached for it — and knocked it into the open top drawer, straight onto a pile of shirts.

I froze. The candle was lying on its side, flame touching fabric. I tried to reach it, tried to fix what I had done, but my arms were not long enough and the drawer was filling with heat and smoke faster than I could think.

 

The Fire — What Happened Next

As the smoke thickened, my first thought was water. I climbed down from the chair, woke Deondrea, and told him to help me put out the fire. Then I ran to our bathroom to find a cup. But before I could do anything there, I ran to my mother's bedroom instead.

She was asleep. We had a rule in our house — you did not wake my mother during her sleeping hours unless it was truly important. I stood there for a moment, that rule pushing against the fear rising in my chest. The fear won. I pressed against her and said, Mama! Mama!! Mama!!! Something's popping and burning!

She rolled over and told me to go back to sleep. Then she closed her eyes.

I slapped her face.

I did not care what happened to me after that. I needed her out of that bed. She opened her eyes — frustrated, half-awake — and said, What, boy? What? WHAT? And I said it again: something's popping and burning in our room. She looked up. She saw the smoke drifting through the air above her.

She was out of that bed in an instant.

When she reached the door of our bedroom, I heard her say, Oh my God. The dresser was fully ablaze. She ran to the kitchen, filled an empty Clorox jug with water, and ran back to throw it on the flames. It did not help. Every time the water hit the fire, the blaze seemed to grow larger. She threw two or three jugs' worth and nothing changed.

She told me and Deondrea to get out of the house and stand on the front porch. Then she went back inside to grab whatever she could — important papers, photographs, what mattered most. She carried armfuls out and set them on the ground away from the house. Then she ran to our neighbor's door to call the fire department, and called my grandmother to come get us, since my father had the only vehicle and was at work.

We stood in the street in front of our house and watched it burn from the inside.

I was devastated. I was ashamed. I was crying, telling my mother how sorry I was. And she — being exactly who she was — kept telling me it was not my fault. She was furious with Kendal for leaving that candle burning. She held me and Deondrea close while we waited.

 

The Fire Truck, My Grandmother, and What Was Left

The fire truck sirens were the loudest sound I had ever heard that close — like a freight train bearing down on you, bold and intimidating and impossible to ignore. My mother held us both close through all of it, her arms around me and Deondrea while the firefighters worked. I could see the emotions cycling across her face: frustration, hurt, tears, relief, gratitude. A whole storm of feelings, all at once.

She was grateful. That was the thing that came through clearest. She knew that material things could be replaced. She knew that lives could not. Whatever we had lost in that fire, she had gotten her children out. And she held onto that.

My grandmother pulled up not long after. She hugged and kissed us all, helped load what my mother had salvaged into her car, and took us to her house. As we drove away, my mother told her everything that had happened. My grandmother said, as my mother already had, that this was not my fault.

I was still ashamed. I was still traumatized. I cried a little more on the way.

The next day, we drove back to see what remained. The trailer had burned down to its iron foundation. The wheels underneath were scorched. My mother walked through the ruins looking for anything salvageable — photos, clothes, shoes, kitchen things. She found a few items the firefighters' water had preserved. We were grateful for every one of them.

The smell of char hung in the air around that foundation for a long time after. As long as I live, I will not forget it.

We stayed with my grandmother until my mother could save enough money for a new home. I thank God for my grandmother every time I think of it. She was there when we needed her — just like my Aunt Ada Lemons had been before. The women in my family had a way of being exactly who you needed them to be.

 

The Car Crash — Kendal Behind the Wheel

When I was around nine or ten years old, we were living for a stretch in Huntsville, Texas — my father's hometown. My mother had gone to Houston for a short visit with family, which was not unusual, though she never liked being away from us for long. She did not entirely trust leaving us in my father's care, and with good reason.

That evening, my father was drinking. By the time night settled in, he was well past the point of being in charge of anything. We were all at his mother's house, and my father was loud and sloppy and harmless in the way a very drunk man sometimes is. Which was when my oldest brother Kendal had an idea.

We had one vehicle — a root beer brown Monte Carlo, my mother's car, bought from our landlord Ms. Sally. Kendal decided he was going to steal the keys from my father's pocket while he was drunk, and take me and our cousin Robert Earl Massey for a ride around the neighborhood.

When he told me the plan, I had a bad feeling immediately. Are you sure you know how to drive? I asked. He assured me and Robert that he absolutely did. And because I was a child and children believe in fun more than caution, I let myself imagine the good time we might have, and I got in the car.

They slipped the keys out of my father's pocket while he was distracted — one of them keeping him talking, the other reaching in from behind. My father tried to resist but was too drunk to manage it. Kendal rejoiced like he had won something. Then he looked at me and Robert and said, Let's go.

We drove around the neighborhood for about thirty minutes. Then Kendal spotted some friends of his in a pickup truck, rolled down the window to talk. His friends asked whose car he was in. He told them it was his, then laughed and admitted it was his mother's. Then they said: you want to race?

I started telling Kendal immediately not to do it. Robert did too. But Kendal's pride had been activated and there was no reaching him. He said yes.

We followed them to the main street. I kept telling him there was a sharp right-hand curve coming up. He kept telling me he knew. We lined up side by side. They counted down.

We pulled ahead immediately — that Monte Carlo had real power under the hood. But Kendal was going too fast, and when he tried to slow down for the curve, the car went out from under him. I remember the tires screaming against the pavement. I remember the world spinning around me, the car going in circles — two, three times — before we slammed hard into a steep ditch. Wham.

My head hit the door window. I had a swollen bump on the side of my head. I was out of the car first, climbing through the window before I even fully understood what had happened. Kendal and Robert came out behind me.

I stood in the street and looked at my mother's car. It was sitting in the ditch in the shape of a V.

I looked at Kendal. I said, Fool. Mama is going to kill you. I tried to tell you not to race. Look at her car. You totaled it. You could have killed all of us.

Robert had a large knot rising from the center of his forehead. He was just as furious as I was.

And then Kendal's friends — the ones who had challenged him to the race — came back around to see what happened. They laughed at us. Then they drove away and did not come back.

Kendal begged me and Robert not to say anything. I told him straight: it was a rap. My mother was going to hear every single detail.

When she came back from Houston, she did.

 

A Childhood Full of Adventure

Amid all the difficulty, there was real joy too — and I want to make sure I give it its proper place.

We built clubhouses out of cardboard boxes. We breakdanced. We jumped rope. We played cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. We made homemade bows and arrows and slingshots, and yes — we absolutely used them on each other in neighborhood wars that felt, to a ten-year-old, like genuine combat. We had pogo stick contests and bicycle races, homemade go-cart competitions and roller skating races.

We played every sport — volleyball, football, basketball, dodgeball, baseball. We had swimming contests and dance contests. We chased each other with water guns for hours. We even raced our dogs once in a while, which did not always go according to plan.

When the rain came, we went crayfishing. We caught turtles and frogs to play with. We hunted birds with BB guns — robins, doves, pigeons, squirrels, rabbits. And on more than one occasion, when the bayou flooded after a hard rain, we jumped straight in to swim. Sometimes we threw our dogs in with us.

Some of my happiest memories involve going out to pick things — berries, pecans, pears, plums, apples, oranges — whatever the season offered. And my mother's garden was its own kind of joy. She grew watermelons, carrots, cantaloupes, cucumbers, tomatoes. I used to help her plant seeds and pull weeds, and I loved every minute of it.

 

My Father's Gift — The Country Side of Me

My father was from Huntsville, Texas — a small country town — and that background lived in him every single day. He was an extreme wildlife and nature lover, genuinely at home outdoors in a way most people never are. From him I inherited my country side, though I grew up in the city. He taught me how to fish properly, how to hunt, how to set traps for raccoon and other forest animals. He introduced me to a way of reading the natural world that I have never lost.

Every other weekend, it seemed, we were loading up and heading out to a creek, a pond, or a lake to fish. Catfish, bass, sun perch, carp — whatever was biting. And without fail, the weekend ended with a fish fry. Those fish fries are some of the warmest memories I carry.

 

Mama's Daily Life — And Ours Alongside Her

My mother was never still. Even when she was not at her job, she was moving — raking leaves, scrubbing floors, tending to the endless business of keeping a household together. Sometimes she would call me and Deondrea outside to help bag up the leaves she had raked. And of course, before we did a single useful thing, we would both take a running start and dive straight into the pile. My mother would let it go for a moment, then her voice would shift — and we would get to work.

She taught me to sweep, to mop, to make a bed. She showed me more about how to move through the world than anyone else, and she did it without fanfare, just by showing up every single day.

There is one memory I return to more than almost any other: my mother cleaning out my ears. I know how that sounds. But if you have never laid your head sideways across your mother's lap while she worked gently with a Q-tip, I am not sure I can fully explain what it meant. It was the most peaceful feeling in the world — completely safe, completely cared for. She would finish one ear and say turn your head, and I would, and I never wanted it to end.

 

The Nintendo — The Happiest Day of My Childhood

I believe with everything in me that what I am about to describe was the happiest single day of my entire childhood.

I was around eleven or twelve years old. Video games were not just a hobby for me — they were a way of life. When I was younger, my mother had managed to buy us an Atari game console, and me and my siblings had played it from sunrise to sunset. But then something happened that changed everything: they released the Nintendo.

I cannot fully explain what the Nintendo meant to a child like me in that moment. It was not just a game system. It was a vision of something elevated, something better, something that existed just beyond reach. The price tag when it first came out was somewhere around three or four hundred dollars. We both knew what that meant.

I watched every commercial. I searched through my mother's Houston newspapers for photographs of it, and when I found them I cut them out and taped them to my bedroom wall. I admired that Nintendo the way other kids admired movie stars. And my mother watched all of this with quiet attention, the way she always did.

Since we could not afford one yet, me, my brothers, and my cousin started making weekly pilgrimages to Walmart, where they had a Nintendo set up that anyone could play for free. Every Friday, Saturday, Sunday — we were there. I got genuinely good at Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt. It was a kind of joy, even if it was borrowed.

Then one day, my mother sat me and Deondrea down and made us an offer. If we behaved at school and brought home good grades, she would try to buy us a Nintendo. She had my complete, undivided, fully committed attention from that moment forward. I told Deondrea the same thing I told myself: we were going to earn this. We did. We brought home good report cards. And then we waited.

One afternoon, me and Deondrea were watching cartoons after school when our mother came home from work with a carload of groceries. She called us to help unload. The last item I brought in was a large box covered in a brown paper grocery bag, taped shut. I set it on the table and started heading back toward the television, assuming it was a fan or some small appliance.

My mother called me back. She told me to open the bag.

I started pulling at the tape and tearing the paper from the top. The box beneath was dark, mostly black. I kept tearing. And then the logo appeared.

The moment I saw what it was, my eyes went wide as dinner plates. My heart launched itself. I felt something lift off inside my chest — pure, uncut joy, the kind a child feels when the thing they have wanted more than anything in the world is suddenly, actually, really there.

I said Mama! — three times at least, each one louder than the last. I ran to her and squeezed her with everything I had. I kissed her. I could not stop smiling. I think it may have been the happiest she had ever seen me.

Deondrea matched every bit of my excitement. We set that Nintendo up in the living room and played from sunup to sundown — with my mother enforcing a nine o'clock curfew on school nights. On weekends, we gave it everything we had. We even made ourselves take breaks to let it cool down, because we were terrified of blowing it out.

It was the happiest day of my childhood. I mean that completely.

 

Siblings — Love, Loyalty, and a Little Chaos

My sister Angela stepped into her oldest-sibling role with real responsibility. When my mother was at work, Angie kept watch over me and Deondrea. She never abused that authority. She was a good and steady presence.

My oldest brother Kendal Ray was a different kind of story. He had a bully streak in him, and when it came out it was aimed at me and Deondrea. His bullying had a particular cruelty — he would hold me down and let Deondrea punch on me, pitting us against each other. Every time it happened, I told my mother. Every time, she came down on him hard enough that he stopped — for a while. Those episodes left a residue between Kendal and me that never fully washed away. I have always known him to be stubborn, selfish, and self-centered in ways that were sometimes hard to understand and harder to accept.

Deondrea and I were close — genuinely close — for most of our early years. But as we moved into our teens, he too began showing a similar streak. What I can say without any doubt is this: I have shown more love, care, and compassion toward my brothers than they have shown toward me. I say that not to place myself above anyone. I say it simply because it is true, and this is my story, and I owe it honesty.

 

Chapter Five: Friends, Cousins, and Community

 

Homeboys, Not Gang Members

Growing up in Acres Homes, we did not have the kind of gang culture you might imagine. The Crips and Bloods were not part of my world. There were a few local Latino gangs around, but the landscape I grew up in was shaped more by drug dealers, pimps, players, and hustlers than by organized gang activity.

What we had was something different — neighborhood loyalty. If you were from Acres Homes, you were one of us. We called ourselves homeboys, a neighborhood posse. If someone tried to harm you at school or at a party, we had your back. We believed in fair fights — one on one, fists only, no weapons. We were not out looking for trouble.

I never joined a gang, and my reasons were my own. I could not see myself being obligated to follow someone else's orders, especially when those orders might cost me my life or my freedom. If I am going to get into trouble, it is going to be because of my own choices — not somebody else's commands.

But I want to say clearly — I do not judge anyone who has been in a gang. Some people join because they never had a family that made them feel loved or safe. Some grow up in households where gang life is the only life they have ever seen. Some men join prison gangs out of genuine fear for their lives. The reasons are as varied as the people living them. You cannot judge a person's choices until you understand their story.

 

Ron Miles — A Cousin Worth Knowing

Among all my cousins, Ron Miles holds a particular place in my memory. Ron was an only child, the son of my Aunt Dale Miles — my mother's sister — a sharp, educated woman who always set her sights high and worked toward them quietly and consistently.

Ron still had his father in his life growing up, even though his parents were separated. I met his dad, Lee, a few times — a warm, easygoing man whose smile reached you before his handshake did. Whenever Ron brought me around, Lee made sure we had money in our pockets to enjoy ourselves.

Ron always had a plan for himself. He wanted to be an engineer. He loved the water and was drawn to underwater welding. He was serious about those dreams in a way that a lot of teenagers are not. And he was serious about me too — he pushed me, in his quiet way, to stay in school, to get out of the streets, to make something of myself.

Aunt Dale eventually moved her family to an upscale, predominantly white neighborhood, deliberately steering Ron away from the streets she could see pulling at young men all around. She was not entirely wrong about the influences in Acres Homes. I can admit that I was not always the best influence on Ron, even while I genuinely encouraged him to pursue his future.

Ron never went to jail or prison. Not once, not ever. And I thank God for that with everything in me.

As Ron's life was opening up — moving toward college, toward the future his mother had built for him — he sat me down one day and told me something that stopped me cold. He said his mother had moved him away from Acres Homes to protect him from drugs, but what she did not know was that his new friends had kilos of cocaine. Whatever you want, they have it in abundance. He told me about nights with powdered cocaine on tables, acid, pills — a level of drug activity that made what I was doing look, in his words, like child's play. The geography had changed. The danger had not.

 

The Landers Cousins

By the time I was around twenty-three, I had grown tired of the revolving door of so-called friends. Some had moved away. Some had stolen from me or lied about me. I started pulling back from people who had shown me they were not who I thought they were.

What filled that space was family — specifically, my cousins from Louisiana. The Landers family. There were seven of them altogether: Jimmy, Katrina, Edward, Rodney, Tiffany, Dominique, and Tymeeka Landers. I loved every one. I was the oldest in the group whenever we were all together, and the years I spent around the Landers cousins are some of the best memories of my adult life. They were my people.

 

Chapter Six: The Road I Took

 

How It Started

I want to be honest about something: I knew the risks before I ever sold my first rock.

Drug dealing is a dangerous business in every direction. You watch for police constantly. You watch for other dealers who might rob you. You get burned by fake product or passed counterfeit money. It is like a game of Russian roulette. I understood all of that going in.

I dropped out of school in the ninth grade. By that point, our family's financial struggles had been grinding on for years, and I was a teenager who was tired — tired of wearing clothes that other kids mocked, tired of watching my mother struggle, tired of feeling like the world had already decided what I was worth. I let other people's voices get inside my head.

My oldest brother Kendal had already started selling drugs himself. He was more influence in the wrong direction than guidance toward the right one. He never pulled me aside and said, stay in school, little brother — these streets will cost you more than they give. He did not do that. And I wished, for a long time, that he had.

So I started selling crack cocaine. My intention was never to get rich. It was never a career choice. I wanted to make enough money to help my mother, to buy decent clothes, to stop feeling invisible. I take full responsibility for that choice. I owned it then, and I own it now.

 

What My Mother Said

I was about seventeen when my mother found out. She did not scream. She did not throw me out. But she made herself absolutely clear: no drugs in her house, ever — and if she found any, I was gone. She stopped accepting my money after that. I had been telling her it came from work. Once she knew the truth, she wanted no part of it, not a single dollar. Her integrity was not for sale, even when she was struggling to keep the lights on.

 

The Honest Truth

The honest truth about my time selling drugs is this: I was never good at it. I was never a kingpin, never a high roller. I was a teenager making a few hundred dollars and blowing it almost immediately, telling myself I could always make more. I was wrong, and I was foolish, and I was wasting my life — I know that now.

What happened next was like dominoes falling. My youngest brother Deondrea eventually followed a similar path. The three of us put burdens on our mother that no woman should have to carry. She bore them anyway. And I thank God she had the strength to endure.

 

January 30, 1995

I was arrested for selling crack cocaine on January 30, 1995. On February 28, 1995, I signed for a five-year sentence. I was devastated. There is no other word for it. Everything shifted in a single moment, the way it does when a door closes and you hear the lock turn.

I was released in June 1998. I came home hoping to pick up where things had left off. Some connections held. Many did not. And the streets were still there, still pulling.

I have been incarcerated since March 24, 2005. I will speak more about those years in the pages that follow.

 

Chapter Seven: Learning to Be a Man

 

What Nobody Taught Us

My oldest brother Kendal had his own curriculum on women, which consisted almost entirely of how to get a woman into bed. How to treat her afterward — how to treat her at all — was never part of the lesson. My father never sat us down to talk about women either. The one thing he gave us on that subject was his example with our mother: he loved her, he respected her, and we could see that. It was not nothing.

I think I understand now why neither of them went deeper than that. My father grew up with parents who were largely separated. You can only pass on what was passed to you. I do not blame him for the gaps. I am just grateful I eventually found other ways to fill them.

 

Becoming a Student

I watched friends' fathers. I watched relatives. I found men around me who treated their women with genuine love and respect, and I studied them the way I should have been studying in school. And then the women themselves taught me — my mother most of all, but others too, over the years. I made a conscious decision to become a student rather than just a participant.

To every man reading this: listen to your woman. Learn what she likes, what she needs, how she wants to be treated — and then give her that, not what is convenient for you. A woman who feels truly heard will give you everything. A woman who feels invisible will eventually disappear. And to all the ladies — I believe you just said Amen.

 

The Gift of Deep Questions

As a child and teenager, I was not someone who asked deep questions. I did not ask my friends how things were at home, where their parents were from, what their childhoods actually felt like from the inside. Part of that was simply being young. When you are a kid, playing is the whole world.

But I see now what that habit cost me. All those years with friends and cousins and people I cared about, and I was only ever skimming the surface of who they actually were. I knew their laughter and their moves. I did not always know their pain. That recognition is one I carry with me now — a reminder to go deeper, to ask the real questions, to let people know they are worth knowing fully.

 

What Makes Us Beautiful

Human beings are relational creatures. We are built to connect. We can talk to each other, share our dreams and our fears, our hurt and our joy. We can love each other. We can carry each other in hard seasons. We can learn from each other in ways that no book or classroom can replicate. That capacity — the simple, extraordinary ability to sit with another person and say tell me your story — is one of the most beautiful things about being alive.

 

Our Actions and Their Ripple Effect

I started thinking seriously about how our actions affect others during my first incarceration, beginning in January 1995. Prison has a way of slowing time down until there is nothing left to do but think — and on more than a few occasions, I found myself in conversations with other men that went somewhere real and deep.

Some of those men told me something I have never forgotten. They said that as adults, especially adults who grew up in the streets, we become almost entirely focused on survival. When you grow up in a bad neighborhood, you are not waking up each morning asking yourself how your choices might ripple out and hurt the people who love you. You are asking how you are going to get through the day. That is the only math that makes sense in survival mode.

I understood that. I had lived it. But sitting inside those walls, with nothing but time and reflection, I started to see what I had not been able to see before — that even in survival mode, every choice I made sent a wave outward. Every arrest, every absence, every broken promise landed somewhere. It landed on my mother. It landed on the people who had invested something in me. And they had not asked to receive it.

I also learned something equally important: people grieve differently. You cannot tell someone to get over their pain. You cannot rush anyone through their grief or set a timeline for when they should be healed. What you can do is walk alongside them with patience and love, make room for their process, and trust that they will find their way through. That lesson has stayed with me. It is one of the few gifts incarceration gave me.

 

My Mother's Pain — What I Finally Understood

When I turned my thoughts toward my mother and sat with what me and my brothers had put her through, the regret came heavy.

She had given everything she had to raise us right. She had carried our family through poverty, through my father's addiction, through seasons without lights or water or food. She had done all of that on faith and love and sheer determination. And then her boys had turned around and handed her a different kind of suffering — the kind that comes from watching someone you raised make choices you spent your whole life warning them against.

I told her I was sorry. More than once. She forgave me — all of us — without hesitation, because that is who she was. Her faith made room for it. Her love required it. But forgiveness does not erase the pain, and I knew that. I did not want it erased. I wanted to carry it honestly, the way it deserved to be carried.

I thank God for bringing my family through every storm. And I thank my mother, who never stopped loving us even when we gave her every reason to.

 

What I Believe

I believe in mercy and grace. I believe in love, forgiveness, compassion, care, and support. I believe in rehabilitation and redemption. I believe that most people can really change if they want to — and I say that specifically about people who are sound in mind and have the capacity to choose differently.

I do not think we should throw anyone away for a mistake. I believe in appropriate consequences for harmful actions. But I do not believe in the death penalty. I believe that human life — every human life — holds value that punishment cannot erase and that no court should have the final word on.

✦ Editor's Note: Demetrius — this is one of the most important passages in the book. You have arrived at this belief through lived experience, not theory. Can you go deeper here? What do you believe rehabilitation actually looks like? Have you seen it happen in the men around you? And when you say you do not believe in the death penalty — what do you believe should happen instead? Your readers will want to understand not just what you are against, but what you are for. This could become one of the most powerful sections of the entire autobiography.

 

Chapter Eight: Twenty Years In — What I Have Learned

 

Who Shows Up

Being locked away from the world teaches you things about people that you cannot learn any other way. You find out very quickly who actually loves you. You see whose letters come and whose do not. You learn whose promises are solid and whose dissolve the moment the visit is over and they step back into their lives.

Since my incarceration on March 24, 2005, I have not had real, consistent support from my siblings or most of my relatives. I have written them what feels like millions of letters. What I have received in return has been, for the most part, false hopes and broken promises. My sister Angela came to visit me once, alongside my mother. She has sent a little money a few times. That is the sum of it.

I am not angry. I want to say that clearly. But I will not pretend it does not hurt, because when I let myself think about it, the disappointment settles in heavy.

 

Strangers Who Chose Me

Here is what still catches me off guard sometimes: the people who have shown me the most consistent love and support during these twenty years have not been family. They have been strangers. People with no obligation to me whatsoever, who chose me anyway. I do not say that with bitterness. I say it with genuine wonder.

I want anyone reading this to know: whoever chooses to come into my life and show me kindness — whether it is a letter, a photograph, a few dollars, a kind word — they will be received with everything I have. Love, respect, loyalty, care. That is not a sentiment. That is a promise.

 

What I Have Learned About People

People are not always who you think they are. And the gap between the love you feel for someone and the love they are able or willing to return can be vast.

We talk about blood as though it guarantees something. Family as though the word itself is a promise. But if you have lived long enough and paid attention, you already know that the bond of blood does not protect you from betrayal, neglect, or abandonment. I am not saying this to be dark. I am saying it because understanding it freed me. When I stopped expecting people to love me the way I loved them, I stopped being destroyed every time they fell short.

People are people. That is not a resignation. That is wisdom, slowly and sometimes painfully earned.

 

A Prayer

But I will tell you what I still carry, quietly, every day: a prayer. I pray that God would move someone — anyone — to show me a measure of love and support in this place. I have learned not to demand it, not to expect it, not to keep score. But I still hope for it. That hope has never left me.

And I thank God for the people He has sent. More than they may ever know.

 

 

 

— To be continued —

Letters 30 and beyond will be added as they arrive.