“What would I use for money to send the girl to college?” said Retta Mae’s distressed mother.

“There are ways to do it,” said the principal.

“Not when you’re as poor as us and black as us,” said Retta Mae’s mother. “Besides, I need Retta Mae to go out an’ get herself a job. We got a lot of mouths to feed in our family.”

The principal said, “It just breaks my heart.”

“It breaks my heart too,” was all Mrs. Wagons could reply.

And it did. Literally. The next morning Retta Mae Wagons’s mother dropped dead where she worked, behind her counter in a Woolworth’s Five & Ten Cent Store on 125th Street and Third Avenue. During the autopsy at Bellevue Hospital, the doctors found nothing wrong with the woman. It’s hard to diagnose a broken heart.

After her mother’s death, a mean and embittered Retta Mae Wagons dropped out of school and joined an angry gang of toughs. The gang roamed the Lower East Side mugging tourists and yuppies. Retta Mae was particularly rough on those they robbed, pistol-whipping and punching people unnecessarily. More than once she was pulled off a victim by one of the gang.

“Why’d you do that? Why’d you pull her off that woman?” asked a gangbanger who went by the initials BMF.

“She woulda kilt her,” explained another one called Big Stick. “That Retta Mae got a lotta mad in her.”

“So? Next time, let her do what she wants to do,” said BMF, whose initials stood for Bad Mother Fucker. “If the nigger wants to kill, let her.”

The gang did well and generally played it smart until the night BMF, high on meth and some other shit, murdered a tourist from Germany. The hood shot the lady three times in her face. The crime made the front pages of all the New York papers. Retta Mae Wagons and the three thugs she hung with were rounded up within hours and booked. The four had their pictures in the New York Post, one underneath the other. It was shortly after her Post newspaper picture that good things started to happen for Retta Mae Wagons.

Retta Mae could credit her lucky break to the pimp named Dannyboy Marley, a sporty Jamaican with a penchant for white-on-white dress shirts and black-and-white wingtip shoes. He saw Retta Mae’s picture in the newspaper and fell head over heels in love. In Dannyboy’s own words, “I see dat newspaper picture of Retta Mae Wagons an’ I say to myself dat’s de prettiest woman I ever see in my life. I wonder if dat woman’s as pretty as dat picture.”

Dannyboy Marley decided he’d have to see for himself if Retta Mae Wagons was as beautiful and sexy as he imagined. And how old she really looked. That was important too. The newspaper didn’t mention her age. Only that she was a minor.