"I grew up in Harlem.  I lived in the projects.  Now I reside in North Carolina but I visit New York almost every other month.  I look at what they call the projects in Charlotte and it is not even a third of what the projects looks like in Harlem.  The projects here is just a bunch of brick run down one story establishments.  The projects I grew up in was twenty-one stories high with about twenty apartments on each floor.  Every night you wonder if you will make it back to your apartment without anything happening.  You take the elevator and hold your breath.  You pray it goes straight up and nobody gets on and trap you inside and does something to you.  It's no way to grow up.  But people do and you think it's normal until you go someplace else and you see that it really isn't.  I am glad my daughter is growing up in the south.  I grew up with two sisters and my mom and dad.  I had a lot of friends.  I was rough and so were my friends.  Most girls in the projects aren't very feminine.  They act rough.  Harlem girls, Bronx girls and Brooklyn girls are rough.  We aren't prissy.  That kind of life style rarely produces prissy women.  Our men accept that, they know the deal.  These women in the south don't understand me.  They think I'm too aggressive, too forward, too opinionated, too strong-willed.  I take no bull-shit.  I say what is on my mind.  They can't understand me, but what the hell do they really expect?  We are a product of many things, mainly our environment, where we grew up and the way we grew up.  That is the clay that carved us.  My clay was carved from the projects, from hanging out with the kind of friends I had, from meeting a man like the man my husband was, all those things carved me and made me Jaki and well, I like me, I accept who I am based on what I have seen, felted and tasted in this life.   

My husband is still in prison, I visit often.  That's no way to live but it's what I do now because I want to and I really don't care what others think about it.  You can't care.  When you get a certain age you realize that.  Years ago I cared and it almost drove me crazy.  But If there was any way I could truly convince black men not to keep going in and out of prison and leaving their sons to be raised by women, leaving broken families, leaving women to visit the prisons, I would do it and then consider my job here on earth finished because it's just that important."