We all have them. Those moments that fundamentally change us. We may not always recognize them as they’re happening, but we look back and they are crystal clear — the turning points that shape our lives, alter our direction, offer us a deeper understanding of who we are or want to become. Moments of truth often come in the guise of a challenge or even a crisis; an experience that threatens to topple us rather than teach us. Sometimes no great strife is involved at all. Revelation comes in all forms. But the result is always the same: We are molded by specific events and experiences. Their duration can be brief but their impact is everlasting. The lessons they teach help and heal us. They provide answers to questions we may not have even known we had. They liberate us.
Sharing these lessons, and our memories of the events that produced them, reminds us that we all ultimately face the same basic truths — that life is short and we each have our own path to travel; that success is relative and commitment to something other than yourself and your bank account is imperative; that your journey is not defined by your talents or gifts, but by your choices; and that at the end of the day, you alone will have to live with those choices — good and bad.
BLACK ENTERPRISE asked six highly successful women and men to share their most meaningful moments of truth. Perhaps their responses will speak to some of the yearnings in your heart. In reading their stories, you may experience a moment of truth all your own.
WYNTON MARSALIS
THE SUMMER I DISCOVERED COLTRANE
Wynton Marsalis Jazz Musician Artistic Director at Jazz at Lincoln Center
The segregated south is not a very creative atmosphere for a young, black boy, but Wynton Marsalis became an artist nonetheless. One of six, he grew up in New Orleans and has been around music all his life. His father is a musician, some of his siblings are musicians, and he has played music, the trumpet, for some 30 of his 41 years.
He is currently the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center (J@LC), the 12-year old, nonprofit arts organization dedicated to the creation, centralization, and distribution of the only original style of music to come out of this country and go international. And you can tell from the passion in his slightly husky, slightly Cajun-accented voice that there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing: “To transform American cultural mythology through the integration of ideas — that’s what this is all about. We want Jazz at Lincoln Center to be a place for the innovation of the arts through the focus of jazz, because jazz music is always collaborating with the other arts — film, dance, you name one.”
Listening to him play and lecture and talk about his music, his work, and the places jazz has taken him, one would think this Juilliard-trained, nine-time Grammy award-winning jazz and classical musician has loved jazz and classical music from the time he was able to hold a trumpet. Not so. “Mama took us to see classical orchestras play a few times, but I didn’t know anything about classical music. I couldn’t get into it. Daddy always played jazz, but I didn’t like that either. I liked them [the musicians his father played with] but I didn’t like the music. And I didn’t understand his dedication to it. The funk bands I knew used to pack the house; I played in a funk band when I was a teenager. But whenever daddy played, there would only be 10 or 15 people around.
“Jazz musicians were strange to me. I liked Earth Wind and Fire, and Parliament; I was used to people in shiny suits and costumes and stuff. The people on the covers of my daddy’s jazz albums looked funny to me. They were dressed normal and looked all serious.”
Then one day when Marsalis was 12 years old, he came home from his summer job and decided to try something. “I came home from work one day and put on one of my daddy’s John Coltrane records. I didn’t like it.” And for most of us, that would have been the end of it. Went there, tried that, didn’t like it. But something was happening that Marsalis didn’t quite understand. “I played it again. I still didn’t like it, but I kept playing it. There was something about it, something about the sound that I couldn’t get away from, something that compelled me to keep playing it and playing it and playing it. And then I started listening to other people. That’s when I started to realize I wanted to be a jazz musician. I had always played, but now I wanted to be good. I wanted to play like ‘trane, like Miles [Davis], and everybody else I was listening to.
“[Jazz] helped me understand life and my place in it. Music is like that, it’s spiritual. It goes beyond emotion; music can take you to a whole different consciousness. My whole approach to everything changed, not just playing. I remember playing a Hayden concerto when I was about 14. I began to appreciate all different kinds of music. Jazz taught me how to listen. I didn’t just have to hear the same beat over and over again. I could listen to five, ten minutes of music and appreciate it, it didn’t just have to be a [popular] hook.”
Now, almost 30 years and one Pulitzer Prize in Music later, Marsalis is jazz. He plays it, composes it, teaches it, and it’s always in his head — at any moment he’s liable to surprise you with a riff on his trumpet, which is never far from him, or break out into spontaneous scatting, tapping his foot to a mental rhythm. “I just want people to be aware of jazz, to make the music available through recordings and broadcasts, and to produce more jazz musicians who can play,” he says. “There’s not any one thing I want people to think about this music, I just want them to be aware of it and check it out. And to come check us [J@LC] out. ‘Cause we swing!”
LISA PRICE
LOSING — AND FINDING — THE SOURCE OF MY STRENGTH
Lisa Price President, Carol’s Daughter Inc.
The names of Lisa Price’s homemade body and spirit care products are as irresistible as their beautiful scents and rich textures. There’s Mango Body Butter, Honey Pudding, and Shea Butter Skin Smoothie, many of which have found their way into the homes of celebrities including Jada Pinkett-Smith, Halle Berry, and Chaka Khan. But each of Price’s personal care creations also bears the name Carol’s Daughter, which has an appeal all it’s own. “Ten years ago, when I was starting my business and looking for a name, I made two lists,” Price remembers. “One had all the things I was, and the other had all the things I wanted to be. One of the things I was was Carol’s daughter. When I read it out loud I got goose bumps. It just seemed right, and it stuck.”
Price started mixing creams and potions in the kitchen of her Brooklyn, New York, brownstone in 1990. Encouraged by the reactions of family and friends — including, of course, her mom, Carol Hutson — she officially started her business in 1993. Once Carol’s Daughter was up and running, the list of reasons the company name was such a perfect fit kept growing. “I have two young sons and my mother helped me with them whenever she could,” says Price. “She helped me hire staff when I first started to grow. Some teenagers on her block were looking for work and she sent them to me. One of them worked here for six years, another one still works here.
“Whenever I got riled up and couldn’t figure out how I was going to juggle this and that, she would give me the strategy to get through it. She never let me get down on myself. She always believed in me.
“I’ll never forget the day I did the Oprah Winfrey Show. You know how the universe conspires to mess you up on the days you most need everything to be okay? Well, that was going on. Nothing was falling into place. I was supposed to catch a plane to Chicago and I didn’t know how I was going to make it. I called her, and my mom — who was never a person who used foul language — said: ‘L
isten to me. I’m talking to you now as your mother. This is your dream and it is coming true. If anybody tries to get in your way today with any bull, forget them. You pack your bags and get on that plane!’ I just nodded and did exactly what she said.”
Hutson was such a strong, proud, and positive person that, although she used a walker to move around, few people knew she had been battling a neuromuscular disease throughout her entire adult life. The battle required her to take drugs that suppressed her immune system, which weakened her and made her susceptible to illness. This past Valentine’s Day, Hutson died. She was 60.
Price, the oldest of eight children ranging in age from her youngest sister’s 8 to her own 41 years, handled the funeral and memorial plans with grace. But when it was all over, the depth of her loss began to set in. “Mommy was always there. We were so close. To not have that has really thrown me. I reach for the phone and realize she’s not there, and it hits me all over again.” But a deeper realization took hold of Price soon after her mother’s death, and it made her question the essence of who she was. “People always tell me I’m strong. They’ll say, ‘How do you do all of this? How do you keep it all together?’ I always felt like I was strong, like I was that person other people saw, but suddenly I felt like a fraud. I thought, ‘It’s not me, it’s her. It’s Mommy.’
“It’s not that I took her for granted while she was here, I just never realized how much she did to hold me up and get me through. I just keep reminding myself what she would say, what she would do, what she would want. And I’ve been praying a lot. She’d always remind me to pray and reassure me that God would not give me more than I could handle. That keeps me going.
“Somebody told me at the funeral that I should never feel sad thinking that my mother didn’t know how much I loved her because I showed her while she was alive. I honored her by naming something for her while she was here. I’ll never forget how I felt the first time I read the words Carol’s Daughter. It’s who I’ll always be, and those two words define me much more than I knew.”
MICHAEL HAYNES
MY HALL OF FAME WAKE-UP CALL
Michael Haynes Vice President of Player Development, the National Football League
Mike Haynes will never forget the moment that changed his life forever. In fact, he talks about it regularly, especially to the pro football players whose lives he seeks to change forever. It was 1976 and he was the New England Patriots’ number one draft choice out of Arizona State (ASU). His college team was undefeated in his senior year and had played in three Fiesta Bowls, and his stellar performance earned him a place in the College Football Hall of Fame. He dropped out of college in his senior
His pride only grew when he walked into the locker room his rookie year with the Patriots to find his locker next to George Webster’s. “I didn’t know much about Webster, but I knew my college coach had a plaque of him on his wall, which said Greatest College Player of All Time. I couldn’t believe my locker was right next to his.” But Webster was already ten years into his pro career, and one day, late in the season, Haynes came in to find Webster’s locker empty. The greatest college player of all time had been cut from the team. “I thought there’d be a big press conference,” says Haynes, his voice still laced with disbelief. “I thought the coaches and players would make a big deal over it. But there was just a brief mention of it at the bottom of somebody’s column in the paper. No press conference, no big announcement — nobody said or did anything. I thought, ‘Wow. That’s the way the greatest college player of all time goes out?’ I knew then I had to go back to school; I had to have something that no one could take away from me.”
Haynes went back to ASU to pursue his degree in finance, but not before getting another rude awakening — finding out how long it would take to get it. “I went to talk to this guidance counselor, and when he told me how many credits I still needed, my eyes just welled up. As a college freshman, I had made the dean’s list. But as my commitments to football and track grew, I took lighter loads until I was taking the minimum number of credits I needed to remain eligible to participate in college athletics. I couldn’t believe I had been so naïve [about my studies] but I still wanted [my degree]. So I started taking courses in the off-season, some even during the season. And I did a few internships in finance, which I really enjoyed. I even started thinking about going to Harvard Business School. I went back [for my bachelor’s] in ’77 and didn’t get my degree until ’82. When I got it, I thought, ‘No one can take this away from me. I deserved it, I worked hard for it, and I’ll always have it.’ It didn’t just improve my prospects for life after football, it improved my self-image.”
In a profession where the average career lasts only three and a half years, Haynes went on to have a long and impressive one, ultimately joining the Los Angeles Raiders, and winning the 1983 Super Bowl before retiring at age 37 in 1991. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1997. When he retired, despite his early wake-up call with Webster, he did so grudgingly and without the assistance he offers pro football players today as head of a program designed to help them through such transitions.
Haynes began doing sports broadcasting and helped launch a golf tour for pro athletes. The latter led to a job as global licensing manager, and then vice president of recreational golf development, for the Callaway Golf company. The NFL job came along at a time when he was needing a change. “I wanted to do something I was passionate about,” says Haynes, now 49. “This is it. I see myself as a change agent. I have a great opportunity to make some positive changes in people’s lives. A lot of guys go to college just to get to the pros or to play college sports. If we could get those guys to value education, they could have a different life. There’s a perception that athletes make so much money, they don’t need to finish their degree. I played for a long time, I made more money than the average person ever will, and I know how wrong that perception is.”
PAMELA NEFERKARA
THE DAY I DOWNSIZED MYSELF
Pamela Neferkara U.S. Retail Presentation Director, Nike Inc.
In 1997, Pamela Neferkara was the quintessential high achieving corporate professional, making good on all of the promise highlighted ten years earlier when she was featured as one of “Ten Young Achievers” in Ebony magazine. As a category director of personal care products for Bristol-Myers Squibb Products in New York City, Neferkara managed the day-to-day operations of a $170 million brand portfolio. She led a marketing group of six and a cross-functional senior management team of 25. The next logical step for the alumnus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and of Syracuse University in upstate New York, was vice president and she knew it. She’d been working toward it for a decade. Then something changed. In fact, in rapid succession, several things changed.
“The decision was made to divest one of the brands I was responsible for, and my boss asked me to think about how I would reorganize the marketing group,” says Neferkara. “Everything came together in that moment. I thought about it and recommended that they eliminate my position. Why? It was the right thing to do. If anyone else had looked at it, they would have come to the same conclusion. I probably would not have seen the possibility of my l
eaving had I not been, in the back of my mind, thinking I needed a change. As category director, I had a lot more exposure to VPs and upper management than I had [earlier at Nike. Becoming a VP] was the next step for me and, from a skill set and capability standpoint, there’s no question I could have done it, but I started to question whether that was the lifestyle I really wanted.” She realized that the answer was no.
Neferkara was asked to stay and manage the divestiture program, and was given a lucrative severance package that enabled her to take a year off from working. “That year was a critical one in my life,” she says. “That year gave me perspective. I was so focused on my corporate life that I didn’t really understand the rest of my life. People talk about work/life balance and I really had very little sense of what any of that meant.” As a result, Neferkara found that just having time to be in her Montclair, New Jersey, neighborhood was a huge source of joy. “Until I took that year off, I had no idea what went on in my neighborhood,” she says. “I didn’t even know what went on in my house.” She took advantage of the time by working with her husband, renovating their 1928 Tudor-style home.
She had started a consulting business from her home when, in 1999, she got a call from a headhunter who had tracked her down through a former secretary. “Nike was looking for marketing executives.” As fate would have it, Nike was just developing its Jordan brand.” The job was in Beaverton, Oregon, just outside Portland. I grew up in D.C. I had flown over Oregon, but never stepped foot in it. I went out for the interview, thinking there was no way I would ever move, but I figured I should keep those interviewing skills in practice. What I found is that it’s beautiful out here. There were so many great quality of life aspects, and the job, which I didn’t think I would have the applicable experience for, turned out to be a great fit.” Neferkara joined Nike Inc. as director of marketing for the Jordan brand.
Four years later, Neferkara’s family, which now includes a 16-month-old son, is happily settled in Portland. In her current job she oversees the retail marketing, field services, and store displays of billions of dollars worth of Nike products throughout the U.S., heading up a team of 110 people. Just as important to her, she lives just three miles from her office, which is located on a lovely campus where hitting the gym is not necessarily viewed as goofing off. “Rather than being disconcerting, stepping away from the goals I’d been targeting for so long was liberating,” says Neferkara, 40. “My viewfinder went from being very laser-like to being as broad as it could be. Suddenly, I was open to anything, and once that happened, the Nike opportunity — something I would never have pursued — came and found me. This whole experience has underscored for me the idea of keeping an open mind toward life and not limiting myself. Sure, I gave up something, but I gained something else. Life is full of those opportunities if you’re open to them.”
DR. CHRISTOPHER LEGGET
MY MOMENT OF TRUTH
MEETING A WOMAN WHO LIVES HER FAITH
Dr. Christopher Leggett Interventional Cardiologist,Medical Associates of North Georgia
Dr. Christopher Leggett is the tenth of 11 children raised in a family that strongly values two things: God and education. His father was a Baptist minister and Leggett was a typical minister’s son in many ways. He was respectful and achievement-oriented, attending prep school at Andover before going to college at Princeton University. But, by his own admission, he was also a bit wild. “When you grow up the way I do, you think you have a good sense of right and wrong. But in high school and college, I was out of control,” Leggett says. Then he met a girl.
“I met my wife, Denise, in 1980. Until I met her, I never knew anybody for whom God was their best friend. I knew plenty of people who went to church, but we were all partying until 5 a.m. on Saturday then singing in the choir on Sunday. Denise, even at that young age, talked to God all the time. Her father was an evangelist and she observed a Saturday Sabbath.
“Denise dreamed of being a lawyer her whole life. But junior year, when it came time for her to take the [law school entrance exam], she found out they only gave it on Saturdays. My advice was: Take the test on Saturday and ask the Lord to forgive you on Sunday. But she had concluded that if the Lord didn’t work this out for her, He had something better in mind for her to do. I’m sitting on the sidelines saying, ‘Baby, I love the Lord too, but I’d be sitting in there taking that test.’ She wouldn’t do it but she kept studying hard. I’m watching her study, knowing there’s no Sunday test date, thinking, ‘What are you doing? Why are you studying?’ She’d just say, ‘I have faith that the Lord is going to work this out for me.’
“As it turned out, that year they offered the test on Sunday in about five cities throughout the U.S. One was Cleveland and she was living in Columbus, just a drive away. They didn’t announce the Sunday option until the week before the test, but she was ready because she’d kept studying, even when she knew it might not happen for her. I was amazed. I decided right then that I needed to get serious about my relationship with the Lord. I watched her just continue to study and apply herself that summer, and I learned how to live what you believe. Seeing the depth of her faith changed my life.”
When Leggett returned to Princeton the next year, he had stopped partying on Saturday nights and would spend most of Sunday in church. He also began hitting the books with a new resolve. “Once I embraced the whole concept
of true discipline and mental strength, I went from being a decent student to being off the charts. I wasn’t any smarter, I was just in a different place, mentally and spiritually. You can be highly educated and have great talents, but if you have no self-control, you’ll never reach your potential. Your state of mind is the greatest predictor of your future.”Leggett went on to attend Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Ohio, marrying Denise while he was still a student. He received his cardiology training at some of the best facilities in the world — Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, among others. He attributes all of these opportunities to God’s work in his life. Today, at age 42, he is one of the most renowned interventional cardiologists in the country, named on BE’s most recent list of America’s leading black doctors (August 2001).
“I never feel like I have to be totally dependent on myself to ensure my success,” he says. “It’s so liberating not to depend on man or anyone in your immediate environment to sanction your steps. I totally depend on God to create my pathway. That makes me feel somewhat impenetrable, even in today’s world.”
Leggett’s faith also gets him through the do-or-die moments he faces in his work almost daily. “People try every day to hurt you. They try every day to limit your success or destroy you. But they can’t. You have angels watching over you and they can’t. I’m not trying to be all existentialist, that’s just where I am. And I will always have my wife and that summer to thank for that.”
DOMINIQUE DAWES
MY MOMENT OF TRUTH
WHEN I FINALLY ASKED, “WHAT DO I WANT?”
Dominique Dawes Olympic Gold Medalist Motivational Speaker
Dominique Dawes’ young life has been a series of dazzling, dramatic highlights. She began taking gymnastics at age 6 and was competing by age 10. Just five years later, she burst onto the international scene in 1992, becoming the first African American gymnast to ever qualify and compete in the Olympic Games in Barcelona.
By the time she retired, following the 2000 Olympic Games in Syd
ney, Australia (Dawes retired twice — once in 1998 and finally in 2000), she had won more national championship medals than any other athlete — male or female — as well as four world championship medals, two Olympic bronze medals and one gold. Perhaps because Dawes was saturated by the spotlight for so many years, her moment of truth came at a quiet time, devoid of drama, cameras, coaches, or fans. “I was sitting at home just thinking, brainstorming about my life,” she recalls. “There was no real single experience that brought me to that moment. I had retired (for the first time), I was working on my degree in communications from the University of Maryland, and I was doing a lot of [public] speaking, some gymnastics commentary, and some acting. (Dawes played cheerleader Patty Simcox in the 1997 Broadway production of Grease.) I had been doing all of the things everyone around me kept telling me I’d be good at. But I was somewhat on autopilot. I was doing things to please other people, not because I really had a passion for them. I was almost a robot. Whatever people said was good for me, I’d just say, ‘Okay. Fine. I’ll do it.'”
But one night, at home alone in Maryland, Dawes confronted a critical question for the first time. “I asked myself what I really wanted to do. I felt almost like I was dreaming, I had never asked myself that. From the time I was young, I was guided in a very structured way. That was good for my gymnastics career, I needed it then. But when I retired, I kept waiting for someone to tell me what to do — like they always had. And they did. But a wonderful friend sat me down one day and made me realize that I wasn’t happy doing those things. At home alone that night, I finally realized, this is my life and I need to pave my own path. I also came to the realization that the key to failure is trying to please everyone. I needed to figure out for myself what Dominique loves to do, wants to do, and is really good at. That was the beginning of my changing the way I thought about my life.”
It also sparked a change in her approach to opportunity. “Something would come up and I’d force myself to stop and ask myself, ‘What is this going to do for me? What are the pros and cons of it for me, not for other people?’ I did a great deal of praying, soul searching, and writing. And it took about two years to really change the way I thought and accept that I do have likes and dislikes, and dreams and goals that don’t match up with other people’s.”
Now 26, Dawes does a lot of motivational speaking targeting youth. She would like to do more local and international broadcasting, sports commentary in particular. She’d also like to be a spokesperson for self-esteem and health-related issues for kids. Dawes has recently begun coaching gymnastics privately at Hill’s Gymnastics in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the gym in which she grew up training, owned by Kelli Hill, the man who coached her from the time she was 6. “When I finally retired (in 2000) — from gymnastics and from living for other people — I felt like I had a 1,000 pound weight lifted off me,” she says. “That’s how I feel now — like I have been totally freed! I’m free to do what I like, and what I want. This is the life that I want.”