The memoir, Rabbit: The Autobiography of Ms. Pat, is your next must read. You will cry, laugh and remind yourself of the power that dreams hold.
This is a quick read, yet you will want to savor each chapter. It's the story of Patricia Williams, an Atlanta comedienne who retells her heartbreaking (and at times rib splitting) childhood in an effort to explain how she was able to crawl out of one of the darkest corners of the ghetto.
Nicknamed Rabbit, she is one of five children. Her father is not in the picture, her mother is busy downing gin and so it's up to her bootlegging grandfather to pay any attention to this young girl. But he's busy, he's got a business to tend. Rabbit grows up with a thirst for knowledge and unrequited hunger pangs from dinners of ketchup sandwiches that don't quite tie one over into the next day. But she meets mentors along that way that shower her with love, clean clothes and words of wisdom.
When her grandfather is sent to prison for shooting one of his talk-backing customers, Rabbit and her family move to a grimy efficiency. She and her sister are molested by an older gentleman caller, they play fast and loose with older boys and both find themselves pregnant. By 15, Rabbit is the mother of two kids. The baby daddy is meanwhile busy making more babies with other women. And Rabbit's got to find a way to orchestrate her own hustle.
In an effort to give her kids a better life, she embarks on an entrepreneurial career that begins with crack dealing on corners to studying to become a medical technician. Along the way she skirts bullets, buys herself a shiny cadillac and becomes the family benefactor. But through love and angels she is able to pull herself together and drag us along one of the more fantastic and humorous literary rides. If I wasn't smiling or laughing, I was trying not to cry. A gem of a book. Literally, all it's cracked up to be.
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