By Brandon Perkins
“IF THEY MESSING WITH YOUR FAMILY . . . I’ll say, if they broke into your momma’s house,
you might want to point ‘em out.” The sentence cautiously stumbles from Project Pat’s lips, wobbling on a line bookended by two very famous mantras: “Practice what you preach (anonymous) and “Don’t Get Caught” (Young Jeezy). A question like this forces him to choose between the weight of his past and the free-man status of his present, especially when his album, <em>Crook by da Book: The Fed Story</em>, drops later this month. Pat is responding to a precarious question: Is snitch-ing ever acceptable? As a man who’s on federal probation, wanting nothing more than not to go back, and whose “Tell Tell Tell” is a certified stop-snitching anthem, there isn’t really a right answer.
“If they robbin’ your momma’s house,” he repeats, eyebrow raised and a heavy southern drawl that adopts something like Jeff Foxworthy’s favorite punchline cadence, “you might want to point ‘em out.”
Memphis, Tennessee is home to choices like this. Growing up in the Cypress Garden Projects—a perennial contributor to Memphis’s near-quest for murder capital of the year status—34-year-old Patrick Houston might’ve been a permanent statistic, in a city and a system full of cold numbers.
According to the last U.S. census, over 30% of the city’s children are living below the poverty line (and we know how brutally honest the government treats its self assessments). According to Pat, it’s “98% black” (census says 61.4%) and between the North and South Sides its 600,000 residents live in over 70 low-income apartments and projects. “They kill you in a heartbeat out there,” he says. “Everybody is on something grimy, from the mayor to the dude flipping burgers.”
But in 2001, Pat (shepparded by his younger brother Juicy J’s success as a founder of Three 6 Mafia) was doing numbers, legally, for the most part. His “Sippin on Some Syrup” chorus was unavoidable. He had a song-stealing performance with your favorite educated kid’s favorite rap group, The Roots. His major debut, Mista Don’t Play, would eventually go platinum—thanks in most part to the success of the unlikely single “Chickenhead”—and despite the uproarious decadence and copious amounts of optimism on the album’s closer “Mission Impossible (Pt. 5 Million),” the year would end with all focus directed towards the numbers that donned Pat’s federal-prison jumpsuit.
“I clicked back into my old hood mentality, when I first got to Texas,” Pat says of the Federal Correction Camp, one that is just as bad as any Texas federal penitentiary you could imagine, (minus the chainsaw massacres). After violating his parole from a previous offense, Pat was unhappy to call the FCC his home. “Cause I was in Beaumont and Beaumont is very scandalous down there. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog. People think it’s Club Fed . . . I promise it ain’t.”
Scared that he might have to hurt someone (“not for my life, but for my stupidity and temper”) and
angry at the system, one that he called “Caucasian,” Pat was that dog. On lockdowns that lasted up to two months and rolling tough on homeboy time (geographic association only), he was also worried that his just-months-ago-platinum opportunity might’ve passed him by.
“A guy that’s locked up, say he was out here sellin’ drugs, doing what he was doing, if he gets locked up for 30 days, he can’t do nothing. A guy that’s out here—he can make a baby, he can win the lottery, he can walk up and find some money—anything can happen to him. Your chances are superbly unlimited out here,” he chuckles. “They limited in jail.”
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