Introduction to the Detroit Hustle

Before I moved into the house for unwed teenage moms, I'd lived a pretty sheltered existence. Even though we ate welfare cheese and got free lunch and wore second-hand clothes and lived in a raggedy house, my family was mostly middle class in its values, if not in its outward appearances.

Foster Mama was anything but. She was unabashedly old-school ghetto, the queen of the Detroit hustle:

• She had two different names and two different ID cards that she used for different purposes.
  
  
• She had a beauty shop in her basement, and you could bet your life she wasn't reporting the income to any government entity in existence.
  
  
• She had an arrangement worked out with a cashier at a local supermarket. The cashier would ring up a small portion of Foster Mama's groceries. Foster Mama would slip her $50 as a bribe and take home most of her shopping cart for free.
  
  
• She kept in touch with someone who worked at a beauty school. He'd leave a stash of stolen hair supplies in a dumpster, and she'd swing by in the evening to pick it up.
  
  
• She knew where to buy food stamps for half their face value from local drug addicts who bought their drugs with their government provisions.
  
  
• She had a business relationship with one of Detroit's biggest drug dealers, an unassuming, unattractive seemingly poor guy – until he pulled a four-inch-thick wad of cash from his sock. He was her loan shark. (And he died a particularly bloody death a few years later – 40-something bullet wounds.)
  
  
• One of Drug Dealer's many side businesses was running Detroit's illegal lottery, where people would pay a nickel, dime or quarter to play the three-digit or four-digit numbers. For a while, Foster Mama was "the house" where people placed their bets, and I was the accountant who used my straight A's in algebra to keep track of the earnings. But Foster Mama even had a hustle on top of this hustle – every so often, but not often enough that Drug Dealer would get suspicious – she arranged for herself and a friend to hit the winning number for $500 and split it 50-50.
  
  
• And my absolute favorite of all her hustles was her booster clothing liquidations. She had a working relationship with boosters, slang for professional shoplifters. They would steal clothes from department stores, and Foster Mama would hold clearance sales in her dining room. The rule was, the consumer paid 1/3 of the ticket price. I went off to college looking real cute in all my 67 percent off stolen outfits.

I wish I could say I disapproved of Foster Mama's scheming, hustling ways, but truthfully, I kind of admired them.

At least until she eventually hustled me, and until I eventually realized that in all of her hustling, she never, ever came out ahead.

But those realizations came years later.

In the short term, I blossomed under her unorthodox and unethical tutelage in a way that I hadn't under my dad's rule.