Alvin Green’s mother died of cancer when he was 4 years old. That same year his father was sent to prison for 15 years for sexual assault.
And yet Green, 22, considers himself fortunate. He had an older sister, and a grandmother willing to step in and raise him. There are other children who have experienced something similar, the death or incarceration of a parent, who never had that kind of love and support, he said.
“No one to even love them … to even at least try to guide them,” Green said. “So you know I’m one of the lucky ones. Even though it was hard, it could have been way worse. So I don’t have self-pity because I know the next man’s story is probably way deeper than mine.”
Green’s story, though, has been indelibly marked by the father he never knew, the man who has spent the majority of his son’s life behind bars. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, Green said. It showed him what not to do, the type of life he wanted to avoid.
“I’ve been through a lot. But you can’t fold. You just can’t fold, because when you fold that’s when you’re gonna end up in jail or dead,” he said. “I want to have kids of my own, and I want to be there for them everyday and be able to teach them the right way. I want them to wake up every day and see their daddy.
“And if he’s incarcerated, that’s the next step to being dead to me. That’s the very next step. There ain’t much of a difference.”
Despite the adversity he experienced at an early age, Green thrived in his later years, playing football for the Warren Easton Eagles. He had one goal in mind: land a scholarship so he could go to college. Things were going according to plan until Jan. 6, 2012.
That’s when the Warren Easton girls basketball team won a hard-fought victory on its home court against longtime rival McDonogh 35. After the game, the crowd poured out of the Mid-City gymnasium onto North Gayoso Street. Green, then 17 years old, was part of the crowd.
“As I was leaving the game, that’s when the shooting started happening and I did what everybody else did: I ran,” Green said. “I was already hit at that point. Once I realized I was shot, I laid there. And then the ambulance came and that was it. I really couldn’t remember too much. It was crazy.”
Police said Shawn Ballard, 21 at the time, shot into the crowd as they left the game in an attempt to kill someone he previously fought. He wounded four other people besides Green: a man and three teenage boys. He turned himself in a few days later and in 2013 pleaded guilty to attempted murder.
None of the victims’ injuries were life threatening, but they were life changing for Green. He had rods put into his forearm to repair the damage from the bullets. It ended his football career and his dream of landing a college scholarship.
“Plan A went out the door, so now it’s time for plan B. What can I do now? I was so focused on me feeling like I was going to be able get to college on football and it didn’t work out that way. Things don’t always work out the way you plan. …
“That was a hard pill to swallow.”
This is the point when Green’s life could have taken a bad turn. But instead of giving up, of making self-destructive wrong choices, he thought of two things: the life lessons learned from his grandmother and sister, and his father sitting in prison.
The women who raised him taught him that the wrong thing can seem like the easy thing at the time. But there’s always a better option.
“They couldn’t really show me how to be a man, but they tried their best to make sure I knew the types of responsibilities a man has to come forth with,” Green said. “They made sure that I had an option as far as I didn’t have to feel like, ‘Damn, I got to go out here and do the wrong thing.’ They made sure that I know that I can always choose an education, that I can always choose to try and do something different.”
Green has tried to find a new path, a new goal. But he admits that it’s been a struggle. He flirted with the idea of going to barber school and is now considering carpentry school.
“I’m still searching for a way,” he admits. “I still don’t know my way.”
What he wants to do most, Green said, is to help others so they don’t make the wrong choices his father made.
“I want to be someone people can look up to,” he said. “I want to help children. I want to help the less fortunate. I want to be able to talk to young black men, try to show them the right way. That’s the type of person I want to be.”