The Road Back

When I transferred from Tennessee State to Wayne State in 2012, I wrote a letter about why I was coming home. Most of it was about following my pops. He'd built EL Mechanical from the basement up after coming through the pipe fitters union. Never went to college. Did it the hard way. The letter said I wanted to follow in his footsteps. It said help from someone I was close to would be just a phone call away. I was twenty-four when I wrote it.

I didn't finish that round either. Fall 2012 I took two classes. Passed one, failed Calculus 2. Winter 2013 I did the same thing. Passed one, failed one. My GPA sat at exactly .500 because I was hitting fifty percent on the nose. Wayne State at that time wasn't built for an HBCU kid going to school at night. They didn't have the infrastructure or the culture for me to be successful, and I didn't have the discipline to push through what wasn't there. I left.

For the next few years, I worked. The construction company shifted, my pops and his partners fell out, the business shut down in 2014. I bounced. Door-to-door sales. Home security, where I actually made good money before they shut our division down. Then I was on my own again, living off whatever I had saved.

By New Year's 2017, the savings was gone. I went to my pops. I told him we needed to get his business going again because I needed to eat. He looked at me and said it wasn't time. He told me this was his business, and if I didn't like how he was running it, I could go start my own.

That was the first time I realized I didn't have to wait on him. That was the night I stopped waiting on anybody.

I didn't have a plan. I had pride and I had pressure. I went out and did what I had to do to keep the lights on. I lost my car somewhere in there too. The engine went bad on me. Cheap mechanics, cheaper fixes, and the engine finally gave out on a friend who was driving it. I ended up at a temp agency, gluing boxes together for car doors, making nine and a quarter an hour. I was twenty-nine, turning thirty, with a rolling paint roller full of glue tearing up my hand for nine dollars and twenty-five cents.

I had one goal: save enough to get a car. Every dollar I spent on lunch with the other temps was an hour I had to work over. So I didn't eat lunch with them. They looked at me sideways for it. I didn't care. I was running a math problem and they weren't in it.

I read the floor for about a week before I made a move. Who actually ran it. Who pretended to. Who was loud. Who was messy. Who gossiped. Once I figured out who really ran the place, I walked up to him at the end of my shift and asked him how late he was staying. He said seven. I told him I'd stay with him and learn. There were thirty or forty temps lined up to clock out at four. He looked at me like I was crazy. Then he said come on. I worked three extra hours with him that night. The next morning he told the floor I wasn't working with them anymore. I was working with him.

Two weeks later the general manager called me in and offered me a full-time hire. I told him I'd think about it. The next day the GM, the floor manager, and a floor supervisor were all walking with me, talking careers. I told them I appreciated it and I was going to pass. I had one goal and it wasn't a career on that floor. Word got out. Other temps got mad at me for turning down an opportunity some of them had been chasing for eight months, watching guys around them get raises of eight cents to a quarter a year. I stayed principled in what I wanted.

I got the car in July. Came back to work the same way I'd been working. In August I went on my family vacation, the trip we take every year that I don't sacrifice for anything. They knew I was leaving for a week. I had already cleaned out my locker before the flight because I knew what was coming. The text came in when I touched down in Florida. Released of my duties. I wasn't hurt. I'd already won. The job was the bridge to the car, and the car was on the road.

Next temp job was a packaging spot in Plymouth. Twelve dollars an hour, six in the morning to two in the afternoon, Monday through Friday. I ran the same play. Head down. Study whoever they put on me as a trainer. Learn how they cut corners. Then do the opposite. Be more productive, more consistent, and more efficient than everybody around me until management notices. Within a month they offered me a hire. Then they upped it. Twenty-eight an hour to move to third shift. Seniority-based union rules, so the only way back to first shift was to wait my turn. I wasn't doing that. I told them I don't work third or second. I go to Pistons games. I go to Lions games. I don't miss family functions for jobs. They sent two older guys with twenty and thirty years on me to talk sense into me. I told them I don't go to games because the teams are good. I go for the experience. They didn't get it.

But somewhere in those nights I started auditing my own life. I was thirty years old. I had been on jobs that flew me around the country, paid for hotels, paid for training. And now I was in a temp shop turning down twenty-eight an hour because the schedule would have cost me my evenings. I realized I had never been consistent anywhere in my twenties, and I wasn't going to carry that into my thirties.

I had a habit by then of planning my next year over Labor Day weekend. Four months to test, fail, scrap, and rebuild before January. That September I started thinking about going back to school. A few weeks later, somebody told me about a program at Wayne State called Warrior Way Back. Then a postcard came in the mail with a meeting on it. I went.

That's where I met Amber Neher. The Warrior Way Back program was new. It was built to bring back adult learners who had left Wayne State with debt and no degree. The program would pay off up to fifteen hundred dollars of old tuition across three consecutive semesters so I could re-enroll clean. I owed about thirteen hundred, so I was inside the cap. The bigger six-thousand-dollar number was financial aid debt I still had to figure out on my own. Amber said she'd help me get in.

After the info session I sat in my car on Warren and 3rd. I was still listed as mechanical engineering. I started thinking, if I switch to psychology I could finish in a year. I'd be done. Then I caught myself.

Here you go again. Trying to cut a corner. You're not going back to school to actually learn. You're going so you can get out the fastest way possible.

I sat in that car for another forty-five minutes. Then I got out, walked across the street to the Construction Management building, and set an appointment with the department counselor. I told her I wanted to transfer in. I told her about Warrior Way Back. She started building a schedule. She started talking to Amber. By the end of October I had a path. By December I had an acceptance letter. In that car I had told myself one thing. If we go down this road, nothing stops us. Because if we do this, anything after this graduation we can do.

I started in January 2019 with two classes to test my feet. In April I started at the NAACP Detroit Branch as an executive assistant. I took the summer off, came back in the fall, and locked in at four classes from then on.

Amber checked in on me the whole time. I made her one promise. I told her I'd keep my grades up because I needed to find a sponsor to help pay for school. I never found the sponsor. The grades stayed up anyway. The grades were the contract I'd made with myself in the car. Wayne State did give me two thousand dollars one semester and told me straight up it was the last help I'd get. I figured out the rest.

When the pandemic hit, I took more classes, not fewer. I needed Macomb Community College for my lower-division construction classes, so I was taking Macomb in person and Wayne State online at the same time. When everything went virtual, I took every class both schools would let me carry. They weren't really communicating with each other. I was. From August 2019 to August 2021 I went to school all year round. By the fall of 2021 I had one class left. A Friday in-person class. I crossed the stage in December 2021.

Seventeen months of coursework after re-enrolling. Fifteen years after I first walked into Tennessee State at eighteen.

Every class presentation I gave was a Pathworth presentation. The business name I'd started using in 2016. If I had to design a construction project, the project was designed by Pathworth Consulting and Solutions. I was already building the thing the degree was about to back up.

Amber wanted me to do testimonials early. I told her no. I didn't want the attention. The more I said no, the more she asked. Eventually I did the Wayne State Instagram takeover. The photo shoot for the COVID fall comeback campaign. The Detroit News piece. I wrote a six-step formula for other adult learners on how to master a semester, because I'd figured it out the hard way and I didn't want anybody else to figure it out alone.

When I graduated, Warrior Way Back tried to hire me. They built a position around my story because the program had holes in it and they wanted me inside fixing them. A newly elected City Council member offered me an opportunity too. I was holding out for NAACP to do something. They didn't, not then. Years later they offered me the same money Wayne State had. By then I'd already walked the path I was walking.

Both my parents were in the small COVID-rule crowd that day. Two parents per graduate. Neither of them had ever graduated from college. My baby sister had graduated in 2017. My auntie around the same age as me had graduated in 2018. I was the next one home. My mom never really understood the entrepreneur stuff I was building. She didn't have the language for it. But she knew when something made me happy, and she showed up for it every time. She walked up to me after, took her pictures, gave me her arms. I'm never getting that moment again. If I ever cross another stage, she won't be there. So I hold that one tight.

She passed nine months later, in September of 2022.

The letter I wrote in 2012 about following my pops sat in a drawer somewhere for nine years before I finished what it said. I didn't read it again before graduation. I didn't need to. The 24-year-old who wrote it kept his word through the 33-year-old who walked.

That's what the road back was. Not a comeback. A contract.