Biography of Beverly Queen: Life and Times at 3324 Tate St.

By Beverly Queen

I, Beverly Queen, was born and raised in Baltimore City at Providence Hospital in West Baltimore. This is my first book, but it will not be my only book. I have more to come in the future. This documentary is a twenty-year accomplishment that was written over the course of my life. The book is based on a true story when you're living from one day to the next of life changes and challenges, coming from a family that was torn apart due to living in an environment of poverty and just being poor with a family of nine sisters and brothers in a two-bedroom town house through domestic violence, mental and physical abuse, drug abuse, and alcohol abuse that had also played a part of our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662457036

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Biography of Beverly Queen

Life and Times at 3324 Tate St.

Beverly Queen

Copyright © 2022 Beverly Queen

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2022

This book is based on a true story that I will always hold dear to my heart. I would not have told it any other way. Amen.

ISBN 978-1-6624-5702-9 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-5703-6 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Chapter 1

Growing Up (From Birth to Nine Years Old)

Chapter 2

Moving to Fairfield

Chapter 3

My Best Friend

Chapter 4

Victory Elementary School

Chapter 5

My Sisters and Brothers

Chapter 6

God in Our Home

Chapter 7

God, I Forgot to Dream Big as a Child Growing Up

Chapter 8

When My Father Retired, 1972

Chapter 9

Hanging in the Project Fairfield Homes

Chapter 10

My First Abusive Relationship (Eighteen Years Old)

Chapter 11

Dating a Drug Dealer

Chapter 12

Drug Dealer at Twenty-One Years Old

Chapter 13

When My Daddy Died

Chapter 14

Moving from Fairfield

Chapter 15

The Day I Married a Drug Dealer

Chapter 16

Taking Over the Drug Business

Chapter 17

The Day I Got Busted

Chapter 18

Moving from Baltimore to Jamaica

Chapter 19

From Texas Back to Baltimore

Chapter 20

Free from Jail

Chapter 21

The Blackmail

Chapter 22

A New Relationship

Chapter 23

The Day My Mother Died

Chapter 24

Would I Have Done It All Over Again?

Chapter 25

Finding Myself and Loving Me for Who I Am

Chapter 26

God Loves Me More Than I Have Loved Myself

About the Author

To my mother and father, Sylvan Eden and Joseph Frances Queen, who have, with much love, since passed on to be with the Lord. My children Keisha Hall McKay Queen, Donovan Fagan, and Isaiah Fagan. My grandchildren—the famous Willie Fryson, Noel McKay, Faith Fagan, Donovan Fagan Ramirez, Anissa Queen Fagan Ramirez, Janasia Queen Kepa, and Christopher McKay. To the young man who entered my life and whom I will always love with all my heart. To the man who had shown me how to climb high when everyone else around me stayed low. Thanks a lot, Donovan Hugh Fagan Sr., Ramirez Pablo Maribel, Angelina Kepa, and Kierra Fagan. Thanks for being the best parents in the world to my grandchildren. And my best friend Patricia and her husband, Harmon, who have been my friends for a lifetime of love and respect. Reggie Thomas, the man of my life even though he was not aware of how close we really were and how much I have always loved him. Special love goes out to Debbie White, my ride-and-die friend. I love you. And much love to my eight sisters, and brothers, and all my nieces, nephews, cousins, and friends. Amen.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to you, Keisha Hall McKay Queen, my daughter, for always being there for me even when I was not there for you all the time. Thanks for holding up the family. Sorry for putting you through what I put you through in life, for all the hurdles that we have climbed together, and for all the secrets we had kept between us to this day. Thank you for being there for me over the years of my life when I was not always there for you. I will say it over and over again, thanks. And again, thanks for supporting me when I could not hold it together. Thanks for taking care of your brothers Donovan Fagan and Isaiah Fagan when I was not there to do so. You are far more the best daughter any mother could have in the world. Every day I think to myself when God bless me with you. We become more than mother and daughter. We became the best of friends. I will always hold you close to my heart. I would like to also thank my grand son artist WillGotTheJuice, Chris Brown, Future, and Money Man for allowing me to write this book every day from the lyrics of their music. You guys keep me going. Thanks. You are the best. Amen.

Prologue

It's about 3:00 a.m., and I am awake with the thoughts of my past. D——n, it's here again, the late-night dreams. They were starting to drive me crazy. It was like an every-night thing for me. It was getting harder for me to deal with my past as I was getting older. My past had traumatized me so bad. The snake dreams and falling-off-the-cliff dreams would not stop. I would always find myself seeing snakes that were not there. They would be at the end of my bed and in the ceilings at night. I was so scared in the dark at nights. When it was time for bed, I could never fall asleep. There was always something coming at me to stop me from sleeping at night. It was like I was always running from someone or something, but I never knew who they were. They were my imaginary strangers that I had never seen before. Then it would be the stomach cramps and the hungry pains that would never go away. So many nights, I would not get a good night sleep. Out of fear of my past, the anxiety and panic attacks were out of control.

Years ago, no one would have ever thought I had been suffering from these conditions. When I was young, I was born ADHD. As a young child, I was very energetic. I could never sit still in my classrooms. I was a very slow learner. But there was no one to diagnose me with these conditions. But I knew what the conditions were as I had gotten older. My life was hard as a child growing up, and the nights would never end. I could never sleep at nights. When I was being bullied in school every day, just the thought of school drove me crazy to the point I was miserable as hell. But no one in my family was aware of what I was going through every day. If there was no school for that day, I was the happiest kid in the world because no one is going to come to my house to bully me, but in the process, I had my brother Ralph to deal with and my daddy. Then I had spent a lot of time wondering what am I going to do today or what was going to happen in my family. Was my daddy going to beat up on my mother, or maybe my mommy will yell at me, or will we have food to eat? Or is Daddy going to work today? What was my day going to be like?

The first thing I would do was go outside. I had loved the outdoors. I would play so hard, sometimes during the day, until the problems would all go away. But when it was time for bed, the problems would still show up in my thoughts every night before bed. I would never go to bed at night without my big, red blanket. That blanket was my best friend. That blanket would smell so good if there was no food in the house to eat or if someone was going to beat my butt. The smell of my blanket made life so easy. I stayed in trouble all the time. I was always in something. I was never a good kid. But to all the children that picked on me a lot in school, good luck. You know who you were. I have prayed for you all oh well and who bully me in elementary and middle school. I was still okay. You might have messed me up psychologically, but I still rise to the top. For my brothers and sisters at the time when I was young who did not protect me from the bullying and did not fight my battles, I was cool with that, but guess what. I had my big, red blanket that did not judge me and never once hurt me. And for the best mommy in the world who had always kept my blanket fresh and clean, thank you. You have always held a part in my heart. I just wish you and Daddy would have made me one of your favorite chosen ones. I still love you. RIP. Amen.

Chapter 1

Growing Up (From Birth to Nine Years Old)

As a child growing up, I was a very happy, loving child. My parents were great together. With Daddy worked for the C&P Telephone Company as a coin collector, and he owned his own mechanic business, working on cars. I thought that was good for an African American in the 1950s to own his own business. But my mommy spent a lot of her time raising us while Daddy was out working. Mommy was our babysitter. We have never gone to a babysitter or daycares because Mommy had stayed home and taking care of us herself. And Mommy had done a wonderful job. Also, everyone in the neighborhood was our babysitter or you stay home alone. Mommy was like superwoman. She was doing it all. Mommy was having a child every two years. But between my mother and father, it was nine children and a half brother. You see, my parents were raised in different types of environments. Their parents had different family morals. Every family was different from the next. Mommy was raised without a father because granddad, mommy's dad, was a White slave owner. He was her mother and mommy's mother's and grandmother's master. Our grandmother raised mommy and her other sisters and brothers as a single parent but with the help from my grandmother's mother and mommy's mother. They helped one another, and they supported one another through love and understanding of one another. Love and affection were not shown. But if love was shown but very little, it had been in a different way, not saying it verbally.

Love, back in them days, was shown with passion. And that was how our parents in the 1900s had shown love for one another. You see, mommy was not from Maryland. Mommy and her mother came to Baltimore from Franklin Town, Virginia, after she and her husband separated before she gave birth to her first set of twins at the time. You see mommy left her husband when she was pregnant with twins and she came to Maryland to live; she later had the twins at John Hopkins Hospital at the time she was dating my dad, he did not marry her while pregnant with the twins she was caring because my father's sister stated when she was at the hospital when my half sister was born. D——n, he was a real man; he must have loved our Mother. It was a boy and a girl. The boy died, and the girl lived on. The father was not in Diana's life. But when Diana was about two years old, that's when mommy's husband had died. Her ex-husband left her a home, but she did not stay there to live. Before he died, she came to Maryland to live along with her mother. Elizabeth lived with mommy out in Tuner station in a house my parents was renting, near the water where a lot of African American had come to live once they arrived in Maryland. Then Elizabeth left and moved with her daughter, Betty, down in Anne Arundel County where she had later died. But my father's parents were a different case. You see, our grandmother and grandfather on my daddy's side separated when my father was young. I believe our daddy was about nine years old, and he was the baby boy. But when their children were as young as ten to twelve years old, our grandparents on my father's side separated. The reason was granddad had an affair with a young lady who had gotten pregnant then he decided to move the young lady down the street from his own family. Grandmom was to take the girls. Granddad was to take the boys. But when they went to court for their divorce, the judge had different plans; he granted granddad to take the girls and grandmom to take the boys. I think if my granddad had gotten the boys, it might have made a difference in my dad's upbringing; my dad always appeared to be a very angry man.

Our daddy was a very hardworking man, and our mommy worked hard as well. I never knew what my life was going to be like until the day I was born. I was about five years old when things were starting to be more clear to me. I was starting to see my life develop in front of my eyes. They say between three and seven years old is when things in your life start to become you. Around about six to seven years old, that childhood that I had once loved for some reason I was starting to hate because things where starting to become more visible to me. I have always felt I did not blend in with my other family members. And I had never felt the love from my other sisters and brothers or my mommy and daddy. To me, something was not right because I could not get along with my other sisters and brothers. I felt like my hair was not pretty enough. I recall one of my sisters telling me my hair was not the texture of the rest of my sisters. So they would call me short-headed is what I was called growing up.

I never knew what they were talking about. But when I was older enough to understand the texture of my hair, I never knew it was a bad grand of hair. I had no shape at all. My a—— was flat as a pancake. My nose had been so flat and somewhat wide. My face was shaped like a pie. I recall when I was young my name was pie face. Someone from the project had named me that, and my sister Diana called me that many of times. I would laugh it off until I got older. It was no longer funny. My daddy named me chubby. Why? I don't know. I was never fat to my knowledge. And you wonder why I was so screwed up as a kid growing up. As a child, I was already being judged and criticized. I did not have low self-esteem. I had always thought that I was pretty. As long as I was light-skinned, you could never go wrong as a kid growing up I was just starving for attention that my parents never gave me or shown me. I never knew I was black until I was grown enough to look in a mirror. That is when I noticed that I was half White. We had a lot of White in our family, on both sides of our family, my mommy's side and my daddy's side. All had White race. Our mommy never once acknowledged herself as a Black woman; she had always stated that she was Cherokee Indian.

At seven years of age is when I remember the places we had lived in, and for some reason, Bay Bridge near Sandy Point Beach was one of the places that I remember so well. This place stayed in my head a lot. I also remember that we lived in a lot of different places.

Every time you turn around, we were moving from one house to the next. We never had a stable home. It was like we were all over the place. We had moved up on Appleton Street that was in West Baltimore in the city, and then we stayed there for about a year or two. And that is when I started to take notice that my dad was abusing my mother on a regular. So from Appleton Street, we moved to Presbury Street, and we lived there for about a year and a half but that is when we moved to Bay Bridge, Sandy Point Beach. To my knowledge, that is when my father was starting to abuse Mommy more and more when we were living on Appleton Street, and it turned into a daily thing. I recall the first fight that I really witnessed. It was one night, and it was very warm that night. He beat her so bad that he threw her out the bedroom window.

That is the first fight that I took notice how bad our mommy had been hurting and the first time that I can remember my mommy with tears in her eyes. My father was hell on wheels. The abuse was so out of control, but the worse thing about it is I never saw a police officer, not once, come to rescue her or help my mother. I remember one evening when we were out to a family get-together, and Daddy drank heavily that night. So we were getting ready to go home, and Daddy had to drive us home. That night was the worst night of our lives. Daddy had an accident coming around that bend around Gwynn Falls Parkway, and the accident was not that bad. No one was seriously hurt according to my mommy and daddy. He never once got locked up. It was like a slap on the risk. I wonder if he was thinking could he not be touched or was mommy just scared to call the police on him, out of fear of him hurting her even more. Why did she take so much abuse from him, or maybe she had been thinking if he goes to jail, who would help her with the children?

I think she was just scared of him. The house that was located at Bay Bridge was the house I had started to remember different types of situations in detail because it was near a lot water, going toward Ocean City, Maryland, I had always been in fear crossing that long Bay Bridge high way. That would be the house that I remember so many awful things happening. I remember one day I came home from school, my first day of school. I came in the house yelling at Mommy like I was crazy. I was like, Mommy, I have all these Black kids in my classroom. As I got older and thinking, d——n, what color was I, it never faltered in my head what color I really was. I remember when I was getting up to go to the bathroom after doing my homework, and my brothers had been throwing a penny bank like it was a ball. And it hit me in the nose and broke my nose. And I wondered as I got older could that have been the reason my nose was not straight enough for me to blend in with the rest of my brothers and sisters. I went to the hospital, and everything was okay, but my nose had been broken really. It felt like I had been crying for days. And you wonder why my nose was so bent out of shape.

I think that is the reason for my nose to not look straight and long. When you are born to a family with White heritage, you don't know what color you really are because you see, my great grandparents on my father and mother's side, their genes had gone a long way. It was so sad that the slave masters were having sex with the slave workers. My parents came from the slaves and their generation of slaves and cotton pickers. This is what had happened back years ago in the eighteen or nineteen hundreds. But mommy would have that conversation with us all the time that is what she had done for a living. My mother and her sisters and brothers were to help their mother and grandmother pick cotton. Sure I was born light-skinned. I was very light-skinned as a child with brown eyes and freckles, not knowing that being a woman of different color but still African American would hurt me mentally, psychologically, and emotionally, and it drained me as a kid growing up.

I was born in a family with nine brothers and sisters, six girls and three boys and a half sister and another brother that I don't know to this day if he is my real half brother or not. Growing up was not all what it was made out