When it rained outside the house, it rained inside the house. There was no kitchen table and only two beds for four children and their mother. The north St. Louis neighborhood was so rife with drugs, gangs and crime, many youngsters wound up dead or incarcerated. The household lacked a loving adult male, a father’s role Chris Carrawell needed to manufacture for himself and his own family later in life.
Carrawell and his siblings came through relatively unscathed thanks to the strict guidance of Joanne Hayes, herself the child of a single and less dedicated mother. She was determined, she says, not to be “a mother of the street,” but rather to attend to her children’s welfare and “break the cycle” of broken families in her community.