From The Southside To His Side

By Tim Neal

The dramatic story of a young man who grew up in a very dangerous part of town. A place where crime was commonplace and where most of the young boys and girls would do time in the juvenile reform system and many growing up only to serve time in prison. His single-parent mother strove to move into another part of town, hoping to avoid seeing him grow up to be a criminal. But even on the other side of town, seeing the neighborhood pimps driving expensive luxury cars, the young man who grew up in poverty could not escape the lure of easy money. The temptation was too great to keep him from becoming involved and the shady business of drug dealing. And with drug dealing comes drug use and becoming involved with some very dangerous people. Soon, he would go deeper and deeper into this world of darkness until, one day, he realized that the men who he thought were his friends had placed a hit on his life. In the house with two hit men who planned to take his life that very moment, you will see the miraculous move of God that caused these men to say, "We will conduct business as normal." But nothing was normal from that day on for this young man who called on the name of Jesus Christ and made him the Lord of his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781645699071

Book preview

Chapter 1

My mother Dorothy K. Neal was born in West Virginia on July 6, 1929. Her mother Edith (Neal) Pass already had a five-year-old little girl named Marie. Edith and her husband were no longer together; she and her daughter Marie had returned to Chapmanville, West Virginia, to live with her father and her stepmother who had raised her. As an infant, her father was away at work on the railroad; the house in which they lived caught on fire. Her mother was taken to safety, but baby Edith was still inside. Her mother did not know that a man nearby had heard the baby cry and reached through the window to rescue the baby. As he went around to the front of the house, he tried to convince her mother that he had her child in his arms, but the panicked mother could not understand that the child was hers. Convinced that her baby was still inside, she managed to pull away from those who tried to keep her from running back into the fire; she returned to the burning house where she died.

Edith’s father William Neal, now a widower with an infant child, would soon meet a young lady named Lennie Schultz, whose father was a Quaker preacher; they soon would be married, and she became Edith’s mother and bore him eight more children.

Edith, now at home with her family and no longer with her husband, soon met a man from California who was in town working for the coal mining business. Edith and this man fell in love, and when he returned to California, he begged her to return with him. Edith, heartbroken and not wanting him to leave yet, realized that she could not be happy that far away from her family. A few months after his departure, she found out that she was pregnant with Dorothy.

Three years after the birth of Dorothy, Edith became very ill; with her family by her side, her mother, a devout Christian, prayed with her, and she gave her life to Jesus, and shortly thereafter, she went to spend eternity with the Lord, leaving behind her eight-year-old Marie and her three-year-old Dorothy to be raised by their grandparents William and Lennie; the little Pass girls would take on the name of their grandfather and would become Dorothy and Marie Neal.

William’s name was originally spelled Neal, but while working with the railroad, every child’s name after Edith was misspelled Neil, and they continued to spell their names that way now and several generations later. Some of the children were married and out of the house, and the others would soon be grown and out of the house as well except for the youngest son Elmer who was the same age as Marie.

Elmer was the two girls’ uncle, but they grew up as siblings. Little Dorothy, being the baby and even in her old age, was treated like a baby by her aunts and uncles. I used to get frustrated when her Aunt Thelma would talk to her and treat her as a child, and for years, it would make me uncomfortable; until one day, I realized that her Aunt Thelma did not mean to talk down to her; Dorothy was her baby sister. I then could listen to their conversation and smile, knowing that these were not two seventy-year-old ladies talking; this was an elderly aunt speaking to and caring for her baby niece, or I could say, her baby sister.

Mother before Tim was Born

Chapter 2

Soon Dorothy was grown and had an opportunity to leave Chapmanville, West Virginia, and move to Cleveland, Ohio. She arrived in Cleveland sometime in the mid-fifties, and this is where she met a man named Jimmie Pridemore who was also from Chapmanville, West Virginia. She had seen him around Chapmanville but never had met him. They soon began to date, and after about three years, she became pregnant with a baby boy. That’s where I come into the picture; you see, I am that baby boy.

My mother expected to get married; after all, this was not a causal relationship. She was in love with Jimmie and had been with him for quite some time. They did argue and break up a few times only to reunite after a short time. During the pregnancy, they had broken up for a short time, and she met another man. She said he was a very nice man, very good looking, had a very good job, and had expressed an interest in marrying my mother knowing that she was pregnant but was willing to raise her child as his own. She considered this proposal, and wouldn’t you know, Jimmie came back expressing his love for her. She loved Jimmie so much that she took him back again expecting to be married. Soon, she found out that Jimmie not only had impregnated her but also, three months later, had impregnated a twenty-year-old young lady only to agree to marry her. My mother’s heart was broken; she had agreed to give me up in adoption to her cousin Margie and her husband Shell.

As the pregnancy advanced, she became more attached to the child in her womb. She called her Aunt Ollie and Uncle Tommy who lived in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and expressed her desire to keep me. Aunt Ollie told her that if that’s what she wanted, then she would support her and invited her to come live with her for a time. She went to Coatesville and stayed for a few months. She talked to Margie and Shell and expressed her apologies and explained that she could not give up her baby.

She soon returned to Cleveland, and I was born in the Metropolitan Hospital, which was at one time called the City Hospital on January 30, 1959. She soon would take Jimmie to court for child support, and this is where Jimmie and his new wife would deny that he was the father.

My mother pulled him aside and told him, Now, Jimmie, you know that this baby is yours.

And he said, I know, but I don’t want her to know.

Mother, Father (seated) and friend

Tim at Age 1

Tim as a baby

Tim at 6 months old

Chapter 3

Jimmie would stop by to see my mother and I whenever he was in town. I used to think he was coming by to see me, but I know now that he was coming by to see my mother. The first time I remember ever seeing him, even though I was told he had been by before, but my first memory, I was in the bathroom playing in the wash basin with a little boat. I heard the knock at the door, and two men came in.

As they walked into the living room, one looked over at me and said, Hey, boy. How you doing?

I politely said, Hello, and then at the first opportunity, I asked my aunt Marie who those people were.

She responded with a chuckle, That’s your daddy, boy.

My first memory of my daddy. The years went by, and maybe every couple years, he would stop by. The last time we lived at 2267 West Seventh Street, I was probably about eight or nine years old, and he came to visit. During the visit, he gave me a dollar and told me to go to the store and get me a pop and a bag of chips. Now in the late sixties, a can of pop was twelve cents, and a bag of chips was a nickel. When I returned from the store, I gave him the change, and he, I’m sure without thinking, took the change and put it in his pocket. He soon left, and later, my mother said that she told him to never return; that if he was so cheap that he couldn’t allow me to keep the change, she wanted nothing to do with him. Now looking back, I know that there was much more to the story than what she wanted to tell her little boy.

I didn’t see my father again until 1976. I was seventeen years old at the time. I had taken my first flight to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where my uncle Tommy and my aunt Ollie picked me up to take me on a vacation to Nashville, Tennessee, to visit some cousins and to go to Fanfare which is a country music festival which included a charity softball tournament. On the way home, we stopped to visit family in Chapmanville while at my aunt Thelma and her husband Uncle Fred’s home. Fred told me that he was friends with my father and that he would call him and set up a meeting with me. I was a little nervous and reluctantly agreed. The call was made, and a time was set to pick me up and to go with my father, his wife, and their son and youngest daughter to watch his son play baseball. I was picked up, and while at the ball diamond, I sat with his wife as he stood by the concession stand laughing and talking with some other men; the longer we sat there, the more agitated his wife became. She was polite to me, but it was obvious that she was upset with him. After the game, I was taken back to my aunt and uncle’s house. We soon left West Virginia, and I later arrived home in Cleveland.

I decided a few days later against my mother’s advice to drive back to West Virginia in my own car. When I arrived, I gave my father a call, and he suggested that we meet again at the baseball diamond; it was at that time that I met my half sister, his oldest, who was only three months younger than I. She had been in Florida and had just returned home. I found her to be a very beautiful young lady, very nice and polite, and still to this day, she’s a very sweet person. We spoke for a while, and when I was to leave, I suggested that we see each other again before I left for home. He agreed, and I suggested that maybe I would stop by his home before I left, and he responded, Oh, son, that would not be a good idea. The old lady is raising cane.

My feelings was visibly hurt, and I said, Well, maybe we can meet at a restaurant or something.

He said, Oh, yes, of course, son, that would be a great idea.

I got into my car, drove to route 119, and was driving back toward my aunt and uncle’s home with tears running down my face. I began to curse my father and had made a decision that day that I would never see him again.

Aunt Marie

Tim at 17