He Kan't Kill Your Future - Sharquent Webster, Author

He Kan’t Kill Your Future – Review by Martha A Cheves, Author of Stir, Laugh, Repeat

‘one day, one of the men who worked at that cab place started driving by me in an old-fashioned station wagon with curtains in the windows.  He would just keep circling back and forth very slowly, watching me.  Everywhere I went, he would pop up.  I would see that station wagon all around town.  One day, the man in the car nodded at me.  The next time, he smiled at me.  Then, he finally pulled his car over next to me and held his hand out with a bunch of quarters in it.  I walked over, took the quarters and continued walking to school, and he drove off.  We never said a word to each other, and I didn’t have a problem taking his money.  In my eyes, it just looked better in my hands than in his.  I remember taking the money and going to a catering truck and buying a cheeseburger, fries and a soda.  That was the best cheeseburger I have ever eaten in my life.  This continued for weeks, until he finally asked if I wanted a ride to school.’

Sharquent was just one of ten children…seven girls and three boys.  Around the age of six her father left her mother and his children to start his life over with another woman.  Being left alone to care for and provide for ten children was more than her mother could mentally handle.  And feeding so many mouths became almost impossible.  But it was done by raiding trash cans and dumpsters.

Hunger wasn’t the only problem Sharquent and her sisters were faced with.  Their older brother decided they were perfect for his own sick desires.  Learning at such an early age what possibilities go along with satisfying a man, Sharquent was able to provide for herself those things that her mother couldn’t and wouldn’t.  This early education became her way to satisfy her own desires…drugs.

Sharquent Webster’s story of growing up in the slums of Los Angeles was one of the hardest books I’ve had the pleasure of reading.  This woman was not only mean but she became a person who had no love, compassion nor feelings of any kind for anyone, including her own self.  Her children, a boy and girl, were just something more to tie her down and keep her from running the streets.  Her family became nothing but people in her life that were there to steal from when she needed a little extra money for drugs.  There was nothing she wouldn’t do to stay on the streets and stay high on drugs.  That is until one day someone mightier than anyone she had ever known caught up with her giving her a reason to want to live and want to live a complete life.

He Kan’t Kill Your Future is a hard book to read because of it's honesty.  But it’s a book that, I feel, should be read by EVERY young person, adult and anyone working with children and/or drugs.  It brings to light some of the warning signs that we as parents might not pick up as signs of abuse both physically and/or substance.

I know that I’m guilty of seeing a person on drugs, alcohol, homeless or standing on the streets begging and think to myself “Why?  How can they allow themselves to live as they do?  Why don’t they do something for themselves?”  The questions I should be thinking are “Why?  What happened to put them in this position?  What can be done to really help them?”  He Kan’t Kill Your Future has made me realize that I’m not here to judge but to help if possible.  Not necessarily through money but through love, compassion and kindness. 

So, if you never read another book this year, He Kan’t Kill Your Future is one that you really need to read.  I feel this is a self help book for those of us who aren’t on drugs, walking the streets and selling ourselves in that it helps make us understand those that are.  It’s a true story about a woman’s life as it comes from under the slimy rock and rockets to the highest mountains.  I truly admire Sharquent Webster for her honesty and strength to write this heart retching story.

223 pages

Outskirts Press

2011

ISBN# 978-1-4327-6445-6