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

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by Terrence J


  “Maybe.” She brightened. “You know, my girl Christina has been trying to get me to visit her at college. Maybe I’ll take Tyler up for the day.”

  She rang me again a week later, early in the morning. It sounded like she was . . . on a bus?

  “I’m headed back to New York,” she said. “I visited my girl Christina up in Syracuse. Bad idea.”

  “Rough night?”

  “The worst.” Her voice was scratchy. “I let Christina talk me into going out to a party. Her roommate said she’d watch Tyler for me. And it sounded like a good idea, just to get a break, you know? Hang out with people my age for once. Except that Christina and her new friends, all they talk about is boys and the clubs they’ve been to, and I didn’t have anything in common with them anymore so I ended up getting really drunk. And then when we got back to the dorm at three in the morning I found Tyler by himself, crying, in a dirty diaper, and Christina’s roommate was nowhere around. And then no one could understand why I was so worked up about it.

  “I should never have left Tyler with someone I didn’t know. Just to go party. That was just stupid. But mostly I’m pissed at Christina. She couldn’t understand why I was so mad at her roommate. She acted like I was making a big deal out of nothing. It’s like—she’s not even remotely interested in what my life is like now. And she didn’t offer to hold Tyler. Not once. I thought we were best friends.”

  I may not know much about teenage girls, but loyalty—that’s universal, and a subject I know a lot about.

  I NEVER KNEW I was a Yankee until I moved to North Carolina. When we arrived in Raleigh, in fifth grade, it was a big enough city to feel familiar to me, and yet it was a completely different world. I was an outsider. My whole family was. In North Carolina, if you weren’t born there, you will never truly belong. Lots of folks called us Yankees. They still do.

  I had always been a good kid in New York City, but ironically, in North Carolina—where we had moved to escape the dangers of the city—I began courting trouble. When we arrived in Raleigh, in 1991, the city was at the very beginning of a long boom that would double the population—from about 200,000 to 400,000—over the next twenty years. Raleigh is one corner of the Research Triangle Park, an economic magnet with top technology firms and big universities. And as the city’s economy grew, it lured people from all over—including big cities like Chicago and New York. Big-city troubles started to pop up, too.

  By the time I hit junior high, the drug dealers had found my neighborhood. A bad element was starting to take over the schools; if you didn’t do what they wanted you to do, they would rough you up. Already, I’d been targeted, for being a “Yankee” and an outsider.

  One day, at the swimming pool in our neighborhood, a kid I went to school with dunked me. I dunked him back—maybe a little too hard, but still, typical boy stuff. The next thing you know, he wanted to fight. The lifeguards quickly broke up our little poolside scuffle, but as he was dragged away, the kid yelled one final warning: “When I see you at the bus stop tomorrow, I’m going to shoot you.”

  I was terrified. It was entirely possible that this kid actually owned a gun—there were kids in my school who did. Maybe he really would shoot me as we waited for the school bus tomorrow. That night, I told my mom about the kid’s threat. She was horrified.

  The next morning, as I readied myself to go face the bus stop, my mom got dressed like a boy, with her hair tucked up under a baseball hat. When I left for the bus stop, she waited until I was almost out of sight, and then silently followed me.

  I don’t know what my sweet, charming mother thought she was going to be able to do to protect me; she had a steel backbone but it’s impossible to imagine her ever getting rough with a kid. When I later asked her what she was thinking, she told that she figured that if someone really was going to pull a gun on me, I better have someone at my back, too. As she said, “As a mom you just do whatever’s necessary to make sure that your kid doesn’t get hurt.”

  At the bus stop, I waited nervously for the kid to arrive. Unbeknownst to me, my mom was also waiting, hidden behind a big tree a few feet back—far enough away that the kids couldn’t see her, but close enough that she could jump in if something happened.

  When the bus arrived, the kid immediately got off of it, surrounded by his posse. Within a minute, we were in a face-off. I pulled off my jacket, and threw down my bag. “What are you gonna do?” I shouted at the boy.

  The kids were trying to egg him on. “Get him!” they cried.

  “If you’re gonna shoot me, just shoot me!” I said.

  Maybe it was because I was acting so fearless, or maybe he was just a scared kid in over his head, too, but he backed down almost immediately. “Forget you, man,” he muttered. Before I knew it, he’d slunk off with his posse in tow, and never bothered me again. The gun he’d threatened had never materialized. My mom, invisible behind the trees, breathed a sigh of relief that she wouldn’t have to intervene after all.

  I never knew that my mom was back there, watching everything—she made sure that she disappeared before any of the kids could see her and start teasing me about being a mama’s boy. And yet, I know the story so well that it’s as if I actually can see her. Hiding in the trees, all in black, with her hat pulled down low over her head. It wasn’t until later, when she told me what she’d done, that I truly understood how ferociously protective she really was. She was willing to do whatever needed to be done to keep me from harm.

  I wonder if my bravado that day was because I sensed that she had my back—even though I didn’t know she was actually there. I do know that I am incredibly lucky that the kid didn’t make good on his threat with a gun. But it is a fact that something inside me was confident enough in her constant care and protection that I felt safe to stand up for myself. I knew that I wasn’t alone, and that no matter what, she was there for me. Because of that, I could be brave.

  One of the things my mom always likes to say is, “You’re only as good as the team that you have behind you.” As a kid, facing that bully, I may have only implicitly understood what those words really meant, but as I grew up, that same message—You’re only as good as the team you have behind you—would come to shape my entire adult life.

  It all starts with my family, of course—my first team. We were a tight-knit unit. It was always just the three of us: my mom, Jaime, and me. And we were fiercely loyal to each other. Everything my mom did was about making sure that I had a great life, and that nothing happened to me. Despite having left New York City for “greener pastures,” she wasn’t going to let her guard down.

  As she says, “The experience that the black male has in this country is different from anyone else’s, even a black female. I’d seen what happens to young black men. I only had one, and I couldn’t mess up. I had to make sure you were physically protected.” All you have to do is look at the statistics—African American men are at the top when it comes to murders, incarceration, and drug offenses—to know that she’s right. There are just a lot more dangers lurking out there for young black men in America, or all young people in America for that matter. When I went to school, fistfighting was the norm; now, with all of the gun violence prevalent in our society, our youth today have it much worse.

  No matter how hard my parents were working, they kept an eagle eye on me. If I had an after-school program, my mom or Jaime picked me up. She knew all my teachers; visited the school regularly to make sure I was getting the education I needed; attended every performance. Even though both my parents worked multiple jobs, I was never a latchkey kid. They arranged their work schedules so that there was always someone home when I got home from school; always a fresh, hot, home-cooked meal for dinner; always someone to help me with homework. She knew every one of my friends by name, kept an eye out for any bad elements. Her focus was always 100 percent on me: She knew that if anyone in this world needed someone at his back, propping him up, it was an African American teenage boy.

  Growing up, I w
as intensely aware of how important our little crew was; how much I could count on my mom and Jaime no matter what happened. I also began to learn how rare it was, so I knew that I had a great gift in that kind of security. And I also came to understand that this kind of fierce loyalty should extend to friendships, too. My mom wasn’t much of a socialite—besides Jaime and me her inner circle included just a few people—but those few friends she had were close.

  As she put it, “I’d rather have a small group of friends I can count on than a lot of friends that aren’t good for anything.” Mom took care to surround herself only with people who were moving in the same direction she was. With a small circle, she explained to me, there’s never any confusion. Everyone knows their role and works accordingly.

  I was inspired, watching her and the way she operated. She helped me understand that I didn’t have to be popular; I didn’t have to try to be everyone’s friend. In life, she showed me, it’s more important to keep your team tight, your friendships close, and work with people that have the same goals and vision as you.

  To this day, I can look back and see how this advice has shaped my life. Thanks to her inspiration, I built a close network of friends that not only always has my back—just as she did that day in Raleigh—but whose loyalty and support has taken me to where I am today.

  It was pretty quiet on the other end. “You still there?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Tiffany. “Tyler’s asleep on my lap. But I’m listening. You sound like my grandma, talking about how my friends are bad influences on me. She never liked Christina, said she was ‘lacking moral fiber.’”

  My mom used to tell me that you are the sum of the people in your inner circle. If you hang around people who aren’t motivated and don’t want to do anything with themselves, get in trouble, skip class, and have no goals, that’s who you will become as well. “It’s imperative that you surround yourself with the right people,” she’d say.

  “Surround yourself in mud and you’re gonna get dirty.” Mom sure had a way with words.

  My inner circle? My two best friends, my brothers: Fred Whitaker and Travis Bond Roseboro.

  Fred is a quintessential New Yorker: motivated and fast on his feet. He’s a general with a soldier’s mentality, the guy who gets the job done. He excels at building relationships quickly. He’s five feet ten at best, but he’s wiry and strong, and he still thinks he’s got a shot at going to the NBA. At our age, we all still play basketball, but he practices. I think he still believes that he’s going to get drafted by the Knicks one day. After all these years in the business, he’s met everyone from Rihanna to Denzel Washington, but the only person he’s ever tried to take a picture of is NBA coach Pat Reilly.

  Travis is more systematic. He’s a very diligent, hard worker, and smart as all hell. I love his sense of humor—sarcastic and witty. He’s six feet one and two hundred pounds and he’s always saying that he’s gonna get abs—so far I haven’t noticed them. I bet him $10K that he still won’t have abs by the time this book comes out. We’ll see.

  I met Travis my very first day of college. Travis was already working at the local radio station, which was covering the freshman step show that I had managed to talk my way into hosting. As Travis remembers it, “Terrence ran up with the most energy I’d ever seen, talking a million miles an hour. He was eighteen years old with cornrows down his back. I turned to someone and said, ‘This is the corniest guy I’ve ever met.’ But Terrence was wired and ready to go. ‘Yeah, I’m gonna be on the radio real soon, too.’ Then he ran down the hill and hosted the show and then ran back up. ‘How’d I do? How’d I do?’”

  We were best friends from that day forward. He was the DJ, and I was the mic man—Travis played the music, I did the talking—and soon we started a business. We became a crew, “Team Dolla.” At the radio station, there were three different tiers of employees, the highest of which were the afternoon and morning jocks, who were invited to DJ and host all the big events in town. Travis and I were definitely third tier—we came off the bench when needed, so to speak. Our show was on the air from midnight to six A.M. But we still managed to get ourselves booked hosting events—talent shows and parties and such. It wasn’t lucrative or glamorous work—usually $200 a pop, shared—but it helped us pay our bills.

  We hooked up with Fred a few months later. Our friend Kim Worth told us that she had a friend who was also a communications major and thought we should meet him, because she thought he would be a great asset to our crew. When we first met Fred, we were suspicious: He was super cocky, had New York swagger, and drove a red 1989 BMW hatchback with all the confidence in the world. I don’t trust guys who drive red hatchbacks.

  “What do you do?” we asked him.

  “I work,” he said. “Anything that you can’t do yourselves, I’ll do it.”

  So we asked him to pass out flyers for a party we were throwing the next day. That afternoon he went to every parking lot on campus and put a flyer on every single car. Within a few hours, everyone at school was talking about the party. Turned out, Fred was a promotional genius. He came back to us later that afternoon and said, “So, do you have more?”

  Travis and I just looked at each other. We knew, from that moment on, the three of us would be working together.

  But the night of the party, we truly cemented our friendship. After a successful event, we went to get food at a local IHOP, where we ran into a guy Travis had known since kindergarten. This guy had just gotten an NFL contract, and because he was celebrating that night, we’d sent him some free drinks—which somehow offended his sensibilities. He came to our table, showing off for his entourage at the other table, and threw a crumpled-up twenty-dollar bill in my face: “Don’t buy me drinks. I don’t need your money.”

  It was clear that there was about to be an altercation, right there in the middle of IHOP. But it wasn’t Travis or me who stopped it—it was Fred, a guy we’d known for all of three days, who jumped up and got in this huge football player’s face. “This isn’t happening. If you even touch one of my friends, you will regret it,” he said. I’m not sure why—maybe God was looking down that day—but the football player backed down. He could have beat Fred’s ass (although I’m sure Fred doesn’t think so). He probably could have beaten up all three of us. It was a testament to Fred’s loyalty that he was willing to risk it. Travis has never been scared to throw a punch, either. Luckily, we all lived to fight another day.

  Travis and I had met with other guys who wanted to work with us, but they only wanted to hang for the fun parts. Nobody else wanted to do the legwork, or to be there when we needed it. Fred was loyal; being friends with him for one day was like being his friend for ten years. He had our back, and we were inseparable from that day on.

  Later, our friend Lashawn Ray would join us, completing our little unit. Throughout my college years, the four of us were a team, no matter what we did. We were brothers. We were never the coolest crew. There were guys we could have hung out with who had better cars, better clothes, better parties. But my boys? We shared a common vision, even if sometimes it just involved hosting a party for enough money to go to the waffle house for dinner. Collectively, we wanted to be successful. We knew we were stronger as a group. Each of us had different strengths. Instead of getting jealous or ripping each other down, we maximized those strengths. Fred was the business guy and promoter; Travis the brains behind the operation; Lashawn was the connector; and me? I’m a good organizer . . . and speaker, of course. We made a strong team. When we worked together, we made things happen.

  There was our DJ and hosting business, sure, but that was only the beginning. Because of the senseless shooting of my dorm neighbor, Christopher, I was motivated to run for student body president. But that required a lot of logistics and management experience, which wasn’t my strength.

  Fortunately my brothers’ skills complemented my own, and my crew of misfits became my campaign managers. And when I won the election, I wanted my team around
me more than ever. I had tons of harebrained schemes, but I’m only one man. I needed people to call on to execute my vision. I had an amazing executive board, appointed by students, but my boys became my inner circle in the positions I could appoint. Together, we managed a budget of half a million dollars, producing events for the school including concerts, basketball games, and parties. Those days were magical. I’m proud of what we accomplished there, and it only happened because everybody on the team had the same vision, and we all supported each other. Just like my family, loyalty was on the top of everyone’s list.

  By the time I graduated, I had a second tight-knit crew, too—my line brothers at Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

  Growing up as an only child, I always felt that I missed out on a certain kind of brotherhood. And since we moved so much when I was a kid, I never formed a tight crew in junior or high school. So when I hit college and heard about fraternities, I was really intrigued. I wanted to experience that kind of camaraderie and fellowship.

  Founded at Howard University in 1911, Omega Psi Phi now has over 750 chapters worldwide. Many accomplished, high-profile black men are members: Shaquille O’Neal, Tom Joyner, Rickey Smiley, Bill Cosby, and Michael Jordan, to name a few. Two of my most influential mentors, Steve Harvey and his business manager Rushion McDonald—who largely inspired me to write this book—are members of the fraternity as well. I spend a lot of time with Steve discussing business and personal goals, and the connection that we have wouldn’t be the same if we weren’t both Omega men.

  Because Travis was a legacy—his father, Big Al, was a member—he knew that he wanted to join the organization. He was always reading books about the Greek system, researching and talking about it; and the more I heard about Omega Psi Phi from him, the more it sparked my interest, too.

 

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