A Quote by Jesse L. Martin
As a child, I was fortunate enough to be close to family members who were - and still are - great storytellers. I was a gullible country boy from Rocky Mount, Virginia, and I believed every folktale they told me, no matter how fantastic.
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When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.
I have such incredible friends in L.A. that are pretty much my family now - I mean, outside of the family I have back in Canada - but they just supported me so hard and believed in me when I barely believed in myself anymore. I still can't thank them enough. They mean the world to me.
It's amazing to think how powerful of a force optimism and hope can be. It's the thing that saves me. I believed that I lived in the greatest country in the world. I still believe that, and consequently, I believed that I had a chance, even though things around me were absolutely crazy and difficult.
Growing up in colonial Virginia, if you know anything about that part of the country, there was a number of tensions there. Because of that, you heard the family members talk about Dr. King and many others who were not just speaking out, but sacrificing a ton so that our world, our country could be a better place.
Reading was a huge part of my life as a child - we were a family of storytellers.
I was not very keen on joining the family business... there were 14 family members working together, and it worried me that I would not have enough individuality.
There are members - very, very close and dear members - of my family - I'm talking immediate family - who simply don't speak to me anymore and haven't done so for years. My marriage fell apart.
As I say, it never ceases to amaze me how gullible some of our Church members are.
The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'.
All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that.
I have a great-great-great-grandfather who was a Confederate cavalry colonel, and I still have his military composite photo on my wall. The chemicals in the photo tint have changed over the years to the point that he looks green. One of my family members apparently still has the piece of paper that listed every thing in his pocket when he got shot.
Every parent worries for their child, but I do worry that he's all right, and happy and stable, and that I've done the best that I can. He's a good boy - so far so good. But if you're a parent, it doesn't matter if your child is five or 50 - you still worry.
My family members were always there and I was very fortunate for that I mean, I played hockey growing up. That was the sport everyone in Charlestown played back then, and I had skates and the equipment, but I was growing so fast, it became hard to afford new stuff every year. But hockey was it for me.
I'm so gullible. I'm so damn gullible. And I am so sick of me being gullible.
When I was a child, I thought of my Delta town as the center of the universe, but now I realize how little I know about the universe. As a child, I thought I was immortal, but now I recognize how limited a time we all have. As a child, success meant scoring A on every exam, but now I take it to mean good health, close family and friends, achieve- ments in my work, and helping others.
My dad and some teachers were constantly pushing me to do better than I was doing because they all knew that I could. I was not interested in what they wanted me to do well in at the time, but still, the concept that there's a great land of opportunity out there, and all you have to do is go attack it, was not something foreign to me. It's why I'm one of the few members of my family that left home.
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