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Back on the Block - Andy & Tata:

Part 1. Andy & Tata

by Brenda Ann Kenneally

1996 - 2002

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in this series: Back on the Block - Andy & Tata


Links

  • Money Power Respect

    Money Power Respect

    Pictures of my Neighborhood

    Photographs by Brenda Ann Kenneally. Text by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc.

    Out of Print! But you can still buy the book from the author. E-mail brenda for a signed copy.

    View images here...


Eight-year-old Andy was already a legend on Dodworth Street by the time a social worker slipped a note underneath the family’s apartment door, charging his mother, Tata, with educational neglect.

Andy was the tousle-headed street kid who could jump over five people with his bike, turn an abandoned building into a shelter for a dozen wild dogs, and stand toe-to-toe with any of the savvy young drug hustlers that worked the doorway of the corner store with his mother.

Tales of Tata’s escapades—her knack for eluding the narcotics squad, her ability to fake an asthma attack convincing enough to get her released from a pair of handcuffs, her refusal to live by any authority, even when it came in the form of a gun-toting supplier whose crack she had smoked instead of sold—provided Andy with a street pedigree that established him on the block before he was old enough to walk.