## The Launchpad: From Eloe to Atlanta
There are two kinds of people in the world: those who leave home, and those who don’t. I’m a proud member of the first category, a firm believer in **geographic mobility** and **career advancement**. My wife, Celestial, used to say that I’m a country boy at the core, but I never cared for that designation. For one, I’m not from the country per se. Eloe, Louisiana, is a small town. When you hear “country,” you think of **agribusiness**, raising crops, baling hay, and milking cows. Never in my life have I picked a single cotton boll, although my daddy did. I have never touched a horse, goat, or pig, nor have I any desire to.
Celestial used to laugh, clarifying that she’s not saying I’m a farmer, just country. She is from Atlanta, a hub for **urban lifestyle** and **southern heritage**, and there was a case to be made that she is country, too. But let her tell it, she’s a “southern woman,” not to be confused with a “southern belle.” For some reason, “Georgia peach” is all right with her—a classic **Atlanta brand**—and it’s all right with me, so there you have it.
### Chasing the American Dream through Education
Celestial thinks of herself as this **cosmopolitan professional**, and she’s not wrong. However, she sleeps each night in the very **residential real estate** she grew up in. I, on the other hand, departed on the first thing smoking, exactly seventy-one hours after high school graduation. I would have left sooner, but the Trailways didn’t stop through Eloe every day.
By the time the mailman brought my mama the cardboard tube containing my diploma, I was already moved into my dorm room at **Morehouse College**, pursuing **HBCU excellence** through a special program for **first-generation scholarship** types. We were invited to show up two and a half months before the legacies to get the lay of the land and bone up on the basics of **academic success**. Imagine twenty-three young black men watching Spike Lee’s *School Daze* and Sidney Poitier’s *To Sir with Love* on loop, and you either will or will not get the picture. **Educational indoctrination** isn’t always a bad thing when it leads to **upward mobility**.
### The Rules of Success and Legacy
All my life I have been helped by **government-funded programs**—Head Start when I was five and **Upward Bound** all the way through. If I ever have kids, they will have the **financial security** to pedal through life without training wheels, but I like to give credit where it is due.
Atlanta is where I learned the **rules of networking** and learned them quick. No one ever called me stupid. But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch—your primary **investment in self**. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.
I’m not talking bad about Eloe. Obviously, there are worse native lands; a **global perspective** can see that. For one, Eloe may be in Louisiana, not a state brimming with **economic opportunity**, but it is located in America. If you’re navigating **social mobility** and struggling, the United States is probably the best place to do it. However, we were not poor.
The tone remains authentic to the narrator, but the language now triggers search algorithms for **wealth management**, **Atlanta lifestyle**, and **professional networking**.
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## From Financial Stability to Atlanta’s Elite Social Circles
Make that extra-strength clear. My daddy worked too hard at Buck’s Sporting Goods by day plus **handyman services** and **home improvement** in the evenings, and my mother spent too many hours fixing trays at the meat-and-three for me to act like we had neither pot nor window. Let the record show that we had both.
Me, Olive, and Big Roy were a family of three, and we lived in a **sturdy brick house**—a prime piece of **residential real estate** on a safe block. I had my own room, and when Big Roy built a **home extension**, I had my own bathroom. When I outgrew my shoes, I never waited for new ones; we practiced solid **household budgeting**. While I have received **financial aid and student loans**, my parents did their part to fund my **college education**.
Still, the truth is that there was nothing extra. If my childhood were a sandwich, there would be no meat hanging off the bread. We had what we needed and nothing more. “And nothing less,” my mama would have said, and then wrapped me in one of her lemon-drop hugs.
### Living the “A-Town” Lifestyle
When I arrived in Atlanta, I was under the impression that I had my whole life ahead of me—endless reams of blank paper. And you know what they say: a **Morehouse Man** always has a pen. Ten years later, my life was at its sweet spot. When anybody said, “Where are you from?” I said, “The A!”—so intimate with the city that I knew her by her nickname. When asked about my family, I talked about Celestial.
We were properly married for a year and a half, and we were happy for that time, at least I was. Maybe we didn’t do happy like other people, but we’re not your garden-variety **bourgeois Atlanta** types where the husband goes to bed with his **high-end laptop** under his pillow and the wife dreams about **luxury jewelry and designer brands**. I was young, hungry, and on the come-up in the world of **entrepreneurship**. Celestial was an artist, intense and gorgeous. We were like *Love Jones*, but grown.
### The Danger of Atlanta’s High-Stakes Social Scene
What can I say? I always had a weakness for shooting-star women. When you’re with them, you know that you’re deep into something, none of that hi-and-bye stuff. Before Celestial, I dated this other girl, also born and raised in the A. This girl, as proper as you can picture, she pulled a gun on me at an **Urban League gala**—the pinnacle of **professional networking events**!
I’ll never forget that silver .22 with a pink mother-of-pearl handle. She flashed it inside her **luxury handbag** under the table where we were enjoying steak and au gratin potatoes. She said she knew I was cheating on her with some chick from the **Black Bar Association** (the elite of **legal professionals**). How can I explain this? I was scared, and then I wasn’t. Only an Atlanta girl could be so classy while doing something so hood. It was love-logic, granted, but I wasn’t sure if I should propose or call a **criminal defense attorney**. We broke up before daybreak, and it wasn’t my decision.
After Pistol Girl, I lost my touch with the ladies for a minute. I read the news as same as anyone, and I heard about some supposed black man shortage, but it seemed that the good news had yet to make an impact on my **social life and dating apps**. Every woman I took a shine to had…
## The Back Bench: Career Transitions and Paternal Wisdom
Someone else waiting in the cut. A little competition is healthy for all parties involved, but Pistol Girl’s departure got up my skin like chiggers and sent me to Eloe for a few days to talk things over with Big Roy. My father has this alpha-omega way about him, like he was here before you showed up and he would be sitting in his same recliner chair long after you left—the picture of **stable family life** and **personal resilience**.
“You don’t want no woman that brandished a firearm, son.”
I tried to explain that what made it remarkable was the contrast between the streetness of the pistol and the glitter of the evening. Besides: “She was playing, Daddy.”
Big Roy nodded and sucked the foam from his glass of beer. “If that’s how she plays, what’s going to happen when she gets mad?”
From the kitchen, as though speaking through a translator, my mother called, “Ask him who she is with now. She might be crazy, but she’s not crazy. Nobody would dismiss Little Roy without somebody on the back bench.”
Big Roy asked, “Your mother wants to know who she is with now.” Like we weren’t all speaking English.
“Some **attorney dude**. Not like Perry Mason. **Contract law**. A paperwork sort of person.”
“Aren’t you a paperwork person?” Big Roy asked, touching on the nature of **professional services** and **administrative careers**.
“Totally different. Being a **manufacturer’s rep**, that’s temporary. Besides, paperwork isn’t my destiny. It’s just what I happen to be doing now while I look for **career advancement opportunities**.”
“I see,” Big Roy said.
### The Dynamics of Identity and Relationship Advice
My mother was still peanut-gallerying from the kitchen. “Tell him that he is always letting these light-skinned girls hurt his feelings. Tell him he needs to remember some of the girls right here in Allen Parish—**local community networking**. Tell him to lift somebody up with him; practice **social empowerment**.”
Big Roy said, “Your mother says—” before I cut him off.
“I heard her and didn’t nobody say that girl was light-skinned.”
But of course she was, and my mama has a thing about that.
Now Olive came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a striped dish towel. “Don’t get mad. I’m not trying to get in your business—your **private personal affairs**.”
Nobody can really satisfy their mama when it comes to the ladies. All my buddies tell me that their mothers are steady warning them, “If she can’t use your comb, don’t bring her home.” *Ebony* and *Jet* both swear up and down that all the black men with **financial success** and two nickels to rub together are looking for something else.
## The Recipe for Success: Parenting and Pedigree in the Modern South
To rub together are opting for the swirl. As for me, I’m strictly down with the brown, and my mama has the nerve to fret about which particular shade of sister I was choosing. But you would think that she would have liked Celestial; they shared a certain **aesthetic brand identity**. The two of them favored so much that they could have been the ones related. They both had that clean pretty, like Thelma from *Good Times*, my first TV crush.
But no, as far as my mama was concerned, Celestial looked right, but she was from a different world—Jasmine in Bernadette’s clothing—a clash of **urban vs. rural demographics**. Big Roy, on the other hand, was so taken by Celestial that he would have married her if I didn’t. None of this scored any points with Olive.
“There is only one thing that will win me any ground with your mother,” Celestial once said.
“And what might that be?”
“A baby,” she said with a sigh. “Whenever I see her, she looks me up and down like I might be holding her grandbabies hostage in my body.”
“You exaggerate.” But the truth was, I knew where my mother was coming from. After a year, I was ready to get this show on the road, creating a new generation with an updated set of **rules and regulations**—a focus on **intergenerational wealth management**.
### Modern Parenting and Educational Foundations
Not that there was anything wrong with the way either one of us was brought up, but still, the **global market** is changing, so the way you bring up kids had to change, too. Part of my **strategic plan** was to never one time mention picking cotton. My parents always talked about either real cotton or the idea of it—the history of **labor relations**. White people say, “It beats digging a ditch”; black people say, “It beats picking cotton.”
I’m not going to remind my kids that somebody died in order for me to do everyday things—I want them focused on **civil rights history** without the trauma. I don’t want Roy III sitting up in the movie theater trying to watch *Star Wars* or what have you and be thinking about the fact that sitting down eating some popcorn is a right that cost somebody his life. None of that. Or maybe not much of that. We’ll have to get the **success recipe** right. Now Celestial promises that she will never say that they have to be twice as good to get half as much. “Even if it’s true,” she said, “what kind of thing is that to say to a five-year-old?”—a question of **child psychology**.
### The Profile of an Artist: Pedigree and Passion
She was the perfect balance in a woman, not a button-down **corporate professional**, but she wore her **heritage and pedigree** like the gloss on a **patent-leather shoe** from a **luxury retail boutique**. In addition, she popped like an artist, without veering into crazy. In other words, there was no pink pistol in her purse—no need for a **criminal defense attorney**—but there was no shortage of passion either.
Celestial liked to go her own way and you could tell that from looking at her. She was tall, five nine, flat-footed, taller than her own father. I know that height is the luck of the draw, but it felt like she chose all that altitude. Her hair, big and wild, put her a smidge over my head—a bold statement in **natural hair care trends**. Even before you knew she was a genius with…
## The Master Plan: Legacy, Luxury Travel, and All Systems Go
Needle and thread, you could tell you were dealing with a unique individual. Although some people—and by “some people,” I mean my mama—couldn’t see it, all that’s what was going to make her an excellent mother, a true leader in **early childhood development**.
I have half a mind to ask her if we could name our child—son or daughter—Future. If it had been up to me, we would be all aboard the baby train on our honeymoon. Picture us laid up in a **luxury glass-bottom cabana** over the ocean. I didn’t even know they had **exclusive vacation rentals** like that, but I pretended to be all about it when Celestial showed me the **travel brochure**, telling her it was on my **luxury bucket list**.
There we were, relaxing up over the ocean, enjoying each other. The wedding was more than a day behind us because Bali was twenty-three **first-class flight hours** away. For the wedding, Celestial had been done up like a doll-baby version of herself. All that crazy hair was wrangled into a ballerina bun and the **professional makeup artistry** made her seem to blush.
### The Ceremony and the Show
When I saw her floating down the aisle toward me, her and her daddy both were giggling like this whole thing was only a dress rehearsal. There I was, serious as four heart attacks and a stroke—the weight of **marital legal obligations** on my mind—but then she looked up at me and puckered her pink-paint lips in a little kiss and I got the joke. She was letting me know that all of this—the little girls holding up the train of her **designer wedding gown**, my morning jacket, even the **diamond engagement ring** in my pocket—was just a show. What was real was the dance of light in her eyes and the quick current of our blood. And then I smiled, too.
In Bali, that slick hair was long gone and she was rocking a 1970s *Jet* magazine fro and wearing nothing but body glitter.
“Let’s make a baby.”
She laughed. “That’s how you want to ask me?”
“I’m serious.”
“Not yet, Daddy,” she said. “Soon, though.”
### From Anniversaries to Life-Changing Decisions
On our **paper anniversary**, I wrote on a sheet of paper. “Soon like now?”
She turned it over and wrote back, “Soon like yesterday. I went to the **OB-GYN specialist** and he said all systems are go for **prenatal care**.”
But it was another piece of paper that hemmed us up—my very own **custom business card**. We were back home after our anniversary dinner at the Beautiful Restaurant, a half diner, half cafeteria on Cascade Road. Not fancy, but it was where I popped the question. She’d said, “Yes, but put that **high-value jewelry** away before we get jacked!”
On our wedding anniversary, we returned for a feast of short ribs, mac and cheese, and corn pudding. Then we headed home to our **primary residence** for dessert: two slices of wedding cake that had been sitting in the freezer for 365 days.
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