CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ Jenny Bennett had three simple rules for her three sons, and they had to be followed:
Once you start something, you must finish. Don't go anywhere without saying where you'll be and who you'll be with. Always protect your siblings, as they protect you.
This was survival in Cooleemee, N.C., a town of fewer than 1,000 in Davie County, 35 miles southwest of Winston-Salem. As the single mother of an interracial family, Bennett saw horrifying things while raising oldest son Raheem and twins Cody and Caleb.
One Sunday morning she awoke to a cross smoldering in her front yard. That wasn't an isolated incident of racial hatred she experienced in the 1990s as the white mother of three mixed-raced children in the South.
"People would say things quite often," Bennett recalled of the slurs. "One instance where my car had broken down and we were actually walking back to our home and someone tried to run us over. The stares, the looks, the whispers _ direct and indirect comments. Those things happened a lot."
Today, each of Bennett's sons are thriving professionally. Raheem is a basketball assistant coach at his alma mater, Greensboro College. Cody and Caleb are rookies for the Hornets; each playing himself into Charlotte's rotation before the NBA season was halted March 11 by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cody and Caleb are with Jenny in the Winston-Salem area, not just for a Mother's Day visit Sunday, but to ride out the pandemic together. There is a tightness _ a sense of mutual protection _ in their relationships that is enduring. They believe that's what got them first to N.C. State, then to Nevada, and now to the Hornets.
"Our mom was on us," said Caleb Martin, who made the Hornets as an undrafted free agent. "She had three jobs and still found time to be in our ears.
"That's really hard to do. We had friends whose parents couldn't care less what (their children were) doing. ... (She) kept us on a narrow line, (and it took that) to get to a place like this."
