When I was nine years old, living on the south side of Chicago, my father was a minister and my mother used to scrub floors. I had seven brothers and four sisters. I told my mama, 'One of these days I'm going to be big and strong and buy you a beautiful house.' That's all I've ever wanted to do with my life, is to take care of my mother.
Growing up in Carol City, it was always a creative place for me to be because it was mad influential, especially going to Carol City High.
I lived with my mother and father and brothers and sisters some of the time; some of the time, my mother and father were feuding, so my mother would take us to live in my grandmother's house.
I grew up without a father, and my mother grew up without a father and her mother grew up without a father. So we have this long heritage of growing up without fathers.
I'm a black man who grew up in America. I'm a father of four children. They don't all have the same mother. I own a business.
I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.
I'm a thirty-something ranch wife, mother of four, moderately agoraphobic middle child who grew up on a golf course in the city.
I grew up to have my father's looks, my father's speech patterns, my father's posture, my father's opinions, and my mother's contempt for my father.
We grew up in a small house with four bedrooms. I shared a bedroom with three brothers. But I enjoy the way that I was brought up. It kept me hungry. It kept me humble.
Brothers Bunk Beds! That's how we grew up. We grew up in a small house, a ranch style home, with three bedrooms and one bath.
My mother was into opera and my father was into jazz, so there was a lot of jazz in the house where I grew up.
I grew up in the city. Both my mother and father were factory workers, and I loved the life in the 'metro.' Everybody saw me as a very urban guy. And I was.
My mother and father were farmers from very humble means, and when I was three years old they moved from the roca to the city to try to give us a better life. My father took a job at a winery and my mother worked as a seamstress.
I grew up in the projects with four older brothers. And there were tough, macho gangsters, drug dealers, killers, and thugs all in my neighborhood. And they were afraid of my mother. So, yeah, I know some strong women.
My mother is Afro-Caribbean and my father is Caucasian-American, and I was born in Pennsylvania and moved to the Cayman Islands when I was about 2. So I grew up there with my mother, and it's really all I know. I grew up there until it was time to go to college, and that's when I moved back to America.
In the house in Beverly Hills where our four children grew up, living conditions were a few thousand times improved over the old tenement on New York's East 93rd Street we Marx Brothers called home.