From Serving Life to Living Life in Its Fullest

And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, we’ll hear Jeremy Clark’s story—a story of brokenness and loneliness, and ultimately, redemption and love. Jeremy went from being the leader of a prison gang to being a leader and inspiration for many.

Take it away, Jeremy. He did. The only time I’ve ever been interviewed by the police. Well, my mother was a good mother, but she was never there. She worked in the bars. She worked in the bar until o’clock in the morning, since she’d leave me at the house mamaself when I was eight, nine years old. And my real daddy had got killed when I was two years old in an accident, so I didn’t have no daddy. My little cousin, he was born with a Bible in his hand. He lived this perfect little life where I thought it was perfect, you know, compared to mine, ’cause he had a daddy, he got a mama. So even though his daddy kind of whooped in with stuff like that, at least he had somebody there to open. Every man my mom brought home was—I mean, he wasn’t fathering material, you know what I mean? He wasn’t gonna throw the football with Mayory of the baseball. He was there for mama. And that eventually, I’d been living with my grandparents. They pretty much raised me for a while. And, uh, they owned a beer joint and they had a little living quarters, and that’s where I lived from eight years old. They let me—it was okay to draink, you know. Do you know what ‘quarters’ are, where you bounce a quarter of the cup, and this got alcoholic? You get the ‘dragon.’ Eight, nine, ten years old, I was pretty good. Yeah. I went to the babysitters, and that’s where I kind of got molded into something, ’cause I got molested. And he would molest all the little boys, so it kind of got me—I guess that early age, kind of getting bitter toward anybody who was in any type of authority. So I remember going back to the babysitters, and there was a watermelon field, and we busted every watermelon and that in that field. So I guess that’s was the start of my criminal career. I didn’t have a curfew, so I was gone all the time, unless like I was twenty-one, not twelve, and the police would bring me home, this crazy stuff. I ‘golted’ about a hundred mailboxes shut one time. I just go through an egg peoples houses and boats, and I mean this crazy foolishness. And, uh, I—it’s like when I rolled into a neighborhood, property value drop, you know, like, “Oh, he knows where this neighborhood is!” That now won’t building selling all these houses, you know? My grandparents were drunk, so I mean, they were for real alcoholics, so I seen what alcohol would do to you when I was real little. I did that, ’cause though, “Oh, this is cool!” But then when I seen what it turned them into, I was like, “I don’t want no part of that.” And I guess just the trick of the enemy, man, ’cause drugs won’t do you like that. They’re different. So I couldn’t afford no real drugs when I was the kids, so I huffed gas, ’cause for about fifty cents, and the two…everybody stayed out all weekend. And I really didn’t think my life was going in nobody direction, but my mama kept waking me up over a gas can. So, at fourteen, I went to my first rehab. First of all, how do you go to rehab, man, and tell everybody that you’re a dick to huffing gas? You know they’re there. Man, “I’m a smoke crack.” “I’m on crystal meth.” Man. “I got a wave and dits,” and “I’ll call it.” “What do you do?” “You?” “Well, I hang out down after seven, laughing.” Man, you lose every cool point. And they kicked me out. I did something and got kicked out of there. So that’s when my little cousin that was born with a Bible said, “You’ve tried everything in the world. Try Jesus one time. If you, if you don’t like him, you always go back to what you were doing.” And so I was saying, “Alright, bet.” I went to church, and there was a man up there preaching, and I didn’t pay him no attention until he stopped that. In the ‘moh’ his ‘sermony,’ he said, “There’s somebody in here that does not believe in God. But if you run to the altar, don’t walk, don’t jog, but run! God can show Himself to you.” And when he said that, I knew exactly who it was talking to you. And I remember the first thought that come through my head at that point was, why that I sat on the back row of this church? But I ran like somebody set me on fire, and I ran down there, and I just stopped. I looked up and I said, “God, this is your one chance to prove that you do exist, but I’m here to prove that You don’t.” And when I opened my eyes again, I was looking for the lights. I don’t know what happened to me, but he got my attention, so I said, “This is might be worth trying.” Like, it was to the point to where the next day I showed up at church, and they like, “We’re not having service today.” I’m like, “Man, whatever happened to me happened in there, and it was this more real than you standing here talking to me.” That’s what I told the lady at the church. So I just went and sat in the sanctuary with no lights on. And I did that every day for a while. And my mama had married a man that was not very—I’m not gonna say he didn’t like me. He probably would’ve acted right, but I—I made his life miserable, so therefore he didn’t really care much for me. But they called me a “Jesus freak.” They said, “You’re a Jesus freak, and this ain’t normal.” So I was like, “Well, I can always go back to doing what I was doing.” “That’s what you want me to do.” And, uh, so they kicked me out of the house at, uh, fifteen year or so old, and I had to go stay with the man that was preaching that message. He said, “Well, you can just come sleep on the floor at the house,” and he ended up molesting me. So at that point, my disbelief in God before only intensified now. So I just took off fronting as far from God as I possibly could and as fast as I could. And the way that it started happening was like, at church one day, man, they were doing music practicing. The drummer was late, and I was looking at them drums, like, “Hey!” They said, “Can you play them?” I was like, “Yeah, I—yeah, I don’t play ’em.” So I said, “We’ll get over and try.” And I got over, and I could keep a beat, and I was like, “You had drum les?” Said, “No.” And when I played them drums, everything in my life was okay. So I started playing the drums. So I loved playing the drums. I wanted to play every service, not because I was like prideful about it, because the other day was way better than I was. But it’s a…all the problems I ever had in life, every ‘fail’ ever, all that disappeared, every struggle disappeared, and like, while I was playing them drums, I was winning over everything. And I remember one night, laying there, and I woke up and I started crying, and I said, “This ain’t right. I know this ain’t right.” And I would pray out loud, thinking it would make him stop. But it’d be like, “If you wanna play them drums, tomorrow just gonna lay there.” So I would just lay there and cry. I ended up nineteen years old, I think I was. That’s when I ended up catching my first felony charge, going to jail. I don’t remember how old I was when I first went to prison, but it was not long after that. That’s when I got involved in gang activity. And during the Aryan Brotherhood, it was just like a networking system, because I had to become a drug dealer, and I got tattooed on my own Scarface, because that was like when I’ve seen that movie as a teenager, I was like, “That’s when I want to leave when I grew up, not the fireman or the police, but I want to leave that guy with double bass full of money.” And in the gang world, people would listen to me. So I made it to the top in a very short period of time. I ended up making it to the Outside State Captain positions, mean I was over everybody in the free world. So everybody had to listen to everywhere I went.

And you’re listening to Jeremy Clark tell a heck of his story. He was labeled the Al Capone of the Aryan Brotherhood in Mississippi by a U.S. congressman. He picked up the Bible, read it, and then gave his life to God after swearing he’d never pick it up. “It is Your Time,” a book by Joel Osteen, helped facilitate some of that change in his thinking. And what should have been life—well, it turned out to be five years. And he gets out, but he’s still the same guy, and boom—back to drugs and back in court again, and somehow an angel comes into his life. And we’ve had these people show up in our lives, all of us from out of nowhere and help us. And some call them angels. I don’t know what you call them. Now that’s what a lot of people I know called them. And my goodness, this woman fought for him. And ultimately, back to the Bible again, and he asked God to change him. On the inside. Meets his mother that last time. She smiles, knowing he’s changed. Dies, and the rest of his life…well, about to hear about that after these messages. The life of Jeremy Clark, from despair to redemption here on our American Stories. And we’re back with our American Stories and with Jeremy Clark’s. Jeremy has been sharing with us this vicious cycle.