Thing is, my father never put his hands on me; he didn’t have to. He simply knew how to bring out the best in me in a way that inspired me to expect the best out of myself. He managed this not so much by being strict but more so by trusting me, by encouraging me to trust myself. This was a recurring lesson that started as early as age seven, when my father started teaching me how to drive. I’d sit on his lap and steer his blue pickup truck through the back roads of Washington, DC, listening to the gravel grind and pop against the tires, giggling all the way. Sometimes, when it seemed like I was on the verge of getting too close to a parked car, Dad would put his hands on top of my own to gently help guide the steering wheel; I loved how they felt—rough and calloused and strong. Later, when I was just about to become a teenager, my father would let me drive all by myself; he would go get some beer, take me to the stadium where the Washington Redskins play football, and sit up under a shady tree while I drove around the parking lot, practicing for the day I’d get my own ride. I’d have to sit on the edge of the leather seat, sticky and hot against my little legs, just to reach the gas pedal and brakes; the truck would jerk violently, making my neck whip as I pushed too suddenly on the gas or got scared and pumped the brakes too hard. Still, I’d giggle every time I passed by my father, who’d be sitting there laughing. “Drive, baby!” he’d yell, and take another swig of his beer. I took my driver’s license test in a big-ass lime-green Bonneville without an ounce of fear, because, over the course of years with my father’s direction, I’d already mastered driving that pickup truck. I’d already mastered how to control fear rather than let it control me.
That’s the thing about fear: Dad had a knack for figuratively knocking it out of you. No one around him was exempt from it—not even adults. Sometime later, long after my parents’ own marriage had dissolved, he matured and committed to his second wife. But there was one problem. She didn’t have a license and didn’t know how to drive. She was too scared. My father wasn’t having it. “Let me tell you something. If you gonna be with me, you gonna learn how to drive,” he told her. “Fuck that being-scared shit. Come on!” And guess who drives now? He forced everyone he loved to look that devil in the eye and “go tell him he’s a liar.” Boris Henson lived on that. He wanted me to fear less. To be fearless.
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My mother was right: I am, in a lot of ways, like my dad. My candor, my humor, my relationship to fear, come directly from him—I carry it deep down in my gut. But while my dad schooled me on the game, it was Mom who taught me how to live it.
Now when I say this to her—when I extend the credit she is due—she shrugs it off, but it is the truth. She stands back and looks in amazement at all that I do: balancing a demanding career with raising my son on my own, and all the while squeezing in some semblance of a personal life. But what I do is not magical, or, in my opinion, unique. All this drive, all this passion, all this get to it and get it done all up in my bones, I get it from my mama. She set up the goalposts and showed me in word and in deed that no matter what lies in the road ahead of me, fear is utterly useless. This she had to do because she was a single mother, heading our family of two in a neighborhood in southeast DC that, when we stepped outside the cocooned paradise she created, replete with my very own room and everything I needed and even some of what I wanted, wasn’t the safest place for a woman and her young charge. When she wasn’t battling my father, she was battling the streets—literally.
The parking lot was where she did her fighting, or, more appropriately, where she defended herself. It was a trap, really: the parking lot, set in a U-shaped valley between the two large apartment buildings that made up our complex, was always dark, and each entrance was flanked by steps on one side and a laundry room and trash room on the other, neither of which had doors or lights. It was the perfect setup for a thief to knock someone over the head and take all she had, and that’s exactly what happened to my mother twice, both times in front of me.
The first time she was robbed, I was six years old. Until that very moment, I hadn’t a care in the world. It was late October in 1976, on one of those warm Indian summer nights, and I was floating high, strutting between my mom and my friend from first grade, who, on this rare occasion, had been invited to sleep over at our place. My mother went all out for me, even taking us out for hamburgers and fries at McDonald’s, an uncommon treat for us back in those days when money was tight and eating out, even at a fast-food restaurant, was a luxury. Though I was living in one of the most troubled areas of a city in which poverty and hopelessness made neighbor prey on neighbor, I hadn’t experienced anything to cause me concern. With my mother, I felt protected, mainly because she always made a way out of no way for me. Because of her, our little family had stability: we never got put out of our place, neither the power nor the water was ever shut off because of an inability to pay the bill, we were never hungry, Christmas was always bomb. I lived for the oversells at Woodward & Lorthrop department store—those exclusive sales when merchandise the store couldn’t move was offered to employees for deep discounts. I was fly in high school: Guess jeans on my behind and Coach bags on my shoulders. I still have a beautiful silverware set Mom bought for me when I moved into my first apartment; the only time I pull it out is for special occasions, and when I do, I can’t help but think about her and the sacrifices she made to make life beautiful. Knuckles raw, back sore, eyes burning, mind numb, she made it work. Made it so that even in the middle of the hood, where crime ran rampant and there were a lot of folks who had little and lived hard, her daughter found paradise in our little southeast DC apartment. Once I crossed the threshold into the home my mother made for the two of us, I felt like I was arriving at a grand mansion. In her typically selfless form, rather than buy herself a bureau for her clothes or a sofa on which she could relax after a long, hard day’s work, she bought me a gorgeous Elizabethan bedroom set, which she outfitted with a Holly Hobbie comforter and a Strawberry Shortcake doll and posters. It was so lavish that for the longest time, I didn’t know we lived in the hood or that we were struggling.
On that fateful night of the first robbery, it was to this paradise that my friend and I were going to eat our McDonald’s, play dolls, color, and maybe watch a little television, before climbing under the covers to talk and giggle and fight sleep until sleep won out. We were skipping along ahead of my mother in the parking lot, making our way to the main entrance of the building, when all of a sudden, a man wearing a stocking cap over his face ran up behind us. My friend and I were too busy talking and laughing and doing what six-year-olds do when they’re excited about a sleepover to understand exactly what was going on. If anything, I was thrown off when my mother giggled, thinking it was a man who was sweet on her, playing a trick. “Oh, George, why don’t you stop playing!” she said, laughing, when the man grabbed her.