The old Negro Spiritual says "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home." The song implies that the lonliest feeling one could feel. I’ve known a lot of feelings but that is one I can’t imagine. If your mother has been a true mother she has been your first teacher, comforter and provider. No one teaches self esteem and self confidence like a good mother. My mother taught me to believe in myself and to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be if I just applied myself.

My mother taught me to laugh, sometimes at myself but the greatest lesson she taught me was the one that Kunte Kinte’s father taught him when he held his baby to the sky and said "Behold the only one greater than yourself." The other part of mother’s lesson was that with God is on your side, you can do and be anything you want to be.

I find myself quoting my mother and imulating her a lot in all that I do. She was a business woman. I pride myself in being a fair business man. She loved her family and put them before any one else. She taught us with memorable phrases that I still quote today. A few examples:

On the subject of poverty, Mother used to say , "The best way to fight being poor is to not be one." Sounds crude but I work hard at not being one. I am amazed at the number of people who look for a short cut to earning a living and end up poor anyway. The rules are simple: work, plus savings, avoids poverty.

On the subject of work, Mother used to say "If you don’t work you don’t eat." And she believed it. She tended to be conservative like most Blacks of her (generation). Conservative in that she believed that people with no jobs are people who don’t want to work. She would always say people talking about there are no jobs , but the newspapers are full of jobs. She would say if you can’t get a job, make one. An unsophisticated way of saying go into business for yourself. At various times she sold sweet potato pies, and then had a long career in the used furniture, clothing and antique business. She called this making a living out of what other people threw away. There was no good job or bad job, just honest work and dishonest work. Dishonest work landed you in jail and not only were we to stay away from dishonest work, but stay away from dishonest people because we might just get caught up in their crime.

Her advice to us about friends was to say, as long as you have a dollar in your pocket you've got a friend. With her second hand store on historical Cottonwood Road in Bakersfield, CA, her four children always had a job. So we learned the art of work and the art of getting along with people. We also learned the feeling of independence , which is probably why we don’t go along to get along. In 1956, When there was a big house on the corner of N Street in Bakersfield in the block where the town’s only Black doctor and the town’s only Black dentist lived , many wanted it but my parents bought it with money made from and saved from that second hand store. Lesson: the seller doesn’t care about how you earned the money, or whether you were a scientist or a second hand dealer. Save your money.

On self employment and going into business she would say, if you earn $10 dollars working for the man you should always be able to make twice that much working for yourself doing the same thing you did for the man. We would sometime take rides and the four of us children would compete for who could find the most soda pop bottles to sell. Lesson: there is money in what others discard.

On church there were lots of sayings as it was a major force in her life and in the life of her family. But when I complained to her as an adult that my pastor held us in church too long preaching then re-preaching she merely asked me, "Didn’t I teach you how to walk." Interpretation when the service is over for you get up and go, even if it’s not over for the preacher.

Very few people impressed her and she taught us that there were few people to be impressed by. She would say, a person might be educated but they might be an educated fool. Don’t follow fools even if they are educated.

My mother loved her children and her husband, our father, and anyone crossing any one of the family had trouble from this small woman, who I still say was bigger than life. We may have felt many things, but the children never felt Motherless. The lessons we learned from her are still the guiding light for much that we do.