Tennessee State

I left Detroit at eighteen to be free.

That's the honest reason. Tennessee State was the school that accepted me and that my parents approved, and I'd skipped any college that wanted an essay because I didn't like writing. But underneath the logistics, I wanted a fresh start. A place where nobody knew I was the owner's son. A place where I wasn't the kid my friends always pushed to the front to lead. My mom and I used to get into it over my car, how much I drove it, how late I stayed out. She was overprotective because she worried. At eighteen, I just wanted to design my own life. Nashville was a blank page and I had no idea what I was going to write on it.

My parents wanted it for me as bad as I wanted it. My mom did every piece of paperwork, every financial aid form, like she was the one going. My pops never got the chance to go away to school himself. When I tried to pick some low-tech school in Atlanta because my friends were headed there, he shut it down on the spot. Not happening. Try again. He took me down to Memphis before I ever enrolled, gave me Beale Street and the restaurants and the hotels, so I showed up to Nashville already having lived a little.

I got there over-stimulated. Forty people in my graduating class, now dropped into a sea of strangers. There was a mixer during orientation week and I didn't want to be at it. I wasn't social yet. I had a gold tooth I'd picked back in tenth grade because I'd always loved Southern culture, and now I was finally in it. Trap music, five colleges in one town, beautiful women everywhere. And I was hobbling through all of it in one Jordan and one flip-flop because I'd just had toenail surgery.

A guy held a door for me that first week. I thanked him and kept moving.

Move-in day, my whole family was in the room. My mom, my pops, my sisters Marci and Raven, my cousin Terea, cleaning the place top to bottom. In walks the same guy with a couple of totes. We recognized each other. You're the dude that held the door. My mom asked who he was there with. He said nobody. He'd come down early for the engineering program, the same one I'd gotten into and canceled because I wasn't doing summer school. So while my family cleaned my side of the room, my mom cleaned his too. Loved on him like a son. Sent him care packages right alongside mine from then on.

His name is Sean.

I'm not somebody who follows. But those first weeks, I followed him everywhere, because he already knew people and it beat sitting alone in the room. We ended up in a group of about ten. Then the drama that always finds a group split it up, and Sean and I looked at each other a month into college and decided it was just us moving forward. People came and blended in over the years, but it was always the two of us at the center. Best two-man game on campus. We weren't showboating, weren't pretending we had girls or money we didn't have. We were just two overly confident young men who believed in themselves, and people gravitated to that because it was genuine. Six years. Same brother every day from eighteen to twenty-four. I was the oldest and the only boy growing up, always wanted a brother, and the luck of a held door gave me one.

The first two years I wasn't trying to be college-educated. I was trying to have fun.

The first turn came at the end of my freshman year, when my pops told me he wasn't funding the parties anymore. That landed different at nineteen. I came home that summer, worked for him, and made the mistake of bringing my air pistols back down to Nashville with the rest of my stuff. Sophomore year, the dorm did a surprise raid, broke into my safe, and found them. Same day, Sean and I had just closed on our first apartment. We were celebrating. I got back to campus and my room was torn apart and I was told I'd have to see the Dean to get back on. She already knew us from a year before. I talked my way out of it with no consequences. The next day I moved off campus.

That's when real life started. A bill every month. Figuring out how to feed myself. Figuring out a job. On campus you're protected. You're not paying rent, so school can be the focus. Off campus, the bills became the focus and school slipped. I was throwing parties, hustling, doing too much, and some of it was the best time of my life and some of it cost me.

Then 2008 hit me from every direction at once.

A roommate we'd taken on left early and stuck us with the bill. He'd never signed the lease, so Sean and I ate it. The complex hit us with an extra month's rent because we hadn't filed a thirty-day notice we didn't know we needed, and at twenty years old I wasn't paying rent on a place I wasn't living in. We kept getting denied at new apartments until a leasing lady finally told us why: we kept listing our current address, and when they called, the complex said we hadn't left, because on paper we hadn't. We went back to the office hot. They didn't budge. We got evicted. It wrecked our credit. We went to court and got handed a loss because the lease said exactly what we hadn't read. We spent nights on a friend's couch in the same complex, looking for somewhere new every day.

In December of that year, a friend I'd grown up with was murdered after leaving a club back home. He'd lived two blocks from me. We'd been in school together since elementary. It was the first real death of my life. I drove up for the funeral. Losing a classmate two years out of high school hit a place nothing had hit before.

Then right after Christmas, I was at my pops' warehouse watching the place for him, hooping with my friends in the basketball room we had in there. I went up to block my cousin's shot, came down on my ankle, and heard it crack. I reached for it and my face hit the concrete and broke my front tooth. I went into New Year's 2009 with a boot on my leg and half a tooth in the front. The doctor said four to six months. I told him I didn't have four to six months, I was trying to get back to Tennessee.

Then my pops sat me down and told me he didn't think it was best for me to go back. That crushed me. Tennessee was my whole life by then. Everything I'd built was down there. But I had to stay in Detroit and come up with a new plan, and I spent those months learning how to walk again, getting a temporary acrylic tooth, working odd jobs for my pops and my auntie, stacking whatever money I could. I never really had jobs before that. I'd always hustled. This was the first time I was grinding it out the regular way, and it was the start of something.

I made it back to Nashville in the fall of 2009 a different person. I'd left the streets alone. I'd stopped selling. I was changing how I dressed, cardigans and collared shirts, trying to figure out who this new college version of me was. It was a weird in-between time. I leaned on a girlfriend who was smart and helped me learn how to actually be a student. My grades that first stretch had been average, then sophomore year had been trash. This time I had a plan and I held to it.

And here's the part that matters most about Sean. In 2009 we threw a party in his apartment and the floor literally caved in. The party became legendary. But behind the legend, a lot of people who said they were solid switched up on him, the organization he was part of disowned him, and he came and lived with me until the heat blew off. He took the whole thing like a man. Took his consequences. Put his time in. Graduated and became one of the smartest men I know. That's my brother. I made a decision to be loyal to him and trust him, and he made the same decision about me, and neither of us has broken it in close to twenty years.

By 2012, the people who came in when I did were graduating and moving on. I felt myself aging out. The thing that used to feel like freedom, getting drunk at nine in the morning, staying up until the sun came up, started feeling old. People started calling me old school for not being on it anymore. I'd matured past the version of me that came down there. It was time.

I applied to a handful of schools back home and got into all of them. I picked Wayne State. I moved back to Detroit in May 2012, and I haven't lived in Tennessee since.

I dropped out three full times across those years. I got evicted. I lost a friend. I broke my ankle and my tooth in the same fall. I partied and I failed and I did things I'm not proud of. And I wouldn't trade any of it, because I went to Nashville a boy and I walked out a determined young man. The freedom I went looking for turned out to be the thing that taught me what freedom costs. That was the whole education. The degree wasn't in it. The man was.