"My mother would beat the hell out of me," she said.
His mother would beat him with a broom handle for doing those things.
It was a police officer, he says, who took him away when his mother beat him.
There's a story I mention in the book, where one child threatened to tell school officials that his mother had beaten him.
'Because my mother had been beating me,' replied the boy.
I almost had one, too, but your mother beat me to him.
My mother beat me because we have only the one bucket.
She remembers watching her mother and older brother beat her baby sister to death.
He told them that his mother beat him and his younger brother, the police official said.
If her crazy old mother hadn't been beating on her again, then what was wrong?