I wasn’t born when my uncle’s heroin addiction reached fever pitch — like the time he tried to set my grandmother’s South Side, Chicago, apartment on fire, when she wouldn’t give him any drug money. I didn’t experience how terrible it must have been to have to put a lock on the refrigerator so your own son wouldn’t steal the food out of it to sell for drugs.
His era of addiction was in the 1940s and ’50s, before painkillers containing opiate derivatives were introduced by the Sackler family — one of the biggest legal drug cartels in the world — to mainly white middle- and working-class communities under the banner of the painkiller OxyContin.
This was a time when heroin was running roughshod through Black communities, and the way the story of racism goes in this country, instead of calling opiate addiction a public health crisis, it was highly criminalized and considered a moral failing. Never mind that my uncle was introduced to heroin in his early teens by a predatory, drug-dealing woman who owned a candy store and introduced the opiate to neighborhood children by holding drug and sex parties in the basement of her store.
By the time I knew my uncle Charles — who eventually overcame his addiction — I thought he was this super sweet old man who walked with a limp. When I was a child, my family would often travel to Illinois, to see my grandma, uncles and auntie. I used to accompany Charles on his walks to the corner store. He would buy me my favorite snacks, including legendary Chicago Jay’s potato chips. As a little girl, I sensed his spirit beyond the broken body, especially when I saw the crinkled edges of his bright eyes narrowing with an infectious smile. However, I didn’t comprehend that the battered broken body was that of an early-50-something-year-old man. Uncle Charles was the youngest sibling of five, and my dad’s baby brother.
