Southern Misery: Book One : Leaving Home

A Memoir by Alfonza Lee Hobbie Montgomery, Alabama, 1982. Eighteen-year-old Alfonza Hobbie has one dream: escape. Escape the poverty of the housing projects, the suffocating racism baked into every institution of his city, and a future that seems designed to break him before he can become anything at all. With comic books in his pocket and heros philosophy in his heart, he boards an Army bus for Fort Knox, Kentucky (Basic Training), not because he chose the military, but because Montgomery left him no other choice. What waits for him there is both familiar and worse than he imagined. Klansmen with rank and authority. A system rigged to weed out anyone who isn't white. Violence in the barracks. Enemies who wear uniforms and carry a lot of hatred, just like back home. But Hobbie is harder than they know. Montgomery made sure of that. Southern Misery is a raw, unflinching memoir about a young Black man who refused to be broken by a city, by an institution, or by the hate that followed him from the Deep South all the way to the United States Army.