Childhood
Stanley Williams III was born December 29, 1953, at the New Orleans Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana to a 17-year old mother.
Williams' father abandoned the family when he was just a year old. In 1959, at the age of five, Williams moved with his mother from New Orleans to Los Angeles, California by a Greyhound Lines bus. His mother moved the two into an apartment on the West Side of South Central Los Angeles.
Because Williams' mother worked several jobs to support them Williams was a latchkey kid (long before the term achieved national popularity in the 1980s) and often engaged in mischief on the streets. Williams recalled that, as a child, he would hang out in abandoned houses and vacant lots around his neighborhood in South Central where he would watch adults get drunk, abuse drugs, gamble and engage in pit bull fights. Williams stated that after the adults finished the dog fighting they would make the children fight each other. Williams participated in these street fights regularly as a child where adults would bet on him and give him part of the proceeds for winning his fights. Williams was often the target of older bullies in his neighborhood and, by the age of twelve, he began carrying a switchblade in order to protect himself against older street thugs.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The childhood shows the man,
As morning shows the day.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)
“The limitless future of childhood shrinks to realistic proportions, to one of limited chances and goals; but, by the same token, the mastery of time and space and the conquest of helplessness afford a hitherto unknown promise of self- realization. This is the human condition of adolescence.”
—Peter Blos (20th century)