- Welcome to Detroit
- I Lost It Before I Got It
- What I Learned
- What Is Money for Anyway?
- I Thought I Was Rich
- Wake Up Call
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
I Lost It Before I Got It
Not long after my father died, I began to hear my mother on the phone in the evenings saying things like, “So what happened to the money? Will he get any? Shouldn’t that go to Clyde?” Intrigued by what she was talking about, I began to listen more. From what I could hear, it seemed my father was entitled to some land not far from Memphis, Tennessee, that should have gone to his child, me. Instead, one of his sisters decided that it didn’t belong to me, so she kept the part that would have been mine. My mother was furious. It all seemed so confusing to me. She explained it to me, in the way my mother always would, as if I were a little adult, that my aunt had taken what was supposed to be mine. Not sure of how that really affected me, it still made me sad since I had learned that you didn’t take anything that wasn’t yours. I never received any part of that land, which I later found out was worth several hundred thousand dollars.
I guess this was my first bad money experience, which was totally confusing because I always thought family was there to help you, support you, and make you feel better. Now I was learning that one of my family members had taken something from me that was worth money. “Why would she do something like that?” I thought. It’s just money. Right?