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