Michael Bennent grew up in a home shaped by instability — foster care, treatment facilities, and the particular weight of coming of age Black in 1960s Detroit. This book doesn’t soften any of it.

But it also does something rarer: it sits real memory beside the future he dared to imagine for himself, long before he had any evidence it was coming. That blend — lived truth and hoped-for possibility — is what gives The New Beginning its voice: honest, unflinching, and ultimately hopeful.

What follows is the record of how a boy who was moved from placement to placement built a home, a family, and a legacy of his own in suburban Atlanta — and what it cost, and gave back, along the way.