Rabbit out the Trap

“Even though I came up in the hood, I dreamed of a different life. My fantasy came straight off TV, from my favorite show, Leave It to Beaver. You probably thought I was going to say Good Times, but I didn’t need to watch TV to see black folks struggling. The Struggle was all around me.”—Rabbit

I first saw stand-up comedian Ms. Pat in 2017 on one of my favorite podcasts, Your Mom’s House, hosted by comedians and married couple, Tom Segura and Christina P. They discussed her memoir, Rabbit, a book she completed with writer Jeannine Amber, who did a fantastic job transcribing her life. Listening to the podcast, I was distressed by the life Ms. Pat had growing up in the 80’s in Decatur, Georgia, during the crack epidemic. I was flabbergasted that she’d had two children by the time she was fifteen with her boyfriend who was eight years older than her, twenty-one; she dropped out of the eighth grade to work and feed her babies; and she was in jail by the time she was sixteen for selling crack. For her entire childhood, she struggled to survive. Writing Rabbit with Amber, sharing her stories with her for the book, was the first time anyone told Ms. Pat that the man she had children with (his name is Derrick in the book) was a pedophile and she needed to stop protecting him. He, along with her alcoholic mother, abused her and didn’t care to protect her. Ms. Pat pointed out that Derrick signed her children’s birth certificates, which require an ID, and no one at the hospital cared enough to report him. Hearing Ms. Pat speaking candidly about the crazy circumstances of her childhood—and laughing—made me fall in love with her. After that podcast, I knew I had to read the book and I followed her on other podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience and Joey Diaz’s The Church of What’s Happening Now. Even Charlamagne tha God got a kick out of her on The Breakfast Club. She was special and her positivity and ability to turn her life around despite the odds taught me, while reading Rabbit, that we can’t use our environment as an excuse to fail or remain stuck. If Ms. Pat—whose nickname as a child was Rabbit because she ate a lot of carrots—can make it out of the trap, I thought as I finished the book, then we have no reason to think we can’t make it out of whatever trap we’re in. Ms. Pat learned this lesson from her supplier, Lamont, who told her, “You gotta look outside the ghetto if you want to get ahead. The hood is nothing but a trap.” Coming from a very poor city with insufficient resources myself, I understand how important it is to leave a place that can’t nurture your growth. Whether your trap is a physical place or a mental state, it’s never too late to escape.  

Ms. Pat’s comedy comes from her storytelling skills, which is recreated beautifully in this autobiography. Her story is a stained-glass window of emotions, each panel depicting raw moments: loss of innocence, laughter, life lessons, and looking for self-actualization. When you see her now as a successful comedian who’s invited to speak on these huge podcasts, you would be surprised at her upbringing—I know I was. She had no real role model to look up to; nobody in her family had graduated high school; her relatives were “self-employed entrepreneurs,” from her grandfather who ran an illegal liquor house, corralling a menagerie of clients in his living room, to her aunt who sold her own food stamps. Pat loved Leave it to Beaver because of how good Mrs. Cleaver was to her kids, doing normal things like grinning at them, which was unfamiliar to Pat whose own mother Mildred never told her she loved her; gave her “slavery-times” advice like teaching Pat that white people were better than her; shot a .22 pistol in the house when the chores weren’t done, even shooting in Pat’s direction; spent her mornings sleeping off the Schlitz Malt Liquor from the night before, forgetting to wake Pat and her brothers and sister for school; running schemes to feed them like taking Pat and her siblings to church services (sometimes two services in one day!) so they could get baptized and become members of the church, benefitting off of the priests’ altruism; and allowing her and her older sister Sweetie to be preyed on. As a caseworker myself, I unfortunately see a lot of instability in households and caregivers depending on welfare to survive just like Pat’s mom and eventually Pat herself. While I was heartbroken by her destitute childhood and, as Lamont calls it when she recounts some of her crazy stories, the “multigenerational shit” that terrorize most homes like a haunted house, what really interested me most was how different Pat and her sister Sweetie’s lives turned out.

Pat and her siblings had to rely on the system to have their needs met. They had a wonderful caseworker, Miss. Munroe, who provided many benefits to the family. For the first time in Pat’s life she opened actual gifts for Christmas because Miss. Munroe signed them up for Empty Stocking Funds. When Pat becomes pregnant at fourteen, the caseworker beseeches Pat’s mother to seek an abortion and charges against the father of the baby for statutory rape, however, Mildred declines both because she and Pat see Derrick as her “boyfriend”—a man Pat learns later is married with kids. For Pat, he’s the first person to tell her he loves her. In my experience, the caseworker did all she could do: she would speak to Pat privately to see if she was okay, got Pat away to a summer camp, and gave the family vouchers for free clothes and shoes. If somebody doesn’t want help, or doesn’t see that there is perhaps a better way, there’s nothing else you can do. But there were other adults in Pat’s life who should’ve done more. One day Pat was late for school and missed free breakfast, resorting to rummaging in her classroom’s closet and dug in someone else’s lunchbox like the dumpster she once had to search in for food. Neither her teacher nor her principal cared about why she stole someone’s sandwich; they didn’t ask her if she had food at home; they only wanted to discipline her for stealing. A child shouldn’t have to wait to go to school to eat well, and it’s the responsibility of the adults around that child to ask questions when behaviors occur. Despite her mother, her boyfriend, and her principal failing her, there were other people in Pat’s path that helped her, which I think made all the difference between Pat and Sweetie and the young women they grow up to be in the height of the crack epidemic in Atlanta. Rabbit explains, “Right from the beginning it was clear to me that crack divided the world into two groups: sellers and smokers, the hustlers and the weak.” Pat emancipated herself from her mother so that she could get her own public benefits, but it was never enough so she became a drug dealer, while Sweetie succumbed to addiction, losing custody of her babies. There were two people in Pat’s life who told her something so essential that I believe if Sweetie would’ve had the same interventions her life could’ve been better.

One of the people responsible for shaping Pat’s mind was her third-grade remedial reading teacher, Miss. Troup. What a woman. Poor Pat was pushed and poked fun of by Porsha, a classmate, for looking dirty and wearing old, torn clothes. That all changed when Miss. Troup took Pat to the bathroom and handed her hygienic products and new clothes. She combed out her knots with love and patience and braided her hair. Her neat, clean wardrobe changed her entire mood. After putting on her new jeans and T-shirt Pat narrates: “In my whole life I’d never felt as good in an outfit as I did that day.” Living in a single-income household, my parents didn’t have extra money to buy my sisters and me new clothes and shoes all the time, so I can relate to Pat and how her whole demeanor could change with just a set of clothes. I remember having many church and school events where I wanted to look good and wear a nice outfit, something different than what everyone had already seen me in, and then looking dismally at my bare closet. Thankfully, I attended Catholic school where I wore a uniform every day and didn’t have to worry about bullies. Miss. Troup saved Pat with those new garments. Once Porsha saw Pat looking presentable she could no longer bully her, but because Sweetie didn’t have a Miss. Troup giving her either brand-new clothes or washing her old clothes, Porsha found a reason to tease and beat her.

The second thing Miss. Troup did for Pat in that bathroom was look her straight in the eye and give her a lesson no one—not a regular teacher or her mother—had ever given her. She told her to dream. She told her she had potential. She told her the world was full of possibilities and she could do anything if she worked hard. For a child deprived of the bare necessities, Miss. Troup’s sage words would save Pat from continuing the life of a criminal. After Pat receives her teacher’s novel information she informs the reader, “In my family, we all moved in the same direction, hustling and scheming and getting nowhere. That was the path laid out in front of me. But now here was Miss. Troup—in all her leather-boot and red-fingernail finery—telling me I could go another way.” Miss. Troup gave her the idea that she was a bright girl who could make something of herself, and Pat believed her. Only a small seed is required to yield fruits.

The second person to cross Pat’s path like the Good Samaritan was her caseworker, Miss. Campbell, from Positive Employment and Community Help, a program that was part of President Bill Clinton’s Welfare-to-Work plan. Pat wanted to change her life around and stop hustling, but her criminal background impeded her from obtaining a medical assistant job, a career she could only have by earning her GED and enrolling in a nine-month medical assistant program, which she did. Perusing her criminal record with Miss. Campbell, making her laugh over how her file was bigger than a telephone book, her caseworker tells her that she missed her calling. Miss. Campbell says, “The way you turn a sad story around, you should be a comedian! You’re the funniest person I know!” Just like Pat never forgot Miss. Troup’s words, thereby making them prophecy, she also kept Miss. Campbell’s proclamation in the back of her mind. Maybe if Sweetie would’ve met someone who offered an encouraging word she would’ve found what she was good at, too. Both sisters encountered scarcity and abuse; nevertheless, Pat never dwelled in the memories and chose to move forward, figuring out the next hustle to survive. According to Pat, Sweetie chased the memories getting high. Pat ends up raising not only her own biological children, but Sweetie’s four daughters as well for ten years. Pat fulfills her biggest dream of having that Leave it to Beaver family by meeting a good man and being a mama to all of those babies, passing down Miss. Troup’s advice to them. Even though she accomplishes her dream, she feels a void, a hunger, for something outside of her family. She retrieves the memory of her caseworker’s compliment about being a comedian and does an open-mic. It’s finally on stage, where she shares her stories and has the audience in rapture, that she feels seen and full.

Performing comedy, talking about her personal life experiences in front of crowds, taught Pat a significant lesson. After one of her shows, a white woman approached her and told her that she went through what Pat went through, which opened Pat’s eyes. “All those times Mama told me white folks were better than me,” she narrates, “had me thinking white people all lived the easy life…I was a grown woman before I found out black folks aren’t the only ones who have hard times. Everybody’s got a struggle. Nobody gets through this life easy.” That was a lesson for me, too, because it’s easy to think you’re the only one going through something because of the color of your skin, or how much money you have in the bank. That kind of mentality can have you thinking you’re supposed to be at the bottom. This book reaffirms that it’s a trap to think you’re stuck because of your socioeconomic status, race, education, etc. I believe it can be a breakthrough when you learn from other people who’ve been there, like Ms. Pat, that you can get out of the trap. Like she says on Your Mom’s House: It’s not how you start, it’s how you finish.

Amber, Jeannine, and Patricia Williams. Rabbit. HarperCollins, 2017.