Born on May 6th 1967, I was the second child born to Burrel and Gloria Wilks of Sacramento Street, in Chicago’s West Side. Delivered at home I arrived on time and from the moment I popped out, was by all accounts a wriggling, boisterous bundle.

A little Taurus bull with a thick hide and thicker head, I propelled my way into the world with enthusiasm and then, like a toy with a run-down battery, I simply stopped.

For the next eighteen months, I sat quietly on the floor, the Wilks household swirling around me. Watching and listening intently, I seldom uttered a sound or shed a tear. One day my Mom lost me. She turned the house and the neighborhood upside down, almost hysterical with worry. I’d fallen between the bed and the wall, it transpired, and had lain there, without a peep, for well over six hours.

“He just never moved. He didn’t crawl or anything. Then the day he finally decided to walk, he hit the ground running. He hasn’t stopped since.” Gloria.

My father, Burrel Lee Wilks II–BL to his wife, Butch to his friends but always a respectful Dad or Father to us kids–moved to Chicago at nineteen-years of age. The only son of Jonnie Taylor, he was raised by his grandparents on a smallholding in Mississippi. Part of a large, extended family, he was one of the few who stayed down South long after other relatives had moved away.

For years members of the Wilks clan had joined the mass migration of Blacks escaping the oppressive hardship of rural life, and heading to all points North and West. My father’s family gravitated North to the Metropolis of Chicago, which while offering less hospitable weather, promised a far warmer economy.

Burrel Lee was left to carry the weight back on the homestead. Pushed relentlessly by his grandfather to work harder and better, he tended crops, drove the tractor, milked cows, looked after the livestock and had responsibility for a hundred other chores.

School didn’t really have much of a role to play in such a strenuous, early-rising, back-breaking, kind of life. Burrel Lee didn’t attend classes much past the sixth grade. The farm was his classroom; hard work his education. For his first eighteen-years, he earned his keep, with sweat, calluses and aching muscles.

But Burrel had something inside that set him apart from his peers: vision and ambition. He demanded more from life than the lot of a small-scale Mississippi agriculturist was going to provide. The frustration of unfulfilled aspiration slith-ered and twisted inside him like cold, slippery eels…

During the early sixties, the Civil Rights Movement was reaching a crescendo. In 1963 Dr. Martin Luther King had delivered his ground-breaking, history-making speech in Washington. That same year Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were both assassinated.

1964 was momentous too. A landmark year politically, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, declaring that discrimination based on race was illegal, and in a dramatic crime that fired up national media frenzy, three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi.

It was against this political backdrop that Burrel Lee continued to labor. As he broke his back on the farm, the flaming heat of these epic events passed him over without singing a hair. But though neither formally educated nor politically active, Burrel was without doubt, politically inclined. He knew what was going on in the world, and he understood it was time to take his place in it.

One night, in the summer of 1964 he packed light and together with his common-law wife Gloria, set off to join relatives in the city of Chicago. I’m sure it didn’t cross his mind the day he left, that many years hence he’d find his way back home to that farm in Mississippi…

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“I’m not the man I was and I’m not yet the man I’m going to be.” ~Burrel Lee Wilks III

No Sugarcoating.

I’m no saint. Never was, never will be. I did a lot of wrong before I did right. A man can’t be judged by his mistakes though, but by what he puts back along the way. When my personal balance-sheet is totted up, I guarantee the credit will far outweigh the debit.

Let’s face it I’m an ex-everything. An ex-syrup-sucking, coke-tooting, gun-toting, gang chief, wrapped in the skin of a passionate, ambitious black man, There’s little I haven’t seen, haven’t done or had done to me.

My days as a gang chief, hustler and crook may be far behind me, but history can’t be denied. We are the sum of our experiences, the good, bad, ugly, sublime and absurd.

I can’t separate myself from what I did as a young man but neither am I going to trail my past behind me like dirty linen, or unwanted baggage. For years the ghetto was my home, my classroom, my livelihood and proving-ground. I’m molded from this clay and shaped by these streets. I have tattoos on my soul.

And What a Journey!

Extracting myself from the stew of narcotics, violence, fast money and cheap life that was my birthright was tough, the wisdom acquired along the way, hard-learned.

Along the road I battled demons, won victories and made just about every mistake a guy could make. I took knocks that could have leveled many a man and killed some. I lost friends and fortunes, experienced pain and betrayal and I did something no father ever should. I buried my son.

But I wouldn’t have missed this ride for anything.

Fearless, thirsty and passionate in the extreme, I threw myself into life with the force of a hurricane, gusting full-speed through every door. More than a few slammed in my face–breaking my nose but never my spirit–and as if by magic, a thousand times as many opened wide in front of me. You see I’ve never accepted that there’s a designated place for me in this world. I believed when I was just a scrap of a kid, and still believe today, that I can achieve anything I set my mind to.

With acute self-awareness, dogged self-reliance and relentless resourcefulness, anything is possible.

In the ghetto you scrabble in the moment because you know, tomorrow may never come. Everything is short-term, immediate, instant, life chillingly cheap. The generations of young men lost to the bullet, needle or penitentiary borders on genocide. If he survives an early grave, a kid from the streets will all too likely find his way into a different kind of tomb, behind the walls of drug addiction or prison.

Look at me: conditioned to be a crook, catapulted out of the cradle into a world of doing wrong. As a ghetto-born, African-American male, a gang-banger and cog in the narcotics-apparatus, what were the odds I’d make into my thirties?

I should be dead by now. I’ve come close. My friends are, my son is, but I refuse to be a statistic.

No Overnight Transformation.

Mine is a rare, celebratory story of transformation. But if you’re looking for an overnight conversion, a phoenix rising from the ashes, then I’m not your guy. I wasn’t a bad kid who one morning woke up a good man.

Real life is far messier and more complicated than that. There was no blinding epiphany for me, no sudden moment of stunning clarity. I wasn’t a nice, neat science project and I wasn’t born again. Transforming Buddy Burrel into the man he is today, took determination, commitment, faith, tenacity and time. It took me years to get my Streetwise MBA–and I’m still studying.

From gangster to life-coach and from foolish boy to wise man, my growth was progressive: evolution rather than reconstitution. The man I am today is the sum of hundreds, even millions, of choices made, as I forged my own, very unique path through life. I would like to share that journey with you.

I am Burrel Lee Wilks III and I am a Master of Being Alive.

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