Jada Pinkett Smith has a new memoir out and, in the book, she opens up about her childhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Specifically, the actress discusses what it was like to grow up as a drug dealer, selling crack cocaine on the city’s dangerous streets. She that she recalls carrying a knife around for protection, and even winding up in some situations where she had guns pointed at her head, while referring to that time of her life the “University of the B More Streets.”
“Growing up, the drug dealers were the ones that had affluence,” Pinkett Smith writes in her book, titled Worthy, per PEOPLE. “That’s what we readily saw as success. And so for me, considering my circumstances at the time, my mother [Adrienne Banfield-Norris, with whom she hosts Red Table Talk] was not doing well, she tried to get clean from heroin.” She goes. on to clarify that she did have a number of “legit jobs” in her younger years, which began around 12 years old. “Having money in my pocket was a must,” she said, going on to reveal that she once worked at The Gap and was also in telemarketing for a while.
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“I just wanted financial freedom,” she confessed, but also couldn’t shake her worries. “What if something happens to my mother? What if she doesn’t come home one night? Either overdosed, arrested, whatever. And so, I decided to sell drugs. I decided to sell crack cocaine.”
Reflecting on her drug-dealing life, Pinkett Smith says that “everybody” in Baltimore in the ’80s was involved in the crime lifestyle. “Drugs were going to touch you, period,” she said. “You could use them, you could sell them, but there was no being in an environment like that and drugs not touch you. And I’m not saying that it’s right, of course, now being in a whole different mindset. But when you’re living in a war zone and you just thinking about survival, I wasn’t trying to use drugs. I surely wasn’t going to be a drug dealer’s girlfriend. But I wanted money so that I could be independent. I wanted to take care of myself.”
Quipping about her former crime ambitions, Pinkett Smith recalled, “I thought I was going to be a queen pin, for sure.” She added, “I was rollin’ with some really high rollers at the time. That’s a whole ‘nother Jada, a whole ‘nother Jada that would chase somebody down the alley with a switchblade because they stole $700. Or the Jada that would sell crack cocaine and then get set up and two dudes come in with nine-millimeters and she gets a gun put to her head.”
Turning serious, Pinkett Smith then offered, “That was my solution at that particular time to survive. And it really helped me. But it put me into a lot of danger and I hurt a lot of people along the way.” Worthy is now available wherever books are sold.
