My Life

Alphonso Green is the grandson of a sharecropper who ultimately served over twenty-nine years in the US Army before retiring in September 2004 at the highest-enlisted rank of Sergeant Major at the Pentagon, Washington, DC. For the past twenty years, he has continued to work at the Pentagon in the Civil Service. He was born in rural Quincy, Florida, in December 1957, shortly after the onset of the civil rights era.

During his early childhood, he lived and later worked on a farm located south of Quincy. While he didn't know it at that time, his family, like many others on that farm, was in the face of poverty in Quincy, Florida. In 1964, at age six, Alphonso started working in the tobacco fields on the land that was owned by a local farmer. The farmhouse in which he lived came equipped with an outhouse for relieving oneself (or using the facilities), be it urinating or the real thing-the outhouse is where it happened. The farmhouse had no running water but was equipped with a hand-dug well in the rear of the house along with a common faucet about halfway between farmhouses that produced plenty of water to drink, use for cooking, and for bathing. Frankly, his family was dirt-poor but so was every other family on that farm. The children just didn't know it.

At an early age, Alphonso was determined to do something with his life; he just didn't know what. This book details the trail that he blazed from poverty through personal dilemmas, adversity, and triumph, which ultimately resulted in a sharecropper's grandson making something out of nothing. From living and working on a farm at age six and serving his country in the US Army for almost three decades to working at the Pentagon, Washington, DC.

There are numerous success stories throughout this country but not many were born poor, in a family without a penny or a place to call home, which pushed himself through life to the top the old-fashioned way.

Alphonso's story is nothing short of compelling. He puts the reader up close and personal in his world and shows all readers that being born poor doesn't mean staying poor and that where you start doesn't have to be where you finish. He started at the bottom, now he's there, playing first-string at the top.