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

Author:J, Terrence [J, Terrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-09-30T18:30:00+00:00

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

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