Jada West

For me, it was all about the money. It always has been. I think it’s in my blood. I come from a family of hustlers. My moms and my daddy were both hustlers. That’s all my mother and father ever talked about. Money, money, money, and how to get it.

They’d known each other all their lives. Moms was born six months and one day before daddy. They lived next to each other and my grandmothers were best friends. Both my mother and father used to say they don’t remember a time when they weren’t together. Even though they never got married and we didn’t always live together, we were always a family.

My daddy was a gambler; that was his hustle. That’s how he put food on our table. He played poker and blackjack, shot craps, played C-low, but his thing was pool. In his day, my daddy could shoot pool with the best of them. He used to always say that when he was truly on his game: “Ain’t another man standing can touch me with a stick in my hand.”

When I was a kid, he would take me with him sometimes when moms had something goin’. It used to make him madder than hell and he would rant and rave and say, “Swear ’for God, this the last time I let her do this to me. She know damn well I got shit to do, ’cuse my French; and if I ever hear you talk like that I’ll beat your little ass. But she knows what I gotta do tonight. But if she was to come home and I ain’t got no money, what would happen?”

“She would lose her mind.” I would always say ’cause she would go off over the slightest little thing. It became kind of a runnin’ joke-us trippin’ on moms trippin’.

“You damn right she would. I can hear her now. ‘What you mean you ain’t got no money? Well, I’ll just go on down to the rent office and tell ’em I ain’t got the rent ’cause my man couldn’t find no baby sitter’,” he went on and on. But the second he got in that pool room, my daddy was a rock. Makin’ shots and takin’ money.