People told five-year-old Stacey Patton that she was one lucky little girl, she was blessed.  At a time when many black children languished in the New Jersey social services department, a hard-working middle-class black couple, George and Myrtle, adopted Stacey and gave her everything a girl could want: new clothes, toys, her own room, and a private school education.  It should have been a dream come true, but Stacey didn’t feel so lucky or blessed when Myrtle suffocated her with a plastic bag, stripped her naked and poked fingers into her, called her a pee rat, and beat her with extension cords, belts, or whatever was on hand.  Myrtle claimed she beat Stacey because she loved her, “I’m beating you so the white man won’t,” she told Stacey.  But what kind of love was it that left a little girl terrorized, with scars and bruises all over her body, and her adopted father unwilling or unable to stop the abuse?  In her angry memoir That Mean Old Yesterday, Stacey juxtaposes the physical and emotional abuse she received from her adopted family with brief chapters on the history of the African-American family, focusing especially on plantation life where families were routinely broken up, parents and children beaten into submission, and rebellion could mean death.