The Wealth of My Mother's Wisdom: The Lessons That Made My Life Rich

by Terrence J

  Tiffany gave me a funny look. “So, like, they were afraid that you were going to get sucked into the gangster life or something? You were going to, what, go work for Babyface?” She laughed at the improbability of this image.

  Hardly. I’d watched Babyface long enough to realize that the life of a low-level drug dealer wasn’t much fun. I never saw him pulling up in a nice car, or hanging out with a bunch of girls, and he wasn’t covered in chains and jewelry. He was just some dude standing out in the cold in a T-shirt and jeans, pretending that he was doing nothing. His life was not a bit glamorous. Maybe he felt like he was doing what he had to do to take care of his family. But watching him let me know that his path was not the path for me to take.

  My mom knew me well enough to know that she didn’t have to worry about me being seduced by the life of crime. What she was really worried about was my physical safety. People were gunned down in Queens all the time, the victims of accidental shootings. Kids were no exception.

  One day, my mom took me to a local park to visit the playground. It was one of the few places the kids could safely play—or, at least, it had been until that point. That day, as I was playing on the jungle gym, a vicious pit bull began running loose around the playground. Some drug dealer had decided that our local park, filled with kids, was a good place to let his trained attack dog run around off-leash. A classmate of mine, a sweet little girl, had already been bitten by this dog, and people in the neighborhood were terrified. My mom grabbed me and ran, and we never went back.

  That was the final straw. Mom and Jaime decided it was time to get me out of New York. We were living like hostages, afraid to leave our apartment, unable to sleep at night, unable to go to the parks, unable to play normal kid games, unable to even walk across the street safely.

  “I kept thinking, ‘We have to get him out of this environment,’” my mom tells me. “Kids should be able to run and play and ride their bikes without fear of getting attacked or mugged. They should feel safe playing sports with their friends. We have to get him somewhere he can breathe. Otherwise, he’s going to become a statistic; he’ll be shot, or worse.”

  Not long after, my parents packed all of our belongings in a U-Haul, settled me in the backseat of our red Dodge Shadow with our cocker spaniel, Spanky (my mom had already achieved one of her three goals), and set off for a destination five hundred miles south of New York City. We were headed toward a whole new life in North Carolina.

  North Carolina wasn’t a total shot in the dark: My mother’s distant family is originally from there. Specifically, it’s the home state of my great-grandma, Mattie Harrison, a strong woman with an entrepreneurial spirit who, I was told, was a bootlegger.

  Rocky Mount, North Carolina, where mom’s family originally comes from, is a town of roughly 57,000 people on the coastal plains of North Carolina, in Nash County. It also happens to be situated right off Highway 95, at right around the middle point of the East Coast. If you’re driving between Miami and New York City, Rocky Mount is your halfway point—just about where you need to stop to spend the night.

  This made Rocky Mount the perfect place to be a bootlegger back in the 1930s, and Great-grandma Mattie took full advantage of her situation. She was a grand personality who cooked up moonshine and bootlegged whiskey and sold it to travelers, in between taking care of her eight kids and toiling on her farm and taking in orphans, too. She did pretty well with her endeavors. Her family owned a fair amount of land in rural Nash County, and although my grandmother Helen—Mattie’s only daughter, my mom’s mom—had eventually moved to New York City, many of my relatives were still there, including my mom’s favorite great-uncle Nate. Many of them lived just down the road from each other. It was the kind of place where no one locked the front door.

  Not long after the pit bull incident, my parents put me in the car and drove me down to Disney World in Orlando. On the way back, we stopped to visit Great-grandma Mattie. It was my first time out of New York, and my first time in the country, and I was totally floored. Great-grandma Mattie had a huge garden, full of trees and flowers and plants I’d never seen before—I knew absolutely nothing about nature, having grown up surrounded by concrete. It was a kind of paradise. I spent three days just playing outside in the garden, riding bikes without concern, making up games with sticks you could just pick up off the ground. That was totally amazing to me.

  See, growing up in the city I didn’t get to really use my imagination. I was kept busy by the people around me, by toys and books, by scheduled activities, by neighborhood and school friends. But when I stayed at my grandma’s house I had nothing to do. I didn’t have a brother or sister to play with, and there weren’t other kids around, so I had to really come up with my own games. I would play with boxes, or go out to the cotton field behind her house to look at bugs, or do Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle “kung fu” with sticks. My mom saw me playing outside, having a ball with only my own creativity for company, and decided, right there, that this was the type of environment she wanted me growing up in.

  When we got back to the city, she and Jaime took their life savings—a whopping $5,500—and bought an acre of wild land in Rocky Mount. They couldn’t afford a house yet, but they decided to move down to the area anyway, in order to start a new life. They believed that the sooner they could get me into a healthier environment, the better.

  I am still floored by the amount of vision this took on my mom’s part. Think of it: You’re just twenty-six, with a little kid, and you decide to buy a piece of grass halfway across the country in a place you’ve never lived. You don’t have a job lined up, no local friends, few family members. Still, my mom was able to look at a plot of empty land and say, “I can see putting a house on this land, putting my family in it, and letting my kid grow up here.” That takes an incredible imagination, a whole lot of willpower, and a tremendous amount of guts.

  So they packed up that twenty-foot U-Haul truck and caravanned down to Raleigh, using walkie-talkies to keep in touch. Raleigh was an hour east of the property my parents had purchased in Rocky Mount, but it made more sense to live in the city, where there were a lot of job opportunities, than in Rocky Mount, which was fairly economically depressed at the time. They could get established in Raleigh, and when things were more stable, build the house they had always dreamed of. It was a huge risk. Fortunately, my dad found work pretty quickly doing electrical and construction work, and my mom lined up a temp job at the pharmaceutical company Glaxo. The plan was to save every penny they possibly could in order to build that house on our property, and eventually move us to Rocky Mount.

  It took almost five years, a time in which we lived very hand to mouth, but Mom and Jaime ultimately did it. Which meant that my mom had achieved her second goal: owning a home.

  Tiffany had finished her meal and was eyeing the pies behind the counter. She sat back and looked at me. “Wow, that’s crazy,” she said. “What if they couldn’t find work? You could have ended up homeless.”

  As my mom told me, “We had the land, so we knew if anything went really wrong we could always pitch a tent. And we made an agreement with each other that if it didn’t work, we weren’t going to blame each other. We were going to go for it and not look back and let the chips falls where they may. We figured, if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere, so why not go for it?”

  This has always been so inspiring to me. My mom was a rebel; she had a vision and just went for it. She didn’t let having a kid stop her from having dreams—in fact, it just made her more focused on achieving the things she had dreamed of. She let my needs motivate her to take the biggest leap you can take. For her, being responsible for me meant her having the vision to try to make a better life—for both of us. After all, it was no better for her living in that environment than it was for me. It was still hard to leave the only city she had ever known, and the life she had built in New York, but New York had changed, and Mom and Jaime knew that North Carolina offered a quality of life tha
t would far outshine the strength of homesickness.

  I watched my mom do this crazy, seemingly impractical thing—because she believed she could make it work. And that let me know that anything is possible. If she could take that leap, take those risks, and pursue her dreams—for herself, and for me—then so could I. If she could be that fearless, then so could I. It meant that anything was achievable, as long as I was willing to try.

  Mom has said to me, more that once, “What we fear in our minds bears no resemblance to what’s really there.” She taught me that being afraid of what could be is a waste of time. Think big, and don’t be afraid to take a leap to make your vision happen.

  The point I’m making is that you need to figure out your ideal scenario—and then fight to bring it to reality. What do you want? What’s your goal for yourself? Your family? To paraphrase the words of Paulo Coelho, “Come up with your personal legend, and even if it seems scary, take the steps that you need to achieve it.”

  The check had arrived. I paid for Tiffany’s meal and then—over her objections—asked the waitress to get her a piece of apple pie to go. “It’s for the baby,” I said.

  She asked for two pieces.

  * * *

  In Her Own Words: Lisa on Vision & Fearlessness

  I like to say that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real. (I like acronyms!) A lot of times what we invent in our minds has nothing to do with what’s really there. We scare ourselves before we’ve even given ourselves the opportunity to find out what life’s about. The monsters in our heads are really just the self-doubt that we bring upon ourselves.

  It’s really important not to let the fear—fear of what you think might happen—stop you from trying things. Women in particular are intimidated a lot.

  My mom held herself back from opportunities because of her fear of the unknown. She’d drive herself crazy with questions like “What if I can’t do this? What are people going to think? What are they going to say?”

  I have to remind myself, whenever I get scared of trying something new, that it’s just the false evidence frightening me. If I remember that, I calm down and I know I can get through whatever I’m facing.

  You have to lose the fear if you want to dream big. When Jaime and I decided to move to North Carolina, it was really scary. Here we were with a trailer containing all our belongings in it, moving to another state with nothing but a deed for property in my hand. We had never lived anywhere but New York City.

  But we made a pact with each other, before we left, that we would always look forward. Driving our car to North Carolina, the front window view was large, so we kept looking ahead; and the rearview mirror was small, so we only glanced back. We kept our eyes forward, on our vision, and didn’t let the fear of what could happen stop us. We just ignored the fear—that False Evidence Appearing Real.

  * * *

  Laz Alonso Talks About His Mom

  Laz Alonso has played a wide variety of roles in his celebrated acting career, including stints on Deception, CSI: Miami, and Breakout Kings. His film career includes leads in Jarhead, Fast & Furious, Stomp the Yard, and of course Avatar. Laz left a career as an investment banker to take a chance on Hollywood, and the risk paid off. Also a fellow BET alum, Laz told me how tough his mom was in this story.

  Growing up, my mother had to be my mother and my father, because my father died at a very early age. He was in and out of rehab because of alcoholism. He would go away, get cleaned up, come home, and be out again that weekend. That was our reality from early on. So my mother did the heavy lifting, and she busted her butt to get me through school.

  I remember one story from when I was young. I had a Green Machine—this kid’s bike that was kind of like a hybrid Big Wheel. I was the only kid on the block who had one. But there was a kid who was the neighborhood bully, and he wanted one. He was named Fred. One day he came up and snatched my Green Machine away from me.

  Most other kids would have run home to get their older brother or sister to come help them out, do their dirty work for them. But I was an only child, so I always went to my mom. My mom was no joke. She feared no one.

  That day, I ran home to her and said, “Yo, Mom! Fred took my Green Machine! Let’s go beat him up!”

  But my mom didn’t even let me in the house. She just stood there in the doorway and slapped me across the face. I couldn’t believe it. And then she asked, “Did Fred hit you as hard as I just did?”

  I started crying, but she just repeated the question: “Who hit you harder? Me or Fred?”

  And I went, “You did!”

  “Well, if you don’t want me to hit you again then you got to go out there and get that Green Machine back, because I worked too hard to buy it for you.” She meant it, too. So I turned around and went back to Fred. I didn’t say a word. I just started whaling on him. I was taking karate at the time, and I went at him so fast that you couldn’t tell if it was my hands or feet flying. He didn’t know what was coming.

  “I want my Green Machine back,” I yelled. And he gave it back to me.

  When I went back to my mom, with the Green Machine, she said, “Don’t ever let anyone take anything away from you again. What’s yours is yours, what’s theirs is theirs.” It taught me a valuable lesson—that I was the man of the house, I had to protect not just what was mine, but what was ours. She’d worked too hard for our life. It was when I knew, as the saying goes, that shit is real. That this was real life.

  Fred and I ended up becoming best friends after the Green Machine. Twenty years later I ran into Fred at an IHOP, and we had a great laugh about it.

  This experience with my mom and Fred didn’t make me violent. It didn’t turn me into a bully or make me fight more, but it did teach me to respect what you have, stand up for yourself, and how to earn respect from others. And after that I became very intolerant of bullies. It made me have empathy for people who were bullied—I would befriend them, help them not get bullied. The bullies usually gave them a pass when I was around, because I tried to get along with everyone.

  These days, I never take anyone for granted. It doesn’t matter their color, creed, religion, sexual preference, handicap: It’s who they are, not what they are, that’s important. If you are the only person who isn’t judging someone when everyone else is, someday that’s the person who will be by your side when you need it the most.

  That’s the theme of my life. Judge me for who I am, not what I am.

  4

  My Mother’s Words of Wisdom About Hustle & Ambition

  I hadn’t heard from Tiffany in several months, but I’d been thinking about her a lot. Word on the street was that she’d given birth to a healthy baby boy named Tyler, just three days after finishing her high school finals. I’d sent over a card and a gift for the baby, and she’d texted me a snapshot of Tyler in return. But I hadn’t seen her around the Boys & Girls Club—it wasn’t too surprising, since she had a baby to take care of—but I worried about how she was handling life with a newborn.

  So I was thrilled to hear her voice on the other end of the line one afternoon in early summer. In the background, I could hear the faint cooing of a baby.

  Tiffany told me all about the birth—more, frankly, than a single guy in his twenties really wants to hear. It sounded kind of like hell. But she was proud of herself for having done it.

  “I didn’t know I was that strong,” she said. “And Tyler—wow, he’s just incredible. Seriously, my heart explodes every time I look at him.”

  As for Sean—well, he showed up for the birth. And it sounded like he was coming around to visit them every evening, bringing groceries and things for the baby. But the idea of moving in together has been dropped—too expensive—and his contributions to the cost of the baby have been negligible, at best. A few bucks here or there, not nearly enough to cover the expenses of baby gear and formula and diapers. And more diapers. And more diapers.

  “So many diapers,” she groaned. “I love this little guy, but sometimes it’s
like all he does is poop and eat and cry. It’s just me and him and the diapers, all day long. Honestly, as much as I love him, I’m kind of looking forward to starting college in the fall and being around adults again.”

  “So you’re going to do it? You’re moving to D. C. to go to Howard?”

  “I think so. Maybe. I hope so.” She stopped and made a funny sound.

  “What’s that?”

  “The baby. I think he’s smiling.” Her voice got soft, and I could hear her cooing to the baby. “Are you smiling at your momma, little man?”

  Aww. Even I felt a little choked up. “Are you happy?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Definitely. I mean—maybe I’m a little bored sometimes, being here all by myself. Mostly I’m just worried about money. I’m down to the last five bucks in my bank account.

  “Sean says his friend might be giving him a job at his club. And I’ve got some ideas. I mean, it’s not like I can go back to waitressing at the diner. But I thought—maybe I can set up an Etsy store or something? I can do some sewing while Tyler sleeps, and try to sell my stuff online. I can do it anywhere—here or at college. Plus, it’s a good way to get my design ideas out there. What do you think?”

  “I think that’s pretty resourceful,” I said. “That’s exactly the kind of hustle my mom would approve of.”

  “You think so?”

  I knew so. Be creative, try new things, and explore your passions—but most important, don’t be afraid to think big. That’s what my mom always taught me.

  WHEN I WAS FOURTEEN, in 1996, I was convinced that my life’s calling was to be a rapper, an actor, or a Supreme Court justice (don’t laugh). I would watch Will Smith on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and think “I want to be like him,” even though I had no idea what that actually meant. It was the era of Tupac and Biggie. For the teenage boys of Raleigh, where I was now a freshman at Sanderson High School, it was all about the bling and the baggy jeans, about being “hardcore” despite the fact that you had only recently stopped wearing superhero underwear.