My mother kept the house clean and we ate good. I didn't know we were poor until I started giving interviews.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My mother was amazing. I guess, in our community, if you wanted to get by you had to work hard. So she cleaned offices. She did everything that you could imagine. We were really poor. But she would say, 'Where you are is not who you are.'
We were poor. But my mom never accepted that. She worked hard to become a residential contractor - got her master's with honors at the University of New Orleans. I used to go to every class with her. Her father was my paternal figure.
For a decade, I was a stay-at-home mom. I sent my husband to his law office, sat on PTA boards and baked cookies - great cookies. All of a sudden, I had no husband, no job, few prospects, and two small children who had grown accustomed to eating.
My mother was a cleaning lady all her life.
My parents, who were split up, were so good at keeping my environment strong and keeping everything around me not focused on the fact that we were poor. They got me culture. They took me to museums. They showed art to me. They read to me. And my mother drove two hours a day to take me to University Elementary School.
I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.
When I was a young boy, very young boy, mothers didn't work. Women were home, they took care of the house, they washed the dishes and took care of the children. That's what they did, and that's what my mother did.
At home, growing up, we weren't really poor. We had everything we needed, we just didn't have what we wanted.
We were so poor that my mother would often leave me in a foster home until she could raise enough money to rent rooms for us.
I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else.