Homegirl

Takisha “Tai” Jernagin was about ten when her father moved the family from Los Angeles to West Covina for a better life. She arrived with an LA mouth and an LA walk in a town that kept asking what she was doing there. At thirteen, a set gave her an answer. At seventeen, she was a mother.

Then came the dancing, the drugs that kept her numb, and a federal case: aiding and abetting an armed bank robbery, in which her role was lookout from a cafe across the street. The sentence was four years and nine months.

She came home to a halfway house with a job notice pinned to the wall, and she followed it. Two associate degrees from Mt. San Antonio College and a bachelor’s from Cal Poly Pomona later, she spends her life helping people find the path she couldn’t see at fourteen.

Homegirl is an unflinching, unglamorous memoir about chosen family and inherited pain, about a mother’s addiction and a daughter re-parenting herself, and about what it actually takes to come home. Redemption here is not an epiphany. It is work, done one day at a time.

Written to be handed to the girl who is one week away from her first jump-in, and to everyone trying to reach her: parents, teachers, mentors, counselors, reentry workers, and anyone who has ever had to start over.