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rests his hands on his belly while we talk, in a spacious part of the club where four men are playing pinochle. He has a hardwood fooring company and limousine service with two buses, an Escalade and a white Jaguar. ���I stay tired,��� the 55-year-old says. ���If I don���t keep it going we don���t got nothing down here.��� He buys any lot he can around Cole���s Place. ���I think this could be another Germantown or Bardstown Road,��� he says, of Kentucky Street and the surrounding area. Big Momma���s is the soul food restaurant at the end of Broadway. Plexiglas divides workers and customers who, on the Friday afternoon I���m there, pack the building that���s big enough for fve stools and little else. Tey order at a microphone. Salmon croquettes sell out in no time. Big Momma is Jessie Green, 69. When I ask her why she opened almost a decade ago, she says, ������Cause I was hungry,��� with a smile that fashes some gold. Sheryl Fox, Green���s daughter, gives me a ���sample���: When I knock, Hall has me wait while he sequesters Caesar, a Cane Corso named after the Planet of the Apes character. ���Saw the movie and got him the next day. Supposed to be getting a girl so we can make some more,��� he says. In the dining room, water runs in a fsh tank that holds no fsh. We head to a room on the frst level with wood-paneled walls, an oval-shaped cofee table and a sectional sofa used as three pieces instead of the intended one. I know the fake plant is four feet tall because it still has a tag from Michael���s. A nook contains a weightlifting bench. Hall lives with his father, but he���ll soon move into a Shively apartment with his girlfriend. Hall wears a cross around his neck, sweatpants and Nike fip-fops over white socks. On Feb. 9, Hall tells me, he became the father of a baby girl named Paisley. ���And I got another coming in September,��� he says. ���Moving a little too fast.��� In addition to ���Child support, bills. Lot of people need to hustle to put some money in their pockets. That���s how we survive down here.��� ��� 20-year-old convicted felon Thomas Hall fried chicken, meatloaf, green beans, sweet potatoes, macaroni and cheese, cornbread and a 32-ounce jug of sweet tea. ���I put some heart in it,��� Green says. C lass is over for the day, but three of the six students in a confict-management course have stayed after to talk to me. We���re at Simmons College, whose roots as the frst black college in Kentucky date to the 19th century. ���Black people make it out of the West End and never come back,��� says 21-yearold Douglas Johnson. ���Your wings might be damaged, but if you see those eagles come back? Tey can teach you to fy.��� When it comes to job applications, Michael Williams, 20, says he���s lucky he has a ���white name.��� He says it���s his middle name, Debante, that stands out. After those two leave, a third student, 20-year-old Tomas Hall, recites a poem called ���Suicide Memories��� for me and instructor Shawn Gardner, the founder of a nonproft called 2NOT1, which encourages fathers to stay involved with their kids. ���Every step from birth, I never knew what my life was worth...,��� the poem begins. I ask Hall where he wrote it. ���While I was locked up,��� he says. ���I���m a convicted felon.��� We decide to meet at his house on Date Street near Victory Park after he tells me he���s willing to share his story. 44 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 3.13 school, he makes minimum wage working third shift at McDonald���s. Hall is the youngest of four on his mother���s side, the second oldest of 10 on his father���s. He moved all over west Louisville as a child. His mother drove school buses, then for TARC. He says his father spent time in jail for selling drugs. When his dad got out, Hall would run away to see him. ���Couple years ago, when I used to pop pills, I used to call my daddy and ask him why wasn���t he there. I would be high. I even cried to him on the phone before. Why wasn���t you there?��� By grade school, Hall was hanging out in an alley with a group of older guys, who liked that he was strong and paid him to do push-ups. He saw his frst guns when he was in ffth grade: ���an all-black baby nine��� and ���a police-edition 40.��� ���Guns fascinate me,��� he says. ���I can���t have them around because I���m a convicted felon, but I like the way they look and sound. I even like the smell of gunpowder.��� We start talking about west Louisville in general, and he says, ���We live in a jealous community. Nobody wants to see anybody else get ahead.��� Hall was selling and smoking weed by middle school. Kicked out of Newburg. Kicked out of Iroquois. He says he can���t remember if one of the times was for punching a teacher. ���I did so much bad shit,��� he says. People called him ���Marco,��� a shortened version of his middle name, De-Marco. His gang: Badd Newz. ���When we showed up, it looked like 100 people,��� he says. I ask if Louisville has a lot of gangs. His response: ���Badd Newz, Doom Squad, Victory Park Crips, 41 Cecil and Greenwood, 41 Cecil and Broadway, 41 Most Wanted over there on Market, Tech Town on 28th and Jeferson or something like that. I���m trying to think of some other ones.��� He says more than 10 of his friends are dead, all shooting victims except for the one who overdosed on pills. ���I���ve got one friend who���s still alive but has half his head missing from a gunshot wound,��� he says. Does he feel safe in west Louisville? ���We probably have diferent defnitions of the word safe. Tis is where I���m comfortable,��� he says. (He adds that I���d probably be fne walking the streets because people would assume I am a cop or crackhead, depending on my clothes.) Two days after middle school graduation, Hall says, he was arrested for two counts of frst-degree robbery and one count for possession of a handgun by a minor. He was 14. ���Even smiled on my jail picture,��� he says. He says he spent a year at a juvenile penitentiary in Adair County, then time at the Louisville Day Treatment Center. When I ask Hall how many robberies he did, he says, ���I don���t really know. I did a couple of ���em.��� He would put a bandana over his mouth or ���mask up.��� ���If you had a whole lot of money in your house, and you���re the only one there, I���m gonna get my gun and come in your house and you���re gonna show me where everything is. Or I���ll plan it out and wait for you to leave. If it���s spur-of-themoment, if I see you pull out money in the club, I might leave a little early and catch you going to your car. It got to the point where I said, ���Why do I need a mask?������ Soon, he was selling again. When I ask him how young kids are when they start doing drugs, he says, ���You can probably catch an eight-year-old smoking weed.��� He started of with a single bag of ���Reggie��� ��� that���s slang, Hall says, for ���regular weed��� ��� and, by his estimate, was soon making $500 to $1,000 a day. He does the math for me. Minimum wage, 40 hours a week, comes to $290 before taxes. ���And that���s if you can get 40 hours. Child support, bills. Lot of people need to hustle to put some money in their pockets,��� he says. ���Tat���s how we survive down here.��� At Western High School, he started focusing on football (he says he played cornerback and second-string running back), getting better grades, selling less weed. ���My phone stopped ringing, and I was doing good,��� he